Stress is one of the most dangerous emotions that you can feel and plays a significant role in the likes of high blood pressure and even heart attacks. With this being said, we can’t live a stress-free existence, and we will all experience stress at one time or another. Therefore, being stressed by stressful situations isn’t dangerous, but being consistently stressed can be detrimental to your health. If you’re someone who’s plagued by stress day after day, you should look to take the necessary steps to eliminate stress from your life. Read on to discover the top tips for stress reduction.
Take the “Easy Route”
As humans, we’re often criticized for taking the “easy way out”. Despite this, if a simpler route is available to us, why should we make our lives any harder? Whether you buy artificial grass in place of natural lawn or a robotic vacuum cleaner in place of a manual version, these are little steps that you can take to help eliminate stress from your life. People who opt for these solutions can be deemed as lazy, but what’s lazy about removing unnecessary work from your life? If you’re often stressed by your endless list of chores, cut that list down by taking the “easy route”.
Rid Yourself of Expectations
This is perhaps one of the hardest steps to take when it comes to crafting a stress-free existence; however, unrealistic expectations that we’re unable to meet are one of the leading causes of stress. It’s also important to note that realistic expectations for one day might be incredibly unrealistic ones for another day. We’re not machines and what we can achieve is relative to how we’re feeling each day. Don’t beat yourself up if you only ran a mile when yesterday you ran three, the point is that you ran. Accept your accomplishments for what they are – accomplishments – and don’t diminish them by comparing them to yesterday’s you.
Reduce Deadlines
Although deadlines can be a positive driving force for some people, others just feel completely consumed by them, which results in their productivity being stunted. If you’re someone who can’t handle the pressure of deadlines, simply remove the ones that you can. If it’s something that can wait, adopt the attitude of “it’ll get done when it gets done”. You’re sure to feel the weight being lifted from your shoulders, and you’ll probably finish it quicker than when you had a deadline in place, thanks to the alleviated pressure.
Focus on the Positive
It sounds like a cliché, but everything is about mindset. If you focus on the positive aspects of your life, you’re sure to feel more positive about yourself in general. By focusing on the negative, you’ll only awaken your instinct to stress, which will niggle away at you until you can’t handle it anymore. Instead, you should provide yourself with words of encouragement. It’s so easy to beat yourself down but building yourself up is something that is quite foreign to a lot of us. It’s time to turn that mindset on its head and focus on the positive.
Change Underlying Beliefs
As previously mentioned, it’s far too easy to talk ourselves down rather than big ourselves up and reversing this is down to changing our underlying beliefs. Other common beliefs that can be detrimental to our mental wellbeing include “I have to do this perfectly” and “I can’t say no.” Both of these contribute to the unrealistic expectations that we set for ourselves that can be extremely damaging to our emotional wellbeing. Instead, accept what you can and can’t do for what they are.
