Calm Among Chaos: Preparing for Stressful Events

For all of us, life will have moments of stress.  In fact, it would be unrealistic to believe that any of us could ever have a completely stress free life, because even positive events, such as births, holidays, and even weddings are full of stress related concerns.  So foreseeing the arrival of stressful events can help us prepare for good self-care for the duration of any event that requires a higher level of endurance for our body and mind.

Most often we are able to see the coming arrival of an event that we know will require more of our time and energy, and it's at these times that special attention needs to be paid to giving extra effort to everything from good nutrition and sleep schedules, all the way to gentle exercise and proper hydration.

Taking a good inventory of all the ways you tend to neglect yourself during stress can help you to make a check list of things to keep close in mind in order to perform good self care when a special, or unplanned event is entering your life and raising anxiety.

Do you tend to forget to eat when stressed?  Or maybe forget to take in enough water?  Maybe you stay up too late focused on projects related to your stressful event and end up with fatigue that only hinders stress all the more.  Sometimes we can work for prolonged hours on projects and forget to take breaks or stand up to stretch, and this only leads to even more stress in the body.  Or maybe your Achilles' heel is that you have poor time management and tend to end up with a lot of unfinished bits to a project that only increases stress all the more.  

Knowing yourself and your tendencies during stress can help to prepare a plan of good self-care when you know stressful events are coming up on the schedule.  So building your self care right into the hectic schedule has got to be top priority.

Here are some ideas to help you prepare when you know a stressful event is coming:

• Schedule your meal times for the duration of the event and stick to them faithfully
• Make sure the nutrition you take in is healthy and helpful to fuel your body for the duration of the stressful situation
• Plan to carry hydration with you at all times
• Set scheduled times to go to bed and use mindfulness breathing exercises to prevent a wandering mind
• Limit the hours you will work each day on your stressful event and stick to the time frames
• Take breaks to go walk, move, stretch, exercise and get away from the technical tasks
• Avoid unhealthy coping behaviors during the stress such as alcohol or other substances, but also other kinds of addictions that can surface during stress, such as spending, over-eating, gambling, and other similar types of poor coping styles.

Since we can be guaranteed that there will be stressful events in life, the basic summary is to know yourself well and how best to help yourself cope during these stressful events when they arise in your life.

"To experience life does not mean that your life is always blissful.  It means that you are capable of tapping into a blissful state of mind amidst the normal chaos of hectic life."  Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD.(Author of My Stroke of Insight)

Thanks to Water Alternatives Photos for the great photo https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/