Managing Stress With Practice, Prioritization and Planning

Understanding your stress is critical to its management. Understanding involves not only knowing what activities, events and situations are causing your stress, but also being able to pinpoint why it is that they are stressful. You must also take into consideration how many stressors are affecting you and how they stack up against one another. Not all stressors are created equally when it comes to their resultant level of stress, their ultimate impact on your life, and the timeframe in which that impact will occur. That is why successful stress management requires looking at the stressors individually as well as considering them collectively.

Can your biggest stressors be minimized with practice? Being bad at or being scared of something is stressful. The stress of parallel parking or public speaking is most likely the result of perceived incompetence, fear, or both. Getting better at an activity can reduce the amount of stress that it levies on you. Improvement comes with practice. Through repeat exposure you may also become increasingly numb to the fear a certain activity or situation may incite, or you may develop methods to actually make that activity or situation less frightening. If there is a time in your life where things are cruising along nicely, and nothing is broken or falling apart, consider tackling a stressor. Purposely put that stress in your life at a time where it won't overwhelm you. Life is full of extremes. Things either seem to be really bad, or really good. The idea is, while things are good, work at eliminating or at least reducing one of the stressors that can pile up when life is ugly.

Prioritizing and scheduling your stressors may help reduce your overall level of stress. Times of high stress are often busy times. There is too much to get done and not enough time. Do an honest evaluation and figure out if something can give. You can do this by understanding what the results are if any of your to-dos is not done. If a task or activity must be done, if the cost of not doing it is too great, can the timeframe be pushed back to allow you to focus your energy on completing other tasks first? Can some of your tasks be completed on a rotating basis? For instance, if you would like to find a job, write freelance articles for your portfolio, and update your blog, can you do one of these tasks per day, thereby working on each task every third day? Or, can you spend a specified amount of time each day working on each task? Perhaps you work on all these tasks every day, but only for an hour or two. Manage your stress by controlling not only the number of stressors in your life, but also the amount of time in your day that they occupy.

Take a few minutes and look at your life. List out what is stressful to you. Drill down further and below each stressor, write out why it is stressful to you. Star or check the stressors that are impacting you on a daily basis right now. Then, write down the anticipated result of eliminating that stressor from your life. Include the timeframe that you expect that result to manifest itself in. From this list you should be able to tell what stressors can be eliminated or minimized through exposure or practice, what stressors can be eliminated or at least put off until later based on impact and timing of impact, and how you might be able to control the remaining stressors through effective time management. This is a very common sense approach to stress management that can have a big impact on your well-being.