Stress Management For Dummies
Overview
Lower stress and anxiety with accessible tips you can use today
Whether related to love, work, family, or other parts of everyday life, Stress Management For Dummies, 3rd Edition is dedicated to helping you stock up your wellness toolbox. This new edition will help you identify your stress triggers and ways to manage them, practice mindfulness and meditation, understand the mind-body connection and how this applies to you and your experience, apply quieting rumination, and more.
With straightforward advice incorporating scientific research on the relationship between stress and health, Stress Management For Dummies, 3rd Edition provides practical tips on how to use key techniques, including the power of gratitude and perspective, to transform your mindset and improve your resilience toward stress.
Inside:
- Explore the impacts that stress has on your biology—including sleep
- Find step-by-step guidance that demonstrates how to manage worry and feel less anxious
- Discover your mental health needs and ways to implement them in your everyday life
- Understand the effects of smartphones, social media, and world events on your mental health and ways to cope
Stress Management For Dummies, 3rd Edition is a trustable, calming handbook that helps you reduce stress and build the life you want.
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About The Author
Allen Elkin, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, certified sex therapist, and the former director of the Stress Management & Counseling Center in New York City. He appears frequently on Today, Good Morning America, and Good Day New York, as well as on programs of PBS, CNN, FNN, Fox 5, and National Public Radio.
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stress management for dummies
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Identifying the symptoms of stress is an important first step to reducing tension in your life. Once you identify the signs of stress, use your imagination and the proven tool of progressive muscle relaxation to put your mind and body at ease.How to measure your stressRecognizing stress symptoms and how often they occur can help you deal with stress.
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Here’s a quick, specific list of ten foods that are not only good for you but also can help lower your stress level. Try snacking on these regularly and watch your stress levels go down:
Nuts: Especially almonds, which have lots of magnesium, B2 (riboflavin), zinc, and vitamin E. Almonds can help regulate cortisol levels.
Some types of jobs trigger more stress than others. What follows is a list of ten jobs or work settings that are judged to be some of the most stressful. These particular jobs were chosen because of the degree of dangers or hazards involved, the demands of the job, the amount of control the person has over what he or she does, the levels of responsibility required, and the number of hours worked.
One of the secrets of effective stress management at work is finding ways to incorporate a variety of stress-reduction techniques into your workday. By using these methods on a regular basis you can catch your stress early — before it has a chance to turn into something painful or worrisome.Take a look at these surefire strategies to help you nip that stress in the bud:
Breathe.
Stress
Any concentrated expenditure of energy produces more stress by tensing your muscles, speeding your heart rate, and quickening your breathing. However, after you stop expending energy, you find that your muscles relax and your heart rate and breathing slow down to a level that is lower than when you started.
This energy boost can come from walking briskly, running for a short distance, doing jumping jacks, jumping rope, doing sit-ups or push-ups, running up steps — anything that gets your body going.
Are you assertive or non-assertive in your interactions with others? Becoming effectively assertive in your interpersonal relationships can result in much less emotional distress. Whenever you act non-assertively, you generally end up feeling more anxious and tense than you would like.
You may also feel angry and resentful about not expressing your true feelings.
Being off-balance can indicate that you’re caught up in automatic, often distorted, thinking, which can cause chronic stress. You need to re-group, detach from your feelings and thoughts, and become centered. One of the best ways to do this is to become more mindful.
This means becoming more aware of your feelings as just feelings, and your thoughts as just thoughts.
An important step in changing the way you manage your time, which in turn relieves every day stress, is becoming aware of how you use your time. Without awareness, your time management can become a victim of your time-wasting patterns.
You repeat the same patterns of thinking and behavior, failing to step away and consider how you’re using your time.
Stress
Feeling stressed is, and always has been, a two-part process. First you need something “out there” to trigger your stress, and then you need to perceive that trigger as stressful. Then you feel stressed. You empower these external events and situations by viewing them in certain ways.
Look at something one way and you feel major stress; look at it another way and you feel less stress, maybe even no stress at all.
Breath-counting meditation builds on controlled breathing techniques and exercises and can alleviate stress. Breath-counting meditation is one of the most basic and commonly used forms of meditation. Here’s what to do:
Sit comfortably.
You can position yourself on the floor or in a chair. Keep your back straight and your head up.
Breathing properly is one of the simplest and best ways to drain your tension and relieve your stress. Simply by changing your breathing patterns, you can rapidly induce a state of greater relaxation. If you control the way you breathe, you have a powerful tool in reducing bodily tension. Just as important, you have a tool that helps prevent your body from becoming tense in the first place.
Most people have a very stressful experience commuting to work every day. They either battle for a seat (if they’re lucky) on a crowded train or sit in stop-and-go traffic for what seems like an eternity. Far from fun, commuting can be a major stressor. Following are some tips to help you reduce the stress of coming from and going to work:
Practice some “auto” relaxation.
Most often, your thoughts and perceptions are what make you angry, and anger in turn causes stress. You can learn to modify your thoughts, lessen your anger, and prevent much of your stress.
Thoughts like “I was angry because that idiot cut me off in traffic” or “Missing my train made me angry” suggest that an outside event or circumstance is what caused you to feel anger.
Your own values can affect your level of stress in your daily life. Here are several exercises designed to help you discover and clarify what values and goals are important to you. These exercises aren’t about passing or failing or being right or wrong, so just be honest.
Does this mean some values are less stress-resilient than others?
Worries can be productive, helping you manage your life and reduce your stress. On the other hand, worrying can result in unnecessary fear, anxiety, and upset. Understanding the differences between these two forms of worrying — productive and unproductive — is an important step on your path to managing and ultimately minimizing your worrying.
Anger is not an automatic reaction beyond our control, even though it may feel like that at times. Instead, anger is a response that can be managed. So, before your next outburst of rage and fury, take a look at some of these anger-reducing strategies and tactics. Who knows? They just may save you from a nasty argument, an upset stomach, costly litigation, or worse.
Understanding why you worry will only get you so far — you need useful solutions to your worrying problems. This short list takes you to that next level, giving you the tools you need to change how you worry and help you start to worry less (and, at times, not at all).
Write about your worries
You’d be surprised that by spending just a few moments writing about your worries, you can weaken their power.
Stress
When you find yourself in a stressful situation, having a simple dialog with yourself can de-escalate the situation, take away your anxiety and stress, and help you cope. You can teach yourself to talk through your stress, put things into perspective, and empower yourself to deal with just about any stressor.
If your worrying is excessive and causing extra stress, chances are your self-talk and thinking are somewhat out of whack, which means that you’re probably making one or more thinking errors. Here are a few specific thinking errors that can cause excessive worrying.
You can learn how to avoid those errors. Each of these thinking errors can add to your anxiety level, make you worry more than you should, and make your worrying more stress-producing.
Stress
Here are a few ways to take some of the stress out of your workspace. Your employer may not be entirely supportive of all of your stress-reducing efforts. If you share a tiny cubicle with three others, it may be hard for you to burn incense, move in a couch, or install a multi-speaker stereo system and personal video player.
You may not be able to control every single stressful aspect of your job, but you probably have the power to control your personal work area. Your workspace can (literally) give you a pain in the neck, straining your muscles and tiring your body.
The culprit may be an awkwardly placed computer monitor, uncomfortable seating, poor lighting, or simply a totally cluttered desk that’s hiding that memo you remember writing and now urgently need.
Sometimes, stress occurs because the situation you’re in makes you a prisoner of the moment. You can’t escape. You have to be where you are, and, to make things worse, you don’t have much to do while you’re there. You may be waiting in line at the grocery store or (gasp!) at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.
Why not capitalize on these situations and turn them into opportunities to bring some stress management into your life?
These days, larger companies and organizations offer a number of services and benefits that can help reduce your stress level. If you’re not aware of such perks, ask around or check with your HR office to learn more. Here are some possibilities that might be available to you.
Gyms and health clubs
Exercise is an important source of stress reduction.
Often your thinking turns to worries and fears when you have too much free, unfocused time. This unbridled worry can induce extra stress. You may find something to worry about no matter what’s going on in your life. It seems that as soon as one stressful situation is resolved, you find something else to be distressed about.
Some people worry far more than they have to, and in turn they do very little to effectively resolve their worries. For these people, much of their stress takes the form of excessive worry. This inordinate and often useless worrying can rob people of much of life’s joy and interfere with their day-to-day functioning.
Are you better off expressing your anger or keeping it in? Popular psychological wisdom suggests that when you’re feeling angry, you should get it all out, releasing that pent-up hostility. Punch that pillow, wallop that punching bag, smash those dishes. You’ll feel better afterward. Right?
Maybe not. As author Carol Tavris comments in her important book, Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, “Expressing anger makes you angrier, solidifies an angry attitude, and establishes a hostile habit.
How and what you eat at work can make a big difference in your stress level. Eating the wrong foods, or even eating the right foods in the wrong amounts or at the wrong times, can make it harder for you to cope with the stress in your life.
Also, when you eat poorly, your body doesn’t work as efficiently as it should.
Your desk or workspace can cause stress for other reasons besides disorganization. The problem is, your body wasn’t designed to sit and work in one place for long periods of time. When you sit in a stationary position, your muscle groups contract. The blood flow to these muscles may become reduced, resulting in oxygen-deprived muscles.
Research has shown that people who feel gratitude are happier, report more life satisfaction, and report less stress. Grateful people are less likely to be depressed, anxious, lonely, and neurotic. But it also appears that grateful people don’t live in a world of denial. They don’t ignore the negative parts of their lives.
The first thing you notice when you work with people under a lot of stress is how often they say, “I’m tired.” For some, the stress of the day is what wears them out. But for most people, it’s a matter of not getting enough sleep. And they are hardly alone.
The fact is, most people don’t get enough quality sleep.
Feeling anxious, nervous, stressed out? Need a quick food fix? Snacking, when done right, is an art. Anyone can down a candy bar or a bag of chips and a soda. The real skill is coming up with a snack that not only doesn’t add to your stress level but also helps you reduce the stress you already have. Here are some guidelines:
Avoid highly sugared treats.
Stress
With practice, you can teach yourself to relax on command by exercising various breathing techniques, tensing and relaxing targeted muscles, and by using imagery and suggestion. Follow this guided relaxation, preferably in a quiet place, and you'll feel the stress leaving your body.
Anger, just like anything else, isn’t all good or all bad: It has many pros and cons. The following sections explain those for you, so that you get a clear picture of anger and the effect it may have on your life.
The positives of anger
Anger can be a highly distressing emotion that results in all kinds of negative consequences.
Stress
A worker in a high-stress job typically faces tough demands but has little control over how the work gets done. Workers in these jobs report significantly more fatigue and exhaustion, trouble getting up in the morning, depression, nervousness, anxiety, and insomnia or disturbed sleep than workers in lower-stress jobs.
Having a belief in something greater than your immediate experience can be a powerful force in helping you create inner peace and cope with the stress in your life. We live in a universe that is both mystifying and, at times, overwhelming. We attempt to give meaning and purpose to our all-too-brief lives.Faith in something bigger, something cosmic, can help some people come to grips with the unknown and perhaps unknowable.
Your emotional distress (in your mind) is converted to physical distress (in your body). Your mind and body are far more interconnected than you might think. Separating the two isn’t easy. When your mind tells you “you’re worried” or “you’re feeling anxious” or “you’re afraid,” your body hears this, as well. In turn, your body can become anxious and fearful.
Changing the way you breathe can make all the difference in how you feel and can alleviate stress within minutes. Sometimes, all it takes to make you feel better is one simple change. The following exercises present various ways to alter your breathing. Try them and discover whether all you need is one simple change.
Stress
Looking for a way to control stress? Progressive relaxation, which involves systematically tensing and relaxing your muscles, is a healthful way to release muscle tension and a proven approach to a more relaxed, less stressful state. Follow these steps for a calmer, more collected you:
Lie down or sit, as comfortably as you can, and close your eyes.
Stress
With some people, more sophisticated strategies and tactics are required to spare you the unwanted and avoidable stress of dealing with them. The following sections outline what you need to do.
Believe it or not, some people can be ill-mannered, grouchy, and nasty and appear to lack many basic interpersonal skills.
Stressed? Imagine that. You'll probably feel better if you can release that stress-producing thought and replace it with a relaxing, calm image. Here's how to put your mind at ease:
Find a place where you won't be disturbed for a few minutes and get comfortable, either sitting in a favorite chair or lying down.
Recognizing stress symptoms and how often they occur can help you deal with stress. Use the previous two weeks as your timeframe and record the occurrence of the following physical and emotional signs and symptoms of stress. After identifying your stress symptoms and how often they occur, use the stress rating scale to find your score.
Of all the ways to relax, probably the one that evokes the most suspicion is meditation. When you think of meditation, chances are you conjure up images of bearded gents in saffron robes sitting in the lotus position. You feel that this wouldn’t go over well at the office. It’s not surprising that you may be a wee bit leery about jumping in and joining the movement.
Probably the best known and most popular form of meditation is meditation for stress reduction is using a mantra. A mantra is a sound or word that you repeat; it can help you focus your mind and avoid distractions.
Choose your mantra for relaxing mediation
The word mantra comes from Sanskrit: “man” means “to think,” and “tra” means “to free.
One of the better relaxation techniques for relieving stress derives from a method called progressive relaxation or deep-muscle relaxation. This method is based on the notion that you’re not aware of what your muscles feel like when they’re tensed. By purposely tensing your muscles, you’re able to recognize what tension feels like and identify which muscles are creating that tension.
One of the best ways to calm your mind and stop those unwanted, persistent worries is to use your imagination. If you can replace that stress-producing thought or image with one that is relaxing, chances are you’ll feel much better. Here’s how:
Find a place where you won’t be disturbed for a few minutes and get comfortable, either sitting in a favorite chair or lying down.
Becoming aware of your worries and concerns gives you a starting point that can provide you with a focus for your change efforts. The exercises that follow give you lots of real-life material to work with as you master your new worry-management tools.
When you change something, it’s important to have a good idea of what you want to change.
Stress
Your thinking plays a bigger role in creating your stress than you might imagine. How you look at potentially stressful events or situations can result in greater stress, less stress, or even no stress.
The important skill you need to master is knowing how to identify your stress-producing thoughts and how to change the way you think.
Everyone feels anger sometimes. Unfortunately, too many people — and you may be one of them — experience too much anger too much of the time. Anger is not only terribly stressful, but it can also be harmful to your physical well-being and destructive to your relationships.
Are you angry because someone cut you off in traffic or kept you waiting for what seemed like an eternity?
Stress
Feeling and expressing gratitude goes a long way toward alleviating your stress in daily life. Intuitively you know you should feel and express gratitude, but you may put it into practice less often than you think.You may look at exercise in the same way: You know you should do more of it, but you just don’t. Sometimes you need to be reminded and encouraged.
If you take life (and yourself) too seriously, you can just about guarantee that your stress level will be higher than it has to be. Life is filled with hassle, inconvenience, and a myriad of other nuisances that can either drive you crazy or bring a smile to your face.
And even the more serious problems that may come your way often contain a trace of humor.
You might find that anger, frustration, and impatience are actually causing chronic stress for you. If this is the case, you can practice lengthening your fuse, and learn to reduce your own feelings of anger and stress.
No one likes frustration. But, unfortunately, frustration is an integral part of your life.
You’ve had a long, long day at work. You’re tired and dragging your tush. The last thing you want to do is take your work stress home with you. Consider these guidelines to make sure you arrive home in better shape than when you left work:
After work, work out. If early mornings or lunchtimes are impractical times to hit the gym or health club, consider exercising right after work.
One great way of creating awareness about your time management is to have some questions ready to ask yourself. These can free you from the grip of auto-pilot and set a more productive course. Here are a few to help you get started:
“Am I making the best use of my time right now?”
“Am I procrastinating and avoiding doing something more important?
Your attempts at stress reduction can easily fall victim to the same fate. Staying motivated and finding the time to practice your stress-management skills is not that easy. You may also find that, even though you now have the right tools, you rarely use them.
This common situation is much like belonging to a health club and never going.
This three-pronged model of dealing with stress provides you with a useful tool to help you understand the many ways you can manage and control your stress. You have three major choices.
1. Manage your stressors
The events that trigger your stress can range from the trivial to the dramatic. They can be very minor — a hassle such as a broken shoelace, a crowded subway, or the world’s slowest check-out line.
Stress
An important approach to bodily relaxation for reducing stress is called autogenic training, or AT for short. The word autogenic means self-generation or self-regulation. This method attempts to regulate your autonomic nervous functions and more specifically your parasympathetic nervous system (your heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing, among others) rather than relaxing your muscles.
Your business travel may be more than getting to and from work, and travelling for business can be plenty stressful. You may spend a lot of time on trains or planes. To many, the idea of travel may seem glamorous. Flying to Paris, Rome, or even Cleveland for work may sound like an adventurous outing, an escape from the stress of the office.
Certainly, one of the first steps in mastering your stress is knowing just how stressed you are. A stress journal can show you what’s triggering your stress right now and can measure your ongoing stress level.
A stress journal or stress log is one of the more useful items you can carry in your stress management tool belt.
Reaching your goals and living by your values is one huge way to live with less stress. Try to spend some time identifying your values and goals, and then look at how you are realizing them.
People have a tremendous ability to hold a set of values they feel are meaningful, yet in their day-to-day lives they can sometimes fail to recognize the importance of those values.
Making lists in order to relieve some of your stress might seem so obvious and so last century, yet lists can be one of your better time-management tools. Try working with three lists:
A master to-do list. This list is your source list, detailing all of the tasks and involvements that you want to accomplish.
Sometimes an unwanted thought or worry grabs you and won’t let go. Perhaps you have an upsetting worry that continually intrudes into your thinking and keeps you from enjoying a pleasant evening with friends. Or maybe you’re trying to fall asleep, and the thoughts racing around in your head make sleeping impossible.
Massage and other touch and pressure therapies are among the most popular ways of relieving muscle tension. If you can’t or don’t want to get a professional massage or a free massage from a friend, you can learn to effectively massage yourself.
You can go two ways: high-tech or low-tech.
The high-tech route usually requires a wall socket or lots of batteries.
Stress
One way to really reduce your stress level may be to forgive others and yourself. Revenge is a way of holding on to anger and frustration, which can cause chronic stress.
We’ve always given lip service to the value of forgiveness, but the reality has always been more lip than actual forgiveness. Psychologically, holding onto a grudge is always easier than forgiving the source of our anger for whatever he or she did.
In order to manage your stress, it’s important to recognize the difference between a thought and a feeling. Most people confuse their thinking with their feelings. For example, if someone were to ask you how you feel about your best friend forgetting your birthday, you might say you feel that she was insensitive and uncaring.
Studies show that venting and expressing anger increase stress, contrary to popular belief. So here are six positive things to do to work out anger and reduce your stress. Think of this part as preventive medicine. If you make minor changes in the way you think when put in potentially stressful situations, you can actually reduce and perhaps eliminate stress.
Job-related stress is a major factor in your health and well-being. Getting to your job in reasonable condition is half the battle. By the time you open your office door (if you have one), you don’t want to feel as if you’ve already fought (and probably lost) several minor skirmishes. Get a leg up on your work stress.
Stress
Worry is one serious cause of stress in many people's lives. Worriers are consummate catastrophizers and awfulizers. They are constantly vigilant, on the lookout for horrendous problems and imminent disasters. This vigilance in and of itself can be stressful, not to mention emotionally and physically draining.
Identifying the symptoms of stress is an important first step to reducing tension in your life. Once you identify the signs of stress, use your imagination and the proven tool of progressive muscle relaxation to put your mind and body at ease.How to measure your stressRecognizing stress symptoms and how often they occur can help you deal with stress.
Stress
Stress can come from your own thinking errors that can create a rather pessimistic and hopeless view of the future. Arguing with yourself can help you create a new perspective when you are thinking negatively, with a bleak picture that brings much unnecessary stress. Here are some useful challenges and quick questions to ask yourself:
“Am I over-reacting here?
Stress
If you think you are overstressed by negative thoughts, you can examine and challenge those thoughts. You probably have many stories you tell yourself about your life that give it meaning and shape the way you think, feel, and act. Three such stories concern your past, present, and future.
Your history — the story of where you came from and how you got to be who you are today.
“What,” you may ask, “have my values and attitudes got to do with the stress in my life?” The answer is, “Lots.” Your personal values and your overall philosophy of life play a major role in determining your stress level.
What you think is important and what you value act together in often subtle yet important ways to either protect you from stress or make your life more stressful.
Your life is already stressed enough without having to worry about what goes into your mouth. However, what you eat — and how you eat it — can contribute significantly to your ability to cope with stress. Eating the wrong things or eating at the wrong times can add to your stress level. Not to worry. Help is here.
Did you know that exercise is one of the better ways of helping you cope with stress? You already know how beneficial exercise can be as a way of keeping your weight down, your body buff, and your heart ticking for many more years.
Exercise and sustained activity — in whatever form — can decrease your blood pressure, lower your heart rate, and slow your breathing — all signs of reduced arousal and stress.
Much of your stress might come from looking at the future with either anxiety or hopelessness. Fearing the uncertainty of the future, believing that the worst will happen, depressing yourself about the future, believing that nothing good will come of it can cause untold stress.
But your life can be far less stressful if you look forward with more optimistic and hopeful attitudes.
Stretching is one of the ways your body naturally discharges excess bodily tension. You may notice that you automatically feel the need to stretch after waking up in the morning or just before retiring at night. But a good stretch can drain away much of your body’s tension at other times, too.
You may be desk-bound or otherwise required to sit for long periods of time during the day, causing your muscles to tense and tighten.
For many of you, your work days are characterized by long periods of sitting at a desk or stuck in a cramped work area, punctuated only by trips to the coffee or copy machine. Other folks are on their feet all day. In either case, stretching is a great way of releasing any tension that has accumulated in your muscles.
Stress, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. What may be incredibly stressful for you may be a minor irritation for someone else, and perhaps not stressful at all to a third person.
It is largely your perception and interpretation of a situation or event that make that event or situation stressful.
The following qualities are the most important skills and behaviors for reducing stress and creating stress resilience. How many of these describe you? If you can’t check off all (or any!) of the items, don’t worry — you can change old habits and learn new ones. Managing your stress is not a magical process. It’s about mastering new behaviors and finding new ways of looking at yourself and your world.
Believe it or not, you have stress in your life for a good reason. To understand why stress can be a useful, adaptive response, you need to take a trip back in time.
Stress in caveman times
Picture this: You’ve gone back in time to a period thousands of years ago when men and women lived in caves. You’re roaming the jungle dressed in a loincloth and carrying a club.
The signs and symptoms of stress range from the benign to the dramatic — from simply feeling tired at the end of the day to having a heart attack. The more serious stress-related problems come with intense and prolonged periods of stress. Here are some of the more benign, commonly experienced stress signs and symptoms.
An important part of managing your stress is knowing what your stress looks like. Your stress responses can take different forms: bodily changes, emotional changes, and behavioral changes. Although they look very different, they are all possible responses you may have when confronted with a stressful situation.
No one single idea or technique can magically relieve all your stress; nor does every technique or approach work equally well for everyone. You need to put together a package of ideas and methods that you can integrate into the various aspects of your life — at work, and at home.
Stress is a major problem in the workplace.
Are you an emotional eater? When you feed your stress, a destructive cycle begins. If so, you may eat whenever you’re anxious, upset, nervous, or depressed. Although emotional eaters can still put it away when they’re happy, delighted, non-anxious, and non-depressed (and yes, during those rare times when they’re actually hungry), most emotional eaters eat when they feel they need to feed their stress.
If you can figure out how to reduce worry and transform your self-talk into something positive and sensible, your stress level will be lower. Worrying is a process that starts when you perceive an event, situation, or circumstance as potentially dangerous or threatening.
You think about that situation — at times unconsciously and automatically — and, depending on what you say to yourself about that situation, you create varying degrees of emotional stress.
Believe it or not, your own thinking actively plays a role in creating your stress. At the heart of this distorted thinking are thinking errors, mistakes or distortions in your thinking that can result in excessive stress.See if you fall prey to any of the following thinking errors and find out what you can do to fix them.
You might feel that your stress is a direct consequence of the stressful event or trigger. You may think that “the situation made me stressed.” And that would be entirely understandable.
However, the reality is, slow lines, difficult relatives, and loud music don’t in themselves have the power to make you automatically feel stressed.
Much of your stress might be caused by your own thought processes. Below are three habits that can induce stress: conclusion-jumping, needing to be in control, and self-rating.
Conclusion-jumping leads to stress
Jumping to a catastrophic conclusion can induce extra worry and stress. You might often come to a conclusion without having all (or at times any) of the evidence.
Here are three ways to get in the habit of de-stressing. Developing day-to-day habits for home and work will ultimately help you live a less stressful life. For example, the simple act of taking a break and doing a few stretches can really reduce the effects of stress at work. And has it occurred to you that if you do more fun things in life — hang out with friends or spend time on a hobby — you’ll be better able to deal with stress?
Here are a few strategies to help you manage your time more efficiently and effectively, and reduce your time-related stress. The first step in this process is to become aware of your current use of time.
Have you noticed how quickly your days fill up? You often find yourself hurried, harried, and rushing to do all that you feel has to be done.
Stress
If you find that your own feelings of anger are often the root cause of your stress, examine your thoughts that are making you feel angry. When confronted with a potentially anger-provoking situation, you can either say things to yourself that make you angry or say things to yourself that reduce or even eliminate any anger that may have been triggered.
Stress
Changing your self-talk is one great way to reduce stress caused by chronic worry. One of the quirks of being human is that we seem to be terrible at dealing with our own problems, but we’re usually pretty good at solving other people’s problems. Why not use this bit of psychological irony as a tool to help you worry less?
Managing your stress is a little like managing your weight. In the beginning, you’re enthusiastic and, with much gusto and determination, you start dropping those pounds. Weeks (or maybe only days) later, your enthusiasm begins to wane. You’re even gaining back any weight you may have lost.
In life, sometimes you need a little reminding.
Using humor has been proven to relieve stress. Still, very few of us would admit to not having a good sense of humor. Yet too often, we lose the ability to laugh (or at least smile) at the nonsense and lunacy of life all around us.
You don’t have to be a standup comic or dazzle the group with side-splitting one-liners to make humor work for you.
Offering of yourself is one great way to relieve your own stress that may relate to your own problems. Often the biggest obstacle to volunteering is figuring out what to do and where to go. Most communities have one or more umbrella organizations or volunteer clearinghouses that are aware of all the volunteering opportunities in your area.
Defining stress isn’t easy. Professionals who’ve spent most of their lives studying stress still have trouble defining the term. As one stress researcher quipped, “Defining stress is like nailing Jell-O to a tree. It’s hard to do!” Despite efforts during the last half century to assign a specific meaning to the term, no satisfactory definition exists.
You may think that identifying your worries, which is a big step in reducing your stress level, is a cinch because they seem to be always on your mind, filling your thoughts, triggering your anxiety and upset, and robbing you of life’s enjoyment. You feel worried, but you aren’t sure what exactly you’re worried about.
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