Stress management
Stress management is a topic that is talked about a lot. But what does it really mean? It contains finding your stress factors as well as reducing them and relaxation.
To start your stress management find out what stress is for you and how you can better cope with it. To be able to do this let’s first look at what stress is and how you react to it.
What is stress?
First it feels different for everybody. Something that feels great for one person, might feel really stressful for the next person. This can be explained pretty easily: Besides other factors, stress develops when we judge a situation and feel we are not ready to cope with it. And this judgement is of course different for everyone this also counts for the management of stress.
There are different signs for stress on different layers, and of course they don’t all have to be there:
Body – Your pulse or blood pressure can go up or your muscles tense. For some people, the breath frequency changes, or the sexual appetite lowers. A changed digestion might be a stress reaction as well. These just names a few.
Feelings – The most thought of feeling is fear or anxiety, but also disappointment or annoyance can happen. Of course, these are just examples.
Thoughts – These you probably already read. “I am never going to make it!” “Why always me?” “I don’t know what to do!” “I lost the big picture!” Of course, there are many more.
Behavior – Again, here are some behaviors that are typical. They might range from losing the ability to plan or to have a good overview, over different eating habits towards rushed work and more.
Relax time
It is ok to feel stressed from time to time, but once you don’t have a regeneration phase afterwards it really gets tricky.
Your body needs rest after a particularly stressful time, e.g. to break down harmful hormones. This also applies, if you have had positive stress! What kind of recovery works for you, you have to find out individually. Here, too, everyone reacts differently.
Often you get a lot of advice here, which can fit you, but do not have to. During my burn-out time I was often recommended things like meditation or autogenic training. These are ways to reduce stress, especially meditation is something I use a lot today. In the “acute” phase, however, this made everything even worse for me. I had to exhaust myself.
In general, you can distinguish 3 different types of stress reduction. There are people who get rid of stress better when they exercise or a massage helps them. For others it can help to go to a museum or to visit an art exhibition. The 3rd type need to listen to an interesting audio book or simply go to a concert. Of course there is no clear separation here and for you a mixture of these might fit best. The only important thing is that you find your way to reduce stress.
We will start by finding out what the sources of stress are for you and then work from there on. There are different possibilities to do this, two examples are the following: Either we check if there are sources that can be eliminated, or we work on the perception of a situation.
Do you find yourself in these descriptions? Contact me for a noncommittal initial discussion and find out what kind of stress you need to manage.
Sometimes it is just too much or too little
To not burn out you need a balance in your life even if you love what you are doing.
Tanja Haag
What you always wanted to know about online Life Coaching
In my point of view Life Coaching is all about your challenges in life. Whether to balance your life the way it is good for you, coping with stress or facing changes – these are all topics I am happy to support you with!
One thing is clear here and that is that a burn-out does not occur overnight, but over a longer period of time, sometimes even years. Otherwise, there are many possible factors that promote burn-out.
If one follows the opinion of the WHO, burn-out only develops at the workplace, through the external stress there. But there are also other factors that play a big role here. And often it is not only an external stress, but this is still strengthened by internal factors.
In 1973, Freudenberger created the term burn-out in the United States. At that time, he described the burn-out of people in caring or social professions. Today, burn-out is no longer seen only in social professions. According to a study by Statista from 2017 with 649 respondents, it emerges that in the service sector most respondents (14%) estimate the risk of burn-out to be the highest. With 11%, health, care and social services are still the second most affected group. In the area of administration, management and office work, 9% of the respondents still estimate their risk as high.