How stress can be dealt

Three ways to deal with stress are:
1. Avoid stress, if possible
2. Utilize stress to your advantage, if you can
3. Cope with stress to prevent disease

How to Avoid Stress


Commonest cause of stress at work is dissatisfaction with job and the commonest cause at home is marital disharmony. Therefore choose your career as well as mate with utmost care. Encourage, develop and strengthen areas of agreement at home.


Learn to enjoy your work by learning everything about your work and doing it to the best of your ability. Have a measure of control over your work—it is important for your happiness. Success may bring jealousies at work and are frequent cause of stress. Modesty and courtesy prevent the circumstances of hostility.

How to Utilize Stress to Your Advantage


• The road to reducing stress in our lives is 'EFFICIENCY'
• Stress provides an opportunity to improve our performance.
• Learn to accomplish more with less effort by avoiding wastage of effort.

• Seize control of success by replacing fear with confidence commitment, dedication and concentration.
• Define what is best to do and do it.
• Take calculated risks.
• Repeat past behavior that produced top performance-the more you repeat this behavior, the more will it become second nature with you.
• "A strong will, a settled purpose and invincible determination can accomplish anything" (Thomas Fuller).
• Each one of us has the potential to become a top performer
• It is top performance which gives happiness and joy and keeps the ill-effects of stress away.

How to cope with stress


• Make a conscious effort to control stress. There should be a daily routine to shed stress.
• To this end listen to music, meditate, develop hobbies, exercise, go for a leisurely stroll, or a joy ride in a bus or car.
• If you cannot go out, indulge in a hobby, e. g. play your guitar, sitar or violin
• Caffeine in any form heightens the stress level. Coffee is the worst offender; others are tea and cola drinks. Restrict their consumption.
• Sometimes circumstances may be beyond your control, a crisis in the family for example, or stress may gradually build up over months. Small irritations, loss of temper and frayed nerves may add up over a period of time. It is then that stress becomes distress and exerts its ill-effects. You should then back off, relax and prevent the situation from overwhelming you. At this point of time forget everything and go on a quiet holiday for a couple of weeks. You will come back refreshed.


Meditation:
Relaxation through meditation is becoming increasingly popular both in India and abroad. It is practiced in many ways. The principles are: Use a simple mental device which may be a 'mantra', a simple word or a visual symbol to relax the mind. Concentrate on the mental device, to the exclusion of everything else. The body will start relaxing. This happens because the mental device blots out all distracting thoughts. The technique is best learnt in a meditation centers.

This article is also published at India Study Channel