You start your day early in the morning and end late at night. You cook, clean, work, drive everyone everywhere. You never get to watch a movie with the family because your too busy cleaning up the kitchen. You have laundry to do and homework to check. If you are sick, it doesn’t matter. You need to get everything done. If you fall behind you spend your day off trying to get caught back up again. You need to find a way that you can deal with the stress in your life.

Don’t you think the word “Stress” has become part of our day-to-day existence? The human race is slowly becoming a victim of Stress. It has moved into our lives through our workplaces, peer pressure, competition in all streams of life, pre and post holiday anxieties, births and deaths in our close associations, starting or ending of a relationship and much more.

Experts have identified two major categories of Stress – Positive and Negative. While Positive Stress is important to enhance self-esteem and motivation levels, Negative Stress should be analyzed and efforts should be made to reduce it. By “Positive Stress” we mean, those Stress levels, wherein, we tend to manage our situations and problems in such a manner that brings about a constructive change in us by boosting up our confidence levels and bringing in a sense of achievement. These outcomes result in personal gratification because of the fact that the problem or situation was met with utmost control and to the best of our abilities irrespective of whether we win or lose during the process. Negative Stress is one’s reaction to a particular situation or environment because of which one undergoes hypertensions, headaches, inability to meet up with deadlines, excessive work or performance pressure and so on.

It is our capability and understanding of situations that results in either Positive or Negative Stress. Basically our reaction to problems, the way we tackle and manage them, determines the level and type of stress. For this reason, experts usually do not talk of eradicating stress but trying to manage it in such a way that we use the same for our self-improvement and development of our personalities.

The key to managing stress lies in identifying the agents causing it, also called “stressors” and trying to reduce them. Some of the simple yet effective methods are - trimming down our emotional reactions to situations; being conscious of the Stress causing agents and understanding the way we react to them; changing the Stress causing environment if need be; controlling our physical responses to Stress; developing our physical reserves; talking about our problems and many more such ways.

We would like to sum up by saying that Stress management is not “rocket science”. Methods of handling Stress are aplenty. The answer lies in creating a win-win situation by managing oneself in the best possible manner and enhancing one’s ability to understand one’s life and environment better.

Next, read these articles on stress relief tips and stress management tips; and soon you will be feeling a whole lot less stressed.