What do we mean “celebrate” National Stress Awareness Day?! If we are honest, all of us deal with stress on some level. Stress Awareness Day was set aside as time to be aware of the stress in our lives and how it affects us.
History of Stress Awareness Day (from www.daysoftheyear.com)
Stress Awareness Day was established by the International Stress Management Association (ISMA) to help provide information on stress, and strategies on how to address it for both companies and individuals. The organization is focused on helping employers and employees help each other by providing comprehensive guides to establishing a program within their organization, and individuals by looking after their health and well-being on a day to day basis.
Stress Awareness Day is your opportunity to start looking after yourself and your life, and break down the individual stressors in your life. Failure to deal with stress in your life effectively can lead to serious health problems, including increased blood pressure, susceptibility to heart disease, and a decline in your immune system. Once you start experiencing these symptoms they can landslide into each other, resulting in growing sickness, and by extension, more stress. It’s truly a self-feeding problem, and a cycle that is necessary to control to enjoy our lives.
How to Celebrate Stress Awareness Day (from www.daysoftheyear.com)
The best way to celebrate Stress Awareness Day is to take the opportunity to remove the stress from your life for the day. Take the time to examine your life and find out where all the stressors lie, and start looking into taking steps to remove them or find ways to mitigate them. Removing stress from your life can start off as a stressful experience, so it can help to get the assistance from organizations like ISMA to look into strategies and support in how to manage those things in your life that cause stress.
Whatever you choose to do, take the time to take a day off and let yourself have a day of freedom. If it’s sickness, do something to help you focus on something other than that sickness. Stress can be a killer, don’t let it take one more day from your life, act now and start living a stress free life!
Today, The Morning Thing shared some ways to relieve stress from Focus on the Family.
Click HERE for the full article.
Here are some tips excerpted from Tools for Time Management by Edward R. Dayton.
- Staying ahead of your work is a good way to relieve the pressure of schedules. By scheduling a completion time 10 percent to 20 percent ahead, you have the peace of knowing there’s time to recover if things go wrong.
- Doing the hard things first, particularly if they have a great deal of emotional content, will relieve the subterranean emotions that tend to plague us in different situations.
- Getting enough sleep is a must. Know how long you can get along with a reduced amount.
- Do the difficult tasks in phases. Often a “first draft” will get you 80 percent of the way along. Time for “topping off” the finished product can be better foreseen, and meeting the deadline seems less of a task.
- Have planned recreation and hobbies. I am a wood carver and a carpenter of sorts. Setting aside time for this activity helps me relax. Other people enjoy different methods of unwinding. One of my close friends has a way of announcing to his secretary when he will be finding some relief. If he says, “I’m going to inspect some real estate at 3 o’clock,” you can be sure that you’ll find him on the first tee at the golf course.
- Admitting and verbalizing the causes for your own irritations (be they lack of sleep, overworking, too much stress or what have you) helps [keep] others from getting emotional with you and triggering unexpected explosions.
- Facing up to the fact you really can’t do all the things you scheduled and that some of them need to be postponed is probably the best relief valve of all. This can be a humbling experience, but the rewards in personal well-being are great.
Rise and Shine 