Gulfport Healthcare

Reducing stress is a step-by-step process. It requires a thorough assessment and examination of your daily life in order to develop your own customized stress-reduction program. The process is not as time-consuming as you might think. It’s actually quite simple. First, you have to figure out which issues are causing you the most stress, including those hidden sources you might not necessarily think of. Next, you have to come up with a plan. Finally, you have to work toward implementing that plan.

Discovering Your Stressors

The first step in this process is to figure out what is causing you the most stress. Until you know which elements of your life are the most stressful, you won’t be able to do very much to eliminate your stress. Start by making a list of everything you feel is causing you significant stress. It doesn’t matter at this point how big or small these stressors are, just write down everything that comes to mind. Chances are, if they are stressful enough for you to think of them, they are causing problems for you.


Next, you need to prioritize each of these stressors. Make a numbered list that starts out with what you believe are your most serious stressors, and moving on down the list to those that you feel aren’t necessarily as serious. This will let you know where to focus most of your efforts.

Once you have this list, you can start putting together your customized plan for reducing stress.

Customizing Your Plan

You’ll want to take your list and start at the top, going through each of you major issues one by one. For each one, think of a way that you can reduce the stress that particular issue causes you.





Make a plan for changing every major source of stress in your life. Explain to your family that these changes are absolutely necessary for your mental well-being, and that you wouldn’t be making such changes if it wasn’t absolutely critical. Hopefully they will understand.




Remember, you probably won’t be able to eliminate these problems entirely. Your goal is not necessarily to eliminate the problems, just to reduce their impact on your life. If you can reduce the amount of stress each issue causes you by a small margin, it will go a long way to reducing your overall stress levels.

Implementing Your Plan

The hardest part of the process will probably be implementation. It’s easy enough to figure out which issues are causing you stress. It’s even fairly simple to think of ideas that might reduce the stress these issues cause you. But implementing the changes can be tough. For example, you may not have a lot of services you wish to part with. Perhaps you feel comforted by having the extra cable channels. If you use them regularly, just keep them and find another way to cut back. But if your family rarely uses these channels, you’re going to have to look at the situation realistically. If they are used rarely, they are an expense that is unnecessarily causing you excessive stress. It’s worth cutting out the extra expense to get rid of that source of stress, even if it means occasionally missing a movie or show you would have like to watch. Just rent it on DVD or ask a friend to record it for you. In the next chapter, we’re going to look at some specific ways to manage some of life’s most common stressors.