Part Two

Recognising your sources of stress

In order to have any long term effect on reducing our stress levels we have to become aware of what is causing our stress in the first place.  So, do you know what are the main causes of your stress?

Things that cause us to feel stressed are called stressors. They can be found in the workplace, in your home, they can be present in your relationships with people in fact, they can be found just about anywhere!

The good news is that once you can recognise where your stress is coming from and begin to identify your stressors, then you are in a much stronger position to start tackling them.

It has been said that there are as many possible causes of stress as there are people in the world and so it’s vital that you identify your own stressors.

Where to start looking

Here are just some of the areas for you to consider:

Interpersonal – relationships at work and personal e.g. role conflicts, disagreements

Work stress – e.g. too much, too little work, time pressures, deadlines, lack of control, interruptions

Social – crowding, lack of privacy, too much / too little contact with others, loneliness

Environmental – e.g. travel, working/living in a system that doesn’t support you, insufficient light, clutter, VDU’s, noise etc

Internally produced – e.g. worry, unpleasant expectations, fear of failure, fear of embarrassment, perfectionism, self-criticism lack of clear plans & goals etc.

Change in – e.g. patterns of eating, sleeping, relationships, living arrangements etc.

List all the possible causes of your stress.

Go through each stressor on your list and ask yourself :  How much stress is this causing me? Give yourself a score out of 10 (1 = low 10 = high)

For each stressor ask yourself:

• How you feel about this problem and your ability to deal with it?
  Hopeless –> doubtful  –> maybe –> possible –> positive
• For each stressor identify your level of desire to tackle the problem and do something about it:
  Not motivated –> willing to try –> partially committed –> highly motivated

Part Three

Learn to monitor your stress levels

Learning to identify your stressors and recognise your symptoms of stress is a vital step in stress-busting. Unless you recognise and address the underlying causes of stress then it will never go away.

To ultimately bust your stress you need to get clear about what causes it and then take action to address the causes. E.g. supposing that work overload is causing you stress, resulting in headaches – taking pain killers may get rid of your headache in the short-term but unless you tackle the cause of the stress – your headaches will return.

So, the first step is to find out exactly what is causing you to feel stressed. In addition to the exercise you just complete, give some time to this week’s action – keeping a stress diary.

Action!

Actions of the Week

Your Stress Diary

For the next week keep a stress diary:

1. At regular intervals e.g. every hour note down the time and estimate each of the following on a scale of 1-10:

• how much stress you are feeling
• how happy you are feeling
• how effectively you are working.

2. When stressful events occur, take some time out afterwards and make a note of:

• what the event was
• what were the important factors that made it stressful?
• how stressful was the event (1-10)?
• how did you handle it?
• What did you do following this stressful event

Keeping a stress diary should provide you with a good idea of the main sources of your stress, what circumstances you find stressful and enable you to see whether your current strategies for handling stress are effective or not.

Part Two

Transforming negative and limiting beliefs

If you tell yourself and others “I’m no good at dealing with stress” “I just can’t cope” you are in effect reinforcing this in your own mind. Now, because we always want to be right, it should come as no surprise to learn that our actions then follow this belief and we become someone who is not good at dealing with stress. This obviously is not helping the situation.

So, here’s what you can do to transform those negative and limiting beliefs. Once you have identified your negative or limiting beliefs, for each one ask yourself, ‘How does this belief serve me?’

Very often, there is a benefit to be gained from holding onto a limiting belief, perhaps avoidance of dealing with the situation. Ask yourself, ‘what difference would it make to my life if I did not hold this belief?’ Now go through each belief and decide what you would like to change it to.

For example, if your belief was, ‘I’m no good at dealing with stress’, you could replace this with, ‘I am learning new ways of coping with stress’ or I am open to finding new ways of dealing with stress’.

Make sure that when you transform your belief that it’s personal e.g. using I am, I have etc, positive and in the present tense.

Part Three

Great expectations

Related to beliefs are your expectations. If it’s an event or situation that you are worrying about, what are your expectations of this situation? Do you expect that ‘I’m going to find this really stressful and I’ll probably end up getting a headache’.

You may have heard the saying ‘where you look is where you go‘ – in other words, if you expect a negative outcome then that’s probably what you will find. You have conditioned yourself to pick up on anything that’s stressful about your work or situation because that is what agrees with your belief – and you always like to be right.

So, check out your expectations. There may be some negative beliefs lurking behind those expectations – if so, and add them to your list.

Hold back on self-criticism

How often do you criticise yourself by saying to yourself ‘I should have ….’. Reprimanding yourself in this way can increase your stress levels as it serves to remind you that you are not performing in the way you’d like to.

When you’re under a good deal of stress cut yourself some slack, be kinder to yourself. Remind yourself that you have a choice and change your ‘shoulds’ into ‘cans’ or ‘coulds’.

For example:

‘This report needs to be in by Wednesday, I should have finished it last week!’

could become

‘This report needs to be in by Wednesday, so what can I do about it?

Using cans or coulds encourages you to look for solutions and reminds you that you have a choice. Criticising yourself for what you should or should not have done just adds to your stress.

Part Four

The subtle saboteurs

You are responsible for your own stress levels, the way you choose to react to situations and the beliefs you choose to adopt has a tremendous influence on how you cope with stress.

However, although your thoughts and beliefs play a significant role there are subtle saboteurs that can also have an effect on your stress levels.

• Chemical and nutritional stressors are not always taken into consideration but can contribute to the stress you experience.
• Caffeine raises the levels of stress hormones, making it more difficult to sleep and can make you more irritable. So, how much coffee or tea (which also has caffeine in) are you drinking?
• Smokers often feel relaxed after a cigarette. However smoking puts your body under chemical stress. If you smoke, try taking your pulse before and after a cigarette and think about the difference.
• An unbalanced or unhealthy diet can generate stress. So are you expecting your body to cope with stressful situations when it’s being provided with insufficient nutrients to deal with the stress? Did you know that your requirement for Vitamins B and C increases dramatically when the body is under stress?

You wouldn’t fill a formula one racing car with 2 star petrol and expect it to perform well, so why expect your body to cope well with stress when you are not providing it with what it needs to cope with stress?

Finally, sleep is something that often gets overlooked when it comes to dealing with stress because it’s so simple. Sleep is the body’s natural way of restoration and regeneration. So how much sleep are you getting? Do you sit in front of the television until late instead of taking yourself off to bed for an early night?

Increasing the amount of sleep you have allows your body to recuperate and helps to bring down your stress levels, so stop sabotaging yourself and give your body some support!

Action!

Actions of the Week

1. Take a look at your negative and limiting beliefs

Write down any you can think of and the reword them to transform them into more positive and supportive beliefs.

2. Become aware of and cut out criticism of yourself and others by watching your ‘shoulds’.

Listen to yourself – every time you use the word ‘should’ think about some other way you could have expressed yourself.

3. Take a look at what you are feeding your body

4. Are you providing your body with what it needs in order to help you cope with stress?

If you don’t know what foods you need to eat in order to counteract stress, then where or from whom can you find out?

5. Are you getting enough sleep?

Try an experiment of going to bed one hour earlier each night, even if you don’t go to sleep. Play some relaxing music or do something that you’ll find relaxing – reading a horror or murder mystery story may not produce the desired effect!

This week you’ve learnt to become more aware of how you can sabotage your efforts to cope with stress through observing your negative beliefs and thoughts and by not providing your body with what it needs to help you. Next week we’ll be looking at how you can regain control and increase your ability to deal with stress.

Part Two

Practice Acceptance

In choosing not to react or how to react to something or someone, one vital ingredient is acceptance. Because, if there were no acceptance then this could lead to even more stress by ‘pushing feelings underneath the carpet’.

Accepting that ‘what’s done is done’ and you can’t change the past gives you the freedom to look to the present and at what you can personally do in order to improve the current situation. Acceptance is a vital ingredient in cultivating feelings of peace and relaxation and therefore an essential part of any stress-busting programme!

So what or who do you need to learn to accept or accept more?

Who’s Judging You and Who are You Judging?

Often when there’s a lack of acceptance, there’s a judgment of something or someone lurking in the background.

How does being judgmental affect your stress levels? If it causes them to rise, then ask yourself, “who has control over my judgments?”

Part Three

Meeting Your Needs

Getting your needs met is of utmost importance in stress busting. But before you get these met, you have to be clear about what they are.

Needs are resources, people, feelings, situations or environments that you require in order for you to be your best.

• What do you need physically in order to be your best?
  Be as specific as possible:
  • what foods do you need to be eating?
  • How much water do you need to function at your best?
  • How much sleep or exercise do you need in order to feel good?
  • What type environment do you need to relax in?
• How much ‘me’ time do you need?
• What sorts of people do you need to be around in order for you to feel at your best?
  If being around people who are negative and draining is having an adverse affect on your stress levels the reply to this question should provide the answer. So how can you take control and reduce the time you spend with negative people who contribute to your feelings of stress?

Make a note in your journal or on a sheet of paper of all your needs and circle all the needs that if you got them met would make a difference to your stress levels.

Part Four

Increasing Your Ability to Deal with Stress

What can you stop doing or stop doing so much of that would make a difference to your stress levels? Often when we are stressed we do things to excess like drinking alcohol, smoking, eating chocolate, sitting in front of the television for several hours each evening, not really watching anything.

University research found that the key stress management strategy is watching television.

The study found that only 24% of the ‘occasionally stressed’ watched television as opposed to 40% in the ‘often’ or ‘always’ stressed category.

Watching television can be stressful, especially the news. So try an experiment, stop watching the news, violent or stressful soaps for two weeks. If you have to keep up with the news, then read a paper, but be selective in the articles you choose to read.

What are you doing to excess that could be having an affect on your ability to cope with stress?

Write down any chemical substance, food or drink or behaviour that could be having a detrimental impact on your stress levels and your ability to cope. Awareness is the key, you don’t need to give something up, just reduce it in order to support yourself whilst coping with a stressful time.

Recognise Your Stress Responses

When you can feel stress building or you are aware of behavioural or physiological changes that means you are becoming stressed, you increase your ability to deal with stress. As with most things, an increase in awareness leads to an increase in effectiveness.

So what are your stress responses?

• What’s are some of the first things you notice when you are becoming stressed?
• Do you tense your muscles or get butterflies in your stomach?
• Maybe you notice yourself becoming impatient or irritable.

Everyone is different in the way they experience stress and becoming aware of when you start to become stressed gives you the opportunity to do something about it.

Part Five

What Can You Do Right Now?

So what can you do when you first notice yourself becoming stressed?

Apply the 80 /20 principle.

Quite simply this states that 20% of what you do accounts for 80% of the results.

So, in other words there are a few things that you do in your life that make 80% of the difference. This principle has been extensively tested over the years and applied to many things including one of the top financial companies in America. They analysed their statistics and found that 20% of their people were producing 80% of the results and surprisingly the top 20% were just 3-4% more skilled than the rest.

If we take a horse race, the winner often wins by a narrow margin – a neck. Over a season, that winning horse may only be just 3-4 seconds faster than the other horses but it always takes the biggest prize money.

You can apply this principle to managing your stress levels. Everyone can make an improvement in their life of just 3-4% in a specific area if they choose to focus on it.

So what would make the biggest difference to your ability to cope with stress? What small steps could you apply right now that would make a difference to your stress levels?

Action!

Actions of the Week

1. What do you control?

Take a sheet of paper and draw three columns. Make a list of all the things that are within your total control, those within your partial control and those over which you have absolutely no control.

2. Evaluate your needs

Make a note in your journal or on a sheet of paper of all your needs and circle all the needs that if you got them met would make a difference to your stress levels.

3. What are you doing?

Write down what you could stop doing or doing so much of which would make a difference to your stress levels

4. Apply the 80 /20 principle to your stress management.

Consider some of your options and write down six things that would make the biggest amount of difference.

In choosing to regain control, this is where you can really begin make a difference to your stress levels. Next week, we’ll be looking at developing more ways in which you can help yourself as well as gain support from other sources.

Part Two

Who do You Need to Be?

In order for you to achieve your goal in terms of managing your stress, who do you need to be or become?

For example, do you need to become more determined or disciplined to apply these stress management techniques? Do you need to become more resourceful? More relaxed? More tolerant?

This is a crucial part of supporting yourself to achieve what you ultimately want. Because, unless you can be or become the person that is needed to achieve the goal, the likelihood of you achieving long-term benefits are minimal.

Once you have identified who or what you need to be or become, ask yourself “How can I achieve that?” What do you need to do differently?

What Can You Do to Support Yourself?

In addition to being or becoming the type of person who’s an accomplished stress-buster, there are several things that you can do to support yourself.

The good think about self-support is that it’s under your control and therefore often the most reliable! So what can you do to help yourself overcome, reduce and prevent the build-up of stress?

The first important step is to take responsibility for reducing your stress.

I know that this seems an obvious step but very often we feel that “outside” sources or “other people” are the cause of our stress. However, regardless of who or what appears to be the stressor – it is you that decides whether you find this stressful and it is you who can decide to do something about it.

Write out a list of all the things you could do in order to support yourself. Put down as many different things as you can think of that you can do which will contribute in some small way to you reducing and or managing your stress.

To give you some examples, you might include:

• monitoring your negative thoughts and beliefs and transforming them into more supportive and positive ones;
• reducing the amount of caffeine or any other chemical substance which raises stress levels;
• going for a walk in your lunch break;
• using positive body language i.e. looking up as opposed to down (this does affect your mood!), sitting and walking upright, smiling (or faking it until you make it!);
• reminding yourself to relax the muscles in your shoulders and neck and regulating your breathing.

These are just a few ideas, we’ll be covering many more over the next two sessions.

Part Three

Where else can you find support?

Sometimes, there comes a time when you just can’t manage to reduce your stress on your own, you need some help.

Support comes in many different forms and a strong support network is an essential part of stress management. The acceptance that we need help is often an obstacle that needs to be addressed beforehand.

So, ask yourself two questions:

• how bad does it have to be before I am willing to ask for help?
• How does this reluctance to ask for help affect my ability to deal with stress?

No one person can provide us with all our needs for support, therefore it’s essential to be able to identify support from a variety of different areas.

Emotional Support

When we’re under stress, emotional support can be an important asset. This can come from family, friends, colleagues or professionals who can listen to our concerns, the people who are on our side and provide us with a safe refuge. So, start by identifying who is in your emotional support network. Make a list of the names of people who you could turn to who can offer the kind of emotional support you need.

Financial Support

Financial support can help alleviate the pressure of financial burdens or the worry of them. This may come in the form of long-term advice or short-term measures. Support of this nature often comes from professionals, organisations or from extended family. If this is a possible source of your stress, then reviewing the support that you need and looking at who you need in your support network is a good first step.

Managerial or Organisational Support

Managerial or organisational support is important in any career and can provide assistance in overcoming the challenges that cause work place stress. If you are challenged by workplace stress ask yourself who you know either inside or outside your organisation that may be able to help you.

Practical Support

Practical support can come in many shapes and forms from asking for help from co-workers / hiring a cleaner or a nanny to booking an aromatherapy massage when you’re too tired to exercise but need a supportive form of relaxation.

Part Four

Expand Your Horizons

The more aware you are of what support you would benefit from and the benefits you would gain from that support, the closer you’ll be to conquering your stress.

How aware are you of stress and what can be done to manage it? Is there a particular aspect that you would benefit from learning more about?

A wealth of information and help is available to help you reduce and manage your stress, so what would help you to increase your knowledge about right now and how can you achieve this? Do you need to visit the local library, conduct a search on the internet or maybe dust one of the books off your own bookshelves and read it?

Action!

Actions of the Week

1. Decide what you want to acheive

Write down in positive terms exactly what you are wanting to achieve regarding managing / controlling your stress.

Whatever you write down as your goal, make sure that you understand what that means in real terms.

How would your behaviour be different? How would you tell if you were succeeding?

2. Who do you need to be?

Decide on who or what you need to be or become in order for you to achieve this goal.

Ask yourself “How can I achieve that? And identify what you need to do differently?

3. How can you support you?

Write out a list of all the things you could do in order to support yourself. Put down as many different things as you can think of that you can do which will contribute in some small way to you reducing and or managing your stress.

4.What outside support can you get?

Ask yourself if there is a particular aspect of stress management you would benefit from finding out more about and taker steps to achieve that.

Taking responsibility for dealing with and controlling your stress, is a crucial step in ultimate stress-busting. You made steps towards that when you purchased this course. The next is accepting that you may need help and asking for it. Next week, we’ll be looking at how to attack stress from different angles and exploring further ways reducing and controlling stress.

Part Two

Slowing Down

It’s the simple techniques that are often the most effective in reducing and managing your stress. Quite often when we’re under stress, we feel as if things are racing ahead and we don’t have the control that we’d like. Purposefully slowing things down can reap substantial rewards. Even if it’s just for 5 seconds to give yourself time to think how you want to react can make a difference.

Practice giving yourself 5 seconds in which to take a breath and evaluate the best response rather than jumping in and possibly regretting it later. You can use this 5 second slow down in a variety of different settings both at work and at home.

Slowing it down can be applied to eating too. One of the possible causes of indigestion is eating too quickly. Also you don’t give your body chance to absorb the vital nutrients that your body needs in time of stress if you eat too quickly.

Part Three

Slowing it Down Even Further

Relaxation and meditation are two excellent stress-busting techniques. So, what’s the difference between them? Both can be done either on your own or with a partner or group.

Relaxation can take many forms but mostly you focus your attention on yourself, and the physical letting go of tension. This can be achieved by listening to a tape (there are quite a few available on the market now), mentally talking yourself or having someone else talk you through a relaxation exercise, where you relax each muscle group in turn. It could also take the form of bodywork e.g. massage with a partner or practitioner.

With meditation, you learn to concentrate on an object and focus the mind on that e.g. the breath, an image, a word etc. The idea is to quieten or still the mind and just allow yourself “to be”. Used regularly, it can help you to obtain relief from tension, anxiety and fatigue; cope better with everyday problems; improve concentration; improve the quality of your sleep and increase the feeling of peace.

Meditation can be practised on your own or in a group and can be used as a very simple exercise to relax the mind and body or developed as a regular practise. You don’t have to join a religious group, or buy any special equipment to meditate and it doesn’t have to be complicated – you can purchase a book or tape on the subject or simply try the following method:

Focus on the breath

1. Breathe in, breathe out (slowly) and count one, breathe in, breathe out count two and continue until you get up to number ten. If you find yourself wandering off, simply bring your attention back and start again at one. Do this stage for approx 3-5 mins
2. In this next stage count one then breathe in and out (slowly), count two breathe in breathe out etc and work up to ten as before for approx 3-5 mins. Just bring your attention back to the counting if your mind starts to wander.
3. Drop the counting all together and just notice where the air first enters your body, become aware of the sensations you are feeling (3-5 mins)
4. Become aware of your body as a whole and just enjoy the feeling of relaxation and peace before bringing your attention slowly back to your surroundings (3-5 mins).

Harness the power of visualisation by faking it until you make it!

Rehearse!

Every actor, when preparing for a performance spends a great deal of time rehearsing scenes. World-class athletes use visualisation to enhance their performance. You too can use the same principle, rehearsing in your own mind scenes of a calm and relaxed you – performing and coping perfectly with whatever challenge presents itself.

Here are a few guidelines to help you:

1. Spend about five minutes ensuring that you are relaxed physically and mentally
2. Picture in your mind’s eye a scene of you exactly as you would like to be
3. Picture everything in as much detail as possible, right down to the clothes you are wearing, the expression on your face, what you are doing or saying etc.
4. Whatever the scene, visualise it having a positive outcome

This method is immensely helpful for stress caused by anticipation.

Part Four

Give Yourself Time to Deal with Stress

Very often, when we are stressed we don’t allocate enough “me” time or recovery time in-between stressful events. Is time or lack of it one of your main stressors? If so, what help do you need in managing it better? Would you benefit from some coaching or taking a course like “Time To Live” in order to deal with this stressor?

Become aware of the time that you currently give yourself for both relaxation and recovery from stressful events. What do you currently do in order to relax? Does it provide you with the recuperation that you need? Or could you do with some deeper, more effective relaxation? When stressful events occur, how much time do you give yourself to relax and bring down your stress levels? What do you do?

Once you know how effective your current methods are, you can then decide whether you need to do more in order reach your goal. It may not involve more time, it may just be that you choose to use your relaxation time more effectively instead of flopping in front of the television.

Part Five

Come Up With Stress-Busting Options

There are a variety of tools, techniques, therapies and ideas that could help you to reduce your stress and coming up with a list of possible options can often help to shift that isolated feeling which can come with stress.

Last week, you were given the task of finding out more about stress management techniques, so now’s your chance to test your expanded awareness of the wide range of techniques available.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

1. Clutter clear your home and office – the process of clearing clutter is a great stress reliever and a clutter-free environment assists with “mental clutter”
2. Aromatherapy massage – the oils can specifically target stress and help reduce tension knots in your muscles
3. Cranio-sacral therapy – is a gentle hands-on treatment which helps the body to restore itself
4. Take a course in yoga – great for reducing stress
5. Take regular walks and exercise each day
6. Go to bed half an hour earlier each evening
7. Play a relaxation tape before retiring
8. Practice deep breathing
9. Seek the support of a coach or friend
10. Transform negative and limiting beliefs by using affirmations
11. Drink more water – to increase the body’s ability to fight stress
12. Review your diet so that you only eat foods that support you (seeking advice where necessary from a qualified practitioner)

So, how many more ideas can you add to this list?

Action!

Actions of the Week

1. Breath!

Practise deep breathing several times per day for the next week and notice the effect that it has on your stress levels.

2. Take time

Practise giving yourself 5 seconds of thinking time before responding (you can alter this if necessary to suit the situation) rather than reacting to a person or situation – breathe slowly and think about your response. After one week ask yourself if this is helping you to feel more in control.

3. Build your repertoire

• What do you currently do in order to relax?
• Does it provide you with the recuperation that you need?
• Could you do with some deeper, more effective relaxation?
• When stressful events occur, how much time do you give yourself to relax and bring down your stress levels?
• What do you do?
• What works?

Try various techniques in different situations and record how they made you feel in your notebook.

4. Try something new

Pick one of the stress-busting activities  mentioned in part 5 this week (or one that you added), preferably something you’ve never tried before, and give it a go this week. Throw yourself into it fully, commit to it and record the results.

Exploring different options for dealing with stress is a crucial part in ultimate stress-busting. Stress comes from different sources and so the more options you are aware of, the more chance you have of successfully tacking your stress. Next week we’ll be pulling it all together and looking at creating a system that enables you to reduce and manage your stress permanently.

Part Two

A strategy for change

In week 1 we looked at identifying your stressors, because once you can identify what is causing your stress, you then have a choice about how you deal with this stressor / situation.

In order to banish the build-up of stress forever though, you need a strategy that you can apply to ensure that your stress levels are kept to a manageable level. What is “manageable” is for you to decide. However, whatever you decide, the following strategy can be applied to your stressors, making sure that you deal with them before they become a problem.

So, the first step is to identify your source(s) of stress and for each stressor and decide which one of these three categories it falls into:

1. Easy to change
2. Possible to change (with considerable effort and planning)
3. Impossible to change

1. Easy to Change

For the easy to change stressors, take immediate action to remove unnecessary stressors where possible, and for those left, write down:

• The Description of the Stressor
• What action you can take to remove / reduce this stressor
• When are you going to take this action
• Who can help – list all the people, including yourself who can help you to get rid of this stressor)

2. Possible to Change

If your stressor comes under “possible to change”, use the above points and decide what steps you would need to take in order for a positive change to take place.

• What would be the very first step you would need to take?
• Would taking this step move you forward towards reducing your stress or do you need to take other steps?
• Decide on the order that these need to be taken and write them down.

Follow through in the same way as for the easy to change stressors deciding when you’ll take these actions and listing who can help you in this.

3. Impossible to Change

Now comes the more difficult task of looking at the “Impossible” to change stressors.

If you have a stressor that you feel is impossible to change, write down all the contributory factors that make this stressor seem impossible to change and try and give the reasons why these factors cause you stress.

• Contributory Factors – list all the factors that make up this stressor and write down why they cause you stress
• Action, Behaviour or Attitude – what could help you to view the situation more positively?
• Timescale – give a time scale for making changes if this is appropriate

Which of these is the most important factor? Start with this one and suggest for yourself a course of action.

This could be an actual action you could take or it may entail a behaviour or attitude change that may help you to view the situation more positively.

Part Three

Creating Daily Habits

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got! In other words, if you’re really serious about banishing the build-up of stress forever, then you’ll have to be prepared to make some changes!

Nothing will change unless you make it change. So, decide for yourself what changes you will need to make or what you will need to do in order to:

• Monitor your stress levels
• Control your stress levels
• Manage your stress levels

What daily habits will you need to create in order for you to achieve the above?

For each of the above categories, make a list of the things you’ll need to do differently or introduce into your daily routine so that they become a habit. Examples of these might include: daily affirmations, meditation, visualisation, playing a relaxation tape, drinking plenty of water etc.

Creating Weekly and Monthly Habits

It’s often not practical to include many stress-busting techniques on a daily basis. Only you will know what is possible for you to do and how often you can do it.

Make a list below of the ideas and techniques which can help towards controlling and managing your stress that you could apply on a weekly, bi-monthly or monthly basis.

Examples might include:

• A monthly massage
• Going to the gym
• Running
• Playing classical music (the type that produces alpha rhythm’s) on the way to and from work
• Reading this course once a month to maintain awareness!

Part Four

Make Stress Management a Work in Progress

To effectively control and manage your stress then it has to be a work in progress, something you work towards on a regular basis.

However, just like any other goal, give yourself rewards for achieving certain steps. After you’ve spent a week successfully putting into practice slow breathing techniques then you might for example decide to treat yourself to a CD.

Rewards are an important part of achieving goals in your life so take the time to make a list of what would be a worthwhile reward for you. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a reward that involves spending any money. It might be the feeling of satisfaction you get from making someone else or yourself feel good.

Part Five

The Ultimate Benefits of Stress Control and Stress Management

Successfully learning to manage and control your stress must be important to you otherwise you would not have chosen to take this course. So, take a few moments and write down why it is important to you?

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What benefits will you gain from reducing your stress?
• What will you be able to do more of as a result?
• What will you need to do less of when you can control your stress?
• What effect will this have on your relationships?

Keep the answers to these questions to hand and remind yourself of them frequently. It’s easy to let new habits die and to slip into our old ways of behaving. The key to change is to maintain your awareness and review the benefits.

Keep notes in a journal or diary to remind you of your progress. It may be a favourable comment a colleague, friend or partner has made about your relaxed manner, cheerful mood or increased tolerance. Or it may simply be that you notice positive changes in your ability to cope with situations.

Whatever it is, acknowledge yourself for having achieved it!

Action!

Actions of the Week for Life

Over the last few sessions I have been setting you tasks and action steps to raise and expand your awareness in what is currently happening, what is causing you to feel stressed. Now, is where the serious work begins – deciding what exactly you need to do and then taking action!

Make a list of all the ideas and techniques which could help you towards controlling and managing your stress. Beside each idea jot down when it could be applied e.g on a daily, weekly, bi-monthly or monthly basis.

Write down what changes you will need to make or actions you’ll need to take in order to:

1. Monitor your stress levels
2. Control your stress levels
3. Manage your stress levels

So, what actions are you prepared to take this week? Write them down and decide upon the very first step for each one e.g. if it’s to drink more water then your first step may be to put water on your shopping list or buy a bottle on the way into work.

Finally, plan to review your stress management strategies once per month. Remember it’s important to find what works for you and maintain your awareness of how to manage stress.

Happy stress busting!