Stress Relief Articles

We breathe in a world of distrust and conflict and we are more likely to expose our children to a future full of stress and negative feelings. As parents and teachers, we have responsibilities to play the perfect role models to our children and teach them how to relieve stress to enable them to be creative, accepting, healthy, and above all, resilient.

Build Self-Esteem

People with greater self-esteem enjoy life more than the others. Self-esteem is a realistic estimate of your own capabilities and worth. If you enjoy better self-esteem, that implies you are more likely to have a positive attitude, you are productive, responsive, imaginative, and attentive to other people’s needs. As parents, we need to encourage our children to develop their natural aptitudes and interests. Knowing their true self-worth will take time, but in the process they’ll learn to be more responsible.

Parents’ Attention and Acceptance

You need to communicate with your children better, and spend more time with them, with your regular, focused, and undivided attention. When your children know and feel your unconditional love around them, they are less likely to feel depressed and stressed.

Creative Thinking

We are shaped by our thoughts. If you give your children a positive environment, they will accept change in a positive way. They will learn that adversities are part and parcel of life and how to handle them; they’ll persist until they are successful, and will become more focused to other people’s needs. Productive thinking can cut down the risk of stress and they will encounter reality with more resilience.  Teach them how to replace negative thinking with creative thinking, and how to create room for self-esteem and coping skills.

Decision-making Strategies

People can make good decisions when they’re able to see alternative solutions to a problem, predict outcomes, view the problem from a neutral perspective and know how to implement alternatives to reach a solution. Children at a young age of four or five can usually generate alternatives and predict outcomes – however, they are still far from advance decision making skills. Give them examples from stories to show how protagonists make decisions.

Stress-busting Skills

You can teach your children breathing exercises, physical relaxation techniques, imagery, and muscle relaxation exercises. Help them identify their stress indicators and responses, and figure out what method will work for them. Let them laugh, read amusing stories, watch cartoons and comedies, and appreciate the humor in them.

Nourishment and Exercise

Sound mind rests in a sound body – take care your children get all the nutrition and exercise. Proper frame of mind and a healthy body triggers self-esteem and resilience. When you make aerobic exercise and recreation a family affair, your children are more likely to take them up and build a lifelong positive habit.

Sense of Commitment

Life becomes more meaningful when you’re committed. Commitment makes your children look for realistic goals. Educate them to be less rigid in how they achieve their goals, and help them learn the goodness of perseverance.

Building Social Skills

To save your children from the negative effects of stress, teach them how to grow in self-esteem and healthy relationships. Help them learn the skills of conflict management and help them grow self-awareness skills.

Persons with more self-control, resilience, positive outlooks towards life, will be able to find meaning in life and emerge true winners. Doesn’t that describe the personality you want your children to grow into?

When you have stress and anger working together, can you think of any greater disaster! Stress and anger are sufficient to get on your nerves and eat up all your positive energy. While you are out to destroy a person and release all your anger on people around you, you are in essence destroying yourself. Anger is a mighty weapon of destruction and it’s beyond any logic. All your positive faculties are destroyed in an instant- and you become an aggressive and hostile individual worked up by rage and wrath. It ebbs within you along with stress and erupts out like a volcano! Can you control such negative emotional impulses that can even overpower a mighty dam!

Think of human civilization, and you picture the ruthless battles, you hear the sounds of the war drums – human history is replete with blood stains and revenges. It is the angry Kings, the angry generals, the angry statesmen and politicians who waged the bloody wars and contrived a destruction plan for humanity. Think closely and you’ll find out that the scariest murders were committed in a fit of rage and stress! If you have stress overpower you, you lose sense of proportion, and your power of reason. You never know, when you can commit an act which you wouldn’t have otherwise committed in a normal state!

Don’t you think we should all give peace a chance? That way we can make this world peaceful and beautiful. When you are surrounded by people who are compassionate and understanding, coping with stress becomes easy. Imagine a stress-free world where you can manage conflicts and crisis more easily and conveniently. No one would like an individual with an angry face, and frayed tempers.  Can you think of marrying an overstressed angry fellow! Even for the boys, would they ever end up marrying an overstressed angry girl? You know the answer – they wouldn’t.

Consider this wise and intelligent way of looking at temper – temper is valuable and don’t lose it so often. Make a poster out of it, and display it in a prominent place in your office or at your home.

Though the implications of stress and anger can be overbearing, managing these negative impulses are not that impossible either. Only thing you will need is the resolve and guts to get rid of such provocative feelings. You have the confidence – you can achieve it.

Place yourself in a comfortable position and peep into your own self. Do some introspection and analyze your personality traits. Then make a list of to do and not to do things. Don’t forget to include the ‘should have done’ and ‘should not have done’ things – that way initiate your war against anger and stress.

Sometimes life seems to overwhelm you with plied up work, annoying children, pending housework, and partner asking for your help. You need a respite. When under stress, you become hostile towards other people as a form of stress-release, or you simply become submissive by hiding the stress.

When you suppress stress, it can blow you from inside. Aggression to people is not a wise thing to do, though you temporarily feel some relief. When reality bites, you feel more stressed from the idea of hurting people around.

Why not learn the ways to relieve stress, so that it doesn’t get the better of you and the people around you! Stress can sometimes be a motivator but it can work against us as well. Let’s mull over these easy and manageable ways to de-stress:

I.    Treat People Appropriately: When people are not responsible for your stress, why get them involved and release your stress on them! Treat your fellows as they deserve to be treated. Not doing so, you build up more stress they will be happy to put back on you. If there’s someone causing you stress, talk to the person explaining how you feel, why you feel that way, and what can be done to change your hard feelings.

II.    Take Responsibility: Responsibility creates more realistic actions and you are less likely to become a victim of others. You begin to control and create your feelings. A responsible person won’t go on blaming others but becomes proactive to control thoughts, feelings, and stresses. You begin self-control, when you assume responsibilities.

III.    Stop Worrying for Future: When you worry too much, you increase the chances of a heart-attack. Being miserable can only ruin relationships around you. The future is not us to see – believe that. Don’t over-anticipate future events and crowd your head with ‘what if’ thoughts.  Stop living in the future; think of today and how you can control things now, at present.

IV.     Self-control: You are the controller of your emotions and when you know to control it better, you can better deal with stress. Self-control makes you more in control of your emotions and actions. However, you’re ability to be in charge of your emotions and actions will depend on the levels of your desire, discipline, and skill sets.

V.    Know Yourself: You need to know that you are stressed and causing pain and discomfort to others. You need to be aware if you are treating a person inappropriately. Figure out the reasons behind your stress and ways to stop the stress.

VI.    Don’t Give up: It is easy to give up when things go wrong. Only thing that can save you from a complete chaos is your zeal to keep going. Don’t stop and give up. If need be, stop, take a pause, think and relax, but don’t lose the perseverance to keep going. If you are going through harrowing times, you cannot get ahead of that if you stop.

VII.    Unwind: You’ll need a ‘get away’ and leave everything behind those are causing you stress. Think of a holiday, if you can’t manage, go for a short walk or work-out. When you’re active you release hormones that counter stress. Distancing yourself from a stressed situation clears your mind and let you contemplate better.

We are allowed the ability to produce stress to complete tasks, or else we would be sitting pretty and be complacent about our lives. With proper stress management tips, you’ll have stress working for you and not you for it.

It seems mothers are made out of some secret elements – they have ample hearts, stout shoulders, a minimum of 3 hands, all the answers and many more talents to go in this list! Surprising enough, what mothers forget is that they are not born with super hero powers to handle all of those things at once, and that as well speak of the amount of stress mothers have to go through. Mom-stress is a fact of life, more so in a fast paced world, where they juggle careers and family life. Everybody would like to get rid of their stress levels – why not mothers think of doing something positive about it!

Stress can have severe implications like depression, heart disease, and an unhealthy mom. If you are a stressed mom, do you know how to reduce stress? If not handled correctly, can have a negative impact on your children too?

You know a mother’s world revolve round her children. They are the most important and most influential things in any mother’s life. Children like to imitate and everything a mom does they will, at some point in time in their lives, will replicate. If your children see you in a constant stress, they will be more inclined to follow those negative behavioral patterns. What you do today creates a watermark for your children. Your child will lead a tomorrow, as per the suggestions they gather from today’s reality – how better you reduce stressful situations in your home.

As a mother, don’t overload yourself that will in turn overload your children. Children are not so adept to handle more works in less time, and they are not physically capable of handling stresses like you.  That may as well lead to developmental and behavior problems in the long run, if they constantly try to keep a quicker pace.

Studies reveal that mothers with more stressful routines will hand out harsher punishments than one who is not. With piling up stresses, mothers can fly off their handle frequently and won’t stop to think before handing down discipline. This will give a wrong signal to the children, who will treat mood swings as the controller of things.

As a mother, you have the responsibility to impart your children the sense of security and let them know that you’re there whenever they need you the most. Teach them about stress and how it can affect daily schedules. Show empathy while they’re going through stressful times in their lives. In a way, teach them how to counter stress and live happier lives.  Give them the tools early about how to deal with stress. You definitely want your children to be better equipped to handle stressful situations in their future.

As a mother, you must teach your children how to take control of stress before it takes you in control.  Avoid the tendency of over-managing and ‘Do it all’ sort of schedules. Focus on the reasons of stress and try to move towards reducing stress, each day. If you can eliminate just one stressful situation, it can make a huge difference for you and your kids. Your children will learn your way of managing stress.

To get the better of your fears you’ll need time. It is not that easy to manage your worries, post-traumatic stress, or anxiety problems. First and reasonable step you can take is talk to a professional who can show you the right path as to how to deal with your fears. Seeking help of a counselor or medical professional is crucial to probe into your current problem and provide you with much help and insight.  In this article, you will find some useful techniques a person can use to help manage their fears and anxieties, other than seeking counsel or medical help.

•    Break your day in chunks and learn to take it one day at a time. It’s better than worrying about how you will get through the rest of the week or coming month. Each day can be a new beginning to learning things and that can include some insight as to how you deal with your problems better. Stay connected to the present and stop speculating disasters well ahead of time. Next week will take care of itself.

•    Commonsensical and positive thinking good deal manages your fears and challenges your negative thinking. Replace no’s with yes statements and keep your chin high. When encountering thoughts that make you fearful or anxious, challenge those thoughts by asking yourself questions – are these thoughts objective, realistic and have lots of common sense in them! If they don’t, don’t waste your time on such redundant thoughts.

•    Self-Visualization is one of the ways to relieve stress from a future event. At times, people get nervous doing certain things and they would always try to avoid those scary tasks. If you are struck with such a similar situation, try to visualize that you are doing that job quite efficiently in your mind. Say for instance, you and your team have to play in the championship hockey game in front of a large group of people in the next few days. Even before the big day strikes, imagine yourself playing the game in your mind. Imagine that you are the crowd puller. When you have positive pictures, you will be better prepared to perform well when the time comes.

•    There is the power of God, more intense and surer than the power of your overwhelming stress and fears. You don’t have to be a devout religious to use the power of God. When the going gets tough, communicate your problems to God as if you were talking to a friend. Review the Bible and pray hard. When you are determined and are open to the solutions that God may provide to you in solving your problem, it will be easy to get the answers. Even if feels hard, believe that God is in control of all beings and you can always ask Him for help.

It is a real task to deal with stress and combat all your fears, however, when you know the ‘help at hand’ indicators well in advance, you are better off. Try to be patient and stick to the bottom-line ‘never give up’.

Can you think of life without stress! Stress is inseparable in human situations. If you get down exploring the root causes of stress, you’ll find in some cases you have no control over the situations. There may be a person who’s causing you stress. For the other kinds of stress, you can blame yourself for creating them and therefore it becomes your duty to find solutions to them.

When you have acute stress, you can understand that more stressed you are, faster is your heartbeat. The greater the pounding, more intense is the level of the pressure. Will you be happy to own such a discomfort permanently! Therefore, you need to do some real stress management out there.

There can be a wide and extensive array of stress reasons. You can be stressed because it concerns your children. It can be a brawl, uneasy argument with your spouse, off and on. Heart patients should be away from such scuffles – learn to develop a trait of patience and avoid stress at all costs. Stress can cause heart attacks.

Think of the traffic police – he manages the heavy traffic in a busy junction-he is the master of traffic rules, he has the assistance of red, yellow and green signals. Traffic cops regulate, control the rush of a large number of vehicles, with the assistance of these signals. Therefore, you too have to control stress reading the signals. Learn the best ways to stress management. Nobody likes to remain in a state of stress. Unfortunately, erratic and undisciplined lifestyles that are the products of modern cosmopolitan civilizations create real reasons for stress. Often times, you’ll discover that stress is forced upon you! Managing stress gets more important in such crisis situations.

Consider these Guidelines to Manage Stress-

o    You cannot change things in spite of all your best efforts – life has its own rhyme and reasoning.  You are not the sole creator of all the problems. Nothing is there as absolute order that you want to achieve in life.

o    Unload your stress. When you know the causes of stress, discuss them with your trusted ones, friends, relatives, or with your spouse.

o    Follow deep breathing exercises as a daily routine. Do the exercises, for at least 10-15 minutes, sitting all alone.

o    Temper is valuable. Keep it. When you have to lose it, do not fly off your handle. Let things die down. Time is the best healer for most of your problems.

o    Consider a glass half filled with water – don’t try to focus on the empty portion. There’s a positive side to all issues, accept it and see how the negative air disappears.

At times, you can seek help from some spiritual personalities, more than your psychologist or family doctor. Do not hesitate to surrender before such a spiritual guru or master. A spiritual healer can show you the path of bliss, all-pervading peace and bless you with such positive thoughts that your stress may just float away like a feather. Take things in true spirits and then only you can understand that stress can be a blessing in disguise!

When you look at the clock, it gives you a time well past midnight. You have been struggling to have sleep since the last two hours and you are still at the square one, you are wide awake. Does that sound alarming! When you push your nerves to the edges of sleep, your mind starts to race, your muscles get tensed. You think you’ll never get any rest. You are suffering from a scary sleep disorder, none other than insomnia. You are not alone; there are million people in the U.S. who struggle to have sleep and end up with stressed feeling and restless tempers.

According to a recent survey conducted by the National Sleep Foundation, there are more than fifty percent of adults in America who experience insomnia at least a few nights a week. You know the bouts of insomnia gets bigger with age and it affects the sleeping cycle of approximately thirty percent of men and forty percent of women. Don’t just press the alarm yet.

People cannot sleep, because they are too stressed out. Stress is one of the major contributors to all sorts of health hazards, starting from weight gain to heart problems. Stress is almost invincible in today’s fast-moving world. Is there nothing you can do about stress and sleepless nights? There are stress relief techniques using which you can reduce or eliminate stress from your life, minimize the stressful situations and get better sleep cycles.

Consider Strategies to Combat Stress and Regain Sleep -

1)    Make ‘to do’ Lists: You can make an exhaustive list and organize your next day’s activities into three categories: ‘To Call’, ‘To Buy’, and ‘To Do’. Remember to attach specific time schedules to each of these activities. Now you are less likely to mess with the things and won’t wake up to chaos.

2)    Get Away: Before you hit the pillows, think of some get away. Take your time out and listen to your kind of music. If you feel like, read a book, as you drink a cup of herbal tea or warm milk. Interpose your busy and unnerving day and your bedtime with this ‘unwind’ regime.

3)   Relax Your Body. When we are stressed, our muscles get the worst blow, especially those of the neck and lower back. You can do stretching exercises to ease out the muscular tension. When you get into bed, lie flat on your back for a few minutes. Flex your muscles as you work your way up from your toes to your temples. You can even try some sleep aids to help you ease into a deep sleep.

Stress management tips shouldn’t overwhelm you – you should always look at stress as if spelling out some difficult words, broken into syllables. Once, a language teacher had problems with one of his students, who was weak in memory and couldn’t spell words correctly. In spite of all the repeated efforts, he failed to come up with the correct spellings, so the teacher did something to make things easy for him. Whatever be the problem words, the teacher devised a simple technique to handle all of them. After providing the solution, the teacher gave the student a day’s time to work up the correct spellings. Surprisingly, the student preferred to do the spellings right then – he remembered what the teacher had said the other day ‘tomorrow never comes’!

The simple tip was to fragment the difficult words into syllables and that made the boy’s job easy.  Stress management tips are somewhat similar to that. You don’t need to make mountains of a molehill and get trapped inside. Do not make a big burden of your stress. If you can handle the stressful situations with more imagination and tact, the load of iron bars can turn into a load of cotton!

Follow Several Easy Way Outs to Stress:

1.    Whenever you feel that a stress is coming up, go for a brisk walk. Make it stress-free and relax your mind. Work while you work, play while you play – remember those good old school poems! Time has come to translate the words, into reality.

2.    If you want to keep stress at bay, try not to make enemies. Even if you have one, try to ignore and avoid his/her caustic comments and negative remarks that can create a good deal stress for you. Nurture friendships with people who have genuine feelings and who don’t lash out to any and every one round.

3.    Always stay away from doing things that upset you most.

4.    Try to be realistic and do not imbibe too much idealism in your personality. When it comes to responding to questions, give straightjacket answers and don’t be vague. Know your limitations and don’t ever make promises of doing things that you can’t handle. A clear ‘no’ is better than a confusing ‘yes’.

5.    When you feel you are an integrated part of the society, it feels great and relieves you of stress. You can join social, spiritual or socio-spiritual organizations to be socially active.

6.    If your stress is overwhelming and you think you’ve reached the point of ‘no return’, talk to a specialist. They can help you with their experienced and valuable counseling. Make sure that you are the creator of your own destiny – so try to keep things in your control. Unload yourself – unburden yourself.

7.    An optimistic and positive attitude will help you ride out a storm and the worst situations.

Stress management tips can show you the route, but you have to tread your own path and develop your own strategy to manage stress. ‘You are the creator of your own destiny-not the victim’ – always remember this piece of wisdom.