10 Tips for Managing Stress

There are 3 main ways to deal with stress: (1) eliminate, decrease, or spread out the stressors (causes of stress) in your life (2) change your attitudes and perceptions of stressful events or situations in your life (3) use healthy coping mechanisms to deal with the inevitable stress in your life.

Here are 3 or 4 tips for each way to deal with stress listed above:

1. Prioritize, then don't sweat the small stuff. Ask: How important is this going to be one year from now? Work toward main life goals, don't get bogged down with meaningless details or get sidetracked.

2. Spread out life changes so that you allow time between stress-producing events to recuperate. For instance, don't plan a wedding, a job change, a move, and plan for a child at the same time. Any change, whether positive or negative, requires adaptive energy and time in order for you to adjust.

3. Learn to say "no" when you really can't handle an additional load. Sometimes pride gets in the way, or we want to be a "nice guy" to others at our own expense. Sometimes we think we can do more than we actually can.

4. Don't be available and accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Take a 10-20 minute relaxation break during the middle of the day. Take at least one day off during the week. Don't plan any activity one or two evenings during the week. Take vacations that are more stress-relieving than stress-producing!

5. Change your attitude about stressful events that you cannot change. For example, change being stopped at a red light or stuck in rush hour traffic from a stress-producing event to a relaxation break; try to imagine that a person you have trouble dealing with has a physical problem that could explain their terrible behavior.

6. If you are in a no-win situation, try to pull away from it for a time of relief, or change the environment which causes the situation.

7. Take a look at your stressors and analyze:

(A) "Are my worries based on objective reality, or something that has a low probability of occurring?" Much energy is wasted on things that could occur, but never happen! Mark Twain once said, "In my time I've known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened."

(B) "Is this inside my sphere of control or not?" If "yes", we do all that we can and then let go. If "no", then there is nothing we can do and we should try and let go.

8. Get daily exercise. Exercise is nature's tranquilizer. The body's stress response prepares us to deal with stress physically. When we exercise, we burn up all of the chemicals and hormones secreted during stress and can fully relax. Exercise actually puts a governor or "limiting" effect on the adrenal gland's response to stress.

9. Use progressive muscle relaxation, massage, saunas, whirlpools, heat, sunlight, and biofeedback techniques. Development of the spiritual component of our lives can often help individuals obtain peace and calmness.

10. Express your feelings. Those who hold things in are at high risk for development of heart disease due to repressed anger. Crying has been shown to emotionally and physically reduce stress by release of certain chemicals in tears. Strong family, community, church, and group associations correlate highly with ability to handle stress well.

Keep this list of tips handy and review it often. They are so simple to do, but we forget to think about them.