International Stress Awareness Week Day 5: Making a plan to continue to reduce stress Sometimes there can be a quick fix to what is making you feel stressed for example, making that deadline, but at other times there is no quick solution to stress. In each instance, it’s important to pull together what we’ve learned this week.
Making a plan to continue to reduce stress Work out how you’re feeling. Using the signs and symptoms of stress to identify if this is what you’re experiencing. Identify what in your life is causing you stress. Coping with stress by practicing self-care and stress reduction techniques. Talk about stress with those around you and seek support. Make a plan.
The first step is to work out how you’re feeling. Remember the Red Cross activity we did, perhaps give that a go again? This will help you work out what is causing your feelings of stress where you can then use the Stress Exploration worksheet to help you rank what is causing you the most impact. Knowing what’s causing you the most stress means you may be able to tackle the causes. Sometimes the action required to address the cause of stress is not a quick fix and may require patience, or it may be that it’s out of your control. In all instances it’s important to learn how to cope with stress and to build our personal resilience. The first thing to do is look after your day-to-day wellbeing. This includes during times of stress and, also, in between times of stress. Building healthy habits can help make you more resilient when those stressful times come around. Going forwards from this week, pick one lifestyle action you can take to improve your resilience to stress. For example, this could be eating one warm meal a day, or reducing screen time before bed to improve sleep. The NHS has some good examples of 10 lifestyle stress busters. Pick one and give it a go.
International Stress Awareness Week Day 5: Making a plan to continue to reduce stress It's important to have to hand a few coping mechanisms that you can use in times where levels of stress feel unmanageable. Practice the 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding Activity and don’t forget what we have said about how important managing breathing is. This doesn’t need to be complicated. Even just practising controlled breathing by breathing in through your nose for 4 seconds, holding for 4 seconds and then breathing out on a count of can be helpful. this is called ‘box breathing’ and you can find more about it here. These sorts of exercises can help bring calm if you’re feeling panicked or overwhelmed. This will then allow you to think more clearly meaning you can address the causes of your stress, or just have a moment of relief. If you are stressed, talk to those around you. This can include your manager, GP, HR, the Wellbeing Officer and your friends and family. By talking about your feelings, you are seeking support to be able to manage and address them. You can also always turn to organisations like Shout,Samaritans, Mind.
Each instance of stress can teach you a little more about how you respond to stress. As life goes on stress can come from new areas which can make it challenging. By having your coping mechanism and stress reduction techniques in place this can help you handle and manage stress as things come at you. Ensuring that you have your daily habits in place that maintain your resilience will also help. Make a plan of what you’re going to work on implementing going forwards based upon what you’ve learned about yourself and how you handle stress.