During Stress Awareness Month we’re spending time looking at the issue of Stress and how we can cope with it.
On Tuesday we looked at three wellbeing tools which can help you find ways to manage your stress. Story Sphere’s, The Stress Container and Breathing techniques don’t work for everyone but they can be part of a helpful toolkit which gives you options when stress happens and allows you manage your stress more effectively.
Today we want to look at three more techniques and give you some hints about how they might be useful.
Break Up a Problem
Stress is a challenge because life can be challenging and so stressful situations will happen. We often feel like we want to avoid stress but thats a very difficult thing to do.
When a problem creates stress try breaking it up into small parts - a little bit like slicing a loaf of bread.
Take a piece of paper and write down the problem you’re facing.
Try to make the problem smaller by finding at least five component parts of it e.g. the cause, the ‘now’ problem and the ‘later problems, what the implications are and how it makes you feel.
Then try to order these problems in terms of what you can action first.
Also ask whether any of these problems are out of your control, if they are focus on the things in your control.
Tackle each ‘part’ of the problem in turn, making it smaller and more manageable.
Control is an important consideration in stress. Sometimes we face things that are in our control but often we face things we can do nothing about. Often it’s the latter things we can’t influence that end up being our worries because they are out of our control - yet we can’t do anything about them. Breaking the problem down often makes it easier because we can see ‘what we can do’ and ‘what we can’t.’
An old prayer goes like this:
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to tell the difference.
Relaxation
Relaxation is an antidote to stress a place of deep rest slows your breathing and heart rate, lowers your blood pressure, and brings your body and mind back to a more balanced place where it’s easier to think clearly and rationally.
There are lots of ways to relax, but what’s yours? Consider a time when you’ve been relaxed recently - why was that and where was that? Is there anything you can learn?
1. When have I been truly relaxed?
2. What was I doing? Where was I?
3. What relaxed me and why?
4. How can I replicate that when I’m stressed?
5. Make time to relax when stress seems difficult to manage
There are many brilliant things to try and build into your life that aid relaxation. Yoga, mindfulness, listening to music, getting outside, your favourite armchair, taking a long hot bath …. all of these work for a time. But whatever enables you to truly relax and the principles behind it can be taken anywhere. For me it’s being near the sea that really helps me so I have an MP3 of the sound of waves, I can imagine a seaside that I picture and it enables me to relax.
By the sea
I relax by remembering my favourite seaside. I can hear the sound of the waves and image the peace it brings.
Diet, sleep and exercise
Our last tip is a simple one. We often talk to people trying to work out issues around their wellbeing and there are always many factors. However 99 times out of a 100 we end up asking …
How is your sleep? Are you eating well? Are you exercising regularly?
This is never everything but it’s normally a factor. Stress is rarely caused by one thing. However if we are tired, if we’ve not been eating well or we’re not active then inevitably stress will hit us harder. These aren’t easy issues by why not take a small personal inventory and ask yourself:
How has my sleep been this week? Am I sleeping 6-8 hours regularly? Am I awake in the night often?
Am I eating a balanced diet? Do I make time for food and to eat well?
Am I active? How? How regularly?
Asking this simple questions can often turn the lights on for people. If we sleep well, eat well and exercise regularly it won’t fix everything but it will give us a good base to work from.
Why not try out these and the other tools we’ve suggested and let us know if they help. Why not share too how you cope with stress and what’s in your toolkit.