What it takes to change the level and kind of stress

What is it going to take to change the level and kind of stress you experience?

When taking a look at how to do something about your stress, you have basically two choices.

You can manage it or you can reduce it.

Managing stress is learning to better cope with the stress. Essentially, how you look at it and why you react as you do.

And reducing it is when you change what precipitates the stress.

Can you remove yourself from the offending situation, or reduce your involvement?

In order to do anything about managing or reducing stress you must have substantial motivation.

You need to have a compelling reason or reasons to have things be different than they have been.

Your motivation needs to be strong enough to help you overcome the natural tendency to allow things to remain as they are.

This is similar to changing anything in your life, the motivation for the new or different thought and action must be more compelling than the way it now is.

Knowing your motivation for anything is key to changing it.

There is nothing you do without a reason. Everything has a reason even if you’re not aware of it.

When you see and understand why you think or do something, you have the real root of the behavior.

You may not be able to make sense out of why you think as you do because you did not consciously decide to do so. It may be something that your mind came up with as a way of understanding, dealing or coping with something.

In you mind, some justification for it had some relevance at one point in your life.

When you can identify the reason, you can then more easily develop reasons for not doing it that are opposite to the reasons for doing it.

It will take some effort, maybe some great effort, to change from what you are accustomed to doing habitually. This is why the strong reasons for something new is so important.

This will entail doing things you are not use to doing, and setting the time out to do them.

It will take doing something out of the ordinary in order to develop new thinking and behavior.

The way to stay stuck is to keep doing what you have always done and expect different results.

The fact that you have identified something that you want to be different indicates you are ready to make changes to it.

So, the first steps to doing something about living with too much stress are:

1) Notice that there is something you want to be different in your life.

2) Discover what your reasons or motivation is for doing what you do.

3) Decide how you DO want to think and act in that situation.

4) Come up with some compelling reasons why you want the new way.

Be prepared that it may be difficult to get to the reason why you feel the stress in a particular situation. Your mind may be blocking this from your view.

Sometimes your mind will attempt to protect you from something uncomfortable or it wants to protect things the way they are.

Keep asking yourself the question, WHY, and eventually with persistence you will get the answer.

Remember, the easy way is to leave everything alone, and the harder way is to make changes.

But you will not progress and grow in your life without change.

Change is the growth activity that many of us feel we should not have to do – it adds work to our life.

Really, change is life — without it you are stagnant.

Yes, change takes effort, but it is worth it.

Addressing your stress and changing its affect on you is a major growth step and you will gain huge benefits in all areas of your life for doing it.

Changing is not an overnight thing, it will likely take time and effort, which is why powerful compelling reasons for the new way are so important. You must have motivation to get yourself to stick with your change efforts.

John

“You can’t understand the world and how you respond to it until you

first know yourself. You can’t change the things you don’t like about

yourself until you search out the things that influence you and motivate

you and hurt you.” — Stedman Graham

“Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself

and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own

life.” — Herbert A. Otto

“What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness

of himself.” — Abraham H. Maslow