subject: Discovering The Stressors In Your Life [print this page] Discovering The Stressors In Your Life Discovering The Stressors In Your Life
None of us can go through life without stress. But, that doesn't mean that there is nothing that we can do about it.
There are many possible causes of stress. Possible triggers could be a job loss, a relationship breakup, the loss of a parent, relocating to a new home, and so on. These and many more factors result in stress for millions of people every day. In addition, different people are stressed out by different things.
For instance, maybe you are someone who loves sports competition. But you have a sister who hates any kind of competition at all. So, you may not be affected by stress at all when involved in a sporting event, while your sister may be too nervous to even participate in the sport. So the first step in preventing stress is to figure out what causes stress in your life.
However, this is often harder than it seems. The act of identifying the origins of your personal stressors can be difficult simply because you are too close to the problem. For example, if you are a mom with four kids and a full time job, undoubtedly you are always on the go. As a result, you don't have much time to yourself to really reflect.
And, because of this, you find yourself in situations where your are constantly stressed out, and possibly yelling at your kids, often without reason. But you don't take a little time out for yourself to figure out why you are so stressed.
This is where it helps to be able to slow down and attempt to isolate the true reason that you are stressed. And, after reflecting, you might determine that the real cause of your stress is that your job does not have flexible working hours. Or it may be that your partner is not helping out around the home as much as he could be. Or maybe the problem is that one of the kids is taking up an inordinate amount of your time to parent. The thing is that until you actually figure out the specific sources of your stress, there is little that you can do about it.
So how can you do this? Well, one excellent way of keeping track of your stress levels is to begin a stress journal. Similar to the way that keeping a food journal helps those on a diet by forcing them to focus on the foods that they eat, a stress journal helps you to isolate your stress triggers.
It helps you to isolate your stressors by heightening your awareness of how your feelings and emotions are being changed as you go through your day. After a few weeks of keeping such a journal, you will have a lot more insight into the things that are stressing you out. And knowing what these things are, you can now be proactive in doing something about them.
