Stress Management

Stress Management: How to Reduce, Prevent, and Cope with Stress

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Make time for leisure activities that bring you joy, whether it be stargazing, playing the piano, or working on your bike. Keep your sense of humor. This includes the ability to laugh at yourself.

The act of laughing helps your body fight stress in a number of ways. Take up a relaxation practice. As you learn and practice these techniques, your stress levels will decrease and your mind and body will become calm and centered. Poor time management can cause a lot of stress. Avoid scheduling things back-to-back or trying to fit too much into one day. All too often, we underestimate how long things will take.

Make a list of tasks you have to do, and tackle them in order of importance. Do the high-priority items first. If you have something particularly unpleasant or stressful to do, get it over with early. The rest of your day will be more pleasant as a result. Break projects into small steps. If a large project seems overwhelming, make a step-by-step plan. Focus on one manageable step at a time, rather than taking on everything at once. If other people can take care of the task, why not let them?

Let go of the desire to control or oversee every little step. In addition to regular exercise, there are other healthy lifestyle choices that can increase your resistance to stress. Eat a healthy diet. Well-nourished bodies are better prepared to cope with stress, so be mindful of what you eat.

Start your day right with breakfast, and keep your energy up and your mind clear with balanced, nutritious meals throughout the day. Reduce caffeine and sugar.

Stress management

Avoid alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs. Self-medicating with alcohol or drugs may provide an easy escape from stress, but the relief is only temporary. Adequate sleep fuels your mind, as well as your body. Feeling tired will increase your stress because it may cause you to think irrationally.

The fastest way to reduce stress is by taking a deep breath and using your senses—what you see, hear, taste, and touch—or through a soothing movement. By viewing a favorite photo, smelling a specific scent, listening to a favorite piece of music, tasting a piece of gum, or hugging a pet, for example, you can quickly relax and focus yourself. Of course, not everyone responds to each sensory experience in the same way.

The key to quick stress relief is to experiment and discover the unique sensory experiences that work best for you. How does stress affect the body? Small changes that can make a big difference to your stress levels. Lawrence Robinson, Melinda Smith, M. Stress Management helpguidewp T Start a stress journal A stress journal can help you identify the regular stressors in your life and the way you deal with them. A number of self-help approaches to stress-prevention and resilience-building have been developed, drawing mainly on the theory and practice of cognitive-behavioral therapy.

Levels of stress can be measured. One way is through the use of psychological testing: Changes in blood pressure and galvanic skin response can also be measured to test stress levels, and changes in stress levels. A digital thermometer can be used to evaluate changes in skin temperature, which can indicate activation of the fight-or-flight response drawing blood away from the extremities. Cortisol is the main hormone released during a stress response and measuring cortisol from hair will give a to day baseline stress level of an individual.

Look at how you currently cope with stress

This method of measuring stress is currently the most popular method in the clinic. Stress management has physiological and immune benefits. Positive outcomes are observed using a combination of non-drug interventions: Acute stress deals with the pressures of the near future or dealing with the very recent past. This type of stress is often misinterpreted for being a negative connotation. While this is the case in some circumstances, it is also a good thing to have some acute stress in life. Running or any other form of exercise is considered an acute stressor. Some exciting or exhilarating experiences such as riding a roller coaster is an acute stress but is usually very enjoyable.

Acute stress is a short term stress and as a result, does not have enough time to do the damage that long term stress causes. Chronic stress is unlike acute stress. It has a wearing effect on people that can become a very serious health risk if it continues over a long period of time. Chronic stress can lead to memory loss , damage spatial recognition and produce a decreased drive of eating. The severity varies from person to person and also gender difference can be an underlying factor.

Women are able to take longer durations of stress than men without showing the same maladaptive changes.

Men can deal with shorter stress duration better than women can but once males hit a certain threshold, the chances of them developing mental issues increases drastically. Stress in the workplace is a commonality throughout the world in every business. Making the environment less competitive between employees decreases some amounts of stress. However, each person is different and some people like the pressure to perform better. Salary can be an important concern of employees.

Salary can affect the way people work because they can aim for promotion and in result, a higher salary. This can lead to chronic stress.

Cultural differences have also shown to have some major effects on stress coping problems. Eastern Asian employees may deal with certain work situations differently from how a Western North American employee would. In order to manage stress in the workplace, employers can provide stress managing programs [18] such as therapy , communication programs, and a more flexible work schedule. A study was done on the stress levels in general practitioners and hospital consultants in Over medical employees participated in this study done by R.

These numbers came to a surprise to Dr. Caplan and it showed how alarming the large number of medical workers become stressed out because of their jobs. Managers stress levels were not as high as the actual practitioners themselves. Although this was a small sample size for hospitals around the world, Caplan feels this trend is probably fairly accurate across the majority of hospitals. Many businesses today have begun to use stress management programs for employees who are having trouble adapting to stress at the workplace or at home.

Some companies provide special equipments adapting to stress at the workplace to their employees, like coloring diaries [21] and stress relieving gadgets. There are a couple of ways businesses today try to alleviate stress on their employees. One way is individual intervention.

This starts off by monitoring the stressors in the individual. After monitoring what causes the stress, next is attacking that stressor and trying to figure out ways to alleviate them in any way. Developing social support is vital in individual intervention, being with others to help you cope has proven to be a very effective way to avoid stress.

Avoiding the stressors altogether is the best possible way to get rid of stress but that is very difficult to do in the workplace. Changing behavioral patterns, may in turn, help reduce some of the stress that is put on at work as well. Employee assistance programs can include in-house counseling programs on managing stress. Evaluative research has been conducted on EAPs that teach individual stress control and inoculation techniques such as relaxation, biofeedback, and cognitive restructuring.

Studies show that these programs can reduce the level of physiological arousal associated with high stress. Participants who master behavioral and cognitive stress-relief techniques report less tension, fewer sleep disturbances, and an improved ability to cope with workplace stressors. Another way of reducing stress at work is by simply changing the workload for an employee. Some may be too overwhelmed that they have so much work to get done, or some also may have such little work that they are not sure what to do with themselves at work. Improving communications between employees also sounds like a simple approach, but it is very effective for helping reduce stress.

Sometimes making the employee feel like they are a bigger part of the company, such as giving them a voice in bigger situations shows that you trust them and value their opinion. Our bodies and minds have been designed with a 'fight or flight' reflex that helps to orient and become alert when we are faced with challenging or dangerous events. Our attention gets narrowed towards such events, and our brain instructs our bodies to prepare for possible physical action such as confronting the event physically e.

Muscular tension, increased heart rate, and higher concentrations of blood sugars and hormones are involved in this process. Our body's stress response is really designed for the people we once were; less sophisticated hunter-gatherer type tribes people whose major sources of stress are where the next meal will come from and how to avoid predators. The stressors faced by most of us today are less physical and concrete than those faced by our ancestors; We worry instead about the threat of being laid off from work, of how to keep our children from becoming drug addicts, and about what to do if terrorists attack.

Where our ancestors could deal with their stress reactions through direct physical activity e. Even when we can, for example, attack someone as a way of discharging our tension, we often don't because we don't want to be sued or arrested for breaking the law.

Because we are often unable to discharge our activation we end up experiencing this activated physical and mental state a lot of the time so that it ceases to be just occassional 'acute stress' and becomes instead 'chronic stress'. The table above lists a number of serious stressful events that people experience, often more than one at a time.

It's important to note that a given event doesn't have to be negative in tone to be stressful; Any significantly challenging event, even positive ones like weddings, can create stress.

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Where acute stress is healthy and very important to our well being, chronic stress is unhealthy. A great number of diseases physical and mental both are either brought on in part or made worse by people being chronically stressed out. Chronic stress also makes it more difficult for us to handle our relationships well.

People try many ways, both positive and negative, to lessen their stress levels. Dysfunctional negative and unhealthy methods of coping include:. These methods are considered dysfunctional because, over time, they end up making the situation worse for people rather than making it better. Drinking as a means of stress reduction works in the short term because alcohol is a powerful muscle and attention relaxer.

Repeated use of alcohol ends up causing 'tolerance' which means that people have to drink more and more to get the same effect. The end result is addiction to alcohol a very serious health and social risk which only adds stress to the drinker's life. Exercise - Regular physical exertion of any intensity a gentle 30 minute walk, a Yoga or Pilates class, an hour long strenuous free-weight workout, etc. Healthy Diet - Eating healthy whole foods and avoiding sugary and fattening treats helps keep the body's internal rhythms more balanced.

Socialization And Supportive Conversation - Many people are able to relax and to feel part of something larger than themselves by sharing their concerns with trusted others.

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