If you have ever wondered if quick fixes work better than long-term changes in life or vice versa, you might want to consider working from both ends for a good life.
Why?
Stress is and will always be part of our lives.
We can’t get rid of it basically as it’s a biological reaction that we can’t just lock it out. It always comes knocking when our ability doesn’t meet the current demands. We just have to find ways to put our stress system at its normal level. When you are challenged, you don’t want to be irritated. When you are challenged, you’d still want to remain calm.
From my own experience of stress in life, tragic deaths, too much work, overload in life in general… I was lost and wanted to know what to do.
In searching for an answer on what and how I did it, I found you need 2 different sets of skills to beat stress.
I call them:
HERE AND NOW AND LONG TERM
- The Here and Now
This skill is to use “at the very moment” the stress comes, and helps you avoid ending up in anxiety or getting a panic attack. This skill set is your natural-born tool or your internal toolkit so to speak.
It is like if you need to present to a crowd but have stage fright, you have to get yourself in control, and what usually works is: taking deep breaths, wiggling your hands, or just walking around.
There also comes mini-meditation to lift up your spirits or pull your strength. We all have these different ways, and to me, it’s closing my eyes and repeating the word “release”.
2. The Long term
This is very important as this means getting to the root cause of your stress and making changes in your life.
Real changes that will prevent you from constantly getting into overwhelm and anxious. The main purpose of these is to make the knocking of stress on your shoulders come less often. They still will knock from time to time – just because as I said stress is part of life.
And it was in this part of my work with stress, I saw a pattern: 3 things that matter in your Long Term toolkit, and you need to keep this as long as you live..
THE 2 PATTERNS
1. Mindset
Are you prepared to make changes? Because YOU HAVE TO. You won’t if you don’t.
2. Energy
You can’t buy energy or get it from someone else, you have to generate that energy yourself by living healthy. Because you need to first care for those basic things to stay healthy and strong to resist the stress attacks.
3. EXTERNAL PLATFORM
Your world outside your body is what matters in the long term.
It is all about RAISING YOUR POTENTIAL CAPACITY
Raising your potential capacity means doing what you can to increase your energy. With more energy, you will be able to do more, and as I’ve said – stress comes when you cannot handle the number of demands.
DELEGATE SOME TASKS
If there’s too much ongoing – literally too much than what you can take even after doing the sorting of things, then you might want to consider delegating or outsourcing.
Outsourcing is a good way to take some tasks off your plate. Just choose the tasks that don’t really need to be done by you personally, and you can focus on the bigger things.
Take the time to ponder, , raise your potential capacity, and delegate some tasks. Combine these all together and you’ll have less stress from too many tasks!
WHERE TO GET ENOUGH ENERGY
You can easily achieve “real energy” by doing ONLY three simple things…And to make it easier to remember and not make it more complicated, just remember the acronym “SEE”.
SEE, as in:
S-leep
E-at
E-xercise
It all sounds so easy, doesn’t it? But then why is it hard to do it consistently? These three things are the inner engines that help us stay alive and do things we wanna do.
The problem is some people are just good at doing it from the beginning, but it doesn’t work like that. It needs to be done consistently to get the abundance of energy that will help us go from chaos to calm.
BONUS
For the bonus, it’s what I call “friendship”.
Meeting people decreases stress and increases calm in life.
Honestly, possibilities are almost endless and all might seem overwhelmingly much to do but we just need to start with small changes….
One at a time, maybe start by changing your diet, or stretching a little, or sleeping an extra hour.
Whatever it is, just remember that all those small positive changes, when added up together become BIG.
WHAT YOU NEED TODAY
It is only when you have the mindset for change and the energy to do it is when you can start looking at everything in life around you.
Your world outside your body, despite being your internal platform, s still internal work, inside your brain, using your built-in tools to manage the outside world around you.
WHAT ARE THE EXTERNAL THINGS
The external things that matter may be: your Job – including that overloaded to-do list, Money, your Network, and people around you – are they good for you, or do they steal your energy, Family/intimacy? Yes, even where you live matters – these are a few of the things you may want to change.
WRITE THINGS DOWN
However, there is no one size fits all solution. Problems are different from one another, so solutions can also look totally different.
In times like this, the best thing to do is ponder about it and WRITE IT ALL DOWN.
YOU CAN NEVER GO WRONG WITH WRITING THINGS DOWN.
Here are questions to answer that can help.
1. “Where do I get stressed the most?” What stresses me out the most?
2. Where do you want to be? What are your goals?
3. Take a look at how it currently is in your life – not someone else’s life or what others think.
4. What’s the next best step to take?
PILLS AND TRANQUILIZERS TO EASE STRESS
To break it to you this early…
Pills or tranquilizers won’t solve your problem as they might just make you end up being an addict.
If you are someone who panics on problems and relies on pills to calm down, you might want to start changing that.
TRANQUILIZERS DO NOT SOLVE THE CAUSE OF STRESS
Tranquilizers make you feel calm, but they DO NOT SOLVE ANYTHING.
And they can make you think slow, CALM but SLOW THINKING.
Let’s get into its effects.
THE EFFECTS OF TRANQUILIZERS
Alcohol is a natural tranquilizer. It is a day of help, and only good for the benefit of the moment.
I also guess that most of you know what it looks like for someone on constant alcohol use – or rather abuse.
Just like alcohol, pill tranquilizers also offer only temporary relief, unless you want to be tranquilizer dependent which also does no good because What happens after it wears off, or after you decide that you’re done being dependent on it? You will have a terrible time getting out of the habit and the urge for it.
You are just back to square one and in a worse physical state.
Additionally, tranquilizers just turn your brains off, and when you’re stressed out, you actually need more of your brain as you need to gather all your thoughts to help you get out of that stressful situation and find a good solution.
So really, does it solve any of your problems at all?
Na-da. Because what it gives you is a temporary relief of bad quality. Nothing more.
REAL STRESS MANAGEMENT
Real stress management is not trying to push the stress away, it is fixing and working on your life so the stress does not come often.
It’s not about how often they come, but about how you handle yourself and tackle them when they come.
I’ll let you in on a little secret…
Stress can either take lives or save lives. It’s part of basic biology and its real purpose is to WARN us when our body can’t take any longer – it tells us to REST. Treat it as a warning system and it can save you. Abuse your body and ignore your warning system and it can kill you.
YOU JUST HAVE TO LEARN TO LISTEN TO IT AND LET IT SERVE ITS PURPOSE.
STRESS AS A WARNING SYSTEM
Stress is in fact a WARNING SYSTEM. It warns us when our minds and bodies can’t take more anymore.
It warns us WHEN TO PAUSE, RELAX, and BREATHE that if we don’t do it we know we’ll end up being vulnerable.
WE JUST HAVE TO LEARN TO USE IT RIGHT.
Because this WARNING SYSTEM, if USED CORRECTLY, CAN SAVE LIVES – your life.
WHAT ARE THE SIGNALS TO LOOK FOR
The first signal from your body when stress hormones start to rise above the “good for you” limit can differ massively from person to person. YOU need to learn your stress pattern.
It can be anxiety, shaking, memory loss, concentration problems, stomach ache, headache, making faults repeatedly, getting angry for no reason, being grumpy, taking on every infection that passes by, sleep problems, overeating, under-eating, getting speeded, getting slow (this is me in a nutshell – everything is in slow motion in my head when I get stressed out).
Figure your early signs, and associate them with things you recently thought of as those are the possible triggers.
Once you’re able to identify them you can easily avoid them.
ASK FOR HELP TOO
When you already know your signals, ask someone you trust to be sort of your accountability buddy, or a person who knows you well and can spot your signs, so if you miss it, you still can be reminded.
If you have no one in mind, remember that getting a mentor is another option too, plus, you can reap more benefits. See HERE how I can help.
Feel free to start your long-term changes with these baby steps.
To your success and keep smiling,
