Top tips for stress

Top Tips For Stressful Situations

Here at HeadGym we get asked a lot about how to deal with stressful situations.

Of course, there’s not one ‘right’ answer as everyone responds to things in different ways. But the key to trying to tackle stress is to understand why you’re feeling that way in the first place.

More often than not, stress starts as anxiety or worry before an event or experience. Most people will have experienced these emotions before an exam, interview, presentation or their first day at a new job.

The common denominator in these situations (and many more that you could consider stressful) is uncertainty.

Uncertainty leads to worry, worry can lead to anxiety or stress and then if it’s not tackled it can even result in depression.

In a situation where you don’t know what’s going to happen, your mind will look to find ‘certainty’ by going through the potential outcomes.

It runs a ‘film show’ of possible events and outcomes which haven’t yet happened (and often we’ll let our minds go to quite a negative place rather than a positive one when imagining these scenarios).

Having these thoughts over and over means you may have decided something’s going to go badly before you’ve even started it. Physically it can cause effects such as nausea, sweating and headaches.

By this point your head’s spinning and you haven’t even started your stressful day yet.

So it’s clear that to deal with stress, we have to go right back to before the event and put some tactics in place to stop the feelings escalating.

Some of our top stress-busting tips, which you should be putting in place before you even notice worry or anxiety creeping in, are:

• Practice meditation and mindfulness on a regular basis
• Limit the uncertainty where possible
• Exercise
• Eat healthily
• Recognise that feeling an element of stress is normal some stress is good and is there to help you ‘fight or flight’
• Focus on the positive on a daily basis
• Appreciate what you have and are

To really maximise the benefits, make all of the above a habit rather than a one-off. It can also help to have the support of a coach to expand and develop some of these strategies, which is where HeadGym comes in.

Ultimately it’s important to remember nobody makes us feel anything, while stress can be attributed to the actions of somebody else, all of the feelings we have are ours and are created in our own heads. This means we have the power to eradicate them!

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