Practical and Effective Stress Management Techniques - Part One

Stress is an emotional or mental tension which results from demanding circumstances. Before moving further it's imperative to clarify a very common misconception about this psychological state. Most of us believe that stress is always damaging and has negative implications, which's far from the truth. In reality, stress can either be good or bad depending upon its amount an individual is absorbing.

The moderate level of stress is positive, which is known as EU-Stress. It's considered somewhat significant since EU-Stress pushes us to get our chores done. Whereas, distress is the real culprit which results from extremely high levels of stress. So now you know when someone is complaining about stress, then it is actually distress they want to get rid of.

There is a wide range of physiological and psychological complications which are associated with distress, and the only good thing about this condition is that it's curable. This is the first part of the stress management techniques trilogy. Each article of this series will provide three practical tips on manage stress and live a happy life.

Stay a Mile Away from Nicotine, Alcohol and Caffeine

When it comes to stress management the usage of nicotine, alcohol and caffeine is a big no. Nicotine and caffeine are key stimulants which increase the stress level instead of decreasing it. On the other hand, when consumed in small quantities alcohol functions as a stimulant. Therefore, drinking alcohol for the alleviation of stress is apparently not a wise decision. It's highly advised to swap alcoholic and caffeinated beverages with fresh juices, herbal teas and water.

Deep Breaths Always Work!

Ever wonder why smoking makes people feel relieved under extremely stressful scenarios? Even though it is true, nicotine which's found in tobacco is not responsible for decreasing stress level. It's basically the procedure of smoking we must be grateful to. A person is required to take deep breaths in order to inhale the smoke from a cigarette followed by long exhales to throw it out. This whole natural process ultimately helps in stress reduction, which can easily be performed without smoking a cigarette.

Consult a Specialist

Gone are the days when paying a visit to shrink was a big deal. Now people have realized that distress is a real problem and consulting a psychologist doesn't mean that a person has gone insane. Thereby, feel no hesitation in getting some advice from an expert who can provide valuable insights and remedies about the problem on hand.

https://ezinearticles.com/?Practical-and-Effective-Stress-Management-Techniques---Part-One&id=9789294

When You Are Consumed By Anger And Chaos, You Have Lost Your Way

Don't Stow Away The Anger

Anger and chaos cannot live in a peaceful mind because they oppose one another.

We believe anger is a toxic emotion because of the destruction it brings to people's lives. To the emotionally intelligent however, anger is just an emotion which does not dominate their mental landscape.

I used anger and chaos together in the title since they can leave you feeling lost in your thoughts and emotions.

Linda Graham MFT explains in Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being: "Our response to feelings of anger, for example, can be positive or negative. We can learn to channel anger into effective action for a good cause, or we can shoot ourselves in the foot when our anger habitually causes us to act abusively toward other people."

If we understand the mechanism behind anger, we can deal with it better so it doesn't flood our bodies with toxic chemicals. The problem is, many people stow their anger because it is considered to be an unhealthy emotion. Therefore, anger is likely to be expressed at an inopportune time if repressed.

Have you noticed how anger makes itself known when you least expect it? You could be in your car driving and suddenly you are cut off in traffic. Soon enough you are trading blows with another motorist over something insignificant such as failing to indicate when changing lanes.

Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener write in The Upside of Your Dark Side: "When you're angry, pausing, deep breaths, and moments of reflection more effectively exercise power and control than rapid-fire responses. If you feel less angry when you slow down, that's great, but that's not the goal. This is about giving yourself a wider range of options to choose from in an emotionally charged situation."

Repressed Anger Stored In The Body

My client Susan experienced anger recently while driving to work. An inconsiderate motorist cut her off in traffic and being socially conscious, she beeped her horn to advise him of her presence, so as to avoid an accident. The motorist took offence and gestured to her with a hand signal that was not the international sign of peace.

This took place early morning while she was driving to work. By the time I saw her later that morning she was still ruminating on what transpired, only now the anger had manifested as lower back pain due to the stored emotion.

Emotions are energy in motion and if not expressed, they become stored in the body via organs, cells, muscles and tissues. If the emotion is ignored or stowed away, its presence is known via pain or illness to get your attention.

The late Candace Pert, an American neuroscientist and pharmacologist who discovered the opiate receptor, the cellular binding site for endorphins in the brain, wrote an article titled: Where Do You Store Your Emotions? She outlines how emotions get lodged in the mind body until they are integrated.

She states: "The emotional memory is stored in many places in the body, not just or even primarily, in the brain... The real true emotions that need to be expressed are in the body, trying to move up and be expressed and thereby integrated, made whole, and healed."

Her work into opiate receptors showed how emotions like anger can lead to disease if we are not mindful of them. With Susan, she repressed her anger towards the motorist because he mistook her car horn as a sign of aggression.

She ruminated on the incident, recalling the anger, so it expressed itself in her lower back, a weak spot for her given a car accident decades ago.

After our discussion, I mentioned something that helped her to reframe the experience. I pointed out how she has a way of being righteous, especially as someone who is socially conscious. She let the motorist know he was in the wrong and felt victimized when he gestured to her inappropriately.

I asked her to reconsider the situation, since other motorists can sometimes misjudge our intentions because we cannot communicate with them vocally.

I then asked her to close her eyes and visualise the emotion of anger. Where was it stored in her body? What did it look like? I invited her to let it be there, lean into it and take deep breaths while directing her awareness to the area of the pain.

The good news is, the pain cleared in two days following more contemplative work by Susan. The point is, anger like other emotions will find its way to the weakest point in your body. Sadly, for many this means it gets stored away for years, if not decades until the person goes into therapy and experiences spontaneous healing.

In fact, there's nothing spontaneous about the healing other than the individual has dealt with the emotion after all this time.

Love Is The Only Way

It was the Canadian singer Leonard Cohen who wrote in the song Anthem: "There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."

The purpose of anger is to draw your awareness to the light, or in this case the love within you.

In most cases, love and peace of mind is the answer, not anger and chaos.

How can I be sure you ask?

Look to your body since it knows the truth. If you think this is just wishy-washy self-help advice, I urge you to hold onto anger and fear for as long as you can and see if it doesn't manifest itself as pain or disease.

In contrast, The Healing Power Of Love overcomes fear, anger, anxiety and other lower emotional states. Love is a healing agent, but first you must release the anger because the two cannot co-exist, as alluded to earlier.

When you are consumed by anger and chaos, you have lost your way. However, what if the presence of anger was leading you back to love?

What I'm proposing is, anger is a call for love, in most cases self-love. You are no more an angry person than a tree believes itself to be a bird.

Whilst on the topic, let's not confuse evil and anger for that is another article saved for a later time.

Anger is an emotional state a person can become stuck in if they do not attend to their pain.

Love is the way. Moreover, love is the only way back to your core self.

So, if you believe the narrative anger preaches, it is because you are consumed by the emotion and have lost your way.

Allow love to open your heart again. Otherwise your authentic self becomes muddied by the mirage of shameless emotions not symbolic of your true self.

http://ezinearticles.com/?When-You-Are-Consumed-By-Anger-And-Chaos,-You-Have-Lost-Your-Way&id=9828735

Stress and How to Cope With It

Stress is a normal response to difficult situations. We often confuse it as some form of mental pressure caused due to our own inability to deal with things. But that's not what it is. Stress is not an action, it's a reaction. Stress is our reaction to various external factors.

Before we get to the whole coping part, first we need to understand a few things about stress that are essential.

1. Stress is not always bad

Stress is the body's way of reacting to a challenge. When faced with a tough situation, there are a whole lot of reactions that the body goes through. Increased pulse rate, adrenaline boost, faster response to stimuli and among those, stress is one.

But the same stress that 'stresses us out', also makes us quicker and more prone to handle situations better. Stress makes us do our best. So it isn't always a bad thing.

2. Stress varies from person to person

Some people are inherently calmer and more composed, compared to others. So, their reactions also are different. Stress levels change vastly across different people and are not to be compared at any stage.

If I can deal with a tough situation well that does not make another person's stress or panic a bad thing. It is after all only a reaction.

3. Stress is not always an illness

There are a variety of stress related disorders. But just because a person is prone to stress, does not make them a patient. Stress disorders, like all other disorders are something that cannot be confirmed unless clinically diagnosed.

Thus, stress in daily life is as normal as it can be.

4. Stress always has a trigger

May not be something happening at the moment. Sometimes the trigger of stress goes back in time, that we don't even recall the incident. That is because our mind is an expert at suppressing information that can be distressing. But no stress, ever comes without a trigger.

Stress that is positive or good for us in some way, is called Eustress and the one which makes us all panicky and unable to see straight is Distress.

Modern day MNCs encourage some amount of work stress to ensure that employees push ahead and don't get too comfortable. Although as the position becomes more and more powerful, eustress becomes distress. Let us now look at some stress related disorders.

1. General Stress

This is your old school, before an exam, important day type of stress. It is so normal and so vastly experienced that if you don't experience it, people think you're a bit weird (in a good way of course!).

General stress requires nothing more than a few deep breaths and a cool glass of water. It goes away as fast as it came.

2. Acute Stress

This is in a way, the big brother of general stress. It is not in any way damaging, but it makes you completely frazzled and leaves you exhausted.

This would be the stress people experience when work load is doubled, during year end or when you study for a history test and get the math paper in hand. The situation is overloaded and so the brain becomes irritated and you start sweating and panicking.

Acute stress can also be dealt with the old ways, but the best thing to do is to simply let it pass.

3. Episodic Acute Stress

This is one of the serious types. It's one thing to be stressed out, but something is off when a person gets worked out about almost everything. Even things that is not stressful. So be it their wedding day or their nothing day, there is something they will stress about.

For people with episodic stress, things get out of hand very quickly. Calm becomes chaos in the blink of an eye. They take on more than they can chew and at the moment of truth, they are about to explode.

Episodic stress patients are often studied for crisis management purposes just to get a grasp of how masses will respond to a situation.

4. Chronic Stress

While acute stress can be thrilling and exciting, chronic stress is not. This is the grinding stress that wears people away day after day, year after year. Chronic stress destroys bodies, minds and lives. It wreaks havoc through lives.

If you can imagine what the stress must be in a situation of war, then I assure, you can imagine what chronic stress is like. It requires medical help and proper treatment.

While Chronic Stress needs proper medical attention, the other forms of stress can be dealt with. One can even cultivate a habit to deal with it.

For people whose daily lives involve stress (stock brokers I see you!), these few tricks always come in handy.

Coping with stress

• Always, DEEP BREATHS. Don't argue, simply follow. Breathe deeply and breathe often.

• Water. Drink it slowly and prolong the drink. Don't gulp it all down and expect to be calm. The more time you take, the more time you get to process things.

• Use a stress ball. Those smiley faces aren't a joke. They release tension from your muscles and that helps you relax physically.

• Be patient. Nothing is going to happen sooner than it is meant to, simply because you're about to burst a nerve! Close your eyes and be patient.

• Be prepared, if you can. This is what you need to do before events that are inevitably going to happen (EXAMS). Be prepared well in advance. No stress.

• Count down from 100. With every number down, think like it's one point of stress leaving your body. By the time you hit 0, you'll be back to #1.

• Know you are human. Like seriously! There are limits to what you can and cannot achieve. So stop biting off more than you can chew. Accept only enough work and do it perfectly.

• Have some quiet time alone. Have some beverage (whatever you please) and let the negativity get out on its own.

To end, get this one right up there on your list of best quotes -

"Tough times don't last. Tough people do."

http://ezinearticles.com/?Stress-and-How-to-Cope-With-It&id=9339018

Mindfulness of Anger

Take three minutes and try this mindfulness practice for dealing with one of our strongest emotions.

Anger—it has an awesome power. Just think back to the last time you really felt it. What words come to mind? Hot? Addictive? Adrenaline rush?

We’re not destined to respond to anger the same way every time we feel it. By tapping into the experience of anger, and bringing compassion to it, we can learn how to approach this dangerous, often explosive emotion in a healthier way.

Take about three minutes with each response. You may also lengthen that time if you want to try more intensity.

1. Sit in a comfortable yet alert position with your hands resting comfortably and your eyes gently closed. Check in with your body, and feel the places where it makes contact with the chair or cushion.

2. Take some deep breaths, completely filling the torso with air, then completely release the breath.

3. Think back to a time when you experienced anger, relatively recently. You don’t need to choose your worst episode. In fact, it’s wise to start with something smaller. Envision and experience what happened, allowing yourself to feel the anger again, right now. Allow the feeling to get as strong as possible within a zone of safety (e.g., not getting to the point where you want to get up and scream and jump around!).

4. Other emotions, such as sadness or fear, may arise as you remember the episode. For now, see if you can stay with the feeling of anger.

5. Where in your body do you experience it? Explore this feeling. You may be tempted to try to push it away. Instead, investigate how it feels, noticing gross and subtle sensations. As you notice a sensation, inquire whether it increases or decreases in intensity. Does it change or move? Is it warm or cool?

6. Practice bringing compassion to the anger. The feeling of anger is normal, part of being human. We all experience it at times. See if you can cradle your own anger like a mother cradling a newborn. What happens if you hold it in this way, with tenderness and care?

7. Say goodbye to the feeling. Slowly bring your attention back to the breath and stay with it for a while, letting your emotions settle into the spaciousness of your breath and awareness.

8. After you finish, reflect. Which sensations did you notice in your body? Did they change as you observed them? Were you able to bring compassion to the anger? How did you do that? What happened to the anger at that point?

http://www.mindful.org/mindfulness-of-anger/

6 Stress-Relieving Tricks to Reduce Anxiety at Work

These simple behavior hacks will help ease your mind when you’re anxious.

When your alarm goes off in the morning, chances are you reach for your phone to 1) turn off the noise and 2) to catch up on email before you even get out of bed, eyes still blurry from sleep. Right?

To say we live in an era of constant communication is more than just an understatement. Technology has led to the expectation that we work longer hours and communicate with colleagues and clients outside the workplace, creating a mentality of anytime, anywhere access.

What’s the mental cost? Stress, which everyone experiences from time to time. But the Anxiety and Depression Association of America reports an estimated 40 million Americans suffer from some form of anxiety disorder, ranging from persistent, unrealistic worry to specific phobias and full-blown panic attacks. Forty million.

Anxiety is simply a learned response to stress, and it can cause sufferers undue frustration and hopelessness. So as the emails stack up in your computer inbox and your phone pings with seemingly urgent messages, how do you get out of that anxious headspace?

Here are seven hacks to help ease your anxiety throughout the work week and minimize stress levels, courtesy of Kelli Walker, panic and anxiety coach, and co-host of the Anxiety Coaches Podcast.

1. Go easy on the caffeine.  

There’s just something about starting the morning with a habitual cup of coffee, hot steam rising from the top. While the caffeine certainly helps energy levels, its effects mimic anxiety symptoms: racing heart, upset stomach, shaky hands. “It’s rarely a symptom or actual cause of anxiety,” Walker says.  “It’s just that if you’re already in a sensitized state, you might feel more vulnerable to the physiological effects coffee produces, and your mind may misinterpret those effects.” Rest assured, you don’t have to kick the coffee habit, but know your body’s cues, and if you’re already feeling tense, consume in moderation.

2. Don’t overthink your stressors.

Sometimes, figuring out what exactly is getting you worked up can make you anxious. “Stress isn’t necessarily going to go away. Some jobs are inherently stressful,” Walker says. For instance, a recent study tracked hospital nurses and measured their stress levels throughout the day, changing nothing in their daily routine. The nurses then practiced mindfulness to help the way they related to the stress. “When the nurses were re-measured, their stress had dropped by 40 percent,” says Walker. "Nothing changed stressor-wise, except the way the nurses related to that stress and were aware of its presence. In my opinion, giving extra attention to the stressors is wholly unhelpful.”

3. Try accepting the anxiety.

Have you ever been sitting in a meeting and you start getting cold sweats and a racing heart? You have a few options: Fight the feelings, remove yourself from the situation… or, says Walker, “accept the feelings and allow the anxiety to sit beside you.” Accepting anxiety means, simply, sitting there and letting the feelings pass. It may not feel good. And, Walker adds, “Don’t force the acceptance. That won’t work either. If acceptance isn’t coming easy or naturally, it’s OK. Getting back to that place and calm and peace doesn’t rely on it. Either way, the anxious state will pass, whether you accept it or not.”

4. Fake it till you make it.

Sometimes, you just have to grin and bear it. And “faking it till you make it” can actually work surprisingly well, says Walker. “Act normal and make light of the anxiety. Power poses work great and can eventually become habit.” So stand up tall and make an effort to smile. “If you tell yourself a lie a bunch,” adds Walker, “you start to believe it.”

5. Take a breather.

Whether meditating for three minutes or just taking deep breaths, remember to take some time to check in with yourself throughout the day. “Even if it’s for 30 seconds,” says Walker, “even just drop your shoulders and release any tension. These little things help you gain altitude from the anxiety and perspective.” And while technology does little to ease a racing mind, there are ways to harness it to help induce calm. If the statistic about 40 million anxiety sufferers can’t convince you that you’re not alone, the sheer volume of smartphone apps for anxiety should. Walker recommends Headspace, Meditation Oasis and the Mindfulness apps, as well as Happify, which offers games to hone in on mindfulness.

6. Get moving.

Exercise is a mood lifter, a physical shift in your day, and its effects on anxiety and depression are well documented. A healthy body goes a long way toward a healthy mind, and the feel-good endorphins release while the stress hormones are reduced.

http://www.success.com/article/6-stress-relieving-tricks-to-reduce-anxiety-at-work

7 Quick Ways to Calm Down When You Are Overwhelmed

Do you need some quick and effective ways to calm down? Do you sometimes feel that you add items to your to-do list faster than you tick them off? Do you spend most of your day worrying about your lack of time?

The truth is, no matter how much we love our job, or how productive we believe we are under stress, there comes a moment when the pressure rises above boiling point. The sheer number of urgent tasks multiplies in a geometric progression. New possibilities no longer sound inspiring, they sound overwhelming and equal more work.

If that’s where you are right now – keep reading! If not, it doesn’t mean you should wait until you get there to learn how to cope with a demanding work schedule and how to calm yourself down quickly when you feel overwhelmed.

Here are 7 quick and easy ways to calm down when you are overwhelmed:

1. Let go of a few activities

Yes, it’s that easy! Take a look at your to-do list and ask yourself, “If I don’t do it today, will it matter a month from now?”

Not every urgent task is important. Just like not every important, high pay-off task is urgent. The best way to keep yourself from getting overwhelmed and to manage your time is to know the difference between the two and learn to simplify your life by getting your to-do list down to three big tasks.

2. Take deep breaths to calm down

This advice sounds so simple it’s often overlooked. But it works better (and faster) than any other relaxation technique out there. There is a direct connection between our emotional state and breathing. An anxious, frustrated or overwhelmed person breathes as if they have just finished running a marathon. A calm person breathes differently. Their breathing is deep, slow and steady. So the best way to bring your heart rate down and to regain your cool is to change your breathing.

Try this now: take a slow, deep breath in, filling your lungs with air and expanding your diaphragm. Hold your breath for four counts and then slowly release the air through your mouth. Repeat four times and notice frustration and the feeling of being overwhelmed dissolve with each long exhale.

3. Make “Just one thing” your mantra

When we feel overwhelmed by the amount of tasks on our to-do list, it’s easy to enter the ‘deer in the headlights’ state. You see deadlines approaching directly towards you, and you know that something has to be done about them, but you just don’t know where to start.

The best way to get your mind out of an ‘inactivity trance’ is to create momentum. This is what makes the “Just one thing” mantra so powerful. It helps to change our expectation that everything has to be completed right now, “or else.”

Next time you feel overwhelmed make grabbing a cup of coffee your “Just one thing.” You can do it, right? Then come back, pick one of the smallest tasks on your to-do list and tell yourself you’ll do just that one task. This is your next “Just one thing” that you will concentrate on until it’s complete. After that you can move on to the next task and so on.

Please note: It’s not “One thing at a time.” Saying this implies that there is a huge line of other tasks waiting to get done and that’s not the message you want to keep repeating to yourself.

4. Reduce the multi-tasking and multi-thinking

It’s been proven that multi-tasking is very inefficient, to the point of dumbing us down (more than smoking marijuana does). The same is true for multi-thinking, when your mind frantically jumps from one thought to another, trying to focus on and analyze several things all at once. Fortunately, there is help. A few minutes of meditation or brainwave music is all it takes to start feeling more relaxed, more creative and less overwhelmed.

5. Get moving

Any exercise you engage in – be it walking or dancing to your favorite beat – helps to pump some ‘feel-good’ hormones, called endorphins, through your body and to clear your mind. Staying active also increases your productivity, enhances your ability to cope with stress and helps you to vent nervous tension, boosting your mood and changing the thoughts that induce the sense of being overwhelmed.

The best part is you don’t have to spend hours in the gym to get the mind-soothing benefits of exercise. Even as little as 15 minutes of dancing or jogging can go a long way towards making you feel better and staying calmer.

6. Change your surroundings

We all need and deserve to take vacations from work woes and family responsibilities. Unfortunately, spending two weeks lazing on a beach, toes in the sand and a Mojito in hand, is not always an option. However, this doesn’t mean that we can’t take short ‘vacations’ from work stress and the technology buzz.

Go outside for a few minutes and enjoy the sunshine. Stop at a park instead of driving straight home from work. Sometimes changing your surroundings and ‘spicing up your routine’ is all it takes to change your perspective on things and find creative solutions to seemingly complex and overwhelming problems.

7. Get some pet therapy

Use pet therapy to calm down.

Studies have shown what most of us already guessed – our pets can be a great help during stressful moments. Simple actions such as petting or playing with your dog or cat can lower high blood pressure, improve your immune system and boost your mood. Besides, pets can make the best conversation partners to share your frustrations with. They listen, they love you unconditionally and they never talk back or say, “I told you so.”Extra tip: Don’t wait for stress to hit you to start practising these quick ways to calm down when you are overwhelmed. The best way to enjoy a worry-free life is not to push yourself to the limit of being overwhelmed and frustrated.What are your thoughts? What strategies help you to calm down quickly when you are feeling overwhelmed or frustrated?Most of the time you’ll take a break from your fast-paced life, then get right back on your horse and go back to getting things done. 

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/7-quick-ways-calm-down-when-you-are-overwhelmed.html