Dealing with stress: An unofficial guide

One way to help manage your stress is to find out the source of the stress. Identifying the source of your stress may be more complicated than it sounds. It is easy to pick out things that make you stressed, but it is not easy to see how you contributed to make it stressful through your thoughts, feelings and behaviors. You may be stressed about an upcoming test, but it might be that you procrastinated until last minute to study, and that’s actually causing the stress rather than the test itself.

One way to help find the true source of your stress is to write what causes your stress down in a journal every time you get stressed. Things to write down are how you felt, how you responded and what you did to feel better. After a while, you will see patterns that will help you find the source of the stress.

Getting up and moving around is a great way to relieve stress. Exercise releases hormones that make you feel good and distract you from your stress. Most of the benefits of exercise start after about 30 minutes..

The most effective ways of exercise is walking, running, riding your bike and doing aerobics. When exercising, focus on breathing with your movement, or on how the breeze feels against your skin. This element of awareness will help you not think about negative thoughts that usually come with overwhelming stress.

Simply talking to someone who understands you and makes you feel safe can be very calming. Talking face-to-face with someone causes the body to release hormones that deactivate your fight-or-flight response. Talking to someone is also a natural stress reliever in nature that helps with depression and anxiety.

People you talk to don’t have to have solutions to your problems they just need to listen to you. Don’t worry about opening up to someone who cares about you, because it will only strengthen your friendship. It is good for your health to regularly talk to friends and family. People will be busy and not be able to always listen to you, so it’s always good to build new relationships. Some ways to create new relationships are by reaching out to to a coworker or an old friend, or join a club to meet new people.

Managing your time better can also reduce your stress. When overwhelmed with too many things in one day, it’s hard to stay focused and calm. You’ll be tempted to cut your time socializing or sleeping when overwhelmed, which can stress you out even more than you already are.

Prioritize your tasks from most to least important. If you have a big assignment to do, it is better to work on your assignment periodically rather than in one sitting.

Setting aside time to be with yourself is very important. Have time to do activities you enjoy and make you feel relaxed. These will lower your stress levels and calm your body. Not all of these will help with your stress, but it is good to try each one to see what fits you best. So whenever you have a test or big assignment due, try to do one or more of these strategies to help cope with your stress.