What To Do To Relieve Stress

Knowing what to do to relieve stress is a powerful feeling. When you know how to cope with stressful situations, you can tackle almost any situation with total confidence, even those that tend to stress a lot of us out. When we are put into situations which tend to cause anxiety of fear, that?s when our stress levels ramp up. This anxiety or fear can be from physical danger or emotionally related worries.

However, worrying never helped anything. You need to either accept things as they are or take action to change things.

Often, being anxious stops us being able to decide what to do. We hesitate between several courses of action, worrying that we will not choose the best. We spend hours imagining possible consequences of all the things we could do. We have imaginary conversations with others in our heads, putting words into their mouths that may be the exact opposite of what they would really say.

Most people who suffer from stress believe that all this thinking is useful in some way. They believe they need to think things through. In fact it very rarely helps at all. They imagine a whole course of action from beginning to end and when they do make a choice they commit to it in an ‘all or nothing’ way so that it is very difficult to go back when, as is likely, things do not work out as they imagined.

The best thing to do in most stressful situations is to act, to take one step from a position of confidence, without fear, and see what happens. Then take another step towards your desired outcome, taking into account any reactions that you aroused.

In order to do this, most people need some training. This is where assertiveness and conflict resolution techniques are very helpful, especially where the stress is caused by the demands or expectations of others, or problems such as harassment or arguments.

It is also important to have a clear sense of what is important and what is not, so that we don’t sweat the small stuff. This means having some perspective on our lives and it is often achieved by taking up a new hobby or sport, some useful activity that you can be enthusiastic about. This will stop your whole life revolving around your work, your relationship, your health or whatever it is that is causing the stress.

A good way to defuse acute stress is to do some slow-moving exercise like tai chi or yoga. Mediation and breathing exercises can also be incredibly helpful. Even taking a walk can help to reduce your stress level.

A relaxation technique which was developed specifically to reduce stress, autogenic training involves 15 minute visualizations, ideally done three times a day. You can purchase CDs which show you how to use this technique.

Listening to relaxing music has also been proven to reduce stress. Choose instrumental music with a slow tempo and a relaxed feel. If you simply must have singing, try to pick something which won?t engage you emotionally, such as music sung in a language you do not speak.

Even in our world where most of us lead very busy lives, stress is still avoidable. You can cope with stress in a variety of ways -you can even think of battling stress as a challenge to be overcome; many find this attitude to be a helpful one to take when trying to reduce stress.