Stress is an everyday fact of life.  You cannot avoid it.  Stress involves any change that you must adjust to.  They can be positive or negative.  All stress is not bad, and is desirable and essential to life.  For example, gain that new job or promotion must bring the negative stress of change and new responsibilities and the positives of new growth and job status.

Whatever the cause of stress, it is how you react to stressors (stressful experiences) that create a stress response – Fight – Flight – Freeze – Fold – Faint.

Stress comes from three sources – Mind – Brain – Body.  Your mind bombards you with demands for adjustment or management.  Your brain interprets and perceives changes and determines the need to press the panic button.  Your physiology adjusts and changes to stress and changes depend on your age, medical history, exercise, sleep and nutritional status.  Stress effects the ten areas of health and wellness. 

Skills in some of the following areas will give you the confidence to cope.  Stress management is about investing in your self.

• Body Awareness – muscular tension is your body’s way of letting you know you are under stress.
• Relaxation techniques – that muscular tension and related matters such as anxiety, sleep disturbance, depression fatigue, irritable bowel, pain, high blood pressure, and so on…..
• Breathing techniques – are an antidote to stress and can reduce all of the issues for which relaxation is useful.
• Meditation – focuses your attention and prevents the symptoms listed from developing into further problems.
• Visual Analog techniques – reduce stress and its physical symptoms by using imagination, believing, reflecting and transcending.
• Hypnotherapy – is a powerful weapon to counteract stress and stress related illness.
• Neurotherapy – gets feedback from your body and develops controls for handling stress.
• Naturopathy and Nutrition – creates the right balance of nutrients and supplements to stay healthy.  Stress may be affecting you because of subclinical nutritional issues, and while you may not experience identifiable symptoms – what you do experience may feel normal when in fact is it chronic.
• Exercise – one of the simplest and most effective means of stress reduction.
• Time management – decisions that change what you do and how you do it.

These solutions are the results of different therapies, but can be put together in creative blends to greatly benefit you, because they have a synergistic effect, become more powerful when combined, and can save you time and money.  We can put various programs together for you.  This might save you from burnout.

MANAGING STRESS CHECKLIST

• Identify your symptoms and their severity.
• Identify their sources.
• Identify your responses to specific stressors.
• Set some goals to help you respond more effectively.
• Set rewards as motivation for reaching goals.
• Alter your thinking, feeling, intentional and reaction frameworks.
• Deal with the principal cause and expectations.
• Learn to manage conflict by assertively handling difficult people and events.
• Pace, lead and balance the areas of health and wellness.
• Like the song about the gambler, know when to hold……know when to run…….