More Tips to Reduce Stress

A few months back this blog posted an article 8 Ways to Reduce Stress, and while that article does tell you how to reduce stress it only gives you 8 ways.  To be fair they are 8 great ways (pats back), but sometimes you need to reduce stress NOW.

Life is full of stressful situations, sometimes just being in a meeting can cause some stress either from boredom or the looming amount of work that is waiting for once you walk out the conference room door. Sitting in traffic, waiting in a doctor’s office, or even attending the PTA meeting can cause stress.

So while you should defiantly follow those 8 ways mentioned earlier to manage your stress long term, here a few tips you can do wherever you are to calm you down and help you get through a tough situation.  While these tips may not reduce all the stress you are feeling they should help you get to a better place to calmly and rationally deal with the situation you are facing.

Take a deep breath (or a few):  Stress causes us to increase the speed at which we breath, taking a deep long breath makes you stop and concentrate, maybe even count to ten while you do it.   You will be amazed at the change in your body and mind once you slow down and just breathe deep.

Walk—A quick walk around the building can do wonders for your stress level.  You are active using up all that extra adrenaline, you can breath (deeply) in that fresh outside air, and you remove yourself from the stressful situation if only for a few minutes allowing you to come back with a new perspective.  If you can’t walk outside, walk down the hall, to the restroom, or even around the house a few times.

Listen to Music—You listen to all those break up songs when you are crying into your Ben and Jerry’s, you jam out to great tunes while on a road trip.  Find some music that reminds you of a calmer, better times, and soon you will see yourself come down from the stress ledge you were about to jump off of.  Great thing about this one is you can pretty much do it anywhere at your desk, your phone, and especially in your car.

Take a Calm.com break.  This website has a calming visualization, you can set it to a guided visualization (shortest one being 2 minutes).  Or just set the timer (again shortest 2 min) and just be.  You may still be at your desk, but at least you are resting your mind (and eyes) from all that stress.

Stressful situations are all around and reacting to them from a place of stress never ends well, and is hard on our mental and physical health.  Hopefully these few quick stress tips will have you reacting with the best results and maybe even take a stressful situation to a personal victory.