What comes into your mind when you hear the word stress? If you ask me, I envision sleepless nights, tummy aches, mood swings, and a lot more things that are irritating (it seems to me that anything that's irritating is related to stress, haha). I see stress as a draining force, the kind that sucks the life out of you and I know that people would give anything (well, almost) just to avoid being stressed out.
Stress basically stems from a lot of factors -- procrastinating, high expectations, problems, changes and many other things. These produce stress when we can't find any other way to handle them. We tend to think more of these things than any other aspect of our life and then eventually, it gets the better of us. It could even lead us to a bottomless pit of emotions at times.
What Module 2 of PERSEF2 taught me is that we COULD handle stress, prevent it even. The first thing that you have to do is to identify your stressors - the things that tend to stress you out. Next is you try to identify its root cause and then you try to think of something that would prevent the root cause. The next thing to do is you list down your plan of action, your plan of action contains the steps that you would take to get rid of your stressor. And lastly, you take note of the challenges that you would be facing in the process of controlling your stressors, this is a good idea because you already know the possible distractions that you will be experiencing and you can come up with ways to deal with them, even before they happen.
Here are some tips to help you manage stress
- Become aware of your stressors (see?)
- Bring attention to you breath (deep breaths..)
- Improve your EQ
- Change your attitudes and perceptions of stress (think positive!)
- Set goals
- Manage your time (I suck at this)
- Take care of your body
- Take it easy (have fun!)
Labels: PERSEF2, stress kills
