In today’s world a life without stress is near impossible. The changes and challenges
Identify, Eliminate and Prioritise on your way to reducing stress in your life.
wrought by the current state of affairs globally often cause reactions in us that can lead to stress.
However, by ignoring the stress in our lives and by keeping sources of stress that are unnecessary around us, we put ourselves at risk of creating imbalances which tend towards ill-health.
The links to high-blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, chronic pain and cancer among other life-threatening and life-shortening ailments have been proven time and again. Therefore, we need to be proactive and implement certain changes in our lifestyle to reduce the effect of stress on our health.
One can choose a complicated way which may just add another item to your already stressful routine, or you may choose to simplify your activities to ensure a holistic lifestyle, which gives room for spirituality, family, career, leisure, entertainment and other enjoyment in the correct balance needed for a fulfilling, healthy life.
Identify
Take some time to relax and meditate on your life. Examine each aspect of your life to determine what stress you are enduring and more importantly the source. Review each of these sources and determine the level of importance given to each of these activities that could be leading to your stress. Then verify the levels of stress caused by the source(s) of your stress. Identifying the source of your stress is essential in crafting a plan of action to begin its reduction.
Eliminate
Once you have identified the sources of your stress, take steps to eliminate all unnecessary stressors from your life. For example, consider single tasking instead of multi-tasking. While multi-tasking sounds great, the worry that we won’t get it all done is actually an unnecessary stress. In our attempts to get so much done at once, there is often a tendency to bite off more than we can chew, leading us down a very unhealthy and unnatural path.
Prioritise
Is spending quality time with your family more important than having your house spotless every second of the day? Are those meetings that last 5-6 hours of your productive time reducing your productivity and increasing your stress levels? These are some of the things that may be considerably raising your stress levels and putting you at risk. Therefore,
Follow these three steps and reduce the stress in your life.
prioritise your activities by the level of their importance, and decide what balance is needed in order to be able to incorporate these aspects into your life, while causing the least amount of stress possible in today’s world.
These three simple steps help to put your life into perspective and help to show us what is important to our own survival. Much of the time we are stressed by taking on activities that are not essential to us because of societal pressures. Taking the time out to examine our lives will surely help us determine whether our health is more important than keeping up with the Jones’ . This in itself will therefore help reduce stress and its harmful effects on our lives.
Are there any other stress reduction techniques you use to ensure a better quality of life? Feel free to share them in the comments section below.
The Merkaba Centre 