4 Practical Ways To Deal With Stress

It’s stressful times right now and more than ever you might find yourself overcome with worry and stress that you aren’t used to.

If you normally handled stress just fine, you now might find that this isn’t the case at all - that you’re more stressed than normal and you feel like it’s overcoming you.

What can be done? Learning proper stress management techniques is essential to your well-being so let’s walk you through four practical exercises you can put into practice starting today.

Remember that everyone experiences stress in a different manner. How you react to stress may be totally different than how your significant other reacts to stress, so it’s about knowing yourself and what works for you first and foremost.

As such, remember these are just suggestions and should not be taken as the holy grail of what you must do. Instead, tweak them so that they fit your own unique situation as best as you possibly can.

Focus On Gratitude

The first way to nip stress in the butt is to start focusing more on gratitude. Often stress comes from a place of want. For instance, you may be stressed about losing your job because you want to maintain your current standard of living.

While there’s no question that there are some people who will stress because they don’t have enough money to cover the essentials should they lose their job (and that is a reason to stress), if you have some money already saved up, chances are if you cut back on your standard of living a little and just purchased the essentials, you’d have enough to get by until you are in a position of working again.

If you can focus on what you do have - and what you have to be thankful for, it shifts your mindset and this in itself can help lessen the stress that you experience.

Deep Breathing

You’ve probably heard that it’s important to practice breathing when stressed but may not fully understand why this is so important.

When you become stressed, you are likely getting some adrenaline as well as cortisol surging through your body. This is the ‘fight or flight’ response that can prepare you for danger.

When this is happening, your body is going to be overrun by your sympathetic nervous system, which speeds the heart rate, increases circulation and halts digestion.

Basically, it makes you feel more ‘on edge’ as you probably have already experienced if you think back to the last time you were stressed out.

To help combat the stress response, you need to tilt your body back to equilibrium, which means allowing the parasympathetic nervous system to come into play. By doing so, you’ll stand a better chance of feeling more calm, cool and collected. This part of the nervous system is responsible for digestion, relaxation, and sleep.

Deep breathing helps to achieve this. When you breathe deeply, you’re forcing the heart rate to slow down, you’re increasing the amount of oxygen being taken in by the body, and you’re lowering the level of cortisol surging through your veins.

The end result is a lower feeling of subjective stress, which will eventually help you better cope with whatever you’re dealing with.

So take a few minutes, sit there and breathe in and out as deeply as you can for a few minutes.

Distraction

Sometimes the best way to deal with stress is distraction. If there’s something that is out of your control and there’s no use stressing over it, try to distract yourself with something else.

Throw yourself into a project, find a hobby that causes you to ‘get lost’ in it, or busy yourself with cleaning the house if you prefer.

Just do something to take your mind off whatever it is you’re stressing about. While if there is an actual situation to be dealt with it’s important not to use distraction and to force yourself to deal with it, in times where you don’t need to deal with anything, this can be applicable.

Meditation

Finally, if you are not meditating yet, that might be something to take up. Meditation has been proven to help combat feelings of stress and also provides an abundance of other health benefits as well.

You really only need to meditate for a few minutes daily to reap benefits from it, so consider adding this to your agenda. Meditation can help stop the worrying about the future, which is often the underlying reason that many people are stressed in the first place.

So keep these four tips in mind. Dealing with stress is an important part of leading your best life and if you try a few methods of doing so, you are likely to find one that will work well for you.