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.

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.

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.