How to Battle the Stress in Your Life

To combat the stress in your life don't take on the entire army, win the war by fighting one battle at a time!

Dealing with stress requires a specific action to combat our instint to react to certain situations. Stress will always come in and out of your life, so learning to manage it will make you stronger and happier. When you feel overwhelmed your heart races, you don’t sleep well and generally you will not take care of your overall health. Instead, it is time to grab the horns of stress and beat it into submission – until the next stressful event occurs in your life.

When you are struck with a “fight or flight” instinct, this is nature’s way of helping you survive. Your adrenaline runs through your veins prompting you to take action. There may be several factors adding stress to your life. You need to identify who and what they are and break the stress factors into more manageable segments. You may have an event pending that is putting extra pressure on you, your job security may be in question or you may be having personal issues with your mate or other loved one. Identify the stress and then prepare for battle!

If you have an approaching event that is causing stress such as a party or wedding, you know the stress will be relieved after the event occurs. It does not matter if everything goes as planned, the day will come and go in a 24 hour cycle just like every other day of the year. So, first of all don’t put too much pressure on yourself for perfection. Keep enough free time for you to have fun and enjoy the event. If you don’t, you may actually reflect a negative vibe over the entire affair.

What else is eating at you? If you are not sure how permanent your job is, you should have a battle plan to find another source of income. Remeber I mentioned preparing for battle? You can not simply make a plan, you must take action. Start networking with friends and send out a few resumes. Talk to people who work for competitors of your current employer. Start a home based business or take a few evening classes if that will give you the certificate or degree you need to find a better way to earn a living. Just do something!

Are you bad at time mangement and that is stressing you out? This is an area of concern for me all of the time. I am a writer, so I work under the pressure of deadlines. Breaking stories and press releases are constantly landing in my lap and my priorities are realigned sometimes several times a day. One thing I have found that helps is to break a large project down into smaller chunks.

It is like housework, don’t clean out the entire attic all at once. Work a manageable sized section at a time so you do not feel overwhelmed by the sheer size of a task. Take pride in what you have accomplished! It is more important to your mental health to save some “fun” time than it is detrimental if you don’t finish the attic in a single day! Allocate small chunks of time to complete a task, if you don’t finish it will be OK. Unless it is of a timely nature (like a deadline), the task will patiently wait for you to return for its completion – no questions asked!

I am a worrier, my husband is not. I lose sleep over the littlest things. What can I change, what can I adjust and what do I have no control over? Write them down, name them and break them down into smaller segments. Sometimes, just a few minutes of permitting yourself to take them on one at a time, individually, will give you just enough ammunition to win the battle.

We may not have control over the situations that occur in our lives, but we do have 100% control over the way we react to them. To combat the stress in your life don’t take on their entire army, win the war by fighting one battle at a time and keep in mind there are some battles that are just not worth fighting, so “don’t sweat the small stuff!”