Your Relationship With Stress: What Causes You Stress
Know
your stress
If stress really impacts your life tremendously, it’s
important to really understand it and to see how you can either minimize it or
change your relationship with it.
You need to know exactly what is causing you stress. Once
you do this, you can evaluate whether this stress is really unavoidable, like
having to study a lot before an exam and missing out on some sleep, or whether
you can find ways to minimize it. If it’s unavoidable stress and it still
overwhelms you, you then can find a better way of understanding and relating to
this stress in your life so that it doesn’t make you feel so incredibly
exhausted or anxious.
To get to know your stress, you could make a long list of
all of the things that cause you stress in all areas of your life. Be as
specific as you can. The more you can isolate the problem, the more you can
work on making it better. Think of all of the tasks you have to do in your job
every day. Which ones are easy and stress-free, and which ones do you resist or
hate doing because they cause you stress or anxiety? For example, you might
feel that doing your afternoon paperwork is fine and you might actually enjoy
the routine of it, but you realize that you have a lot of stress when you need
to put together a spreadsheet of all of your data. Once you know the cause of
your stress, zone in on the reasons why it makes you feel so uncomfortable.
Perhaps you’re not as good as someone else in the office at putting together
your spreadsheets, and they made you feel self-conscious about this fact before.
If this is the case, you could try finding ways to minimize this stress in your
life. Maybe you’ll take a course in data entry and analysis that will make it
easier to do. Maybe you can speak to the person who does it better than you and
ask them for pointers. Once you know what the problem is, you can deal with it
more effectively.
Continue this process of getting to know your stressors in
all areas of your life. Don’t just say, “My relationship with my brother is
stressful.” Give clear points about what is stressful in this relationship. Is
it when he asks you to drive him around because he doesn’t have a car? Is it
because he speaks to you in a condescending tone? Is it because he still hasn’t
repaid a debt to you? Try and figure out exactly what it is that makes you feel
stressed about this relationship.
Then, you can focus on more everyday tasks that might be
causing you stress as well. Are there things you need to do every day or once
in a while that cause you to feel a lot of stress? Try and list these as well.
You could then try rating them in terms of how much stress
each aspect causes you. Something that causes you an extreme amount of stress
could be ranked as a 10 while something that is manageable could be a 1 or 0.
When you see all of the 7s, 8s, 9s and 10s on the list, you can easily tell
where you need to make some changes.
A trained counselor might be very helpful in getting you to
identify the things that cause you a lot of stress in your life, since often
these are not immediately clear. You might have some underlying insecurities or
fears that are also causing you additional stress. If you can identify these
yourself, gain some clarity on them, but if not, remember to ask for the help
that you need.
The deepest fear we
have, 'the fear beneath all fears,' is the fear of not measuring up, the fear
of judgment. It's this fear that creates the stress and depression of everyday
life.
Tullian Tchividjian
Minimizing Stress
The next step, once you know your stress and you know what
causes you the most stress, is to try and cut out all of the unnecessary
stressors in your life as far as possible. Why live with more stress than you
really need? Your stress response was designed to deal with real dangers,
challenges and threats, so don’t waste it on things that you can easily avoid.
For example, I hate driving and it causes me a lot of
stress. I used to live far away from work, and even though I loved my home, the
commute to work was extremely stressful for me. I moved into another place, not
quite as nice as my former home, but much closer to work. I drastically
shortened my commute and I don’t have to drive as much anymore, and my stress
levels have lowered because of this.
If you know that there is an area of your life that is
causing you a lot of stress, and if there are ways to change it, do it as soon
as you can. Your energy should be spent on doing things you really love and
want to do, not stressing about things that could be changed.
If you hate shopping malls, try shopping online. If you are
annoyed with a certain person and if they bring you down, avoid them if
possible. If you feel stressed walking through a certain street on your way to
college, find a longer way that is more pleasant. If you’re being constantly
criticized for your spelling errors, hire a professional editor to go through
all of your work before submitting it. Sometimes these small shifts can really
impact on your everyday wellbeing, and even spending a bit more money, taking a
bit more time out of your day or feeling a bit uncomfortable in the short run
can make all the difference to your life.
Go through each of the stressors on your list and try and
see if there are ways that you could minimize the amount of stress that they
cause you. Experiment with some changes and see how they make you feel.
Remember that the most lasting changes come gradually, and you need a really
good reason to make them if you want to succeed.
Change your relationship with stress
There might be some things on your list that you really
can’t change or eliminate in your life. You can’t avoid your boss even though
he causes you a lot of stress. You can’t get rid of your need to do public
speaking if you work at a training facility. You can’t magically get rid of a
health problem that might be causing you stress.
The key to dealing with stress in these situations is to
begin to change your relationship with the stress that you have. You need to
stop fighting the stress or being overwhelmed by it, and rather see it as a
necessary part of what you are going through in order to help you to perform
better. When it’s not possible to eliminate the stress, you need to try and
make the stress something that you recognize as a natural, healthy response to
certain situations.
When you feel very stressed, you could recite something to
yourself like, “This stress is my body’s natural response to help me perform
better. I need to use it to make sure that I do something productive and
useful.” When you have this type of attitude, you might be able to feel less
resentful of the stress you have before doing public speaking.
You can also start to see stress as a sign that you might
need to do things differently in future. If you experience a lot of stress with
a particular project, the stress could be indicating that you didn’t have the
best strategy for completing that project, and reworking this strategy might
help you to feel less stressed next time. For example, you might have completed
the easier parts of your project first and left the difficult parts for the
end. Even though you got everything done in time, you were always thinking
about that big, difficult task that was still waiting for you. In future you
might do these more challenging parts first.
Seeing stress as either an asset for getting through
difficult times or a sign that you should make some changes can give you a
better relationship with stress in the long run, and you might be able to avoid
a lot of the health complications which go along with chronic stress.
Learn to surrender
Those people who have the most stress are often those who
are holding on tightly to things that are really out of their control. When you
spend a lot of energy on thinking about, complaining about and feeling helpless
about something, it can add to your stress and burn you out. If there are things
that are really out of your control and you feel a lot of stress about them,
you need to learn how to surrender and accept that you don’t always have to
control everything.
You might worry a lot about what other people are thinking
of you. You might still hold on to resentments about things that happened long
in the past. You might continuously complain and be affected by things and
people that you have no control over. You might be stuck in an argument with
someone who will never change his or her mind. All of these things add to your
stress levels and tell your body and mind that there are negative situations
that it needs to respond to.
If something is really out of your control, the most healing
and liberating thing you can do is to let it go. Let go of your need to be
right. Let go of your need to be resentful. Try and see your life with some
perspective of the bigger picture. In the bigger picture of your life, do you
really want to be spending so much energy worrying, complaining, fighting or
distressing when you know that it will not accomplish anything? It will only
leave you more bitter, and will hold you back from happiness and peace.
Of course, it’s okay to do all of these things once in a
while. We all need to release or give voice to our emotions at some points. But
when they become patterns that really give you a lot of stress and make your
life less enjoyable or less productive, then they’re not worth continuing.
A good strategy here is to go over your list of things that
give you stress again and to mark off all of the things that you really cannot
control. If you are giving a lot of energy to something that you have no
control over, then mark it off. Once you’ve identified all of these, you could
start a “surrender” list. Perhaps you could look at each item and say, “I surrender
to the fact that I have no control over this thing, and no matter how much
energy I spend on it, it won’t change what is, what was or what will be. I
might not get over it right now, but I’ll do my best to focus on it less. I
resolve to spend my energy on places where I can have a positive impact and
make my life and the lives of others better.”
Getting over the stress which these things cause you might
not be easy. It might already be a part of your personality to worry a lot
about some of these things. But you need to make the decision to change for
your own health and quality of life. This type of stress doesn’t help you at
all, and surrendering to the situation is one way that you can find some relief
and freedom from these things.
Letting go helps us to to live in a more
peaceful state of mind and helps restore our balance. It allows others to be
responsible for themselves and for us to take our hands off situations that do
not belong to us. This frees us from unnecessary stress.
Melody Beattie
How do you deal with stress?
We know that there are healthy and unhealthy ways of coping
with stress. When you’re feeling particularly stressed, it will be very
tempting to go for the unhealthy ways of dealing with stress because these seem
like quick-fix solutions. If you eat an entire pizza, at least you will be
distracted from your exam for a few minutes. If you watch a lot of television
it might make you forget about your fight with your friend.
The unhealthy ways of coping with stress are bad because
they don’t work to solve the problem, and they actually make the problem a lot
worse most of the time. By trying to avoid or resist your stress instead of
looking at it for what it really means and dealing with it, you’re simply
making the problem even bigger for yourself. Unhealthy coping mechanisms try
and take you out of the reality of your situation, and if you rely on them too
much, you might avoid doing something to get rid of the stressor. You’ll have
to deal with the reality at some point. Even though it feels fun to
procrastinate from studying with hours of video games, this doesn’t make the
exam suddenly disappear. You’ll still have to get to the studying, and by
delaying it you might actually give yourself more stress since you’ll have less
time to study.
This doesn’t mean that you’re not allowed to use these
strategies sometimes. It can be quite a relief to get home from a busy day at
work and zone out for a while with a television show or have a drink. But if
you look to these strategies every time you feel stressed you’ll be adding to
your problems in the long run. You might develop a dependency on some of these
coping mechanisms and struggle to deal with stressful situations effectively in
future.
A few of these unhealthy coping mechanisms are listed in the
next blog page, and the reasons why they’re so ineffective are also given. Later,
we’ll look at strategies that really do work to alleviate stress and to help
you deal with stressful situations better.