Stress Management Techniques have become hugely popular and diverse. In the 19th Century the great killer was disease. Understanding the need for cleanliness, rising hygiene standards and vaccines and antibiotics eliminated disease as a killer for the most part.

A hundred odd years on and we are mostly being killed by degenerative illnesses. Heart disease, Cancer and so on are the major cause of death. One of the factors that exacerbates these conditions is stress.

Stress does so much damage physically, psychologically and emotionally. Yet it is greatly misunderstood. Let's look at the most common stress management techniques.

Stress Journal

This involves keeping a record of what happened to cause stress and analyzing what triggers stress in your life. It's useful in increasing awareness of your emotional state, but needs you to be dilligent in recording it.

Progressive Relaxation

The idea behind this is that you first tense muscles then relax them. The point being that it's hard to relax when your body wants to tense up. So you go with the body and then direct it into relaxing. Again a useful technique, but it assumes that you can't treat the stress more directly.

Self-Hypnosis

Basically this involves listening to a recording either from a hypnotist or recorded by yourself and inducing yourself into a relaxed state. Like anything else it takes practice and dedication to master and isn't practical in most situations. Once again it starts with the presupposition that stress is unavoidable.

Meditation

Meditation is essentially reaching a state where the mind is free of thought. Without thought there can be no stress and only relaxation. Practiced every day it will obviously give you a place of relaxation, much like returning to the default factory settings.

This then gives you a fresh start to work from and the accumulative effect of training your brain to reach a place of neutrality lowers your set point so that you become a generally calmer person. As a result you create less stress and become more resillient to it.

However it does take a lot of practice and dedication. Few people can quiet their mind without practice and few people will put in the practice to reach the stage where they feel the benefit from it.

The other drawback is that it's a little like pressing the pause button on life, while you get yourself ready. Underlying this is the assumption that you can't deal with life without it being too much for you. I think it's possible to live life without getting ground down by it.

Autogenics

Autogenics is a specific practice of visualisations that lead to relaxation. It was developed in the 1930's by a Psychiatrist from Berlin who developed auto-hypnotic techniques.

Again it takes daily discipline to use these techniques consistently.

Visualisation

The idea behind visualisation is that you use the power of your imagination to help relieve symptoms or manage problems. It's a start in learning to train and control your brain.

It's sometimes used by people with illnesses, such as Cancer Patients imagining their immune cells fighting off cancer.

Refuting Irrational Ideas

All stress is caused by a clashing of reality and our expectations of what that reality should look like. None of us have a perfect picture of reality. So one way to reduce stress is to find out what ideas we have about ourselves or life are invalid and creating our stress.

Nutrition

Stress causes a series of bio-chemical reactions that changes the hormonal balance of the body. This can cause havoc to the body's ability to digest food. The stress response basically shuts down the digestive system in order to deal with the threat in front of us. Therefore whatever is currently in the digestive tract is eliminated as quickly as possible to free up energy without ingesting all the nutrients. So it doesn't necessarily matter what nutrients you eat, but what gets digested.

As well as the digestive effect, stress can use up nutrients, thus depleting the body's resources. So nutrition can play a huge part in dealing with stress. Your body needs nutrients to be healthy. A lack of health will lead to a lack of resilience in dealing with stress. Nutritionist's would take it's influence further and point out that certain foods, such as caffeine can stress the body in itself.

Coping Skills Training

Coping skills are the skills that you use to cope with stress. Many people training others to manage stress more effectively teach basically the techniques listed here.

Biofeedback

This is essentially listening to your body. Blood Pressure, heart rate and skin temperature are examples of physiological measures. This makes the individual aware of the effect their thoughts are having on their body. People aren't always aware of how they feel and just how stressed they are at times. Seeing physiological triggers can make people aware of effects on their body and act as a motivator and trigger to relax.

Exercise

The body's stress response is all about preparing for action. Exercise provides the action. The physiological reactions to stress and exercise are fairly similar. Exercising speeds up the time it takes to recover from the stress effect.

You are always going to encounter stress, but the key is the speed you can regain balance and get back on track. Exercise puts your body in a more resilient condition. It also has a postive effect on the individual's mental and emotional state leading to less perceived stress.

Assertiveness Training

One of the most common sources of stress is a lack of assertiveness. Stress is an overload of demands that exceed the person's ability to cope. Not being able to say No and wanting to please everyone leads people to take on too much and build up unexpressed feelings of resentment and bitterness.

The ability to assert yourself is essential. What are you, if you do not express what you stand for? And so skills to improve this ability are a great way of cutting off stress from it's source.

Thought Stopping

This refers to developing a habit of interupting chains of thought. It's helpful because we typically get into habits of thought. Therefore if we have been stressed our thoughts veer towards looking at situations from a stressful perspective.

Time Management

All we have in life is our experience, which we measure and organise in time. So time management is really about effectively focusing our attention on the areas that are most important to us.

Being clearer and more organised in managing time reduces demands on us and gives us a feeling of being more in control. This obviously leads to less stress in our life.

Breathing

Changing physiological states, such as the rate and depth we breathe at and posture we hold leads to changes in attitude. Part of being stressed is a physiological change to shallower breathing. Focusing on breathing deeper and in a more controlled fashion induces relaxation.

The downside is that just as we can never think of the witty reply until after the situation, equally we rarely remember to breathe deeply, or are able to, when we are most stressed.

Stress Toys

Stress balls, putty, mini punchbags and so on are all little gimmicks that provide a focus for people to release their aggression. It's really a more modern way of the age old tradition of making a scapegoat, rather than confronting or dealing with the person who you are really angry at.