How To Distract Yourself from the Greatest Distraction in Life: Stress

Have you ever thought about the biggest problem you’re facing in life? It’s not related to your career, relationships, friendships, or studies. It’s related to your mental health, and it’s called stress. When you’re under stress, you cannot focus on anything positive. You are not able to do your best job, and you can’t maintain good relationships with your family, friends, and partner. When you think about it, stress s the greatest distraction you face in your life.

There are many ways to put stress under control. You can never get rid of it, though. Stressful situations will keep haunting you throughout your life and there is no way to become immune to them. The point in stress management is not becoming completely senseless. It’s all about changing your own attitude and maintaining control over your thoughts and emotions under stressful situations.

We’ll show you few tricks on how to distract yourself from stress – the greatest distraction in your life.

Understanding Stress

Before you can do something about it, you need to understand what stress is all about. It is the physical, mental, and/or emotional tension that certain circumstances cause. Before we go any further, let’s explain something really important: stress can be positive, too. Imagine yourself being in the jungle and seeing a lion running towards you. Stress is what makes you run. You can’t stay completely calm and relaxed in such situation, can you? Stress is what triggers a father to save his child from drowning, and it’s what makes you defend yourself or run when you’re under attack.

Without this complex mix of hormones and chemicals the human body releases when it’s triggered by stress, the human wouldn’t have functioned properly. However, your mind tends to prolong the reactions to stress. It doesn’t allow you to forget what happened and relax after the stressful moment you went through. When the stress is prolonged, it causes serious consequences to your wellbeing.

How to Handle Physical, Mental, and Emotional Stress

There are three types of stress you may be facing:

• Physical stress

This is the simplest form of stress, which we all experience at one point or another. What happens to your body after a long, strenuous walk or run? Maybe you’ve spent all day working in the garden? We are often putting our muscles under stress, and we can easily recognize the effects: we feel tired and we may experience pain in different parts of the body.

Physical stress is not that bad. You can easily recover from it by resting and sleeping. A nice massage or a spa session will also relieve you from this type of stress.

• Mental stress

Mental stress is slightly more complex. It’s the type of stress you go through when you’re straining your mind too hard. An accountant, for example, is under great mental stress during working hours. Their job may seem monotonous and simple to an outsider, but they have to deal with tons of numbers and a single mistake can cost them their job. When you’re doing intellectual work, you have to remain constantly focused – that’s putting a lot of stress on you.

This type of stress doesn’t easily go away by sleeping. When you’re straining your intellect throughout the day, your thoughts create a total chaos when you finally go to bed. Accountants often dream of numbers and final bills, and that’s not funny at all.

You can keep mental stress under control by staying aware of it, taking several constructive breaks during working hours, and knowing your limits. If, for example, your boss asks you to write a blog for the website but you don’t have time or skill to do that, stressing out over the situation won’t do you any good. Instead of trying to achieve the impossible, you can start looking for writing services reviews that will help you find a company you can outsource that task to.

• Emotional stress

This is the type of stress that leaves the most serious consequences on our wellbeing. When you’re under physical stress, you can easily recognize it and take a rest to solve the situation. Mental stress is a bit more difficult to deal with, but at least you are still aware of it and you can identify the causes and manifestations. With emotional stress, you cannot always find out the cause. Sometimes you feel bad and you don’t know why.

Every single action you have taken throughout your life left a deep trace in your mental and emotional patterns. You might not remember everything that has happened to you, but your subconscious does remember. That’s where the emotional burden comes from.

When you’re under emotional stress, you experience weird symptoms, such as the feeling of being overwhelmed, frustrated, nervous, and tense. You may also experience several physical manifestations, such as sweating, headaches, chest pain, insomnia, pain in any part of the body, grinding teeth, and much more. You may become forgetful and unable to focus on the work, and you’ll probably be very pessimistic.

The consequences of long-term emotional stress can be very serious. Some people face cardiovascular disease, eating disorder, sexual dysfunctions, and different types of mental problems, including anxiety and depression. It seems like emotional stress can be the root cause of every single health issue you’re facing.

How to Distract Yourself from Emotional Stress

Unfortunately, it’s not easy to get rid of emotional stress. People have emotions, and that’s a good thing. Sometimes those emotions get hurt, and we all need to learn how to handle such pressure. The task of managing emotional stress takes a lot of work, but it’s not impossible. The journey will make you a stronger, more positive, and better person, so guess what: it turns out that all that stress has a positive role in your life after all. Here are some techniques that will help you put this kind of stress under control:

• Meditation

Meditation and relaxation techniques have proven effects for stress relief. Many people perceive meditation as “something you do when you close your eyes and you zone out.” Those are the ones who never tried actual meditation. There are different techniques of meditation, but all of them have something in common: they help you get deeper into your subconsciousness and unveil the reasons for the emotional stress you’re going through. Even Zen meditation, which basically teaches you to think of nothing, has the same effect: it cleans your mind and soul from all accumulated stress.

You can try an online guided meditation for stressful moments, but it would be even better if you started an actual meditation course. Find a good yoga teacher and pay upfront for the course. That will make you responsible to go to every single session and stay committed to the practice. You will notice how you’re becoming calmer by the day. Just like stress leaves traces in your mental and emotional processes, so does relaxation. You’re stressing out every day without even trying, but you have to make an effort to relax.

• Writing

Did you know that keeping a journal can help you relieve yourself from stress? Get a special notebook or start an online diary. It will take only half an hour per day for you to pour your soul out. No one will read it, so you don’t have to be worried about the things you write. But, you do need to be honest with yourself: write exactly how you feel and don’t even think about how it sounds. It’s important to get that entire emotional burden out, so you it will lose its intensity.

• Physical activity

When you’re under a lot of stress, you should keep yourself occupied and distracted with an activity you really like. Gardening, running, walking in nature, exercise… all these things will distract you from the problem and will give you the positive energy you need.

Remember: stress is part of your life, so you shouldn’t be looking for ways to get completely rid of it. The point in stress management is to understand where the tension comes from and control the way you react to it. Hopefully, we gave you the guiding points that will make you a stronger person. Now, you need to make an effort to follow them.

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Louise Coleman is a professional freelance writer with wide experience in covering educational, inspirational, blogging, and traveling topics. Also, she adores writing analytical articles to help people to overview and understand better significant and interesting researches. Apart from writing, reading is her real passion from the very childhood.

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