2 Efficient Ways to Cope with Stress

Stress is one of the major problems that threaten our lives every day, influencing our health as well as our well being. The first thing you need to do in order to cope with stress is to understand how it works and why it does us so much harm.

Recent sociological studies have shown that the main source of daily stress derives from the way we perceive ourselves in the society. Our social status consists of our economical wealth, basically the money and belongings we posses, our physical appearance and our social relations that we have with other people.

Basically, what we do is to compare our personal general welfare and status with that of the others around us and, in most cases, we are dissatisfied with the outcomes, hence stress effects come into action.

On a long term, discomfort related to stress can do a lot of harm to our physical and mental health and we should do what stands in our power to minimize its negative outcomes.

Before we give you some tips on how to cope with stress we need to clarify one more thing. Stress management is something that is contextually related and when adopting the appropriate method/s to cope with stress one should take into consideration the personal settings in which stress symptoms occur.

In this article I will reveal to you two very efficient techniques you could use to cope with stress and hence improve the quality of your lives. Good luck!

1. Positive reevaluation of the situation.

This coping technique basically refers to moving your attention and focus from the thoughts that bother you to other thoughts that don`t cause distress and discomfort. To put this coping technique into action, first you need to identify the thoughts that cause you discomfort. In doing this, you can further identify the cause/causes of your stress. Once you have discovered the source of your discomfort, you need to find one or more positive thoughts that you should focus upon more and more and get rid of the uncomfortable thoughts.

All you have to do is to reconsider your situation from a different angle and focus your attention upon the latter thoughts, that are more comfortable and in the end more helpful for you. I will show you here a little example of how it works.

First, we have the stress causing thought: “I have so much work to do at my office and also at home, I can`t take it anymore!”. This troubling thought can be replaced with “I know I work hard, but my family has everything they need and we love each other!” or “I`m so glad I have a job, people today would kill for a position like this!”). It is clear from different points of view, things can be utterly different. It`s a matter of how you put it!

2. Alternate activities.

Alternating your daily activities is a great way to reduce the irritation produced by the state of distress. This is probably one of the easiest coping techniques with stress related problems. Alternating your activities basically refers to finding an exit out of your everyday routine.

Routine is not altogether bad, but if you also find yourself in a distressful state of mind, it will only do you harm. Why? Because your distress has become a part of your life routine, and if you engage in the same routine every day, you practically allow distress to continue to affect your life.

The first step to take is to evaluate your daily activities from the point view of their importance to you, because some activities need to stay (eg. going to work, taking your children to kinder garden etc) and other can become optional.

The 2^nd degree importance activities can be alternated with others you wish/want to do. Try to find a physical activity, a sport to practice, go out for a walk one day a week, take cooking lessons etc. Whatever you choose, don`t repeat the very same activities for more than several days in a row. The logic is simple. The more you get to do all sorts of different activities the more likely you will think less or even stop thinking about the issues that cause you stress.