Aug

15

Self Improvement: Managing Stress Levels

Filed Under Development 

The last couple of months have been pretty huge in our household. I don’t think we’ve ever experienced the changes we have recently. And many of them are right up there on the Holmes-Rahe Scale - a tool to identify stressors in your life. Go there and have a look.

Here is a short list:

  • Changed job
  • Father passed away
  • Christmas (yes that is a stressor!!)
  • Wife started full time work
  • Son got driver’s licence
  • and the are a few more

The problem for many of us these days is the white noise that comes in as a distraction or underlying intereference with what we are trying to achieve in life. When you take a step back and have a look at what is going on in our lives it is pretty insidious. White noise is all that extraneous stuff that goes on, demanding our attention but taking our focus off what we are trying to achieve.

That’s why I like what Leo writes about at Zen Habits when he talks about 27 Great Tips to Keep Your Life Organized. There’s some really good and practical stuff there. Leo is also great at communicating the essential elements of his point so the time spent reading isn’t wasted. For example, Point 5: Do One Thing At A Time. Not all that scientific but if you review your day (and you’re anything like me) you’ll find there are a zillion things racing through your mind while you’re trying to do something else. Thus you lose your effectiveness.

Steve Pavlina also has a great technique (I haven’t implemented yet) around not listening to news. Here is Australia I listen to the ABC and every half hour we get 5 minutes of news - and it’s all bad. Steve’s solution is to NOT listen to the news (radio, newspaper etc). And if you think about it it’s not a bad idea. Imagine, first thing each morning you wake up to news - and it’s all bad. That is not a great start to the day. Killings, tragedies, inflation, interest rate rises and the pathetic list goes on. Pathetic in the sense that there is not much we can do about any of the issues we hear and yet, without knowing, they can deflate the energy of our day before we start.

Now we come back to the Holmes-Rahe Scale and how our lives are affected by stressful situations. Too much stress and we become prone to illness, fatigue and burn out. If we inadvertently add to this through negative influences on our lives we are, potentially, shortening our lives and, more than likely, shortening our daily effectiveness.

Both Leo’s and Steve’s ideas on managing information and workload will go a long way to managing the operational stress levels we wortk within.

Life events, as depicted by the Holmes-Rahe Scale can be a little harder to prevent. So, do what you can and reduce your stress in areas that are easier to manage.

By the way, my score on the Holmes-Rahe Scale ewas 455!! Beat that (lower) … Please!

Comments

One Response to “Self Improvement: Managing Stress Levels”

  1. self improvement hints and tips on April 3rd, 2008 8:03 am

    self improvement hints and tips…

    Think of the worst situation that can result after the self- improvement. Try to find various solutions to it. Reflect on how much you can loose, if the worst happened, and how important those things are to you. If you find more than one reasonable sol…

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