Stress Management
What is Stress?
According to the American Institute of Stress (www.stress.org) there is actually no single definition of stress that everyone would agree on. Stress is a subjective feeling, what is stressful for one person may be pleasurable or have little effect on others and we all react to stress differently.
In order to have a working definition we could however say like this:
Stress is a subjective feeling that puts us in the mercy of our anxious self. It causes a fight-or-flee reaction in our body that on the long run is unhealthy, and that may be destructive for our mind and body.
This definition may not be perfect, but it is good enough for us.
Todays high speed, hard competition society, with its incredible information overflow, causes stress in people. Burnout is an extreme syndrome of stress. We all probably know people who has went through such a period.
If you are too stressed, you time management will suffer. Luckily there exists many ways and habits for keeping stress under control. For most people I highly recommend using at least a few of the below suggestions to manage stress.
Stress Management: Keeping Stress Under Control
At Time Management Solutions we have a 7-way approach to stress management. It consists of the following parts:
A diagram showing seven ways to prevent and cope with stress.
The techniques above all represent different approaches to the same thing. There is no single right or wrong way. They are all useful and you should use what works best for you.
Let’s dig a little deeper to the different approaches.
Personal productivity skills and time management is what most of this site is about. When your productivity is on a level where you know that you perform efficiently at work, you will experience less stress. A good place to start exploring for more information is our section on Introduction to time management, if you aren’t familiar with it yet.
From here on they are in some sort of a ease-of-implementation order:
Physical activities and doing sports is beneficial in many ways. Physical exercise releases built up tension. It also releases hormones that make you feel good. A fit body helps your mind to stay focused and it also can handle stress for longer physically.
Doing sports also forces you to be in the now, which makes it impossible to worry about stuff and things on your mind. This gives your mind a possibility to relax.
Journaling (writing a diary) is an excellent way of learning to know yourself better. It can also work more acutely; if something is stuck on your mind a good exercise is to write it down and just to discuss the matter in your diary for 10-20 min. You don’t even have to come to a conclusion. Still it will calm you down. Read more about journaling for stress relief.
Meditation may to some of you sound esoteric. Nevertheless, I recommend trying it. You may also only use a relaxation CD (or mp3), which can easily buy on e.g. Amazon.com. Meditation calms down the whirlwind of thoughts in your head. The effect is immediate, and done regularly it will be even stronger. Regular meditation will result in a generally calmer you. But most of us never manage to do it regularly. Read more about meditation stress relief.
Leading a balanced life is about having more than one important thing in your life that you value highly. You should not base your identity merely on your job, income, or family, because it is risky. Due to some unexpected event you could lose your “precious” and due to your one-pillar mindset that would make you lose your identity too. In stead you should be living on more fronts than one. This also makes it possible to relate stressful things at let us say work, against a richer context of things in other ares of your life. Stressful things won’t blow out of proportion.
Leading a balanced life also means that you don’t have any harmful dependencies of alcohol, drugs or let’s say food. Furthermore, it means that you sleep enough. Leading a balanced life is a broad concept, but I think you got the picture.
Conflict resolutions skills are one part of social skills. Many times stress and bad feelings are a result from social situations. People problems, as they say. In order to resolve difficult social situations you need to be able to face reality, the problem, and to lead difficult conversations. Your mindset should not be tuned for avoiding problems. To put it shorty, conflict resolution requires maturity.
Mindfulness (aka. Present Moment Awareness) is a more conscious and generic skill of living in the now. In practice, living in the now means that you are not constantly re-living moments from yesterday or 5 years back… the time you did some grand mistake in your life or some random angst you had in school. We all should stop dwelling about such things and just let go! However, present moment awareness also means that you don’t live too much in the future. It is O.K. to have dreams about your future and to enter that dream every now and then. But it is not O.K. to live a deferred life, where you are holding back on things because “one day” when you will have the perfect moment you will finally do this and that. That “one day” will probably never come, so start doing things you want to now.
By re-living bad moments from the past our body actually reacts partly in the same way that it did during the original experience. This is why you actually can feel the “stress” of uncomfortable things that happened years ago when you think about them later. Our poor bodies are not completely able to differentiate if something really happens now or if a moment is re-lived in the mind. By re-living bad moments we create a bad feelings and vibes in our bodies. This leads to increased stress.
Present moment awareness is a skill. You can learn it too.
What now?
If you feel stressed, pick a few practices from above and work on them for a while. This way you will find the ways that suit you the best. We will also be adding more specific resources and advice to this section, so stay tuned.
An easy way to start a new practice is to use the weekly follow-up form, found in our goals section.
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