Managing Stress Tips | Dealing With Stress | Stress Reducer Tips

Posts Tagged ‘time of entry’

What is a stress diary?
You know that you ’suffer from stress’, you know that you fly off the handle at the slighted provocation because you are always feeling tired and irritable - but you don’t know why and you feel powerless to stop it.

Keeping a stress diary is a useful way of identifying those things that cause you stress, and how much stress they actually cause you!

How does a stress diary work?
Basically you need to keep a diary each day and take note of the following:

• Date and time of entry
• Whether there was any particular event that made you feel tense and stressed
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how stressed did you feel
• What symptoms of stress were you exhibiting
• How did you handle the stress (if at all!)

You should keep this diary over a period of time such as a couple of weeks so that you can start identifying patterns of behaviors and events. Soon you will start to be able to identify:

• Which events outside your control is causing you stress (examples include standing in queues, dealing with obnoxious customers etc) and how you reacted to these events. Remember, ultimately it is your own behavior, your reaction to the event that is causing you stress. You need to learn how to modify your behavior to these events so that you experience less stress. As soon as you can identify your behavioral patterns and your reactions to certain events, you can start to manage your stress levels.
• Which stressors were self induced BY your behavior? Examples would include – ignoring the alarm clock and then getting stressed because you are late for work, or, the killer, taking on too much responsibility and work because you think you can handle it and then running out of time (and feeling stressed as a consequence) to complete the tasks.

As soon as you can identify your responses to stressful events and the behaviors that are causing self-induced stress levels you can start doing something about it.

Related posts

• Managing Stress Tips (0)
• Stress Puppy or Relaxed Cat? (0)
• Stress Management And Health (0)
• Stress caused by rates of change (0)
• Stress - The Modern Disease (1)