Stress Management

Stress is a common thing people experience every day. I’m currently experiencing it now writing this. Besides that fact, being over stressed is bad for your health and can cause them to lose motivation in the things they do. It’s good to have your stressors under control so you don’t eventually crash out and can stay healthy. High schoolers (Likely junior and seniors) and college students are probably the most stressed-out people (if you search it up the result will be people ages 18-34) so knowing how to manage you stress now will benefit you in future.

Stress management: Using different coping strategies and techniques to mange one’s overall stress levels and help improve a person’s quality of life.

• The biggest part of stress management is know what causes stress in your life. This can either be from school, work, sports, etc.
• If you’re thinking that you don’t REALLY know what stresses you out, start asking yourself questions, identify habits, attitude and excuses you have.
• Another big purpose of stress management is to avoid and replace unhealthy coping skills you’ve created for yourself.

• Binge eating
• Using alcohol or drugs to relax
• Procrastination
• Withdrawing from your friends, family and activities
• Try overworking yourself/keep busy every day to avoid facing problems

There are more, but these are the most common ones, which are all BAD and should avoid doing them as they can be harmful to your well-being.

Four A’s: Avoid, alter, accept and adapt

1. Avoid unnecessary stress: Not all stress can be avoided, but can likely eliminate many other stressors that are unimportant in your life. For example, people, environment, hot-topics that cause arguments, etc. Knowing how to say ‘no’ in any of these situations can help prevent stress early on. Whether saying no mentally and controlling the situation beforehand or straight up telling people know (In a respectful way). Understanding your own limits will help prevent you from taking on more than you can handle.
2. Alter the situation: Sometimes stressful situations are unavoidable, when they are, try altering them. You can try do this in a few different ways: Voicing your feelings/opinions, be open to compromise, try asserting your opinions so they don’t get overlooked and find a balance in your life.
3. Adapt to stressors: Certain stressors can become extremely overwhelming and hard to alter. If you’re unable to change the stressor, change yourself to help regain control. Ways to do this are by: Changing your perspective, evaluate how this will affect you in the future and set reasonable expectations so that you don’t set yourself up for failure.
4. Accept the things you can’t change: Stress is unavoidable. The times where you can change it, try to accept it and even embrace it (Depends on the situation). Acceptance can be difficult but coming to terms with stress can be easier than ripping your hair out trying to find a solution.

This is the most common form of stress management people do. Staying physically active is a huge stress reliver and is a good way to stay healthy.

• Having poor time management skills can cause you more stress.
• You can avoid this by doing a few things
• Stop over-committing to activities
• Prioritize urgent and important tasks (Check time-management section)
• Divide things up into smaller steps to avoid becoming overwhelmed
• Don’t think you’re the only one responsible for a task (This is really only applicable if others are included). Also don’t let others push all the responsibility of a task onto you.

• Spend time with friends or family.
• Try talking to them about things that stress you out. It’s likely that your friends might somewhat understand the stress you’re experiencing. This connection will help you become more resilient to life stressors, as the thought of knowing you aren’t the only one experiencing this will help you.

If you make time for yourself regularly this can prevent the likelihood of you getting burned out.

Remember that being stressed is not always a bad thing. Sometimes stress can be helpful, however, if a stressor starts to become overwhelming and having an impact on your quality of life, it’s not good for you. Stress is universally unavoidable, but you can effectively manage it using healthy coping strategies. Also, these techniques are just suggestions, they don’t need to be followed to a tea. Everyone has their own preferences and knows what works best for them, this is a just to show there are other options available.