Are you experiencing a racing mind or feel overwhelmed? This experience is a feeling commonly described as stress. Stress is a natural part of life and, in fact, very human. The trick to coping with it all: learning how to identify and manage stress, while working towards healing or curing the onset of stressful events, so they occur less. Do you want to face your next stressful event with an effective approach and ways to tackle it with methods for any occasion? Let’s begin....

Manage stress: embrace the problem
Stress has always been very much a part of life. There are several types of stress that result from exposure to environmental stresses, i.e. chemicals, toxins or other harmful products that stress our body. Physical stress like exercise or heavy exertion, and emotional stress, are what we seem to most often experience in the fast-paced world we live in today.

Stress serves us as being a survival response and technique. It tells our body and/or our psyche to be hyper-alert to a situation or a threat that allows us to prioritize the concern and behave or act accordingly. However, when certain elements of stress in our lives override our ability to respond appropriately or creates negative side-effects, solutions to manage stress become necessary. For most of us, the real impact occurs when we cannot seem to find the appropriate solutions to manage stress before the next stressful situation is upon us.

Stress, and certainly chronic or prolonged stress, not only produce unhealthy neurotransmitters and hormones that negatively impact our body, but can also manifest as anxiety or depression. There are both mental health issues many individuals experience at some point in their lives. To start unpacking and approaching stressful situations, resources are available on Instagram IGTV to help address issues like anxiety and how to be present.

Address anxiety, fear and the mind
When stress becomes anxiety, it is purely an interpretation of fear for a future event. Anxiety is actually your psyche being afraid of a future event, it senses it will not like the outcome of this future event and thus wants to avoid it. Fear actually is afraid of fear. Anxiety is a mechanism that supports that concept.

When you feel the waves of nausea, the hot flush or the butterflies and tingles in your limbs, it is an immediate response in the present moment, even though that future event has not occurred yet. It has only been contemplated or predicted as a possible scenario. The body demonstrates feeling afraid for a possible outcome for something that has not yet - and may not – happen. And it expels hormones, chemicals and neurotransmitters to get away from the situation. These effects not only compromise the immune system, cause inflammation, create short tempers and further creep up as other side effects later in life.

Developing an understanding to all of this helps you to not only face stress through deconstructing its fundamentals but also arms you with a mindset to approach it in the future.

1. Change chemistry
   Shake up your chemistry. Go for a walk, exercise, focus on breathing, do some gratitude work, and take up journaling to write down your thoughts. By doing these things, you change your body’s chemistry and restore the euphoria that was missing. Many of these activities release endorphins that serve as the counter chemical or neurotransmitters to stress. These activities help combat stress by generating the positive chemicals and hormones the body thrives on and helps the mind function optimally.
2. Rearrange programming in mind
   Think of the inner-working of the mind as our beliefs. A lot of our fears come purely from thoughts and beliefs we have created without reason or foundation. In fact, Dr Albert Ellis the founder of modern-day Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is known for saying: “People and things do not upset us. Rather, we upset ourselves by believing that they can upset us”.
   While it is natural to think about the future in order to plan for it, one shouldn’t feel anxiety over any one thing. This is where the mind and emotions sabotage our ability to think clearly. And where stress can become a choice. Emotions change our behaviour – they make the situation more complex by disabling our ability to think and ‘high-jack’ our logical mind. To put it simply: plan for a possible outcome, but choose not to react to the emotions. Stressful emotions can block or fog our clarity of mind, preventing working towards a solution. When we work on removing the emotions it provides a clearer picture of the event, future and what we really need to plan.
3. Reinterpret stimulants
   We receive a lot of information on a daily basis. These can be from the news, social media, conversations, or other forms of messages. By taking control of incoming stimulants and curbing the flow of excessive information, by choosing which stimulus to ignore, helps to calm the overwhelming barrage we fall victim to. Decide what stimulants you allow to enter your brain, rearrange them, and think for yourself. Before you know it, you start to eliminate the external forces causing you undue stress. As Buddha said, either you control your mind or let your mind control you.
4. Be present
   As stated earlier, stress is a current moment emotion and anxiety is the fear of the future. So a good way to further focus and channel a solution is to be present with clarity of mind. If you feel stressed about external worries you do not have control over, just be present. Being present is forgetting past pretense while still letting go of expectations for the future. In other words, let go of the outcome, by focusing on the journey or the specific tasks that need to occur at that very moment.
   However, letting go of the past pretense of emotions does not mean to let go of knowledge, lessons or experience. The goal is to lighten our mental load of past emotion while still holding on to important lessons learned from the past. You just let go of the emotions attached to the past and future. This gives clarity to your values and vision for your goals and direction.
5. Practice mindfulness with meditative activities
   This last tip combines all the above into being mindful. Practice mindfulness through daily personal check-ins and meditation. Mindfulness allows us to experience thoughts, with an awareness of them and manage how we react, to create a better response. If you need further information on mindfulness or meditation, explore how to start this revolutionary practice to reclaim your life and manage stress. Meditation is in part the practice of letting go of future events by practicing being present and calm. What we practice can then become our norm.

Ease stress with a supportive community
For resources and more, join our online community and engage with material designed to help you. Discover words for thought, video guides and notifications on upcoming material readily available on Instagram and Facebook.

Manage stress, reclaim your life
I hope this discussion helps you approach the mental chatter and manage stress with a sense of direction and relief. If you have more questions on how to take on stress and lead a mindful lifestyle, get in touch.