Stress Management Techniques: Creating Your Own Program

Stress Management techniques are the set of methods each of us reaches for to manage stress in our lives.  Everyone has a different bag of tricks and not all techniques used for stress management fit everyone.  The important thing to know is that just having some stress management techniques to reach for is the first step in coping well when these life events arise.  To be unprepared is to ignore that sometimes life is stressful and to avoid healthy coping techniques is an invitation to anxiety, exhaustion, and depression.

Knowing your source of stress is a great place to begin.  It can be the job, the kids, health concerns, or any number of things that contribute to your daily stress.  If you have not yet identified what it is that leads to your stress, try to spend some time journaling about when your stress is more prominent or when it begins and ends.  This can help you identify where it's coming from.  Once you know the source or cause of your stress, you can identify what needs to change or what needs to be added to your life in order to better cope with the stress, reduce the stress, or completely eliminate the stress entirely.

Coping with the stress might mean that while staying in the stress, you practice ways to reduce your physical symptoms without removing yourself from the event.  For instance, you might learn breathing techniques that slow the breath and therefore slow the heart rate and blood pressure.  Reducing the stress can include breathing retraining used in coping with stress, but it might also include other kinds of adjustments such as reducing hours at work, reducing the frequency of exposure to stressful events, reducing productivity, and working with cognitive behavioral techniques to reduce the amount of time you worry.  Eliminating stress can mean that it might be time to let that current job go and find a better one with less pressure.  It can also mean moving if the area you live in is stressful and unlikely to change.  Eliminating stress means just that, removing it from your life and making a change for good.

Taking the time to develop a set of stress management techniques for yourself is well worth the time.  Once you know what works for you, it's easy to reach for and easy to apply.

Thanks to Dimitar Nikolov for the great photo
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