Stress can reduce the quality of all aspects of your life, from work performance to personal relationships. Continue on for some simple tips on how you can control your stress and get you back to living a fun life!
Consider getting a pet as a way to relieve stress. Having a dog waiting for you at home with his tail wagging can be a great boost after a hard, stressful day at work. Even jut have a fish can really improve your mood. But don’t take on a pet if you’re not going to be able to care for it.
A good tip that can help you keep your stress down is to start living your life the way you want to. There’s nothing worse than settling in life and having regrets about it. By going after your dreams you’ll notice that your stress levels will be much lower.
Use your sense of smell to reduce stress. Soothing smells such as bay, lavender, basil, or peppermint can help calm you down. Using a small vial, mix rock salt and add a few drops of whatever oil you have chosen. If you begin to feel stressed, simply open your vial and smell the contents for a quick aromatherapy treatment.
Sip on tea to help calm yourself. Chamomile tea is known for its calming effect, but there are also other teas that can calm you as well. Try a cup of passionflower, catnip, kava kava, or skullcap. Steep these herbs for about 10 minutes and you will get the full effects of their calming powers.
Your mind can easily become cluttered, which is a fast track to stress, if you attempt to think about more than one thing at a time. Instead of focusing on many things that you need to do, focus on only one at a time so you will be able to accomplish it easier.
Pay attention to your daily activities for unexpected sources of stress. Video games are relaxing at first but overdoing them causes frustration and takes away time from things that you need to be doing. This time could be better spent sleeping or eating healthy meals.
When it comes to dealing with stress, you may wish to join an online group that deals with whatever is causing the stress in your life. This is important because there is a lot of help online and a lot of people who can provide many different angles of help that may just work for you.
The first step to getting a grip on your stress level is to take an analytical look at how you could improve your methods of dealing with it. Try writing down stressful events and situations you have come across, and how you responded to them. Do this for a few weeks. Review the log and note if your actions were productive. If you aren’t handling stress well, you can learn new coping skills that will improve your overall stress level.
One tip to be sure to consider when dealing with your stress, is to make sure that you do not abandon your problems. This is extremely important because many times, things that are causing stress will not go away and postponing them may only make the issues worse with time.
One of the best ways to reduce or eliminate stress in your life is to learn how to say “no”. If you find yourself overwhelmed with too many commitments or constantly doing things you would rather not be doing, it could be because you have a problem turning people down when they ask for help. The best way to avoid this problem is to be honest with yourself and with others. If someone asks for help and you don’t have the time or energy, simply tell them no.
To keep control over a stressful situation, take a breath before you act. Count to ten, then breath deeply and you should be able to continue in a calm manner. The is a very effective stress management technique which can help you to handle difficult situations professional without becoming angry, reckless and defensive.
Walk, bike, run or whatever! Just get out there and do it! A variety of stress hormones and neurochemicals build up in our bodies when we experience chronic stress. Exercise is one of the most effective ways to reduce these chemicals, one of the most effective ways to prevent significant stress-related damage to our health.
Don’t be tempted to use drugs, legal or otherwise. While it may seem the most natural thing in the world to turn to alcohol, cigarettes, or other drugs to reduce our stress levels, the truth of the matter is that these drugs only escalate our problems. They actually result in heightened stress levels, not reduced stress. We become oversensitized to the very things that are causing our stress in the first place.
If the stress in your life is causing any of the problems mentioned at the beginning of this article, like relationship and health problems, make sure you don’t let this cycle continue! Apply these tips today and every time you need to so that you can stay healthy and happy.