Take Steps To Deal With Your Stress

We live in an “always on” world. Just about everything you want is at your fingertips, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s fabulous, but it’s also exhausting because it has created the expectation that we are “always on” and doing things 24/7. That kind of pressure can be relentless, and it makes it increasingly harder to strike a good balance in your life.

Between the pressures of your job, increasingly longer work hours and the pressures of home and family, stress is all but inevitable in our modern world. The question, then, is how to deal with it, and unfortunately, there is no class for that.

Below, you’ll find some quick and easy-to-implement things you can do, starting today, to knock your stress level down several notches. Ready for some stress relief? Let’s go!

1) Walk – preferably in the woods: Every day, you should block out at least fifteen minutes to just unplug. Get away from your desk, your family, your friends and anything else that’s adding stress to your life. Science has shown that a fifteen minute walk every day will reduce your stress levels by as much as 25 percent. That figure is doubled if you walk in the woods, so if you have some trees near where you live, take full advantage of that fact!

2) Get more sleep – It may sound silly, but the very best way to do this is to set a regular bed time and stick to it! Don’t eat anything in the hour before bedtime, and turn your thermostat down a few degrees, because studies have shown that we sleep better when it’s cooler. Most Americans only average 6 hours of sleep a night, and our bodies need 8-9. Is it any wonder that so many of us are stressed?

3) Live the list – Making an ordered list of the things you have to accomplish is another simple but powerful tool when it comes to reducing stress, because it gives you a finite number of things to focus on throughout the day. Order your list by priority so that you take care of the most critical things first, then work your way down to the less important stuff. It gives you a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction as you cross each item off!

If you start attempting to reduce your stress with these three simple tips, you’ll find your stress levels falling rapidly, and you’ll be much happier and healthier for it.