Self Care & Stress Management Tips

Stress is an everyday fact of life. Learning how to respond to stress determines what impact it will have on your life and your future. Davis, Eshelman & McKay, (2008) suggest that some stress is good for us and other types of stress can be particularly harmful.

When stress becomes observable to us and people around us, we often try to manage this with less successful strategies such as working harder, numbing pain with food, alcohol or drugs, by procrastinating or venting frustrations on people. While believing we do a reasonable job of taking care of ourselves, we often revert to our well known and familiar coping habits when faced with a crisis.

These coping habits may be:

Changing a personal conversation to something more agreeable.
Telling ourselves that ‘being busy’ is a great way of coping and managing pain.
Holding the belief that ‘soldering on’ shows strength and conviction.
Physically or emotionally distancing from the most important and caring people in our lives.
Self criticism, believing you could have been better.

Do any of these approaches sound familiar? Employing these survival skills can become comfortable territory. Comfortable because we avoid talking or thinking about ourselves and our real needs. While initially successful, this approach is potentially detrimental in the long term. Convincing ourselves that we are managing our stress levels by adopting these techniques is really a veiled version of dishonesty. Who are we making more comfortable with this dishonesty?

Getting real with ourselves is the first step to moving forward and beating the stress patterns that block our pathway to success. Some of our needs may require more attention in terms of:

Sleep – understanding the importance of peaceful sleep
Emotional support – reaching out for help
Time to yourself – learning to say no
Physical energy – exploring a new health regime
Companionship – finding new friends or opening up to others
Change – getting used to a new environment
Peace -you worry all the time
Hope -you are afraid things won’t get any better
Touch -You miss the affection and closeness of a loving relationship

When we are not present or grounded, we are not really present in other important relationships. Self- care does take time and energy. Yet it is time well spent with clear and instant rewards most obvious to you and to other people. Therapy will help you to get started into a new regime and set up a plan to help move towards your goals. In the meantime, you can begin with the activities on the list below. Choose one thing you might focus on each day. See if you can manage to complete this list in its entirety.

Just for today

I will suspend all judgement – look for the best in everyone and praise it
I will slow down – take my time talking, walking and driving
I will say no – without feeling guilty
I will be grateful – for all the people in my life who think the world of me
I will replace – all negative thoughts with encouraging and empowering ones