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Ask Us!How to Set Goals, Juggle Time and Be Happy:
Thoughts about Stress Management
What is Stress?
Perception seems to be the key to our experience of stress. Perception helps to explain how, in the same situation, one person feels overwhelmed and helpless, while another person feels challenged and stimulated.
Stress shows up in the perception of threat, potential harm, or loss of control. We all face demands, pressures and expectations from others and from ourselves. We all have resources to deal with those influences. When we perceive that those influences exceed our resources, we feel stressed.
Coping involves making accurate appraisals of our perceived stressors, changing what can be changed in the situation and/or perception, redefining and re-establishing our level of personal control, and creating a supportive social network.
Managing Stress
The following are 25 effective verbs to add to your lifestyle action vocabulary and actually manage the stress in your life.
- Identify your negative stresses.
- Change what you can.
- Let go of what you cannot change.
- Learn positive coping skills for the rest.
- Control your time.
- Define your goals.
- Set priorities.
- Use a daily planner.
- Be true to your own personal value system.
- Create a self-affirming, organized environment.
- Simplify whenever possible: look at the BIG picture.
- Communicate assertively versus aggressively.
- Employ positive self-talk.
- Eat low-fat/high-fiber foods with complex carbohydrates, plenty of fruits and vegetables, dairy products, some protein, and 6-8 glasses of water every day.
- Sleep 6-8 hours at night.
- Exercise 20-30 minutes aerobically 3-4 days a week with resistance training and stretching 2-3 days a week.
- Rest: find quiet time.
- Practice relaxation techniques.
- Self-protect: learn to say no.
- Stop being so critical of yourself and others.
- Do things that you will like yourself for having done.
- LAUGH!
- Explore aroma, hydro, music, and other therapies.
- Talk to a trusted friend or counselor.
- PLAY!
About the Author:
Kathy A. Barney, B.A., R.N., M.A., was Stress Management Coordinator for Indiana State University Student Health Services / Promotion from 1997-2000.