Keeping Stress Levels Down When Life Gets Overwhelming
Nothing can hold you back quite like stress.
Unfortunately, stressors are everywhere. Even a small amount can severely impact your ability to perform. Therefore, it’s important to learn how to deal with your stress effectively.
This past week was crazy for me. My boyfriend had surgery on Monday. My plan was to stay with him for this first week to help him get back on his feet. Just as he was starting to get up and about using a walker, I got a call that my dad was going to the emergency room with stroke symptoms. Well there goes the best laid plans. Time to run to the hospital 40 minutes away. On top of all of that… I was working remotely for my corporate job. Fortunately, because of my background and stress management I was able to keep it all together by keeping my emotions and mind in balance. Not doing so would have sent me in a spiral downwards like it used to before my formal training.
Stress can cause significant mental and physical ailments.
According to a research study from New York University entitled, “Cognitive Emotion Regulation Fails the Stress Test,” even a small amount of stress can impact a person’s ability to keep their emotions in check. Stress, if unchallenged, can build up in the body and mind.
Stress can also impinge on your love life. One study found that chronic stress can have an undesirable impact on sex drive in men. In pregnant women, high levels of stress can have a negative effect on child development. It can also cause issues with body weight.
Finally, stress takes a toll on your heart. When you’re stressed, the hormones circulating in your blood can cause your heart to beat faster than necessary, and make your blood vessels constrict. This increases blood pressure, and can exacerbate an existing heart condition.
It Won’t Happen… Probably
One of the biggest contributors to stress is worry. But, look at it this way: Most of the things you worry about probably won’t happen.
Decide here and now to stop mulling over things that are out of your control. Equilibrate your emotions surrounding why you worry. How does worrying serve you? How does it not serve you? Balance your emotions to help squash your worrisome thoughts. Bring yourself to the present moment and what the situation actually is.
Put your energy into visualizing the outcome you’d like to see. Vividly visualizing the desired outcome has repeatedly been shown to also lower stress levels.
Worrying doesn’t contribute to the problem-solving process in any way. When has worry ever actually helped you resolve a crisis? In a stressful situation, you may find yourself asking the question, “What if..?” While that question can get you thinking, the stress-soaked mind isn’t in the position to generate solutions compared to a balanced mind that can see things for what it actually is including both perceived positives and perceived negatives.
Remember that at any given moment, you’re either working on a solution, or you’re spending time worrying. In addition to the equilibration process, meditation is a great way to clear your mind and de-stress. To get started, simply take five minutes out of your day even if it’s in the middle of a stressful situation to focus on your breathing.
When your thoughts move away from your breathing – and they will – refocus on each breath. As you gain proficiency, you can increase your sessions from 5 minutes to 10, and then to 15.
Meditation has been shown to reduce stress levels and blood pressure.
Everyday Stressors Add Up
A single neglected weed can take over a garden in a few weeks. Similarly, life’s small stresses quickly add up. Free yourself of these low-grade stressors by being aware of them and then drawing up a plan to deal with them one by one.
As you remove the small stressors from your daily life, you’ll empower yourself to deal with life’s larger issues. You’ll have more energy and feel more optimistic. With optimism comes opportunity.
Proactively dealing with stress is like taking off blinders when you deal with it in a Balanced, Aware and Dynamic (B.A.D Ass) way. Suddenly you’ll find new and exciting ways to express yourself. You’ll form deeper relationships with your family and friends. You’ll also feel more gratitude for everyday things. Gratitude has its own rewards.
Get started now by making a list of all the stressors in your life. Once you think you’ve got them all down, step away for a day, and then go back to the list to add any you forgot. Then, go through them one by one. Balance your emotions surrounding why these things stress you. Be aware of how stressing about these things affects you. Then write a sentence or two on how you can deal with them in a dynamic way moving you forward towards achieving a goal. Take action on your ideas. This takes time, but step by step, you’ll feel your stress melting away.
Love & Light, 🙏💝🙏
Dawn-Marie
Your Mindset Transformation Virtuoso & Nature Goddess Guide.
Written 12 January, 2020
Biography
Dawn-Marie P. Dalsass, President of Livelihood Spirit Balance is a Stress Management Maven. She’s a Stress and Anxiety Expert for Middle Managers. She started her career in Corporate America while she was in high school and worked her way up the ranks finding herself in middle to upper management for most of her corporate career. She loved what she did but along the way she battled stress, anxiety and depression. When work and life were more than she could handle she planned her suicide in detail. Fortunately, she didn’t go through with it when she saw her 2 little boys on her way to get a knife with a plan to end it all. It was in that moment that she vowed to pull herself together and begin a new journey.
In 2015 she started her own business called Life Coach DM. After several years of working with clients, she realized that the majority of her clients were in middle management just like she was. She had helped most go from being stressed, anxious and / or depressed to being more balanced, aware and dynamic while guiding them on their own journey to achieve life goals including work life balance.
Dawn-Marie has since become a Certified Nature & Forest Therapy Guide and teaches individuals how they too can annihilate the stress, anxiety and depression (aka S.A.D) that middle managers and working parents can face through a process called equilibration (the balancing of the mind and emotions) along with the healing benefits a deep connection to nature (both indoors and out) can bring to become fully balanced, aware and dynamic (aka B.A.D).
Through her own practice, Dawn-Marie discovered what she calls Livelihood Spirit Balance where how one lives their life is in alignment with their authentic self, their B.A.D Ass-self. With Livelihood Spirit Balance, Work Life Balance and everything else just falls into place.
Based on her years of work and client success stories, Dawn-Marie changed her business name to Livelihood Spirit Balance to align with her teachings, mission, vision and purpose.
Dawn-Marie offers online courses, personal and corporate development coaching, workshops and seminars. As the owner of Total Convalescence – Nature & Forest Therapy she also offers public and private Nature & Forest Therapy Walks.
Dawn-Marie is a:
- Certified Mindset Transformation Coach
- Certified Nature & Forest Therapy Guide
- Certified Law of Attraction Wealth Practitioner
- Certified Fraud Examiner and
- Certified Internal Controls Auditor
