Stress Management Tips and Techniques: How do we do it?

In this series of articles I’m going to be showing you some stress management tips and techniques. I was inspired to do so when reading an article a Times Online Article: Coping with Stress

which says that half a million people in the UK are being made physically ill by their stress. Not a good thing.

My approach is going to be a bit different in that I’ll be helping you to use NLP techniques to manage and reduce your stress.

A lot of people will say that their workload, partner or circumstances. But if we look closely we’ll see that isn’t really the case. Does your work magically climb into your brain and trigger stressful feelings and emotions? The fact is that your response to the outside world is something you can have total control over. You might not be used to it, but it’s certainly something you can learn to do.

Back to the questions; ‘How do you make yourself stressed?’

Imagine yourself, sitting at your desk, or walking along, all of a sudden something happens and you start making that ‘stressed’ feeling in your body. What is the chain of events that leads to this happening. For example do you, say something to yourself like ‘I’ll never get it done in time’, make an image in your mind of you working till late in the evening, feel tension in your neck, shoulders and stomach.

Your task for today is just to notice what your strategy is for putting yourself in the ‘stressed’ physiology. Make a note of what you say to yourself, what you see in your minds eye and what you feel in your body. Maybe you can make these notes over the next week every time you get these feelings. Once you’re able to observe what your strategy is you’ll be able to change it.

In upcoming articles about stress management techniques I’ll explain what we can do with this information, but for now you might find that observing the strategy that you follow will already lead you to feeling more detached from the immediate emotions.