Stress has a stronghold on many aspects of people’s lives in today’s society. Stress can impact us negatively and causes health problems, work tension, physical pain and it highly impacts our ability to think rationally and make decisions. Stress often puts our minds into a state that seem inescapable and negative stress tends to create a focus on that element which then causes other cascaded effects that spiral into more negative actions such as self doubt, frustration, anger, loss of confidence and unhappiness. Negative stress along with these results often cascades even deeper where it is very hard to break clear from and so the best way to handle stress is to know about it and know what to do to handle it and eliminate the negative stress in your life.
I’ve learned a lot about stress in my own life and in helping others handle significant stress. I’ve learned to use stress in the best way possible and I can access stress as a critical learning tool for personal development. I no longer let stress impact my hope, attitude or faith. I use those together to manage stress and have learned a number of ways to handle, manage and change stress to be useful for self-improvement.
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1. Awareness Of and Recognizing Stress
This is the first and most important point of handling stress, you must first be able to recognize it. Being aware that stresses exist and watching for it is best way to be able to handle it and use other tips to then handle it effectively. If you don’t recognize stress until it already has its grips on you and its impact already affecting your decisions, its much harder to manage it then. Look for the various ways you can be more aware of stress even if you don’t know the cause of the stress itself. This can be down by watching for stresses and for having others recognize it in you as well.
Perhaps you experience some of these behavior stress symptoms:
- irritable behavior and frustration
- reduced exercise or active living
- increased food (especially junk food) consumption
- hard to focus or make decisions
- trouble sleeping or restlessness
- moody or emotional outbursts
- negative or depressed attitude
Other Physical Signs of stress that are common are:
- Muscle tension or pain
- Stomach / abdominal pain
- rashes or skin irritation
- shortness of breath or irregular breathing
- sweating or cold spells
2. Identify Stress When It is Negative
All the signs of stress above can help you to identify stress when you may not know the source of it without further analysis. This is where this step comes in and its important to identify what stresses are positive and which ones are negative. The body reacts to different stresses and these chemicals tend to either a fear response or relaxing and enjoyable response. Negative stresses are your body’s way to instinctively handle danger and so the release of adrenaline is typical to increase your senses and provide a heightened awareness and anxiousness to get out of the situation.
Positive stresses typically release serotonin, endorphins or dopamine and these can relax you and help you feel enjoyment from the experience. This enjoyment usually helps us to complete that activity, feel good about it and often engage in it again. This happens in personal development, in a job well done or in physical activity since the body releases positive stress chemicals that ‘makes’ us like it.
Excessive stress of either type can be dangerous but at the same time, some of both are needed to have any kind of drive or motivation to change, grow or contribute. None of those can happen without some stress stress to inspire / encourage us to do them. So, the stress that is negative is a result of something that you are fearful of and often completely out of your control. Uncontrollable stress that eats away at a person is dangerous as it can be very hard to eliminate as often the beliefs that create the stress are the same beliefs that are emphasized by the same stress itself so it often strengthens even further. Stress that is caused by past events is nearly always negative stress as it is a case where a person dwells on or second guesses a past decision and can’t move past it. The scenarios that didn’t occur are played out over and over in their mind as being better than the decision that was made and is too late to change so this brings on more and more stress. These are just a couple of examples of negative stresses.
Its these habits and beliefs that create negative results from negative stresses that need to be changed. Identifying and changing your reaction to be more positive and hopeful can prevent negative stress from taking a further grip. The whole point of stress (from an instinctive point of view) is to alert you to danger so that you can react accordingly and get away from it. If that danger is in your habitual negative response, the body will simply continue to alert you to that with more and more stress. You must learn to choose your response and how you react.
3. Change Stress Into Positive Hope
The differences between positive and negative stress in the body are subtle. The chemicals released vary somewhat but that quickly changes in how we respond to the event as well. It is possible to change the stress by controlling the response we have from a negative stress to a more positive one. If we are hopeful with any stresses towards making the situation better and we do not dwell on the past, the stress can be something that drives you to change the situation and improve it. Most stresses have two sides to them as well (the old famous is the glass half full or empty) and depending on what you see from the stress, this often drives you forward to improve it or to dwell on it and spiral down as a result. Having hope that whatever causes the stress will reside is the best way to ensure you keep looking at the positive outcomes and opportunities from stress. What are the current stress in your life? What good can come of it and how can you use and learn from that to improve yourself, your life or that of others?
4. Learn From Failures, Don’t Dwell on Them
Just as I stated with the outlook of hope, you can keep a mindset to learn from failures that may have triggered or resulted in the stressful circumstances. You must look at what you benefit there is. This is hard to recognize when our emotions are still stressed but it’s still a great method to not let stress take control of us. Since you will never eliminate stress and you will certainly never get rid of stress that has already occurred, you might as well make the most of it and learn from it. If what you learn can be shared with others to help them avoid a similar stress, then you can move past it even easier and make it a positive event in your life.
5. Talk Your Way Through Stress
Some people do deal with stress better than others but we all deal with it better when we have support and love from others when in stressful situations. Talk about your stress and situations that cause it whenever you can with friends, loved ones or even colleagues. Find someone you can trust not to be judgmental or add more pressure. Expressing some of feelings may not change the immediate situation but it always relieves some of the tension to share it with someone else.
6. Take Action to Relax and Relieve the Stress
Most stress results in us feeling like we cannot control the situation and this is most often due to overload and excess pressure. To relieve stress you have to take charge of more influences on you and get away from some of those influences and make time for things that you need to calm your body and mind. Making time for yourself, your hobbies, family, spirituality, solitude, exercise and other enjoyable activities will all help to relieve tension and make the stress much more manageable. You can take action on others tips in this article as well to handle the stress and of course any other methods you have to handle stress, the things that matters, is that you need to take action to manage the stress instead of just letting it build while you keep doing the same thing. If you learn to take immediate action at the first signs of stress you can prevent it from ever building beyond your control and keep your frame of mind to make the most of the stress and use it to your advantage.
7. Ask For Help
Perhaps you just don’t know how to manage stress or these tips don’t work for you once you are under under tension. This is fairly typical since you lose your ability to rationalize and make decisions when under stress and so if that is the case, you need to ask others for help who are not impacted in the same way as you. If they are not stressed by the situation, they can easily guide you and help you with any of these tips that you just may not have the strength to battle on your own.
8. Change Your Activities That Cause Negative Stress
The activities we engage in are largely in our control and so we can change our activities to eliminate stress or handle it better. We need to know what situations to avoid or when to engage or disengage from something that will pressure us in a negative way we cannot handle. The best time to do this is when you are NOT under stress as you will be able to make better decisions and see the big picture of what is worthwhile and if any stress can be used to your advantage or not. Analyze your activities and if you are looking to avoid stress that reoccurs in your life, you have to make some changes to your activities if you expect the results of them to change.
9. Change your Beliefs About Stress
And finally, this tip is the the one area I feel has the biggest impact on stress. Your beliefs. Beliefs about stress drastically change how you react and what emotions are triggered by stress. If you believe that stress cannot be managed and that it is always negative, then you will typically react that way the emotions you will allow to surface will reinforce this and typically give you that exact result, a very negative experience. On the other hand however, if you belief that stress is something to use as tool to learn from, improve yourself and to use a guide to make your activities the most effective and enjoyable, you can much more easily recognize stress and use it to your advantage by looking for stress that can help you in that journey and to quickly react to improve your situation. Doing this, turns stress into positive experiences and you can live much more in the moment and with hope instead of dwelling on problems and being stuck in the past.
Beliefs can be changed by changing your knowledge of a subject but they typically require some reinforcement as well. Take these tips and think about how you can apply them to easily manage stress in your life. Read about people and autobiographies where individuals have overcome tremendous stress in life and made the most of it, to surpass great hurdles, terrible circumstances and massive challenges simply by changing their beliefs and have the inspiration and drive to most past them. You can do the same with stress and turn it into a tool that only makes you stronger and guided in a way that improves your life more and more. I hope these tips encourage you to improve the way you manage your stress and that you can eliminate negative stress and make it all positive in some way. While you can never completely eliminate all negative stress, you can learn to quickly change it and make the most of it!
Posted by Mike King under Learning | 22 Comments »
