How To Stop Stressing: 7 Tips To Find Balance And Relax
Do you feel like stress is pressing in on every side? Do you struggle to relax and find balance in your life? If so, you may be struggling with stress and anxiety. If you aren’t proactive in addressing these issues, they can have a negative impact on each area of your life. Learning how to stop stressing can be the key that you need to find balance in your life.
Signs Of Stress And Anxiety In Your Life
Stress can impact you on multiple levels—including your mental and physical health. To reduce stress, you need to first understand how to spot when it’s happening.
Signs of stress and anxiety can include:
Change in sleeping
Change in appetite
Trouble concentrating
Headaches or dizziness
Exhaustion
Clenching or grinding teeth
Aches and pains throughout your body
Muscle tension
These are not symptoms that you want to deal with regularly in your life. And, if left unchecked, you may find that they are leading to larger health concerns such as depression, heart disease, diabetes, and more.
If you have identified these symptoms in you or a loved one, you may benefit from taking the time to explore a path forward with a licensed therapist. A telehealth professional through BetterHelp can offer guidance while being flexible and accessible from the comfort of your own home. Online therapy has been shown to be effective at treating a variety of conditions while delivering comparable results as in-person care for most conditions.
Understanding The Natural Stress Response
Some of the physical responses that we have when we feel stress coming on are part of the fight-or-flight response. This can be an essential reaction to have if you are in a life-threatening situation. And it is a response that many credit with the survival of the human race throughout history. For example, if you come face-to-face with a wild animal, your fight-or-flight reaction could be what leads to you staying alive.
However, most of us are not coming face-to-face with wild animals that are trying to kill us regularly. Instead, we’re facing daily stresses such as financial burden, overwhelming schedules, coworkers that try to take the credit for the work that we do, and notifications dinging on our phones regularly. These situations are not life-threatening. So instead of our fight-or-flight response kicking into gear and saving us, the stress can continue to build, causing us long-term physical and mental health challenges.
This is why it’s important that we learn how to reduce stress and anxiety in our life.
Stress Management Tips For Finding Balance
The following strategies can help you learn how to manage your stress and anxiety in your life.
Learn How To Identify What’s Causing The Stress
Many different things can be causing you stress in life. Some large life changes may be easy to identify as the cause of added stress. This could be things like getting a promotion at work, becoming a new parent, or going through financial trouble.
But your stress may be coming from things outside of the situations that you’re in. It could be from a lack of knowing how to handle your emotions or struggling with time management skills. While you can learn stress management techniques to use when you feel stressed, learning how to identify the trigger can help you work on addressing the root cause of it.
Mindfulness Meditation
Mindfulness meditation can help you reshape the way that you see things and perceive things in your life. As you practice this form of meditation, you learn how to be in the moment and perceive things that are happening without connecting the emotional response that can lead to stress and anxiety.
Meditation allows you to think through situations in a new way and look for solutions that you may not have noticed if you were responding in the natural stress response. If you’re unfamiliar with mindfulness meditation, there are many apps that you can find that can walk you through the process of getting started. They even have guided meditations that you can use to address your stress.
Learn To Prioritize
Sometimes part of finding balance in life is learning how to set priorities around the tasks that you need to accomplish. If you struggle with saying “no” when asked to do something, you may find that you’re taking on more tasks than you’re actually able to accomplish healthily.
It can be helpful to establish priorities for your life. Decide on what things are the most important to you. This will look different for each person. For example, if you’re a parent, you are probably going to want to prioritize your family, while a single adult would likely not have the same obligations.
Once you create a list of priorities, you can start to use that list as you take on new responsibilities. For example, if you’re asked to join an extra committee at work that requires you to work longer hours, you can consider if that is going to meet your priorities or if it’s going to get in the way of another priority on your list. So, if you have already decided that your priority is to leave work on time each day so you can make it home before your child gets off the bus, you’ll know that joining that committee at work is not going to fit into your priorities at the moment.
Break Down Goals
While setting goals can be important and helpful in life, it can also be a source of stress. If you find that you’re struggling with stress and anxiety because of your goals, it can help to start breaking them down into smaller, more achievable goals.
Take time to look at the goals that you have in your life, and then break them into a list of all the small actions that you will need to do to accomplish that goal. Then, you can start to focus on each one of these actions, one at a time, instead of just focusing on your larger goal. Not only can this help you to experience less stress and anxiety in your life, but it can also help you achieve those big goals.
Exercise
The Anxiety and Depression Association of America has found many ways that exercise can help reduce stress and anxiety. This doesn’t mean that you need to start an extensive exercise routine, but simply doing things like walking, running, and yoga can have a positive impact on lowering stress and anxiety in your life.
When you participate in physical activity, it releases endorphins in your brain that can help boost your mood, improve concentration, and reduce fatigue. It’s also been found that exercising during the day can help you get better rest at night—this can help reduce stress because some people tend to struggle with insomnia when they’re feeling anxious.
Deep Breathing
When you start to feel stressed, your body naturally responds with the fight-or-flight response. When you practice deep breathing, it can help reverse the natural response that takes place. For example, as stress builds, you may notice that your heart rate increases. This can cause you to take shorter and quicker breathes, raising your blood pressure and potentially leading to dizziness, headache, muscle tension, and more.
When you notice the symptoms happening, you can practice deep breathing techniques, which can help put a stop to those natural responses. By controlling your breath, you can help lower your heart rate, which in turn lowers your blood pressure. This could have a domino effect on the other symptoms that you experience with stress and anxiety. Plus, deep breathing is something that you can practice even in public without others knowing, so it’s a good strategy to understand how to use.
Learn To Recognize Your Success
Some people struggle with stress because they feel like they’re not accomplishing the things that they want to in life. They struggle with feeling like they’re not good enough, which leads them to feel like they always need to be trying to accomplish more. This can lead to a lack of balance in life as you’re always striving to get something done and not taking the time that you need to focus on yourself-care.
Learning how to recognize the success that you have daily can go a long way in building your confidence, which can help you avoid falling into the pattern of taking on too much. You’re not likely to look for approval from others when you have healthy self-esteem, so you can take a realistic look at what you want to accomplish and what you want to do. This can help you to relax and live a more balanced life.
Takeaway
While goal setting, exercise, deep breathing, prioritization, and meditation are key techniques to handle stress, if you’re still struggling with finding balance in your life and you find that stress and anxiety are overwhelming you, you may want to talk with a therapist. Don't be afraid of feeling like a burden when you ask for help.
While some people have the belief that therapy is only for people that have diagnosable mental health disorders, that’s simply not true. Licensed therapists like those at BetterHelp can help individuals with many different life challenges, including anxiety and stress. Your therapist can help you learn how to identify the stress triggers that are in your life. And they can work with you to help you learn critical coping strategies to overcome stress and find the balance that you’re looking for.
Frequently Asked Questions:
What Are 5 Ways To Relieve Stress?
Here are five ways to relieve stress:
Spending time with others—social support is shown to increase resilience to stress
Outdoor activities—even just 20-30 minutes of time outdoors can lower cortisol levels
There are a number of different health benefits associated with yoga, including stress relief and the potential for lower blood pressure
Progressive muscle relaxation—various studies have shown that progressive muscle relaxation lowers stress hormones and reduces mental stress
Breathing exercises—deep breathing and breathing exercises can help decrease anxiety, lower cortisol levels, and promote psychological relaxation.
Breathing exercises are a convenient tool to turn to because you can use them anywhere, and there's a range of different breathing exercises to try
If you're feeling stressed, there are a number of other techniques you can utilize, too. Physical activity, "me time," a break from stressful situations, positive affirmations, planning for high-stress days or events so that you know what to expect or do to cope, creative activities, and hobbies all may be beneficial.
Some people find that watching TV that is familiar to them, (e.g., a favorite television show) is restorative and offers a sense of control. There are things you can do in your everyday life, too, to support your overall well-being and self-care. Practicing sleep hygiene and working to get enough sleep the best you can, for example, is crucial for health and wellness. Make sure to speak with someone who can provide individualized medical advice if your stress is ongoing or if you experienced symptoms of stress that are a cause for concern.
How Do I Know If I'm Too Stressed?
There are a number of potential signs of stress to look out for. If you're feeling stressed, you might feel overwhelmed and be more prone to negative thoughts, trouble sleeping, feelings of anxiety, feelings of depression or changes in mood, and other symptoms. The chances are that if you feel as though your stress levels are too high, you're correct. Perhaps, there's a stressful situation that you don't know what to do about, can't do anything about, or that you can't stop thinking about. If you feel as though this might be true for you, there are things you can do. Talk with a medical or mental health professional, such as a doctor or therapist, if you need help with stress and stress management. Therapy can help people reduce and manage stress, improve mood and quality of life, lower levels of depression and anxiety, if applicable, find coping skills, and work through or deal with stress and stressful situations.
How Can I Relax My Mind?
Breathing exercises, yoga, mindfulness meditation, and time in an outdoor or natural setting may all be helpful ways to relax the mind. It can also be advantageous to spend time with friends. In addition to yoga, other forms of physical activity, such as a walk, can be helpful. If—on a regular basis—you find it hard to relax, experience feelings of overwhelm or a loss of control, or feel like you can't get out of your head, it may be beneficial to talk with a therapist. They can help you find what works when it comes to managing stress levels, give you a safe space to discuss the topics or events that might be on your mind, and find tools that help you, as a unique individual, cope.
What Are 5 Emotional Signs Of Stress?
Five emotional signs of stress can include irritability, feeling overwhelmed or a loss of control, feelings of depression, feelings of anxiety, and isolation or loneliness. When we experience stress, our nervous system responds with what's often called the fight-or-flight response. Prolonged stress can lead to serious consequences (including—but not limited to—high blood pressure, an increased risk of heart disease, and an increased risk of anxiety and depression symptoms), therefore managing stress levels is vital. The good news is that taking control of stress is possible.
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