The greatest weapon against stress is our ability
to choose one thought over another.
What is stress?
Stress is an emotional and physical response that you show toward different pressures in your life: from the workplace, school and other institutions. Stress reactions include the inability to focus, concentrate, headache and fast heartbeat. Almost everybody has some kind of stress in their life. What is important though, is how we choose to respond and deal with it.
How can you master your stress? Shift!
When working to overcome stress, it is important to recognize first the stress is present, to some extent in every walk of life, every career. So, quitting your job should not be your first response. Stress can affect you personally or individually, and it can also hamper the productivity of teams.
Your work environment may be a major stressor for you, but this is not something that you can always easily control or change. So, instead of trying to control the work environment, you can control your work (to some degree), your response and yourself. You can take one step at a time toward reaching the final goals. The question then is, how do you go about working around stress?
You can reduce the risk of being stressed out by shifting how you see things to a new perspective. What does that mean? A concrete example would be learning to let go of situations where you have absolutely no control. Use that time and negative energy that you usually pour into stressing about and worrying over the things which you cannot control, and transform it instead into positive energy. You need to use the full force of your mind and change your focused energy toward other things which you can control.
Knowing yourself helps you become familiar with your own emotions and responses, and offers insights into how to control them. This shift in attitude helps you to more easily overcome and manage your stress. There are things which you can change, and these are the places you should expend your energy. And there will be things that are simply beyond your control.
Three simple steps
Actually there are simple steps that you can help you deal with most of life’s stressors. Failing to adequately and properly deal with stress during its initial stages may eventually lead to chronic stress condition. Chronic stress is listed among root causes of frequent headaches, ulcers, indigestion, high blood pressure and heart issues.
• Saying “no” to commitments that would require time and energy that you do not have to give, or (and this is tougher) that you do not want to give.
• Get healthier, physically and mentally
- Exercise, especially stretching and breathing exercises.
- Meditation
- Eating healthier food
• Asking help from other people to lessen the burden.
To deal with stress, you can reduce the stressors in your life to avoid feeling the effects of stress.
Stress prevention
In addition to working on your stress reduction, you also need to pay attention to stress prevention going forward. Stress prevention removes, or at least significantly decreases, the possibility of stress happening. Obviously you cannot avoid every stress in life, but you can approach life in a more prepared fashion.
With this two methods, stress reduction and stress prevention, it is important that you develop the ability to identify which of your emotions are primarily stress-driven. This goes back to knowing yourself well. You can begin to isolate some of those attitudes and/ or learn how to react better to the stressors.
You have to know and understand your limits. After understanding your limits, you would have to learn how to say no. It is different that you know your limitations, but still accept whatever other people say to you.
Working to remove the stress from your life, will help improve your focus. It will encourage peace, tranquility and spirituality within you. You can incorporate stress reduction and prevention in daily life.
With a little personal work, you change your entire outlook and perspective in life.
Thoughts?
Photo Credit: meaganmakes via Compfight cc
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