Effectively Managing Stress and Uncertainty

A major key to living well through times of change and uncertainty is to take personal responsibility for your “self” care.

Prolonged stress leads to anger, depression and illness. The more responsibility you take for yourself, the more easily you are able to navigate the roads of change.

What is optimal “self” care and how can you practice it?

Self care requires truly understanding yourself from the inside out and balancing the needs of your body, mind and spirit. It involves taking time to nourish yourself every day and knowing your trigger points. Once you are aware of different stressors that impact you, you can learn tools, techniques and resources to draw on whenever needed.

What is the Problem?
Unfortunately adaptation to stress has become so commonplace that it is often a major obstacle to the self awareness necessary for skilled self care. It is easy to become so used to “the way things are’ that you believe you are not being affected by stress. This mind set is one that will allow stress to silently but steadily erode health over time.
An important first step to changing this is to pay attention to the feeling of overwhelm, that  sense that there is too much to do in too short a time or any kind of feelings of overload. Today these feelings that are so widespread that they are often dismissed or accepted as par for the course. However, it is at this stage that there is a prime opportunity to change the way your body and mind are affected by stress.

More often than not you are aware of the conscious thoughts that flow through your mind. Beneath them is another stream of thought that has a lot more to do with your real feelings, beliefs and views about yourself, others and life itself! Because of the nature of the conversation’ at this level, no amount of intellectual planning or strategizing will be effective in supplying the long term solutions needed to maintain balanced health.

What is the answer?
To give ourselves time on a regular basis to let the conscious mind quiet down so we may hear the deeper river of thought and feeling that moves through us. It is here that the all important self knowledge resides. Once we understand what is happening there, we can release old worn out beliefs that no longer serve us, erase negative thoughts and feelings and create a fertile ground for approaches that will genuinely guide us toward the life we want to live.

It is in that space’ that you will come to really know yourself and be able to not only understand your triggers, but also have a clearer knowledge regarding what the solutions are. As brilliant as your everyday mind is, it is your quieter inner self’ that holds the wisdom that will bring you to a rich, satisfying healthy way of being. In this quieter space questions can be asked that guide you toward your own strategic plan for inner world peace!