Posted on March 03, 2016 by Jenny Cromack
What is stress?
Stress is a forced adjustment to a demand, threat, or pressure rather than a “thing”. We will experience several stresses and when we do if we cannot cope efficiently with these stresses it can have detrimental consequences both physically and mentally.
Image taken from shutterstock.com
Common stresses may include:
· Work, School, Uni
· Family, Relationships
· Time, Deadlines
· Money
Three Simple Tips:
Before going into any specific methods for managing your stress try these simple tips. They aren’t always possible but it is always a good place to start.
1) Change the stress – e.g. talk to your boss about moving deadlines or creating more time opportunities for specific stressful tasks
2) Change your perspective – e.g. is it that you physically don’t have time, or are you simply not managing your time well enough? See it from an outside view.
3) Remove the stress – this is not always possible. Ask yourself is this stressful task necessary?
Exercise and Stress
The body responds to stress by releasing stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. This prepares the body for “fight or flight”. The concept of stress also causes feelings of worry, anger, and frustration to build up and can be a huge burden on our life and mental health. Exercise is a great and easy way to release these feelings and counteract the stress hormones in the following ways:
· It releases “happiness” hormones such as serotonin and endorphins – these can also help sleep quality which also helps combat stress
· It clears the head – allows you to forget the stresses even if only temporarily and can often make things seem less stressful than first thought
· It changes your focus – having something else to focus on will help direct your response in a beneficial way and release the pent up feelings
If your stress response usually results in feelings of anger, frustration, and you find yourself bottling up emotions then weight training and high intensity exercise is a great way of venting and releasing these pent up emotions.
If you are someone who can relax and release in a more calming and relaxed manner yoga, pilates, or low intensity exercise is a great way of achieving this.
Lifestyle Tips
There are more general ways of coping with stress such as:
· Acceptance – you can’t control everything and things will go wrong but get up and move on don’t let it linger
· Positive Outlook – go from “I will never do this” to “I will do all I can, it will get done eventually”
· Walk Away – take a step back from the stress, leave it alone, and come back to it later. Time spent worrying is wasted time.
· Manage Time – physically document and dump your tasks into a diary. Don’t sleep on them or allow time for worrying.
This is a very general advice guide. Specific techniques are available to help with stress and the next series of blogs will discuss some of these methods such as Centering and Attribution Training.