How to Manage Stress?

How to manage stress? Stress, like opinion, is subjective and relative to the person experiencing the situation that leads to triggering stress responses. And that is how stress affects us. It sets off a series of physical responses which aims to compensate, and or protect us. How to manage stress? Stress is what causes chemicals and hormones to be produced by your body in order to aid you to face the music and rise up to the challenge, so to speak. How to manage stress? Short answer is, yes! It is through knowing what stresses you and learning how to handle any particular stressful situation in a manner that is non – destructive.

How to Manage Stress: Understand It!

It is after all a situation that can affect not only your physical health but your mental health as well. Long answer is, the basic understanding of stress and how it affects you, somehow allows you to take back the reins and give you the privilege of steering yourself out of the situation causing you stress.

Controlled studies and informal suppositions of people under stress showed that not all stress factors are the same for all. Under controlled circumstances, individuals who were exposed to varied situations showed varied results in terms of what gives stress to an individual. How to manage stress? A lot of people think of stress as an event that occurs to them, be it a form of possible harm or, on the other end of the spectrum, encouragement. Then there are those who suppose that stress is how our bodies, our minds and behavior respond when something stressful happens.

Triggers

When an event which raises stress hormones our immediate response is to, first, mentally evaluate the situation, thereby allowing us to deduce if the situation poses danger to us, once we have assessed the situation, we decide how to deal with it. When we are confident that we have the skills to deal with a particular situation, this is not deemed as a stress factor. However, this changes radically when we are in an unusual situation that makes us realize that the demands of the situation is no match for our skill to overpower.

There are circumstances in life which prove to be stress-provoking, but in the end it’s our perception of whether we are equipped with the abilities to handle the situation or not. It is how we perceive the stress-provoking incident and how we react to the stress factor which determines the impact of the situation on our overall health. Understanding oneself and knowing the strengths and weaknesses one has, they would be able to learn how they can handle difficult situations better.

Support Groups

How to manage stress? A support group who rallies behind you, no matter what, is another stress reducing factor. When you have family or friends who make themselves available to you, you are less likely to wallow in stress for too long. This would be a good time to identify the people in your life that you are sure you can count on in times of trouble laying stress. They may not necessarily have the solution to your problem, they may not know what to say to you during your time of distress but the important factor in all of this is that you have people in your life who how empathy and who listen.

Don’t Get Hijacked by Your Amygdala

The next time you feel that you are being hijacked by the amygdala sit down and write about all the feelings that you are encountering at the moment. Identify them, give it a name, and word it out. You don’t necessarily need to solve it at the very moment, just write down a situation that set off your stress hormones and list all the emotions that feel. Be specific as you can be.

Once you have done that and when you are later on feeling much stronger, come back and address every one of those emotions that you had listed down. Revisit the concerns you wrote when you have confidently recovered from the highjack and figure out if what you had listed, all of them whether they be valid concerns or irrational ideas and thoughts.

Some Tips to Manage Stress

How to manage stress? Writing down a list allows you to understand the origin of the stress factor thereby allowing you to make better, more rational decisions later when your neocortex is hijacked by your amygdala. Now this may not be the solution to your problem next time but it will reveal a pattern of how your rational brain is being overtaken by the irrational part of your head.

Make this a habit. Make it a point that every time you are in the grips of a stressful situation that you write down the root cause of the stress. You want to put down on paper how the situation makes you feel. Write everything down no matter how silly think it may sound put it down on paper.

When you revisit it later on then you can figure out what is this a good response to that stress factor that set off all my stress hormones to go haywire. Being able to answer each and every one of those feelings will validate whether or not it was something that deserved to be stressed over. Most of the time you would realize that the stress you had felt at the onset of the stress factor did not match the intensity of your reaction.