Stress management
Stress management strategy #1: Avoid unnecessary stress
Not all stress can be avoided, and it’s not healthy to avoid a situation that needs to be addressed. You may be surprised, however, by the number of stressors in your life that you can eliminate.Learn how to say “no” – Know your limits and stick to them. Whether in your personal or professional life, refuse to accept added responsibilities when you’re close to reaching them. Taking on more than you can handle is a surefire recipe for stress.
Avoid people who stress you out – If someone consistently causes stress in your life and you can’t turn the relationship around, limit the amount of time you spend with that person or end the relationship entirely. Take control of your environment – If the evening news makes you anxious, turn the TV off. If traffic’s got you tense, take a longer but less-travelled route. If going to the market is an unpleasant chore, do your grocery shopping online.
Avoid hot-button topics – If you get upset over religion or politics, cross them off your conversation list. If you repeatedly argue about the same subject with the same people, stop bringing it up or excuse yourself when it’s the topic of discussion. Pare down your to-do list – Analyse your schedule, responsibilities, and daily tasks. If you’ve got too much on your plate, distinguish between the “shoulds” and the “musts.” Drop tasks that aren’t truly necessary to the bottom of the list or eliminate them entirely.
Stress management strategy #2: Alter the situation
If you can’t avoid a stressful situation, try to alter it. Figure out what you can do to change things so the problem doesn’t present itself in the future. Often, this involves changing the way you communicate and operate in your daily life. Express your feelings instead of bottling them up. If something or someone is bothering you, communicate your concerns in an open and respectful way. If you don’t voice your feelings, resentment will build and the situation will likely remain the same.
Be willing to compromise. When you ask someone to change their behaviour, be willing to do the same. If you both are willing to bend at least a little, you’ll have a good chance of finding a happy middle ground. Be more assertive. Don’t take a backseat in your own life. Deal with problems head on, doing your best to anticipate and prevent them. If you’ve got an exam to study for and your chatty roommate just got home, say up front that you only have five minutes to talk.
Manage your time better. Poor time management can cause a lot of stress. When you’re stretched too thin and running behind, it’s hard to stay calm and focused. But if you plan ahead and make sure you don’t overextend yourself, you can alter the amount of stress you’re under.
Stress management strategy #3: Adapt to the stressor
If you can’t change the stressor, change yourself. You can adapt to stressful situations and regain your sense of control by changing your expectations and attitude. Reframe problems. Try to view stressful situations from a more positive perspective. Rather than fuming about a traffic jam, look at it as an opportunity to pause and regroup, listen to your favourite radio station, or enjoy some alone time.
Look at the big picture. Take perspective of the stressful situation. Ask yourself how important it will be in the long run. Will it matter in a month? A year? Is it really worth getting upset over? If the answer is no, focus your time and energy elsewhere. Adjust your standards. Perfectionism is a major source of avoidable stress. Stop setting yourself up for failure by demanding perfection. Set reasonable standards for yourself and others, and learn to be okay with “good enough.”
Focus on the positive. When stress is getting you down, take a moment to reflect on all the things you appreciate in your life, including your own positive qualities and gifts. This simple strategy can help you keep things in perspective.
Stress management strategy #4: Accept the things you can’t change
Some sources of stress are unavoidable. You can’t prevent or change stressors such as the death of a loved one, a serious illness, or a national recession. In such cases, the best way to cope with stress is to accept things as they are. Acceptance may be difficult, but in the long run, it’s easier than railing against a situation you can’t change.
Don’t try to control the uncontrollable. Many things in life are beyond our control— particularly the behaviour of other people. Rather than stressing out over them, focus on the things you can control such as the way you choose to react to problems. Look for the upside. As the saying goes, “What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.” When facing major challenges, try to look at them as opportunities for personal growth. If your own poor choices contributed to a stressful situation, reflect on them and learn from your mistakes.
Share your feelings. Talk to a trusted friend or make an appointment with a therapist. Expressing what you’re going through can be very cathartic, even if there’s nothing you can do to alter the stressful situation. Learn to forgive. Accept the fact that we live in an imperfect world and that people make mistakes. Let go of anger and resentments. Free yourself from negative energy by forgiving and moving on.
Stress management strategy #5: Make time for fun and relaxation
Beyond a take-charge approach and a positive attitude, you can reduce stress in your life by nurturing yourself. If you regularly make time for fun and relaxation, you’ll be in a better place to handle life’s stressors when they inevitably come. Don’t get so caught up in the hustle and bustle of life that you forget to take care of your own needs. Nurturing yourself is a necessity, not a luxury. Set aside relaxation time. Include rest and relaxation in your daily schedule. Don’t allow other obligations to encroach. This is your time to take a break from all responsibilities and recharge your batteries.
- Connect with others. Spend time with positive people who enhance your life. A strong support system will buffer you from the negative effects of stress.
- Do something you enjoy every day. Make time for leisure activities that bring you joy, whether it be stargazing, playing the piano, or working on your bike.
- Keep your sense of humour. This includes the ability to laugh at yourself. The act of laughing helps your body fight stress in a number of ways.
The Therapeutic Benefits of Pets
For those of you who haven’t guessed by my continuing photo posts of my animals, I adore my pets. So I decided to do a quick post on the physical and psychological benefits of pet ownership.
While most pet owners are clear about the immediate joys that come with sharing their lives with companion animals, many remain unaware of the physical and mental health benefits that can also accompany the pleasure of playing with or snuggling up to a furry, scaled or feathered friend. It’s only recently that studies have begun to scientifically explore the benefits of the human-animal bond. Studies have found that:
- Pet owners are less likely to suffer from depression than those without pets.
- People with pets have lower blood pressure in stressful situations than those without pets.
- Playing with a pet can elevate levels of serotonin and dopamine, which calm and relax.
- Pet owners have lower triglyceride and cholesterol levels (indicators of heart disease) than those without pets.
- Heart attack patients with pets survive longer than those without.
- Pet owners over age 65 make 30 percent fewer visits to their doctors than those without pets.
- A pet doesn’t have to be a dog or a cat. Even watching fish in an aquarium can help reduce muscle tension and pulse rate.
One of the reasons for these therapeutic effects is that most pets fulfill the basic human need to touch. Even hardened criminals in prison have shown long-term changes in their behavior after interacting with pets, many of them experiencing mutual affection for the first time. Stroking, holding, cuddling, or otherwise touching a loving animal can rapidly calm and soothe us when we’re stressed. The companionship of a pet can also ease loneliness, and some pets are a great stimulus for healthy exercise, which can substantially boost mood.
How pets can help to make healthy lifestyle changes
Adopting healthy lifestyle changes can play an important role in easing symptoms of depression, stress, bipolar disorder, PTSD, and anxiety, Caring for a pet can help with those healthy lifestyle changes by:
- Increasing exercise.
- Providing companionship.
- Helping meet new people.
- Reducing anxiety.
- Adding structure and routine to your day.
- Providing sensory stress relief.
Pets and Older Adults
The key to aging well is to effectively handle life’s major changes, such as retirement, the loss of loved ones, and the physical changes of aging. Pets can play an important role in healthy aging by:
- Helping you find meaning and joy in life.
- Staying connected.
- Boosting vitality.
Another key point is the use of companion animals with Alzheimer’s patients. As part of the disease, Alzheimer’s patients may exhibit a wide variety of behavioural problems, many related to an inability to deal with stress.Research at the University of California at Davis School of Veterinary Medicine concluded that Alzheimer’s patients suffer less stress and have fewer anxious outbursts if there is a pet in the home.
Pets can provide a source of positive, nonverbal communication. The playful interaction and gentle touch from a well-trained, docile animal can help soothe an Alzheimer’s patient and decrease aggressive behaviour. In many cases a patient’s problem behaviour is a reaction to the stressed response of the primary caretaker. Pets can help ease the stress of caregivers. Cats or caged animals may be more suitable than dogs, which generally require more care and can add to the burden of someone who’s already looking after an Alzheimer’s patient.
Pets and children
Not only do children who grow up with pets have less risk of allergies and asthma, many also learn responsibility, compassion, and empathy from having pets. Unlike parents, pets are never critical and don’t give orders. They are always loving and their mere presence at home can help provide a sense of security in children. Having an ever-present dog or cat, for example, can help ease separation anxiety in children when mom and dad aren’t around. Studies have also shown that pets can help calm hyperactive or overly aggressive kids. Of course, both the pet and the child need to be trained to behave appropriately with each other.
Children and adults alike can benefit from playing with pets, which can be both a source of calmness and relaxation, as well as a source of stimulation for the brain and body. Playing with a pet can even be a doorway to learning for a child. It can stimulate a child’s imagination and curiosity.
Children with learning and other disorders
Some children with autism or other learning difficulties are better able to interact with pets than people. Autistic children often rely on nonverbal cues to communicate, just as pets do. And learning to first connect with a cat or dog, for example, may even help an autistic child in their interactions with people. Pets can help children with learning disabilities learn how to regulate stress and calm themselves, making them better equipped to overcome the challenges of their disorder.
Playing and exercising with a pet can help a child with learning disorders stay alert and attentive throughout the day. It can also be a great antidote to stress and frustration caused by the learning disability. Learning to ride a horse can help elevate the self-esteem of disabled children, putting them on a more equal level with kids without disabilities.
Managing Stress
First, it is important to recognize stress
Stress symptoms include mental, social, and physical manifestations. These include exhaustion, loss of/increased appetite, headaches, crying, sleeplessness, and oversleeping. Escape through alcohol, drugs, or other compulsive behaviour are often indications. Feelings of alarm, frustration, or apathy may accompany stress.
Stress Management is the ability to maintain control when situations, people, and events make excessive demands. What can you do to manage your stress? What are some strategies?
- Look around: See if there really is something you can change or control in the situation
- Set realistic goals for yourself: Reduce the number of events going on in your life and you may reduce the circuit overload
- Exercise in stress reduction through project management/prioritizing
- Remove yourself from the stressful situation: Give yourself a break if only for a few moments daily
- Don’t overwhelm yourself: By fretting about your entire workload. Handle each task as it comes, or selectively deal with matters in some priority. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Try to prioritize a few truly important things and let the rest slide
- Learn how to best relax yourself: Meditation and breathing exercises have been proven to be very effective in controlling stress. Practice clearing your mind of disturbing thoughts.
- Selectively change the way you react but not too much at one time. Focus on one troublesome thing and manage your reactions to it/him/her
- Change the way you see your situation; seek alternative viewpoints: Stress is a reaction to events and problems, and you can lock yourself in to one way of viewing your situation. Seek an outside perspective of the situation, compare it with yours. And perhaps lessen your reaction to these conditions.
- Avoid extreme reactions: Why hate when a little dislike will do? Why generate anxiety when you can be nervous? Why rage when anger will do the job? Why be depressed when you can just be sad?
- Do something for others to help get your mind off your self
- Get enough sleep: Lack of rest just aggravates stress
- Work off stress with physical activity, whether it’s jogging, tennis, gardening
- Avoid self-medication or escapism: Alcohol and drugs can mask stress. They don’t help deal with the problems
Begin to manage the effects of stress
This is a long range strategy of adapting to your situation, and the effects of stress in your life. Try to isolate and work with one “effect” at a time. Don’t overwhelm yourself. for example, if you are not sleeping well, seek help on this one problem.
Try to “use” stress: If you can’t remedy, nor escape from, what is bothering you, flow with it and try to use it in a productive way
Try to be positive: Give yourself messages as to how well you can cope rather than how horrible everything is going to be. “Stress can actually help memory, provided it is short-term and not too severe. Stress causes more glucose to be delivered to the brain, which makes more energy available to neurons. This, in turn, enhances memory formation and retrieval. On the other hand, if stress is prolonged, it can impede the glucose delivery and disrupt memory.”
Most importantly: If stress is putting you in an unmanageable state or interfering with your schoolwork, social and/or work life, seek professional help.
Perfectionism and Procrastination
When perfectionism and procrastination combine, you can be your own worst enemy. By freeing yourself from this complex process, you can better use your time to accomplish more with less stress. Here you’ll see a sample of how this process works, a case example, and some ideas for breaking the perfectionism-procrastination connection.
What is perfectionism? Is it stretching for excellence in areas of your life that you find purposeful? Is it pattern of nit picking, defect detecting, and controlling? Do you hold to lofty standards, demand perfection from yourself, and make your worth contingent on meeting lofty standards? Depending on your definition, it can be any one of the three. I’ll focus on demanding perfection. If you dread the thought of performing poorly, you may experience anxiety if you anticipate a substandard performance. What you fear is based on what you think of yourself if you fall below your standards. You may also feel anxious thinking that others will also judge you as a failure.
Contingent-worth anxiety thinking is a form of dichotomous thinking. You see future performances as successes or failures and measure your personal worth according to this same judgmental process. You are a winner or a loser, worthy or worthless, strong or weak, and so the list goes on. For example, you decide that a B+ grade is respectable. You expect this performance from yourself. The goal is reasonable. The expectation is not. You get a B and feel like a failure. In a perfectionist world of fixed convictions, it is not enough to do well enough; you have to do perfectly well. It’s not enough to have typical performances; they must be exceptional. When attaining perfection becomes a contingency for worth, anxiety is a common consequence.
Perfectionism is a risk factor for performance anxiety and procrastination. You expect a great performance. You have doubts whether you can achieve perfection. You have an urge to diverge and do something less threatening. Therefore, you wait until you can be perfect. This is an example of perfectionism-driven procrastination. A perfectionism-procrastination process contributes to what Rockefeller University professor Bruce McEwen describes as an allostatic load. This is a wearing and tearing of the body due to stress. If you hear your inner voice telling you that if you are not great you are a big nothing, you’ve found an anxiety belief that adds to your allostatic load. Uncoupling yourself from this thinking can help end this perfectionism-related stress.
Perfectionism is a changeable form of thinking. For example, you are always more complex than what you produce, so you can’t be either perfect or imperfect. This is the concept of the pluralistic self and here is how pluralism works. You are a person with many attributes, your self-worth does not depend on a singular life aspect. ie. grades. To combat perfectionist thinking work at accepting this pluralistic view of you, and you are on your way toward easing up on yourself and achieving more of what you desire.
Steps to Overcome Perfectionism
Step 1: In your journal, answer the following questions:
a. What characteristics of perfectionism are true for me? How do these perfectionist traits impede my efforts to change my problematic behavior?
b. What irrational beliefs of perfectionists do I ascribe to? How do these beliefs influence my desire to change? How do these beliefs contribute to a failure script in my efforts to change? What rational alternatives can I adopt to reduce the negative impact of perfectionism in my life?
c. What are the negative consequences of perfectionism in my life? What am I doing to address these negative issues in my life? How do these negative issues affect my past and current efforts to change my problematical behavior?
d. What new rational behavior do I need to develop in order to overcome the negative impact of perfectionism? How will these new behavior traits help me to fully achieve change in my life?
e. How can my social support system help me in overcoming my perfectionist attitude? What contributes to perfectionism in my support system? What changes in my support system would reduce its perfectionist character?
f. How does dealing with my perfectionism help me in my efforts to change? How well does perfectionism explain why past attempts to change have failed?
Step 2: In your journal, identify a problematic behavioral pattern you want to change; then list the characteristic negative behavior traits of the pattern. For each of the negative characteristics list positive alternative behavior traits. For each of the new alternative behavior list your likelihood of achieving them 100 percent of the time. How many new behavior traits could you achieve 100 percent of the time?
Step 3: Once you have recognized that no change can be achieved 100 percent of the time, continue changing your problematic behavior patterns. If you continue to be hindered by perfectionism, return to Step 1 and begin again.
For more tips on combating procrastination you might find this video helpful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNnXseUr8sM&context=C3d2436aADOEgsToPDskKh6sw4U-Wj632iLbVbsrCH
Musings of a Student: Living with PTSD.
What is PTSD?
PTSD is short of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD is brought about from either a mild case to a severe case of something traumatic happening in their lives.
Many people associate PTSD with those who have gone off from war. They call it “shell shock”. What they don’t understand is that people in war zones also can suffer from PTSD themselves. Hearing IED’s go off, car bombs, gun shots, grenades, even the smell and experience of tear gas can set have a person or people go through PTSD.
It’s not just war zones that cause PTSD. Something as common as child beating, spousal abuse, physical and emotional abuse, rape, seeing someone die, seeing several people die in a matter of months, can cause PTSD.
My PTSD started after I was raped in 2007. The psychologist I saw said that I was suffering from a mild form of depression called dysthemia. Unfortunately, small things triggered my dysthemia, which led to high extremes of anxiety, fear, and crying bouts.
Hearing rape jokes, being touched without being invited, reading about rape, hearing about rape, sets my anxiety.
My PTSD is not as extreme as most people are. However, I did have to go through at least 6-8 months of therapy, all of which includes visiting with a psychologist every week, going to classes in order to cope with PTSD and its triggers, and even seeing a counsellor every two weeks in college. Some treatments are longer than others. Some don’t go through treatments and suffer for a very long time with their PTSD. Some can afford it, some can’t.
My PTSD was set off again about 2.5 months ago when I was being harrassed and touched inappropriately. Some of you may have remembered when I was homeless for a few days this year. That was the same guy who kicked me out of the house and told me that I was full of crap for making up this story.
I was in a depression funk for about 2 months.
Both times of PTSD, I woke up crying, I was lethargic, and I was very wary of who came and went on a daily basis. Even getting bumped accidentally in the shoulder would set me off. I thought I couldn’t function.
Alhamdulilah, though, I’ve had many great people in my life who keep my triggers at a minimum. Some would forget, and I would just emotionally shut down and become very tense. Very lethargic. And I would have to physically remove myself from the situation until they’ve realised what happened.
I highly recommend those who suffer from PTSD to seek some kind of help. To live in fear from loud noises, jokes, certain types of people is not a way to live your life.
Final exams are a great time for breakdowns
It is the most stressful time of year at university. Every bit of procrastination, every day you didn’t attend a lecture comes back to shout “fuck you!”
I have so much to do and it all feels too much. I can’t every look at my texts without having a panic attack. I feel like I can’t do this and I can’t go on.
But I must.
Keep Calm