Handling stress so it doesn’t handle you

It's easy to say, "Chill out, go meditate, take a walk and just shake it off."  But when stress entrenches itself in your day-to-day life, those recommendations can fall short of the kind of help you need.  Maybe you're a college student, maybe a soldier; maybe a single mother of 4, maybe a middle age man out of work for an extended period of time; maybe a cancer patient.  Though some techniques seem to work universally for most people, the trick to reducing and managing stress is to find the therapy that best suits your needs, your circumstance and your personality. 

Meditation

What's great about meditation is that it doesn't require any expensive equipment - just a quiet space pretty much anywhere that allows you to be comfortable physically, so you can focus attention, relax your breathing.  Even a few minutes of meditation can restore calm and inner peace and help to relieve stress.  These days meditation is used for relaxation and stress reduction.  It's considered a type of mind-body complementary medicine and it basically helps you to focus your attention and eliminate the stream of jumbled thoughts that are filling your mind and causing stress.  The best part of mediation is the fact that its benefits continue even after your meditation session ends.  Meditation can allow you to feel calmer, and it can even improve certain medical conditions.  Specific benefits include:

• Getting a new perspective on a stressful situation
• Focusing on the present and what is really happening in the moment
• Advancing your skills to manage stress
• Reducing negative emotions
• Increased self awareness

Types of meditation include:

1. Guided meditation also called guided imagery or visualization.  A professional leads you through a process that has you using all of your senses to form mental images of places or situations that you find relaxing.  The ability to invoke these images when you feel stress rising is the secondary goal.
2. Mantra meditation in which you repeat a calming word or phrase to prevent distracting thoughts. 
3. Mindfulness meditation which involves having an increased awareness and acceptance of living and being in the moment.  You focus on breathing and observe thoughts and emotions without judging them.
4. Qi gong, Tai chi and yoga are other exercise modalities that help you to focus and relieve stress.

Positive thinking, self talk

Is the cup half empty or half full?  Being an optimist can help you avoid or mitigate stress.  Positive thinking can be a management tool for controlling stress.  It doesn't mean ignoring harsh realities - it simply means you approach difficulties head on in a more positive and productive way.  We've all seen tennis players who talk to themselves on the court in the middle of a nasty losing streak and turn things around -that's positive self talk and optimism at work.  Positive self talk can lower rates of depression, lower levels of stress and distress and provide the individual with better coping skills during hardship.  Someone who doesn't use this tool can end up picking up some rather unhealthy and dangerous habits like smoking, drinking, overeating and self medicating or abusing drugs.