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5-Minute Daily Program for Stress Management

Webmaster | June 16, 2010 | no comments

If we ever really stopped to think about it, there are many factors that can trigger stressful situations, even how we work or even relax. You can ever find yourself to be totally stressed even when you are relaxed and bored.

Since stress is inevitably unavoidable in life, it is important to find ways to diminish and avoid stressful incidents and decrease negative responses to stress. Here are a few of the things that can be done by just remembering it, since life is essentially one routine following another such as brushing your teeth or eating lunch. You can accomplish a few of them in a longer amount of time, but as we all know – every minute counts.

Manage Your Time

Time management skills allow you more time with your family and friends and possibly increase your performance and productivity. This also helps to reduce stress.

To improve your time management:

Save time by focusing and concentrating, delegating, and scheduling time for yourself.
Keep an accurate record of how you spend your time, including work, family, and leisure time. This will help to indicate possible bottlenecks for efficient time management.
Prioritize your time by rating tasks by importance and urgency. Redirect your time to those activities that are important and have a higher priority first, then tackle the lower rated tasks.
Manage your commitments by not over or undercommitting. Don’t commit to what is not important to you. Remember your priorities.
Deal with procrastination by using a day planner, breaking large projects into smaller ones, and setting short-term deadlines. Don’t overwhelm yourself into fretting over large projects.
Examine your beliefs to reduce conflict between what you believe, what your life is currently like, and what you would like your life to be like. Consider prioritizing long range goals.

Develop Healthy Coping Strategies

It is important that you identify your coping strategies. One great way to do this is by recording the stressful event, your reaction, and how you cope in a stress journal. With this information, you can work to change your unhealthy coping strategies into healthy ones; those that help you focus on positive aspects and what you can change, control, and improve in your life.

Modify Your Lifestyle

Some behaviors and lifestyle choices affect your stress level. They may not cause stress directly, but they can certainly interfere with the ways your body and mind seek relief from stress. Always Try to:

Balance personal, work, and family needs and obligations.
Have a true sense of purpose in life.
Get enough sleep, since your body needs to recover from daily stresses.
Eat a nutritional, balanced diet for good defense against stress.
Get moderate exercise throughout the week.
Limit your consumption of alcohol.
Don’t smoke. If you smoke, quit. Now.

Social Support

Social support is a major factor in how we experience stress. Social support is the positive support you receive from family, friends, and the community. It is how you know that you are cared for, loved, esteemed, and valued. Increasing amounts of research indicate a strong relationship between social support and better mental and physical health.

Change Your Thinking

When some event triggers negative thoughts, you may experience fear, insecurity, anxiety, depression, rage, guilt, and a sense of worthlessness or powerlessness. These emotions trigger the body’s stress, just as an actual threat does. Dealing with your negative thoughts and how you see things can help reduce stress.

Think about something else, something pleasant. Thought-stopping helps you stop a negative thought to help eliminate or prevent stress.
Disproving irrational thoughts helps you to avoid exaggerating the negative thought, anticipating the worst, and interpreting an event incorrectly.
Problem solving helps you identify all aspects of a stressful event and find ways to deal with it positively.
Changing your style of communication helps you to communicate in ways that make your views known without making others feel put down, hostile, intimidated, or insulted. This reduces the stress that comes from poor communication. Use the assertiveness ladder to improve your communication style.

Everyone can get stressed even though we’re just using our hands to do the talking, but having to sit for 7 or 8 hours is already stressful enough and have our own ways to relieve stress. Whether you’re the mail guy, the CEO, or probably the average working parent, stress is one unwanted predator you would love to keep out of your life.

For more information on how to effectively handle stress, click here.