3 Tips for Tackling Stress in Your Life

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realise that life can be stressful at times – and sometimes, stressful enough to be seriously damaging to your overall sense of well-being and health.

When you end up caught in a cycle of chronic stress, one of the things that happens is that your “stress hormones” – primarily cortisol and adrenaline – spike to dangerously high levels, and remain elevated far longer than they should. Over time, this has the ability to lead to organ damage, including damage to the brain, in addition to other things.

So, it’s one thing if you feel a bit stressed every now and again – but if stress is too much of a strong and present reality in your life, you really need to take steps to change that.

Here are a few tips for tackling stress in your life.

• Simplify and streamline things where and when you can

As a general rule, there will always be things you can do to streamline, simplify, and “smooth out” at least some of the situations you face in life.

If, for example, you run a small business and keep having problems with the floors getting scuffed and being difficult to clean, you could have epoxy floors installed, and this would then significantly reduce these issues.

It’s not always possible to completely eliminate problems and complicating factors, but as and where you find opportunities to streamline and simplify things and make your life a bit easier without compromising your principles, you should take those opportunities.

• Put your health first, and make sure your nutrition and sleep are in order

If your health is in the best condition it can be, your nutrition is excellent (and you have any potential micronutrient deficiencies addressed via supplementation) and you’re sleeping like a baby, then the odds are you will be resilient enough to handle some pretty enormous challenges in your day-to-day life.

If, on the other hand, you’re in terrible overall health, live on processed snacks, barely sleep at all, and down several pots of coffee a day, even a relatively mild challenge is likely to send your stress levels through the roof, and to cause you a lot of woe as a result.

In order to reduce your stress levels and just to have a decent quality of life in and of itself, you need to put your health first, and make sure that your nutrition and sleep are in order. It’s likely that you – like so many people – are deficient in vital nutrients such as magnesium and vitamins D and K2. Ensure that any such imbalances are addressed.

• Focus on systems rather than goals

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams has gone on record saying that he thinks “goals are for losers” and should be more or less ditched in favour of “systems.”

While Adams is arguably too hard on goals (without some kind of goal, it is difficult to make sense of life, or to progress in any direction) he does make a valid criticism of being too goal-centred.

Specifically, Adams points out that when you are desperately pursuing a goal, you are, by definition, not happy with where you are right now, and are pinning your happiness on your ability to achieve that goal. But it’s difficult to see and manage the future, so what if you don’t achieve that goal? And even if you do, will you really be “satisfied,” or will you just be compelled to find a new goal?

“Systems,” on the other hand, are daily habits and routines that you engage in for their own sake, and that which increase the odds that you will achieve success in various dimensions of your life, at the same time.

By focusing a bit more on “systems” and a bit less in “goals,” you may be able to reduce some of the stress in your life and feel better too.