There is no one alive who doesn’t have some element of stress in their lives. If it’s not family stress, it may be financial stress. If it’s not money, it’s health concerns. Whatever the particulars of one’s problems, the impact is significant on our health and happiness.
There are temporary sources of stress like a traffic tie-up that threatens to make you late for work, or an examination for a class. But these are finite problems that end pretty soon. It’s only when stress lasts for days or weeks that it can do real damage.
That’s when it’s essential that we find healthy, long-term ways to cope with stress. When we allow substance use or destructive habits to be our coping mechanism, we get only a temporary reprieve from the stress. To make matters worse, we can end up with a destructive and dangerous addiction. Indeed, drug rehab in Orange County has serviced many people who started down the path to addiction because of stress.
So it’s important to develop healthy strategies for managing stress. Let’s look at some of the most successful techniques.
Eliminate The Source
Sometimes we expend so much energy worrying about something that we’d be better off to put that energy into taking action against it. If money is tight, find a side job to help ease the pressure. If a family relationship is strained, sit down and talk with the person. If you have health issues, ask your doctor how to correct it.
Attacking the source of stress does more than eliminate the effects of stress on your health. It also removes a problematic situation from your life. Best of all, finding an effective technique to eliminate one source of stress will leave you better equipped to fight off the next stressor you encounter.
Get Some Perspective
It’s been said that life is partly what happens to you but mostly how you react to it. While we would never downplay the impact of tough times in our lives, it is true that we can do a lot to manage stress by trying to give things the proper perspective.
A great rule of thumb is to ask yourself if the problem you’re facing will matter a week or a year from now. You may soon find that the issue isn’t as important as it seems right now, and that’s the first step toward fighting back against stress.
If it does turn out to be a long-term problem, look for help. Talk to someone who has been through a similar issue, and build some reassurance from their successful resolution.
Burn The Stress
Stress is actually a physiological condition. It usually involves elevated blood pressure, increased heart rate, and muscle tension. While you may not be able to eliminate the source of the stress, you can combat the manifestations it takes in your body.
Exercise is a great way to do this. Physical activity releases endorphins, which make you feel more relaxed and happier. It also gets your mind off whatever is stressing you, which is often the most effective way to attack it. And of course, exercise can help reduce those direct physiological impacts of stress. It also carries the added bonus of improving your health.
It’s not always possible or realistic to avoid everything that can cause stress in our lives. It would be foolish to imply otherwise. But once these stressors enter our lives, they don’t have to get control of us. With some simple techniques, applied consistently, we can keep stress from generating other problems that can eventually overshadow the original problem.