Effective Techniques for Managing Stress

Stress is often disabling – but it doesn’t have to be – the right combination of healthy stress-management strategies can go a long way towards both mitigating stress and managing its impact.

Stress is a part of life, but chronic stress has serious health consequences. Here’s how you can deal with it.
Some tips to manage stress are listed below:

Exercise

Thus, many clients find exercise valuable but struggle to fit routine physical activity into their schedule despite periods of heightened stress and hardship. Besides release of hormones like endorphines, which boost our well-being and bring us relief, exercise also eases stress by relaxing muscles and enhancing sleep patterns, lowering blood pressure, and regulating hormones. In fact, studies have shown that, by combining mindful breathing and exercise, physical activity also helps in the de-stressing process which leads to better mental well-being, enhanced focus and alertness, improved attention and concentration. The secret to developing an exercise regimen to combat stress is to discover activities that are just right for you so that you are moving in a way you love and that fits into your life, whether it be a bit of jogging in the park or a yoga class; by setting realistic exercise goals, you will be able to keep yourself on the exercise success track so that you keep exercising.

Listen to Music

Intense situations can also be harmful to you both physically as well as mentally. Learning healthy ways of handling stress and to fully enjoy a good lifemusic and relaxation exercisescan help us alot.Others include meditation technique, yoga practice and timely sleep will also serve as means to relieve pressure energy. During my research, I found numerous studies showing that relaxing music decreased cortisol levels as well as anxiety, likely through its activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis of the endocrine system and the autonomic nervous system that helps us to relax. Create a playlist for a relaxed and happy mood by adding songs with slower tempos, voice pitches and gentler melodies, nature sounds such as flowing water or birds chirping, or guided relaxation exercises with relaxing music using BetterSleep app.

Take a Bath

While research on bathing might be relatively scarce, the little that we know, supports those claims: regular bathers display lower stress levels than those who do not bathe, and they sleep better too. The heat of the water relaxes the muscles; the silence releases the mind. Last but not least, a naturally occurring phenomenon kicks in when you take to the tub: a warm bath stimulates your vagus nerve, a long tendril that connects your brain to your belly, slowing your heart rate and blood pressure. Boquin suggests taking several deep breaths before getting in your tub, then listening more keenly — to what smells, hears, feels, sees, and tastes differently — such that you redirect your attention and bring yourself back into the moment — one of the hallmarks of mindfulness meditation.

Talk to a Friend

It is recommended to contact a friend when you are suffering from stress. This is useful as not only can you relax by offloading your problems, but also you will get some advice from them and this advice might be a plan to get through it or something that people will not tell you if you are alone to yourself. Long-term stress can lead to real, health-damaging consequences, such as indigestion and stomach ulcers (gastrointestinal tract distress) or cardiovascular issues (palpitations, high blood pressure). Sleep can be affected by stress and might explain, in part, why people under great stress have a greater risk of obesity or diabetes. If you notice these markers of stress among friends and family, don’t ignore them. People don’t always recognise they need help – and might feel ashamed to ask for it; reaching out to stay in touch with an email or call also reinforces it’s okay to ask for help if needed. You might ask them if there’s something they’d like to talk about or if you can reach out to them.

Take a Break

When bills keep coming and there’s no shortage of worries about deadlines and responsibilities, stressful situations can feel monumental and out of your control. Yet there’s far more power over reduced stress than you might think. The real secret to stress reduction is to figure out what it is that riles you up, and devise more adaptive ways to manage it – perhaps by spending less time with people who are upsetting you, or by changing your milieu (If news on TV stresses you out, or traffic, try to not be in the car when you read the news, for example, or listen to music), or by finding ways to do something more physical at work when you’re taking a breather. Even just once every half an hour, get up from your screen, walk around the building, deep breaths, talk to a co-worker – something, anything, to lower your stress. Get back to the work refreshed.