How to Reduce Stress by Altering Your Stress Reactions

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Stress is a spiral, and to decrease its effect, you'll have to alter your stress reactions. Check out several ways to do that.

Step 1: Experiment with responses
Examine how you react to stress and try to understand what spurs on the anger or tension to control you. Experiment with modifying your normal responses, such as a tendency to panic, by breathing slowly when you would normally be inclined to hyperventilate or obsess.

Step 2: Stem tension pain
Unclench jaws, neck, and shoulders to stem the tension and the unexplained physical pain that follows.

Step 3: Cut back
Cut back on activities and simplify your schedule instead of calling in sick to work or giving in to anxiety. If you can, delegate duties to others. You don't have to take on everything yourself.

Step 4: Embrace triumphs
Set realistic goals for tasks, rather than magnifying the inevitable disappointments you set yourself up for. Train yourself to embrace small triumphs and find some good in the usual procession of perceived setbacks. Plan and prepare each day to prevent stress-producing time crunches.

Tip
Turning to smoking, drinking, and drug taking are common resorts for managing stress, giving an illusion that the lift is a reduction of anxiety -- which only returns with a vengeance.

Step 5: Surround yourself with friends
Surround yourself with positive people when you feel lonely and isolated, and when you know that an eruption is coming. Find a way to enhance your sense of well being in a safe environment if you've been overreacting to friends, loved ones, and fellow workers.

Step 6: Get a hobby
Take up a hobby to distract yourself from your anxieties, and use it calm the mind in anticipation of stressful events. This helps strike a balance in your work and personal life. Reading, arts, crafts, gardening, sports, music -- anything out of the ordinary that's free of pressure, measurement, or obligations will do.

Step 7: Combat with exercise
Combat the fight-or-flight urge through the energy release of exercise. Stress-induced tension makes us want to run or beat off the wolf at the psychic door, so use that impulse and wear yourself out with some beneficial running, swimming, or aerobics.

Tip
See a doctor, counselor, or other health professional to get a handle on your tension and self-defeating habits.

Step 8: Try breathing exercises
Try breathing exercises. Inhale when the stress is high, on a long, slow, seven count, hold for another seven, then release through pursed lips on the same count. This returns oxygen to the body that is depleted due to anxiety. This simple breathing trick can help whenever emotions are running high.

Step 9: Get rest
Make sure that you get enough sleep at night. While some people joke they are too busy to sleep, using caffeine to stay awake or going through your day weary and tired can make you more prone to snap at your peers. Taking care of your body through exercise, loosening tense muscles, relaxing, getting the right amount of rest, and remembering to breathe can go a long way in improving your outlook on the most stressful situations.

Did You Know?
By 2006, mood disorders were costing employers than $50 billion per year in lost productivity, and over 321 million lost work days.