More Ways to Eliminate Stress

By: Beth McHugh 2010

Stress is part of life, but it’s how we deal with stress that makes the difference to whether we feel challenged or overwhelmed. When it’s “overwhelmed” time, that’s our signal to change the way we are currently running our lives. Here’s some ideas to help you cope with life’s inevitable dilemmas.

1. Prioritize pleasant events
   Most of us get so caught up in the weekly routine of school lunches, ballet classes, meal preparation, household chores, job responsibilities, (and the list goes on), that we forget to have fun.
   
   Fun is essential to our mental health, adults need it to survive, and it is not intended to be the sole realm of the under 18s. Make sure that you program fun into your life. It is just as important to your wellbeing as keeping the house clean. You make have to make appointments with yourself to have fun. That’s fine. Choose a regular date, mark it on your calendar each month, then simply select what you’d really like to do. It doesn’t matter what the activity is as long as you do it on a regular basis.
2. Watch the time
   Time management is an important part of dealing with stress, particularly when the stress you are experiencing is associated with having an overloaded workload. Time management does not mean squeezing even more projects into your day! What it does mean is learning to prioritize and delegate.
   
   Compile a list of tasks you hope to achieve for the day, put aside your superwoman cape, and slash all the unnecessary items off the list. Your tasks for the day have suddenly become far more manageable and your stress levels will lower accordingly. At the end of the day the sense of achievement that you will experience on having completed most of this reasonable list will encourage you to both feel more in control and courage you to repeat this success in the days ahead. In repeating this, day after day, it will gradually become a habit that means that your natural way of handling the day will be with a sense of calmness and control.
   

   
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