We are all exposed to stress at various stages of our lives these days. It's become a fact of life. We talk about the reasons for our stress and we discuss various ways to alleviate it quite often, but how often do you talk about how it can upset the work life balance?
The pressure of deadlines to be met and decisions to be made, a lack of cooperation and problems with fellow colleagues, the children who have to be picked up from school, a tense relationship at home, plus a high consumption unhealthy food choices picked up in a rush on the way home from a busy day, all contribute to the reasons we can suffer from stress and stress related illnesses.
What is stress?
Stress is a mixture of psychological and physiological reactions of the human body. In many cases, stress is the emotional side effect of not feeling able to find enough time to do those things you know need to be done.
A good example of a stressful situation is spending more time than you should solving problems at work, while you spend less time with family and friends or less time finding ways to unwind from the pressures of your job.
When your work/life balance is unequal you risk putting excessive strain on yourself physically and emotionally.
How Can You Manage Stress?
Stress management is about developing new perspectives in our lives and learning time management techniques. When demands on your time from work absorb your entire focus to the exclusion of your family obligations, you're creating stress.
To help manage some of the stress generated from an unbalanced work life, you may need to consider delegating some of your extra work activities. You might also think about addressing your work load with your employer and explaining the need for more assistance with some tasks.
Creating a Balance between Work and Home
When you willingly pour yourself into your work and exclude those people who love you, it's a bit like admitting that their needs come a poor second-best to what your employer needs from you first. Most people instantly react to this statement by saying that they work so hard in order to provide for their families.
Unfortunately, children don't see the distinction between you choosing to spend time away from them and needing to provide income. The sad fact is that many marriages also begin to suffer when your work-focus seems more important than the family you're supposed to be going to work to provide for.
Make a promise to sit down to dinner with your family each night. Not only does this force you to break your work-focus, but it also means sitting down to a relaxed meal with the family who love and need you.
Balancing Christian Values
Returning to our Christian values can also have a profound effect on eliminating stress. It seems that over the years we have let our Christian values slide into the background in favor of the "work at all costs" syndrome. Getting back to our basic values can aid us in managing and eliminating stress.
An integral Christian value is family and that basic value alone has reduced in importance as our need to spend more time working takes the focus. Take time out to spend some quality time with your family will not only reduce your stress levels, but it will bring you and your family closer together again.
Matt Peters
Learn how to simplify life this way http://simplifylifethisway.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Matt_A._Peters
Sunday, 19 September 2010
Thursday, 11 March 2010
Relieve Stress by Relaxing
Even when you are handling stress well, you need a breather. Time to renew and recharge ensures that you continue to manage stress in a healthy way. Here are some tips to help you take advantage of time to relax and release.
Most of us want to simply unwind after a hard day at work or a long day of handling stressful situations. Stress can come from many sources - deciding which bills to pay when money is short, medical issues, family demands - not just your job. You are working to meet these stressors head on but it can take a lot of wind out of your sails when you're done.
Relaxation Techniques
The thing about relaxation is that we don't get nearly enough of it. An ideal relaxing situation is one in which the stressor doesn't figure - anywhere. You are not sitting down in an easy chair to mull over the events of the day. You are instead focusing on something more pleasant to recharge your batteries for future stress management.
1. Go for a massage - There is nothing more relaxing then letting someone else do all the work for a change to make you happy. All you have to do is lie there, listen to soft music and let the tension in your body melt away.
2. Take an uninterrupted hot bath - This is not the time for your spouse to sneak in for a romantic rendezvous. Dim the lights and light candles. Aromatherapy candles in relaxing scents like chamomile and lavender will also lighten the mood. Enjoy the warm water and wafting smells. You can even have a CD of earth sounds playing in the background (far away from the tub).
3. Try yoga - Yoga has been practiced for centuries as a way of enhancing the mind-body connection. By concentrating on your breathing and your body movements, you can learn to control your body responses. It takes practice to get good, but even that frees your mind and helps you to relax.
4. Watch a funny movie - Have you ever heard that laughter is the best medicine? Well, laughter releases endorphins in your body. Your dark mood lifts and you feel better - better able to cope with life and whatever was on your mind previously.
All of these things are great but they won't help if you don't set aside time to do them. Make a commitment right now to carve out time each day to relax. Pen it in just like you do everything else. Leave more time than you need in case one day you need all of that time to restore balance to your body.
Find a relaxation technique that pleases you and start there. You can add others for variety. Once you get started, you'll look forward to those times with joy.
Stress, especially on a long term basis, can cause numerous emotional and physical issues. The first step in dealing with stress is to understand what it is and what it does to you.
http://www.Stress-Relief-Action-Guide.com is a website you can visit that goes into extensive detail into the causes of stress and how you can manage or eliminate stress from your life.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dillon_McRamey
Most of us want to simply unwind after a hard day at work or a long day of handling stressful situations. Stress can come from many sources - deciding which bills to pay when money is short, medical issues, family demands - not just your job. You are working to meet these stressors head on but it can take a lot of wind out of your sails when you're done.
Relaxation Techniques
The thing about relaxation is that we don't get nearly enough of it. An ideal relaxing situation is one in which the stressor doesn't figure - anywhere. You are not sitting down in an easy chair to mull over the events of the day. You are instead focusing on something more pleasant to recharge your batteries for future stress management.
1. Go for a massage - There is nothing more relaxing then letting someone else do all the work for a change to make you happy. All you have to do is lie there, listen to soft music and let the tension in your body melt away.
2. Take an uninterrupted hot bath - This is not the time for your spouse to sneak in for a romantic rendezvous. Dim the lights and light candles. Aromatherapy candles in relaxing scents like chamomile and lavender will also lighten the mood. Enjoy the warm water and wafting smells. You can even have a CD of earth sounds playing in the background (far away from the tub).
3. Try yoga - Yoga has been practiced for centuries as a way of enhancing the mind-body connection. By concentrating on your breathing and your body movements, you can learn to control your body responses. It takes practice to get good, but even that frees your mind and helps you to relax.
4. Watch a funny movie - Have you ever heard that laughter is the best medicine? Well, laughter releases endorphins in your body. Your dark mood lifts and you feel better - better able to cope with life and whatever was on your mind previously.
All of these things are great but they won't help if you don't set aside time to do them. Make a commitment right now to carve out time each day to relax. Pen it in just like you do everything else. Leave more time than you need in case one day you need all of that time to restore balance to your body.
Find a relaxation technique that pleases you and start there. You can add others for variety. Once you get started, you'll look forward to those times with joy.
Stress, especially on a long term basis, can cause numerous emotional and physical issues. The first step in dealing with stress is to understand what it is and what it does to you.
http://www.Stress-Relief-Action-Guide.com is a website you can visit that goes into extensive detail into the causes of stress and how you can manage or eliminate stress from your life.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dillon_McRamey
Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Stress Management
Stress management to me means learning that the inside of my body is mine to control no matter what is happening outside of it.
Stress, stress chemistry, whatever you want to call it, is an option then, unless I need to respond quickly to a real threat.
Think driving home and someone swerves into your lane, and I bet just thinking about that brought a bit of a jangle to your body.
That jangle followed an image in your brain or maybe the very rapid recall of that kind of experience from your past, and the jangle was a stress response, or what John Gottman, Ph.D. calls DPA, or diffuse physiological arousal, and that stress response in this case followed a past or future memory, which occurred while you were reading information at your computer.
Stress management must be based on that very simple experience. The chemistry in your body, in this case adrenalin and cortisol, follows closely on your thoughts, so closely that it is faster than you can blink your eyes, which takes all of 1/10th second.
The stress response, or DPA as Gottman calls it, will limit us to three behavioral options at its strongest, run for your life, flee for your life, or freeze, none of which are going to help your gracefully accept a gift of fruit cake from your aging Aunt this Christmas, although you may consider fruit cake to be a deadly threat.
The key to stress management then is not to eliminate stress but to learn management tools that allow you to steer your body like you steer your car, with lots of small changes.
If you think about how you drive, you are attending to a significant number or variables and adjusting the position of the vehicle on the road, accelerating, slowing, ect. constantly.
If we can do that with the inside of our body frequently, and adjust our thoughts and breathing, we can quickly manage a stress response.
How Quickly?
Ever heard of EEG biofeedback, or heart rate variability biofeedback?
EEG biofeedback is a tool which helps folks learn how to manage brainwaves which can cycle anywhere from around 4 cycles per second to 42 cycles per second.
Heart rate variability biofeedback can work at your pulse rate, which we will say is 70 beats per minute for the sake of discussion.
While not as fast as EEG Biofeedback, heart rate variability biofeedback is plenty fast for my stress management process, and since technology is so wonderful, I do have a program to recommend that you learn for very rapid stress management, literally heart beat by heart beat.
Earlier I mentioned John Gottman,Ph.D., who has done some amazing research about marriage, and about the masters of marriage.
He says the masters of marriage have developed the ability to recognize and soothe themselves when they are flooded, and Gottman's recommended tool for that recognition is to take your pulse and if your pulse rate is over 100 beats per minute, then take a time out for 20 minutes.
The program I like for a quicker version of this recognition and choice process is a version of heart rate variability biofeedback.
Not only can I use heart rate variability biofeedback as a stress management antidote, I can practice it for joyful generativity.
I mean why not keep the inside of my body coherent, based on my heart rate coherence, until such time as someone swerves their car into my lane?
(That swerving cannot happen near me until I am actually driving, right)?
Stress Management or Joyful Generativity?
Lots of my anger management and domestic violence clients report that since they only get mad every so often, they are not in need of anger management or domestic violence services.
Most of us who are not suffering heart attacks routinely may look at stress management the same way, I only need to manage stress when the boogey man attacks.
I want to suggest that waiting to manage stress is deadly. I also want to suggest that if stress is optional, so is joy.
Since my feelings follow only my thoughts, not anything external, I see no reason not to generate some joy or contentment on a regular basis, say every five minutes, for two heart beats.
Instead of adrenalin and cortisol, and the jangley feeling, I can feel contentment and have a lot of DHEA flowing through my body, which is the anti aging hormone by the way, and all that joyful generativity comes from learning heart rate variability biofeedback, which is a really simple process.
In fact, if you are a business person, your entire staff should learn Heartmath, so staff meetings could have a coherent heart beat.
Just imagine that your entire staff, or your family took a moment to make the brain in their hearts coherent, and then brought that coherent cooperative and affiliative physiology to a staff meeting instead of the jangly physiology?
Staff meetings could become fun and truly efficient.
Don't believe me? You will just have to check out stress management the heart rate variability way.
Michael S. Logan is a brain fitness expert, a counselor, a student of Chi Gong, and licensed one on one HeartMath provider. I enjoy the spiritual, the mythological, and psychological, and I am a late life father to Shane, 10, and Hannah Marie, 4, whose brains are so amazing. http://www.askmikethecounselor2.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mike_Logan
Stress, stress chemistry, whatever you want to call it, is an option then, unless I need to respond quickly to a real threat.
Think driving home and someone swerves into your lane, and I bet just thinking about that brought a bit of a jangle to your body.
That jangle followed an image in your brain or maybe the very rapid recall of that kind of experience from your past, and the jangle was a stress response, or what John Gottman, Ph.D. calls DPA, or diffuse physiological arousal, and that stress response in this case followed a past or future memory, which occurred while you were reading information at your computer.
Stress management must be based on that very simple experience. The chemistry in your body, in this case adrenalin and cortisol, follows closely on your thoughts, so closely that it is faster than you can blink your eyes, which takes all of 1/10th second.
The stress response, or DPA as Gottman calls it, will limit us to three behavioral options at its strongest, run for your life, flee for your life, or freeze, none of which are going to help your gracefully accept a gift of fruit cake from your aging Aunt this Christmas, although you may consider fruit cake to be a deadly threat.
The key to stress management then is not to eliminate stress but to learn management tools that allow you to steer your body like you steer your car, with lots of small changes.
If you think about how you drive, you are attending to a significant number or variables and adjusting the position of the vehicle on the road, accelerating, slowing, ect. constantly.
If we can do that with the inside of our body frequently, and adjust our thoughts and breathing, we can quickly manage a stress response.
How Quickly?
Ever heard of EEG biofeedback, or heart rate variability biofeedback?
EEG biofeedback is a tool which helps folks learn how to manage brainwaves which can cycle anywhere from around 4 cycles per second to 42 cycles per second.
Heart rate variability biofeedback can work at your pulse rate, which we will say is 70 beats per minute for the sake of discussion.
While not as fast as EEG Biofeedback, heart rate variability biofeedback is plenty fast for my stress management process, and since technology is so wonderful, I do have a program to recommend that you learn for very rapid stress management, literally heart beat by heart beat.
Earlier I mentioned John Gottman,Ph.D., who has done some amazing research about marriage, and about the masters of marriage.
He says the masters of marriage have developed the ability to recognize and soothe themselves when they are flooded, and Gottman's recommended tool for that recognition is to take your pulse and if your pulse rate is over 100 beats per minute, then take a time out for 20 minutes.
The program I like for a quicker version of this recognition and choice process is a version of heart rate variability biofeedback.
Not only can I use heart rate variability biofeedback as a stress management antidote, I can practice it for joyful generativity.
I mean why not keep the inside of my body coherent, based on my heart rate coherence, until such time as someone swerves their car into my lane?
(That swerving cannot happen near me until I am actually driving, right)?
Stress Management or Joyful Generativity?
Lots of my anger management and domestic violence clients report that since they only get mad every so often, they are not in need of anger management or domestic violence services.
Most of us who are not suffering heart attacks routinely may look at stress management the same way, I only need to manage stress when the boogey man attacks.
I want to suggest that waiting to manage stress is deadly. I also want to suggest that if stress is optional, so is joy.
Since my feelings follow only my thoughts, not anything external, I see no reason not to generate some joy or contentment on a regular basis, say every five minutes, for two heart beats.
Instead of adrenalin and cortisol, and the jangley feeling, I can feel contentment and have a lot of DHEA flowing through my body, which is the anti aging hormone by the way, and all that joyful generativity comes from learning heart rate variability biofeedback, which is a really simple process.
In fact, if you are a business person, your entire staff should learn Heartmath, so staff meetings could have a coherent heart beat.
Just imagine that your entire staff, or your family took a moment to make the brain in their hearts coherent, and then brought that coherent cooperative and affiliative physiology to a staff meeting instead of the jangly physiology?
Staff meetings could become fun and truly efficient.
Don't believe me? You will just have to check out stress management the heart rate variability way.
Michael S. Logan is a brain fitness expert, a counselor, a student of Chi Gong, and licensed one on one HeartMath provider. I enjoy the spiritual, the mythological, and psychological, and I am a late life father to Shane, 10, and Hannah Marie, 4, whose brains are so amazing. http://www.askmikethecounselor2.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mike_Logan
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