Is anyone out there feeling some stress today? I’ll make an educated guess that most of you are feeling some level of stress. It has become the norm in our everyday lives. However, you don’t have to live your life this way. There are strategies that you can utilize and decisions that you can make to lower or eliminate the stress that you feel on a daily basis. Here are some tactics that might help you lower your level of stress and enable you to enjoy your life more.
Get an objective view of the situation
I understand that you lead a busy life. You have a lot of different responsibilities on your daily priority list. However, you can become so overwhelmed with your commitments and responsibilities and so hyper focused on your own experience that you can no longer see things clearly. In order for you to get a more realistic view of your life, ask yourself the following questions:
1. What impact would this have on my life or others if I don’t follow through with this responsibility?
2. Is the impact worth my level of stress and anxiety?
By asking these questions, you could force yourself to see that it isn’t the end of the world if you drop this commitment. It’s so easy to get lost in the endless loop of stress or anxiety that you can lose sight of whether it even truly matters.
Watch your extreme thinking when you start getting stressed
Think about someone you would deem as stressed or anxious. Chances are they talk in extremes and their extreme thinking fuels their anxiety. They pepper their communication with words like “have to”, “always”, “never”, “must” and “should”. They speak in hyperbole, setting themselves up for more stress. This communication style is simply fuel to the fire. The running dialogue is always swirling in their head, and it’s the perfect storm for a life filled with stress and anxiety. Until they address what they’re telling themselves and make an effort to manage it, the stress and anxiety will only get worse. We all fall into this pattern now and then, so make an effort to acknowledge it and take action.
Stay away from stressful people
Do you know any people in your life that are stress mongers? These are the ones that just resonate with anxiety. Every time you’re around them, stress just seeps out of their pores. The problem is that it usually then seeps into your pores. Their goal is for you to understand the level of stress that they are feeling. However, what actually happens is that they successfully transfer that stress to you. Often, you leave the conversation feeling stressed and anxious while they go on to their next victim. I’m going to take a wild guess here and say that they probably don’t follow through on any advice you give them. My suggestion to you is to minimize your time with these individuals. If it’s impossible, just don’t engage in the anxiety talk and change the subject in the conversation.
Steve Maraboli said the following,
“I promise you nothing is as chaotic as it seems. Nothing is worth diminishing your health. Nothing is worth poisoning yourself into stress, anxiety, and fear.”
Please keep this in mind the next time you’re tempted to fall into this unhealthy pattern.
