Recognizing Stress for What It Is

Everywhere you turn right now, there seems to be bad news with potentially scary consequences. The natural reaction is to feel anxiety, a sense of helplessness, and some anger. Do you feel this way? If so, you are likely dealing with a fair amount of stress and you may not fully realize the extent or impact of it. On a scale of 1-10, where 10 is extreme stress, where would you say your stress level is right now?

You may not really know how to answer that, but your body might. Stress starts off as a psychological response to situations you perceive as overwhelming, threatening, unpleasant or beyond your control; and for many people the financial crisis is all of those things. Your perception of and response to this crisis is determining the extent it is taking a toll on you mentally and emotionally. The greater your fear and anger coupled with the feeling you can’t do anything about it, the worse you feel emotionally.

You have a choice as to how you see and respond to external factors in your life. It is when you don’t believe you have choices and feel at a loss that you are most stressed and at risk for physical symptoms. If that is your situation right now, there is something you can do for yourself that will help.

You can take better care of yourself physically by getting enough sleep, increasing your activity, eating healthy foods and doing some stress reduction techniques such as paying attention to your breath. You can also focus on how blessed you really are with gratitude and look for evidence that good things are happening despite all the bad news.

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Boost of Confidence

Have you ever felt badly about your ability to reach a certain goal or outcome when you didn’t achieve something you thought you should? If so, you may have even felt badly about yourself, assuming you should have been able to follow through, go the extra mile or will yourself to just do it. This happens even to the best of us.

What is interesting is the more you judge yourself (or feel judged) for not succeeding, the harder it becomes to ever fully achieve the goal. Can you think of a time when this was true?

You can push yourself harder, try to get others to force you, or admonish yourself more, but most likely the end result is you will have greater resistance and probably give up altogether. When this happens, you will also lose some of your self-confidence. I’ve watched this with clients over the years and seen it in myself.

What boosts your confidence is seeing yourself succeed, even if that success is learning two aerobic steps a week, setting a fitness goal of being active for 15-20 minutes three days next week, or setting time aside to relax for 5 minutes. It isn’t how much or hard you do something that determines if you are successful. It is being certain of your ability to achieve what you set out to do and having experienced success in having done it. The more success you have, the more willing you become to try a bit more – but again only as much as you know you can handle and succeed at.

As I have learned, it is totally acceptable to start off small or easy when you are getting started with a new activity, setting goals for yourself, or changing your habits. Each small success boosts your confidence and instead of feeling resistance to doing more, you will feel eager to see what more you can do. As I am fond of saying, “the more you can do, the more you want to do”, and I watch as clients who started off walking just a mile or so when they started end up doing long charity walks, runs or triathlons a year or more later. They would never have reached those levels if they had pushed themselves to do more at the beginning. Instead they allowed each success to boost their confidence, and with each boost they did a bit more until they surpassed their wildest expectations and confidence levels.

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Envisioning Wellbeing for Yourself

Have you ever thought about what wellbeing or wellness means to you? If you could envision yourself at your personal best and experience your life in a way that feels really good, what would that include or what would that look like?

I recently was asked this question, and it did make me stop and think. It’s funny because I focus on living and feeling my personal best to walk my talk in my business, but this takes it a step further. I realized it was more than about my health, fitness and self care. It is also about what I want to experience from life. I want to be delighted in every moment. For me this means feeling my personal best, being fully present in the moment, receiving the best life has to offer with gratitude, giving my gifts to others in the world, and cherishing the time I have with friends, families, colleagues and my pets. These things are what I envision my wellbeing to be. What about you?

Creating a vision of what you want in your life becomes something to aim for. It isn’t wishful thinking beyond what you can have. You can decide which part of this picture is important enough to work towards now. Start by setting three and six months goals to reach milestones that will eventually get you there. You can even get started by setting specific weekly goals to reach these interim targets. Creating a vision of what you want in your life, milestone goals and weekly goals is the same process used by wellness, life, dream and career coaches to assist clients in moving towards a better life. You can do this for yourself.

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