In life we can be frequently faced with stress. Whether big or small, often it is a big nuisance in our lives. In my career, stress appears to be one of the biggest complaints and struggles people deal with. I’ve not met anyone who has been able to completely avoid experiencing stress.
With practice we can certainly learn how to manage stress and improve our reactions to it. When we stress over our stress, we create an even bigger mess than the one we are already faced with. Not only does stress create much strife, but it also affects our health more than we may realize.
When we don’t find ways to balance the stress in our lives, it often manifests in health problems and unhappiness.
When we take the approach to fight stress head on, we end up creating more stress for ourselves. It isn’t always possible to eliminate stress from our lives, as circumstances can be out of our control. We can, however, accept that when it arises we can practice better management.
We can think of stress as an alarm system. Rather than struggling so much with it, we can look at it as an advantage of communication from our inner self. When stress arises we can understand that our body, mind, and spirit are letting us know something is out of our alignment.
It could be simply that we need to step back and reevaluate our situation. Slowing down to look at things a little more closely can be therapeutic when dealing with stress. When we can give ourselves the space to calm down and center ourselves, we can find clarity in handling our stress. It can also allow us the time to shift our perspective away from feeling stressed. We can have stress without panicking or making our stress bigger by the way we perceive it.
Many times we stress because we don’t know the outcome. We create bigger unease and stress by imagining worst-case scenarios. Overthinking can escalate quickly, causing us to stress further. Making some peace with stress enables us to work through it better. Accepting how things are can enable more choices in how we deal with our stresses.
Stress can be a healthy communitunicator in our lives rather than an exhausting battle. When you feel stressed try to step back a little and ask yourself what the stress is trying to communicate with you.
You can acknowledge stress as an alarm system, warning you to listen to your body and what it’s trying to tell you. Maybe you’ve said yes to what you really are miserable doing. Or you need to rest and take better care of yourself. Just because your mind wants to continue pushing you forward without taking a break doesn’t mean it’s good for your body or health. We may not be taught to listen to what our bodies are communicating, but we can learn from it if we do. I’ve seen people get severely ill too many times because they didn’t listen to their alarms. I’ve also learned a few of those lessons the hard way. They aren’t easy lessons when we ignore those nudges.
Reevaluating how we spend our time and energy can help reveal where our stresses can be coming from. Take some time to see what is really necessary. Sometimes it simply comes from our hold on how we think things need to be. When we can let go of our expectations, we can release a lot of our stress.
When we can honor what we need for our health by setting boundaries for self-care, we can heal many of the effects of stress. It’s helpful to take some time or give ourselves a little space to understand what we need more or less of in our life.
Habits can be tricky to break, but if we can notice when we make the statement we feel or are experiencing stress, we can start by pondering what is off-balance. Rather than use the word “stress,” change the language to “off-balance.” When something is off-balance, we can look at ways to try to balance it out. The word “stress” in and of itself seems to amplify powerlessness. It’s like an escape to avoid looking deeper into what is really going on inside ourselves.
You’re probably not going to eliminate all your stress in one day. What you can do is practice more things that calm and center you to manage the stresses in your life. Managing isn’t always about eliminating. It’s mostly about guiding, controlling, and directing.
Stress can overwhelm us and bring us all to our knees at times. We can empower ourselves away from the stress mentality and towards more balance in our lives. Stress is screaming for the need to neutralize. We all de-stress differently. The key point is honoring the importance of some equalization. This is how we can live and manage with stress present in our lives.