How to Handle Stress - Lifestyle Tips

Learning how to handle stress and managing it well is an important aspect of a healthy lifestyle. Navigating modern life and maintaining an appropriate balance between work and home can be an extremely difficult task.

However, it is also an incredibly important one, as excess stress can lead to a wide array of issues that can disrupt one's life and perhaps even lead to illness.

Though every individual differs in terms of stressors and appropriate methods for alleviating them, the approach for handling stress is similar amongst most people.

The first step in how to handle stress and alleviating it is to figure out its source - and whether or not anything can be done about it. For example, if one is experiencing distress due to the economic climate, it may alleviate some stress to trim one's budget and add more to an "emergency fund".

In general, confronting a given issue in a direct way may be difficult, but it can be instrumental in relieving feelings of stress. On the other hand, for many people, taking action against the sources of stress is not an option. Whether one's stress is triggered by work issues or issues in personal relationships, it can be helpful to engage in positive self-talk. For example, in learning how to handle stress, ask oneself:

• What is the worst that can happen?
  
  
• If it did happen, how would I handle it? (Chances are, it isn't going to be The End Of The World that you’ve internalized.)

Because stress, anxiety, and fear are closely linked, imagining the realization of one's fears has been shown in research to be quite effective in reducing stress. Generally speaking, it allows us to see that that we've built issues up in our minds so much that we're experiencing undue stress. Several studies have correlated feelings of helplessness with stress, so the use of self-talk can help us understand that we are not helpless over our stress triggers; in fact, we are quite capable of handling even the worst that could come our way!

Aside from using positive self-talk in how to handle stress and to reduce it, there are a number of techniques that experts recommend for effective stress management.

One of the best things to do for how to reduce stress is to exercise more. Exercise affects the brain in such a way that "feel-good chemicals" are increased - in effect, increasing one's capacity to cope with life's stressors.

Another great way for how to handle stress is to engage in activities that stimulate one in a physical sense; for example, going to an art gallery and stimulating oneself visually can relieve stress, as can simply taking a walk and focusing only on the sensory experiences it brings - ask yourself questions such as:

• What do I smell? (flowers, the smell before rain, etc.)
  
  
• What does this sound like? (birds chirping, cars driving past, wind whistling, etc.)
  
  
• What do I see? (a bright green tree, a perfectly in-bloom rose bush, etc.)
  
  
• What do I feel? (the sun’s warmth, a cool breeze, etc.)

Stimulating the senses can bring the brain down from its high stress mode, making it a wonderful way to relax and boost your efforts toward how to handle stress.

You can exercise more, engage in self-talk , even drink de-stressing tea all the time, but if you don't implement the most important principle of handling stress, you're going to have a lot of difficulty. The key principle for how to handle stress is this: know thyself.

Know what you can and cannot do, and don't push yourself past your limits. It is okay to say "no" when you've 'got enough on your plate'. Although it can be hard to be honest with oneself about stress triggers, it's an important part of handling stress in a proactive way, so that it helps you rather than controls you. To effectively manage stress, you really need to be in tune with your inner self, and to develop an awareness for when your stress levels are rising too high.

Learning how to handle stress is a task that many of us spend our whole lives struggling with. Finding balance, peace, and an optimal stress level is not an easy task, but there are ways proven to help us work toward that.

Lifestyle changes, self-talk, meditation, exercise, and analyzing the sources of our stress can all help in managing stress, thereby making us healthier, not only in a mental sense, but also by reducing our risk for the diseases linked with excessive stress.

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