When stress becomes overwhelming, your physical and mental health can suffer. It can be tough to stick to your goals and accomplish what you have set out to do. Good stress management skills are essential, yet many people have not developed them. With the tips below, you can better deal with life’s difficulties.

 

Understand Stress

Stress is often misunderstood as something to be avoided at all costs. In fact, it can be positive in smaller doses. It pushes you to accomplish goals and strive for more. At the same time, at too-high levels, it can have the opposite effect, paralyzing you and making it difficult to achieve anything. In particular, chronic stress, which is ongoing, can grind you down and have a negative effect on the rest of your life. Your goal should be not to eliminate stress entirely, which would not be possible anyway, but to find better ways of living with it.

Problem Solve

Sometimes, you can mitigate stress by facing it head on and solving the problem that it creates for you. Struggling with debt is an example of a common kind of ongoing stress that plagues many people. Making a plan to pay off the money you owe cannot just reduce the worries that debt creates but can also be empowering, giving you confidence about solving other problems in life as well. To start with, you may be able to reduce how much you owe in various areas.

You might be able to cut your education debt payments by refinancing with a new lender. This can mean lower interest rates, lower monthly payments, and less money owed altogether. You can sometimes reduce credit card debt by putting your balance on a lower-interest card. Combine these actions with an aggressive plan to quickly pay off the money you’ve borrowed and get on firmer financial ground. Proactive actions such as these are important in dealing with difficulties in life.

Seek Balance

It can be easy to lose sight of what’s really important in your life, and this can exacerbate stress. If you’re spending all your time worrying about your job, you may neglect your family. Establishing boundaries that better prioritize the things that mean the most to you in life is critical. You might promise yourself that going forward, you’ll leave the office at 5 p.m. each day regardless of what your employer expects, and if this is a problem, you’ll look for a new job.

Seeking balance also means making some time for yourself. Even if nothing is more important to you than your family, you probably still need some down time that doesn’t involve taking care of or being available for other people. Sometimes, you may need to carve out time by getting up early or setting aside your lunch break as “you” time. It’s important that you don’t allow a search for balance to become yet another source of stress. At all times, remember that this is about checking in with yourself and your needs, rather than establishing a new set of hard-to-reach standards

John Mali
Director of Media Relations at AboutBoulder.com john@aboutboulder.com
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