How to Manage Stress

Living with stress is a delicate balance between it helping productivity and affecting your career, health, and relationships. Truly learning how to manage stress is the only way to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

There are many articles that give you ideas for relieving stress symptoms, but relieving the symptoms doesn’t change why the stress is happening. Don’t get me wrong, self-care is important but it is only one main ingredient when learning how to manage stress. It helps relieve the symptoms but when you only practice self-care you are putting a mask over the issue and not resolving it.

As an engineer and a mom of three kids, I know firsthand what daily stress looks like. For years I thrived on stress and used it to drive productivity in everything I did work and in life. This can be done, but there is a delicate balance between productive stress and the harmful stress that affects your career, health, and relationships.

When life throws curveballs, harmful stress takes over and you need to have the tools to kick it to the curb before it destroys your life. The tools I’ve used for years to manage my stress and simplify my life are found in the Simplify Life Your Way available through SeekingSimpleLife.com. The first step for me to figure out how to create more balance was understanding my Pillars of Life.

Harmful Stress

According to stress.org, 77% of Americans suffer from physical stress symptoms and 73% of Americans suffer from psychological stress symptoms. Harmful stress is said to be caused by job pressures, money issues, health, relationship issues, poor nutrition, media, and lack of sleep. Can you relate? Me too!

	Cause	Factors
1	Job Pressure	Co-Worker Tension, Bosses, Work Overload
2	Money	Loss of Job, Reduced Retirement, Medical Expenses
3	Health	Health Crisis, Terminal or Chronic Illness
4	Relationships	Divorce, Death of Spouse, Arguments with Friends, Loneliness
5	Poor Nutrition	Inadequate Nutrition, Caffeine, Processed Foods, Refined Sugars
6	Media Overload	Television, Radio, Internet, E-Mail, Social Networking
7	Sleep Deprivation	Inability to release adrenaline and other stress hormones

Source: https://www.stress.org/daily-life/

When stress isn’t managed it creates this harmful cycle within multiple areas of our lives. Not managing work stress can sometimes be brought home. You don’t mean to yell at the kids or be short with your spouse but the stress from work left very little patience to handle what was happening at home. Long term this will affect your relationship with your family and other areas within your life.

Learning how to manage stress is the only solution to maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

The root cause of stress always stems from something not working correctly. It will be a task that you are doing that is affecting your health, relationships, or productivity in your life. When you look at the different areas of your life you will start to see a pattern.

Where to begin?

The steps to learning how to manage stress are repeatable and are used to help simplify life so that you can manage stress. The 5 Day Challenge is used to step you through this process so you can start making small changes in your life that will make big impacts on improving your life.

How to manage stress without just putting a mask over the issue is key to long-term improvements and a healthy lifestyle. You want to:

Determine where the stress comes from – through mindfulness and self-reflection
Find Solutions for fixing the issue – accepting that change is necessary
Prioritize what matters – determine what is “noise” and what isn’t
Develop a growth mindset – know that you can learn from this experience and improve
Self-care – finding ways to maintain a healthy mindset and lifestyle

Simplify Life

Life doesn’t need to be complicated and messy. It doesn’t need to be full of chaos, feelings of overwhelm, and constant stress. My challenge to you is to take control of your life again. Find ways to simplify your life bit by bit so that you reduce that stress.

Find ways to improve work so you are productive with your time and working towards your goals. Improve home life by simplifying the schedule and making time to reconnect with your loved ones. Create a healthy lifestyle where you are being the best you can be, taking care of yourself, and loving the life you have been given.