Unless you are a Buddhist monk living somewhere in the Himalayas having no deadlines at work or spouse trouble at home or peer pressure at school, you would be familiar with the word “stress” and the damage it can do.
Let’s face it: stress is a fact of life. There’s no one who’s not experienced it or felt like falling apart when hit by its full force.
While we can’t wish away stress from our life completely, we can certainly learn how to manage it better. Here are 4 tips to manage stress better and improve the quality of your life—and of those around you.
1. Figure Out the Source
What’s bogging you down? That’s the first thing you must figure out when you feel your head getting as dull and heavy as a rock under the weight of stress.
Often, when we are stressed, we feel stressors hitting us from left, right, and center. However, in reality, there are only one or a few underlying stressors that are causing the much of the trouble.
Identifying the causes is winning half the battle against stress. The other half is completing the following exercise and the other tips listed in the series:
- Are the stressors under your control? More often than not, we worry over what’s not under our control. Once you’ve identified your stressors, list them on a paper under either of the two headings, controllable and not controllable. Stop worrying about what’s not under your control, and perform the next steps to better manage that’s under you control.
- How severe is the problem? Using a scale of one to ten, with one standing for a minor problem and ten for a disaster, rate each stressor. This will help you see things in the right perspective, as most things we consider as disaster on a closer inspection reveal themselves as no big deal.
- Create an action plan and follow it. Once you’ve identified the stressors over which you’ve control, create an action plan and follow it. Even when the situation is bad, we breathe so much better when we know we are doing all we can to improve things.
2. Take Time Out to do Things You Love
It becomes so much easier to manage pockets of stress if your life is filled with activities that you love doing.
Happiness is the antidote of stress, so do more of the things that make you happy. For example, you might feel like stuck in a rut on the job front and that might be giving you huge amounts of stress. While you might have charted a plan of action, things won’t change overnight. Till the tide turns, investing time and energy in your favorite activity after work will help lift your spirits after a hard day.
3. Exercise a Little
Exercise is a great stress buster, and that’s why it always finds a mention in almost every talk about how to manage stress.
When you exercise, the brain ups the production of its feel-good neurotransmitters, endorphins. As a result you feel better and have more energy to take on life’s challenges.
Another advantage is that your sleep improves when you exercise regularly. One of the side effects of stress is lack of sleep, which feeds on as well as feeds stress. That is, lack of sleep can lead to more stress and the greater the stress, the poorer your sleep is likely to be.
4. Count to 10
Ever snapped at someone or done something under stress to only regret it a few seconds later?
A simple tip to avoid this is to momentarily step away from the stressor and collect yourself. Count to ten, take a few breaths, stretch a little, and recite an affirmation are all good ways to get hold of your nerves and avoid doing or saying something that will become a cause for regret later.
Stress is an unwanted guest—we don’t invite it, but it still pays us a visit. Thankfully, there are tips to ensure its stay remains as short and underwhelming as possible.