Tips for dealing with stress:
- View change as a positive challenge, not as a threat or something to be fearful of
- Focus on what you can influence and change, not what you have no control over
- Make an effort to resolve conflicts you have with other people.
- Create a support network of trusted friends, family or counselor.
- Meditate.
- Participate in activities you don’t find stressful, such as your favourite sports, social events or hobbies.
- Set realistic and achievable goals at home and at work.
- Exercise regularly.
- Maintain a healthy diet and sleep schedule.
a good site for free study tips: www.how-to-study.com
All techniques used to manage stress involve either changing the internal cause of the stress (that is, your thoughts and beliefs), altering the external cause of the stress, or a combination of the two.One technique that can help to manage stress is called ‘Mediating Responses’. Often, it is your emotional response and/or attitude to the stressor that leads to you feeling stressed out. For example, if you’re stuck in a traffic jam and you’re late for an appointment, your emotional response may be something like, “Why does this always happen to me?? I’m going to be late!! Everyone is going to be upset with me!”. This response would probably lead you to feeling anxious and angry, and you may end up cutting into traffic, swearing, showing your anger, and arriving to the appointment completely stressed out.
Let’s apply the mediating response to this stressful situation. So, you find yourself facing the cause of stress that is the traffic jam and your being late for your appointment. Instead of letting your emotional response and attitude be like the one above, you make a conscious effort to apply the technique.
In this case, a possible mediating response would be to think to yourself, “I will stay calm so that when I arrive at the appointment I will be relaxed and confident. There’s nothing I can do about the traffic, so I’ll spend the extra time getting mentally prepared for the appointment.” What would this probably lead to? Not anger and anxiety. It would probably lead you to feeling calm, relaxed and confident. It could lead you to calmly ring the person you are meeting and explain the situation, safe driving, and your arriving there feeling relaxed, and in control.
Next time you’re feeling stressed out about something, try out the mediating response and let me know how it goes 
Most of us will know that developing and improving ourselves is a major factor in being able to successfully achieve our goals. What are ten ways we can improve ourselves and increase our natural power?
- Decide that you want a strong personal foundation: A strong foundation is a choice.
- Get rid of tolerations: Whatever you are putting up with slowly destroys your personal foundation. Take the time to fix, remove, act on, or delegate anything that you are tolerating in your life.
- Improve your attitude: Make an effort to see things in a positive light. Stop gossiping. Be friendlier.
- Thank people: Give thanks to people who have affected you, both positively and negatively.
- Surround yourself with people who have a positive outlook on life: Negativity and cynicism will eat away at your personal foundation.
- Take care of yourself: Enjoying regular exercise, a good amount of sleep, and a healthy diet will increase your natural power.
- Manage stress: There are techniques which you can use to manage your stress. Learn them and master them. Keep only healthy stress in your life.
- Live the life that you want: Live according to your values, not according to someone else’s values that have been imposed on you.
- Resolve unfinished business: Fully communicate and resolve any issues you have with people and situations.
- Strengthen your strengths: Build on what you have to become more successful.
Having a strong personal foundation is vital to living a fulfilling life.
Go with what your instincts tell you:
Procrastination is often to do with putting off making decisions. Being willing to make quick, informed decisions is necessary to being able to complete projects and sticking to your schedule. Make quick and informed decisions by going with your instincts.
Change focus:
We often procrastinate because we aren’t ready to do the one step we feel we need to do to move on. Perhaps we don’t have all of the information we need yet, we may not have written a plan for the project, we haven’t ‘brainstormed’, we may not feel prepared. If you aren’t ready to take on a particular task, it can be more effective to focus on the steps you need to take before you are actually ready to tackle this task. If you find yourself postponing doing a task, ask yourself whether there is something else that you need to do in order to successfully complete this task and then do that first. This change of focus may be what you need to feel more able to take on the task.
Break down your tasks:
If the task before you is overwhelming, try dividing the task into smaller, more manageable parts. Make sure these parts are achievable and realistic. Then complete each of these smaller parts on their own, don’t think about the other parts, just focus on the part you are currently working on. Each part may take you 1 hour, 2 hours, 1 day or more. Remember, just focus on the more manageable, smaller part that you are currently working on, before moving onto the next one.
Give yourself a deadline:
Some people work better under pressure, and work better when they have a deadline looming. If you feel that leaving things to the last minute really does help you to perform, then accept this about yourself. Then establish self-imposed deadlines, BEFORE the actual deadline. Treat your deadline as though that is it. Forget about the actual deadline. Make your deadline three days earlier than the deadline that is given to you. Book other urgent matters to be done in the time after your deadline, so that you are kept under pressure but also have built in a 3-day time cushion in case things do go wrong. You may find that after a while you may eventually discard the need to do things at the last minute, and find it easier to get things done ahead of time and with less stress.
Many people underestimate the effect that stress can have on their lives, and are often unaware of the connection between stress and the physical and psychological impact it has on their well-being.
Stress is as varied as each individual’s ability to cope with it. Have you ever felt completely stressed out about an assignment, or exam, and yet other people around you seem perfectly calm and relaxed about the same thing that’s stressing you out? Everyone copes differently with stress and reacts differently to the stressors we face in our lives.
What is the difference between stress and stressors?
Stress is a pattern of physiological, emotional, cognitive and behavioural responses to real or imagined stimuli. It is a product of natural selection; that is, it is a behavioural adaptation that helps us to confront or escape threatening situations.
Stressors are the generally aversive stimuli which cause the stress response. They can come in numerous forms, and aren’t necessarily always bad. For example, a positive stressor can affect behaviour in positive ways, such as competing in an athletic competition or doing an exam. Negative stressors affect behaviour in negative ways. They may include catastrophic events such as natural disasters, or may be relatively trivial such as being late for an important appointment.
Other positive stressors may be giving a speech, having a due date for an assignment, nerves when going for an interview, intense physical exercise, or doing a test.
Other negative stressors may be having a pet die, close family move away, high study pressure, or spending time with people you do not get along with.
When experiencing stress, we experience a range of physical and emotional responses, which in the long-term can have adverse effects on our health.
Some biological changes that may occur when under stress include heart rate increasing, blood pressure rising, digestion stops and perspiration increases. This happens to prepare the body to deal with the stressor, providing a heightened psychological and physical state of alertness and readiness for action. Our bodies respond in the same way to both positive and negative stressors.
Stress is perceived as an emotion. It isn’t the stressor itself that causes the stress, but our emotional response to it, which in turn impacts the nervous system. Many of the harmful effects of long-term stress are caused by our own beliefs and reactions to the stressor.
There are many ways to deal with stress, but it is important to have an understanding of what stress is before you can really start to manage it.
One of the major problems people face when trying to effectively manage their time lies in the way that they perceive the concept of time. One of the highest priorities when it comes to controlling your time is to challenge your very perception of the time concept.
Good time managers ask the crucial question of “How long will this take?” They calculate how long tasks will take and incorporate the time they need into their daily schedules. If you consistently miscalculate the time it takes to complete tasks, you will find that you are constantly taking on more than you can handle. Miscalculating time can also lead to procrastination, for example if you think a 1 hour task will take 3 hours, you will find it more difficult to start.
It’s easy and typical to over-estimate or under-estimate the time tasks take to do based on how you feel about the task. If you enjoy it, you can be sure to think it will only take a few minutes. If you hate it, you think it will take you many hours to do.
Try to be literal when talking about time. It’s easy to get into the habit of saying ‘oh that will only take a minute’ to a wide range of tasks such as putting the clothes away, eating lunch or buying a loaf of bread. This affects the way we think about time, and leads us to more time miscalculation.
To improve your time estimating skills, here are two activities you can try:
1. Time three tasks: Choose three tasks that you find yourself delaying unnecessarily, and spend some time analyzing your time. Record the task, how long you think it will take, and how long it actually took. Time yourself doing each task at least three times to get a solid average. Try to do the tasks at around the same time each day, for a more consistent result.
2. Keep track of your time estimates in your daily planner: For one or two weeks, next to each item you put on your to-do list, write down how long you think the task will take. Then time yourself doing the task and write down the time it actually took you to finish the task.
Compare your actual times with your estimated times. Is there a pattern? Are your estimates varying by the same percentage? Are some tasks harder for you to judge the time? Did some tasks go by faster than you estimated? What does this show you about your relationship to the tasks?
You may not have been able to track all the kinds of tasks you do in one or two weeks. Try to use this technique of estimating and recording time for up to a month. It is worth the effort to be able to schedule your time more realistically. A few weeks of making an effort to carry out these time-estimating techniques can help you to develop an accurate sense of how many tasks and what kind of tasks can fit into an afternoon, or how long exactly it takes to buy your groceries, and so on.
Success usually involves making an effort to get the life that you want. It doesn’t always occur due to luck or random events. Often, success is the result of hard work and dedication.
Here are some helpful tips for achieving success, and consequently being able to lead a better life:
- Don’t wait for anything: Be the initiator, always. You have to be willing to make an effort for a successful life.
- Solve your problems: Even if you weren’t the one who technically caused the problem, solving them anyway may give you relief and achievement.
- Hang around people who bring out the best in you: Being around people who constantly bring you down by insults, criticism, negativity, etc can really shape you for the worse and drain your energy. Success is usually attained more easily when you have a good support system of family and friends.
- Set goals based on your values: Don’t set goals based on what you should, could, or would do. Do what you want to do, as long as they are in line with your values. Pursuing something because you think you ‘should’ may well affect you negatively in the long-run.
- Take the time to invest in yourself: Your own personal development is a crucial factor of success. Spend the time to learn how to become the person that you really want to be.
Success is something different to everyone. Decide what success means to you. What does it feel like? What does it look like? How does it sound? Then try out some of these tips and let me know how you go.
Interesting ad by Dove, have a look:
Dove Evolution commercial
People often wonder how coaching works, and where you start with coaching. I think that a great way to start the coaching process is to explore your tolerations. This involves developing a list of 40 or so things that you are just tolerating in your life. This could be anything, from the dirty dishes piling up, to having to find your school uniform in the morning.
Tolerating all these things can really drain your energy; energy that could be better spent doing what you want to do, or studying, or working, and so on. Once you get rid of all of these initial annoyances, chances are that you will feel more refreshed and full of energy.
I started my tolerations list a few months ago and came up with a list of 41 items, of things that I am tolerating. Within a week, I was able to tick off around 5 items. Then, I sort of forgot about the list, and when I went to look at it again after 4 weeks, I found that I had already completed more than half of the initial tasks I wrote down!
So, if you can, spend some time or a day or two working out what tolerations to get rid of, and see how you feel afterwards. Even if you don’t actually consciously put time aside to complete the tasks, you may find that after a few weeks or months of writing it down, that you have already completed it!