The Common-Sense Of Stress |
|
|
|
|
||
|
It may help to maintain your general stress-awareness if you refer back to the 20 ground rules or guidelines listed in stress management. It is also enormously valuable to familiarize yourself with the specific things which you as an individual find stressful-anything from frustration within a relationship which seems to be going nowhere, an inability to let the past go, or allowing past experiences to build up into sources of anger, to the harassed feeling we all experience when there are too many demands on our time.
One very practical and useful approach to stress-assessment of this kind is to keep a detailed 'time management' diary, noting the various ways in which your time was spent.
By listing on the entry for each day exactly how you used your time, you will be building up excellent 'source material' to enable you to use your time most effectively - which in itself is a strong defense against harmful, negative stress.
Taking regular stock of your own stress levels is the ideal complement to relaxation techniques in equipping yourself mentally and emotionally to cope with stress. Thinking of how you may affect others - family, friends or work colleagues in particular - through stress is also important: for example, being aware of how excessively motivated, overactive people can so easily become sources of stress to others as well as to themselves, is a good way of ensuring that you do not inadvertently become the exhausting kind of person who quite literally cannot stop. In your relations with others, you can reduce stress by not taking offence easily and generally trying to see a situation from the other person's point of view as well as your own - it's an attitude which creates not only good relations, but a richer view of life.
|
||