10 great ways to reduce the effects of stress

Often the first step to reducing your stress is realising that you have some control over your stressors. You might find that it’s useful to have the support of a life coach for a few sessions to enable you to  reduce the effects of stress in the ways suggested.

A life coach is similar but different from a counsellor or therapist. You will be encouraged to look forward  and discover ways to  set and achieve the goals you want for your life. Many life coaches work with their clients on the telephone rather than face to face and charge  fees for their services.

The sort of things you could work on with a life coach to reduce the effects of stress:

1. Get your life more balanced: don’t spend most of your days working, life outside  is as important. Start to say ‘no’ when asked to do extra  work especially if it is outside  your normal working hours
2. Be more organised: tidy your work space; tidy your cupboards at home and notice how much less stressed you feel when you know where to find things.
3. Clear clutter: don’t hoard stuff just in case you might need it someday. Throw stuff away if you haven’t needed it for several years or if it’s broken or out of date.
4. Get help: when you feel you have too much to do ask someone or pay for help lighten your load.
5. Delegate: some things could be done regularly by someone else as a favour or for payment. Explain clearly what you want and how you want it done and leave them to get on with it and you to get on with something else.
6. Stop doing what doesn’t have to be done: Step back and ask yourself why you are doing some things. Maybe there is no longer any reason they have just become habits and need to be stopped.
7. Look after your body: when you eat healthy fresh food without additives or sugar and keep to low fat then you will feel much less stressed. Not only food but stop abusing your body with tobacco or alcohol and keep it flexible with regular exercise.
8. Look after your  mind by keeping up to date, reading as a way to relax and learning new things  and doing puzzles to keep your brain active. You will notice how this reduces your stress too.
9. Look after your spirit by being in nature each day; watching the sunrise or the stars; or connecting with your spirituality with formal or informal religion.
10. Keep in touch with friends and family: love them or hate them, they say blood is thicker than water and  keeping in touch in some way can be helpful to lower your stress. You have to find the amount of contact right for you because for some families this has the opposite effect. You may prefer to keep in touch with good friends instead!

If you want to find out if coaching could help you to do some or all of the above then CONTACT ME

Coaching, is it for you?

Have you ever felt stuck and wanted to talk over your challenges with someone?

The obvious choice is to turn to partner, friends or family. But they are too often involved in their own life issues and tend either to pull yourself together and do what they think is best for you, or shrug their shoulders and dismiss your concerns because they don’t really sympathise with you.

So what could you so instead?

You could push your concerns away and carry on as before. This might be find in the short term but the feeling of wanting something different will return from time to time until you finally make the decision to do something about your life.

You could follow the suggestions of your friend and end up doing something which you don’t really feel comfortable doing at all. This  won’t solve your problem because you will be doing something which is not congruent with your own needs and may also be against your morals too.

You could do something drastic without really considering the consequences.  This could be good for you because sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and trust that when you do so you’ll be able to find your feet again. However it’s usually a good idea to think through the pros and cons of the action you decide to take.

You could bury your frustration in alcohol or junk food. This may give you the false illusion of being helpful but it won’t solve anything, just make you numb for a short while, won’t make the problem go away and lead to other health and life problems for you too

You could seek  help from a therapist. If you want to explore your past and find the reasons about why and how you got into the situation you find yourself in now , then this can be useful.  But understanding your past may not enable you to move forward into a brighter future

You could seek help from a life coach. If you want to accept where you are today and now want to move towards a better and different life then a coach will enable you to do this while he or she sits beside you for part of your journey and helps you to face challenges and do what you truly want to do.

Book a free ABC session and find out how coaching can help you.