For medical reasons, if I do not manage my stress, I may not be capable of functioning at all. These four tips on stress management are not the only things I do to keep my life on an even keel. They are simply four important things that I've done for a long time that can help anyone to reduce stress in their lives. Stress is a killer. It can drive someone into physical or emotional collapse, raise blood pressure and kill, affect digestion, sleep patterns, headaches, almost any part of the body can be damaged by stress. There are different kinds of stress though, and correctly identifying them can make a big difference in your life.
So my first tip is: Sort out your stressors.
Find out what they are, specifically. Don't just let ten thousand niggling worries romp around in your head in circular fashion. Write them out either as a list or journal about them and vent about every single thing that bugs you -- and everything you are excited about.
Eustress is excitement, it's happy stress. A vacation you're looking forward to, holidays or a wedding or the arrival of a new baby or pet, meeting someone special you've been parted from, seeing old friends or going on an exciting vacation can all be stressful -- in a way that is generally less hard on the body than the painful kind of stress. Some situations fall in between -- they can be interpreted either way.
Stress is triggering animal instincts to fight or flight. This striving isn't a bad thing. Some people actually have a high stress threshold. They may become negatively stressed by having too little going on and load themselves up with more commitments and activities to reach their personal plateau. If you fall into this fast-paced category, it becomes even more important to manage stress well and to understand that boredom is its own type of stress.
Listing your stressors, sorting out what they are and why they are stressful, will help you understand what's going on in your life. It is the first step toward managing your stress -- because if you do find a ski weekend hurtling down a difficult course at high exhilarating speed is relaxing, then for you it is. It may involve some stress, but something happens when that adrenaline push is fulfilled. It's going to clear your system of other stresses.
So in sorting your stressors, also list the things that relieve stress for you and don't question what's on the list. If you are soothed by angry dark goth music, then go with what your mind and body are soothed by and don't subject yourself to miserable hours of Easy Listening that will stress you instead of relaxing you.
The person who can manage your stress is you, so these lists and journals are your tool. Being honest with yourself about what stresses you in what ways will make it much easier to deal with the stresses of other people telling you what you should feel or think. Everyone is subjected to that one, but if you know where you stand it's easier to recognize it when you're pressured about something. This step is about self care.
2. When you have sorted out all your stressors and know what they are, it's time to make some decisions.
Prioritize your stressors. Start out by sorting them into things you can change and things you can't. Other people's behavior isn't something you can change. With a child or a pet you may succeed over a long steady purposeful time of giving them attention and consistent discipline, but that takes real patience. It isn't something you can do something about immediately other than making the choice to educate yourself better on child care or dog training.
"I don't know what to do about that dog!" is something you can change by putting time and effort into studying dog training. The way to make changes in your environment is by making changes in yourself.
Sometimes these are hard choices, like recognizing bad relationships and cutting them off or giving them distance if you have reasons not to cut them off. An irritating supervisor may be coupled with an income you don't want to change, though in the long run it's important to weigh job stress against the stress of changing jobs. Just prioritize it neutrally.
Be completely selfish in sorting out your priorities. Until you know what your priorities are, you can't honestly take other people's priorities into account. This exercise is for informational purposes. You can put that into your lists -- "I put the welfare of my family and their happiness high in my priorities" and that is okay, that sets it as a priority. But be honest about it if you're running yourself into the ground to do so, because even in that relationship if it's happy, there will be some clutter. There will be things you do that aren't appreciated or needed or wanted, while there are things you need that go unnoticed if you don't ask.
Again it's a matter of knowing yourself and where you stand and what you want.The best time to do this level of sorting out is when you're alone. Then find a concerned friend who has nothing vested in your life and is willing to give you a bit of time to sort out your feelings. Vent with that friend and share your results. Several of them are good for different points of view. Pen pals are especially good for this because you can spend hours going into depth but they don't take as long reading it as you did writing it. Thus your distant friend will be able to give good advice from an outside perspective.
3. Don't beat yourself up.
This is a biggie. I mean don't beat yourself up even if you were flat wrong, knew it was wrong, did it anyway and will regret it till the day you die it was that huge. If it is the past then literally the only thing you can do is learn from it. And many times the things people beat themselves up for are not things they could control!
Life is full of risk. We get taught to be fearful of risk. But successful people don't beat themselves up over mistakes. They go "That didn't work" and treat trial and error as exactly that -- trial and error.
There is a big difference between "Well, that experiment didn't work" and "I am a failure because my painting is so lousy." Well gee. If you didn't do the lousy painting you couldn't see how to turn it into a good painting, and if you don't accept mistakes as information, you will miss any chance at good luck and serendipity in your life.
So forgive your mistakes. Or better yet accept them. Be human. Be real. Life has risks and it's okay that it does. Ms. Right may turn out to be a control freak. Mr. Right may turn out to be a couch potato deadbeat. That great job could turn into a dead end under an overseer that ought to work for Simon Legree. The rent may come due the same month you had a dental emergency and your kid broke a leg and all sorts of trouble happens -- sometimes you're in the path of the tornado.
But the best way to actually handle major emergencies like that is not to worry about all the little ones. Because when something big like a house fire or divorce happens, all of a sudden which brand of shoes to get next week also goes up in smoke and you're left dealing with the major crisis.
That can lead some people to be crisis junkies, constantly seeking major emergencies or creating drama to hush the ten thousand bee-stings of their petty worries, like what someone thinks of their hair or body scent. If that is your pattern, train yourself out of it, seek support groups, do something, because that brings the train wreckage of the major disasters into the lives of everyone around you as well as ruining your own life. It's far better to get some excitement into life by racing on inline skates or doing artwork or rock climbing than to tear up your personal life over nothing because nothing happened in it recently.
Sub-tip -- creative activity like painting, novelwriting, real drama as in amateur theatre and so on, are perfectly legitimate ways of attention seeking that work for a lot of people. You can get real applause doing stuff like that if one of your stresses is feeling like people don't notice you. Give a good show and you won't be ignored.
When you have taken all your priorities and your troubles and your goals and desires, sorted them out and then run them past a good friend or two -- let it go. Drop anything you can't control as not worth worrying about. Prioritize the things you can do and don't try to do it all.
A little more success every day is the key to getting anything done. Gradually improving habits is the way to lose weight or get a better job or get the novel written or do any big goal you set your mind to. These things are doable. Don't throw out the things you care most about, your hopes and dreams, in trying to de-stress. Throw out the things that bug you and aren't your goals but other people's goals for you. This is one really good way to reduce stress in itself because everyone is constantly told what to do all the time by everyone around them. It's part of the flow of social life. Part of being human.
But once you have prioritized and decided the things you are going to do, how you'll do them, organized it to suit yourself in whatever way actually works for you rather than the methods that work for other people -- it gets more manageable.
This comes under "Don't beat yourself up" because nine times out of ten, if you are beating yourself over something you can't control or something too petty to worry about, a friend will spot that looking at the information in the first two steps. A friend's outside perspective will not put how the guy on the elevator looked at your hair above whether you made it to work on time, or whether you have all your recipes on little cards versus actually cooking a good meal. Apply common sense to priorities and borrow it from friends, who always have more because they're not trying to deal with it themselves.
Fourth tip for managing stress.
Whenever possible do what you enjoy doing and avoid things that you hate.
This sounds simple, but stop and think about all the things in life that people do out of habit that gets passed on through assumptions. I cut out televised news to reduce stress. Its content was depressing and I got more information out of reading it online rather than living it viscerally as if there on the battlefield. Some people find televised news exciting -- and especially love to be the one to retell it at the office.
I like hearing it secondhand from them and reading it online, and my stress levels drastically dropped by cutting that out. Eventually I dropped television altogether because the commercials were driving me nuts. Little stressors like that can add up! I buy DVDs now instead of watching cable.
If you have no spare time and no spare money, these are serious problems in themselves. Sometimes this organization can also solve that. But sorting out what you would do if you could is a helpful exercise and knowing what really makes you happy is vital. Every time you do the things you do enjoy -- writing poetry, hiking, rock climbing, bowling, painting, puttering in the garage, playing video games -- these are times to recharge and gain energy for the things that have to be done.
It's too easy to get caught up in the fast lane and let all the reasons you work hard vanish out of your life entirely because work gets all consuming. Or the relationship bogs down in arguments and all home time is spent in marital arguing. Identifying your stressors and your relaxants is vital to doing something about it.
Don't try to change your habits all at once. That's overwhelming. You may want to stop being a couch potato, work out, lose weight, get active, do sports, bowl a perfect score and become a painter and whoa, while some of those goals and dreams mesh pretty well, it'd be better to start off slow. Like take up the bowling once a week and go hiking to paint outside, but not take the painting too seriously or worry about whether it's any good.
Rate your skills, rate your pleasures, list the things you like about yourself and don't forget to give them time. You may like to think of yourself as a nice guy or gal. You may emotionally need to do things for other people -- I've met plenty of people who do. If that makes you happy, do it. If you're doing it out of guilt or grim duty, maybe try to find some other way to help that isn't so painful, find something you enjoy doing that's part of a public good.
Seeking happiness honestly is the fourth tip. Knowing what relaxes and regenerates you versus what stresses you out is the first step to customize your life. You're the one who has to live in it. There's no reason to suit it to your mother in law or your boss or your gossipy acquaintance, and if you let all those people decide who you are -- then the stress is unending because no two of them will agree on who you should be.
All four of these take giving yourself time and attention, time and kind attention. Everyone gets starved for that in a rude world where everyone else is busy all the time. But when you have fed those needs yourself in ways that don't hurt other people, it's easier to have patience with them and work out ways to get along.
Good luck with your journey. Whatever works for you, this process of sorting it out should make it clearer.
