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:
- 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
- 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.
- 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 Throw stuff away if you haven’t needed it for several years or if it’s broken or out of date.
- Get help: when you feel you have too much to do ask someone or pay for help lighten your load.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
