How to Eliminate Stress From Your Life Without Taking a Yoga Class or Changing Your Schedule in 10 Steps
By Chris Hammond
Have you ever Googled “eliminate stress” only to find a long
list of impossible tasks from people who obviously don’t have a job and aren’t
married with kids? My personal favorite
ideas were to quit work (really? because last time I checked you work to earn
money to care for your family and quitting work would add considerable stress
to your life), have an open schedule (this is laughable as my schedule is
almost entirely dictated by my kids’ activities), and avoid difficult people
(yes, that is really possible when you work with difficult people all day
long). You already know that you need to
reduce the stress in your life but having ridiculous suggestions about how to
go about it only increases stress and gives you the impression that reducing
stress in your very busy life is impossible.
It’s not.
Here are a few suggestions that have been tested and proven
to be effective by very busy people like you.
1. Know where you are going. As silly as it sounds, having goals for each
area of your life actually reduces stress.
For instance, if your goal with your teenage son is to help him be a
self-sufficient adult who is not stuck playing video games on your sofa at age
25 then you have a goal. With that goal
in mind, he should be making his own meals, taking care of his own laundry, and
working at a part-time job. Doing this
process for each area of your life makes decisions easier and less stressful.
2. Stick to your plan. Using the teenage son example, you will
undoubtedly be met with stiff resistance on his part as you enforce the new
direction. This is good. As a parent, your responsibility is to teach
your child to become a functional adult; it is not to be their friend
(hopefully that will come much later).
By remembering your goal, sticking to it and serving out consequences
for not following the plan, you will reduce more stress in the long run but not
the short run.
3. Set realistic expectations. Just because you spent all day cleaning the
floors of your house does not mean that anyone will even notice. If you clean the floors expecting gratitude
or praise then you are likely to be disappointed. Instead, decide that you like the floors
clean and you are really cleaning them for yourself.
4. Monitor your thoughts. This is a biggie for most women as thoughts
tend to run rampant and one strange phone call can leave you replaying it for
hours, if not days. Give yourself the
two times rule. You are allowed to
replay a conversation two times; any more than that, you need to distract
yourself and move on. Think about it for
a second: when was it ever productive to waste a bunch of time obsessing over
something that you can’t change?
5. Be your own best friend. Your inner dialogue should be as kind to
yourself as you are to your best friend.
Would you ever look at your best friend and call her “stupid” for making
a mistake at work or call her “fat” for eating a piece of chocolate cake or
call her “loser” for missing an appointment? Of course not! So stop doing this to yourself.
6. It’s ok to say “no”. Mommy guilt runs strong and powerful
especially when you are working and you know that your kids don’t have your
undivided attention. This means that
some activities will conflict with work, forcing you to say the dreaded “no”
word. It’s ok, you are not in this alone
and it is good to teach your kids that they can’t get everything they want when
they want it. Remember the bigger
picture.
7. Don’t lie. It is very tempting to play God and believe
that you know what someone else is thinking and can make someone feel better by
telling a little lie. But lies have a
strange way of catching up to you and creating much bigger problems and stress
in the end. So make a habit of being
truthful even if it might hurt someone’s feelings.
8. Set boundaries in your life. Boundaries are like walls which are very
useful; after all, who wants to watch you in the bathroom at work (ok, I admit
that visualization was a bit over the top but highly effective)? Here are some practical stress-reducing
boundaries: don’t answer your phone when it rings, check email only three times
a day, non-emergency communication gets an automatic 24 hour wait before
responding, and limit social media stuff to once a day.
9. Choose OCD behaviors wisely. Some OCD tendencies are rather useful such as
always putting your keys or purse in the exact same place every day. This eliminates the mad dash to find things. But other OCD behaviors are not useful, such
as needing to wash your hands 50 times a day or cleaning obsessively with
bleach. Get help for the behaviors that
you need to change and embrace new habits that are time savers.
10. Work on you, not everyone else. In the end, you are only responsible for
yourself. (Yes, there are those kids of yours but they are already responsible
for some of their behaviors and most likely need more, not less,
responsibility.) When you take time to
work on your own issues instead of pretending they don’t exist, you will find
more energy. After all, you can’t give
what you don’t already have.