Stress Management Shouldn’t Be Stressful!

Every day is a new opportunity for stress relief!

Stress is an unavoidable part of life, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Some forms of stress are necessary and even desirable–for example, eustress (the type of stress you experience watching a suspenseful movie or riding a roller-coaster) can keep life interesting and exciting.  However, chronic stress (the type of stress that feels constant and threatening), or too much stress of any type can lead to a host of health issues and a less satisfying life.

Managing stress is key.  We don’t need to rid ourselves of stress, but we do need to create a balance between too much stress and not enough, between the negative forms of stress and the stress that keeps us feeling vital and alive.  Just as we need work-life balance, we need balance with stress. But stress management can become complicated.

There are many ways to relieve stress, which is both an upside and a downside to stress management.  Here are just a few of the many options:

• Mental stress relief: You can think about things differently, through a shift in your focus or a positive reframe.
• Mindfulness: You can take a step back from your stress and focus on the present moment instead with mindfulness exercises or meditation.
• Taking action: You can do a myriad of different things to change your situation, with varying consequences.  Sometimes this makes things better, but sometimes things can backfire and you can create new stress.
• Build resilience: You can form habits that can actually build your resilience to stress.  For example, exercise and meditation have both been found to make people less reactive to stress over time, and bring greater results with continued practice.
• Calm your body: If you can calm your body and reverse your stress response, you can approach your challenges from a more reasonable and less reactionary frame of mind, minimizing your chances of worsening the situation or slipping into a state of chronic stress.
• Build resources: By mobilizing the resources you have–supportive friends, applicable skills, and even money–you can lessen stress by feeling more prepared to handle whatever comes.

These are just categories of stress relievers, and there are more. The number of options for stress relief can feel empowering, but they can also create stress as you sift through your options and try to decide the best approach. What many of us do is we find a go-to coping mechanism or approach to stress and then use it for most of the situations we face, whether or not it’s the best approach. This can cut down on endlessly weighing options, but it can also create stress because what works for one situation may not be the best option for another.

In the interest of keeping stress management as simple as possible, I recommend a two-pronged approach:

Find short-term stress relievers.  These are fast-acting ways to calm your body and approach stress from a more relaxed place. Breathing exercises, for example, can reverse your stress response in about a minute or two, and then you can move on to taking action from a more peaceful place.

Develop a resilience-building habit.  Here is where you can get into a go-to stress relief habit and stick with it. Find something (again, exercise and meditation are great options here) that can help you to feel less stressed over time, and practice it regularly. Yoga is wonderful for this, as it combines exercise and meditation, but walking, jogging, weight training, mindfulness, and many other habits can qualify here. The key is to practice regularly; a daily 10-minute session is better for stress relief than a 70-minute session once a week or even two 35-minute sessions a week.

That’s it!  You can create a more thorough stress management plan for sure, or you can even find two or three habits that help you to relieve stress every day instead of just one.  The point is to find something that works for you and build on it.  Once this simple plan starts working, creating a more intricate plan with greater flexibility and more options will become much easier. But for now, what will you do today that helps you feel less stressed?

Many of these options are discussed in my book, 8 Keys to Stress Management.  You can also find more information on stress at Verywell.com; I’ve written hundreds of articles on stress management that can be found there.  Finally, this site offers a newsletter that shares stress management tools you can use; I highly recommend that you sign up.  (This free newsletter introduces you to simple research-based techniques for managing stress, and recommended tools that make stress management infinitely easier.) But for now, what will you do today that helps you feel less stressed?