3 Tips For Dealing With Stress Constructively

‘Tis the season for a lot of things, not the least of which is stress.  And stress begets articles by “experts” on how to cope with said stress. While most of this advice is well-intentioned, the practicality and applicability of it to the life of the average Gen Meh-er is dubious at best.  Put another way, taking a soothing bath with aromatherapy oil ain’t gonna do jack about fixing your credit card debt, is it?

Photo by kelvin255

I’m not a threats/bribery/meditative kinda girl, so the following are the only tried-and-true stress mitigating approaches that I’ve found work for me. Take a deep breath and read on.

3 Tips For Dealing With Stress Constructively

Think about a point in the future when this will be behind you. This is advice my mother used to give and I still use it. Think about how you’ll feel on Tuesday at 4:31 PM when your organic chemistry  final has been handed in.  Think about a week from tomorrow when you’ll be moved into your new apartment and waiting for the cable company to come by to hook you up. Or Jan 13 when that damn gallbladder will be out of your life for good. The point is to put the stressor in perspective and fix your mind on a (calmer) point in the future when it will be over and to focus on the sense of relief you’ll feel at that point.

Think about the worst case scenario and determine your mitigation strategy. Your mind is going to go there anyway, right? So once you’ve determined all of the things that the fates could throw your way, plot out a concrete response for how you would deal should this come to pass. For example,  if I don’t find an apartment in city X before my lease in city Y expires, I can always sell/donate my furniture and move back in with my parents temporarily. If I lose my job in the next round of lay-offs,  my resume is up-to-date and this is a list of six temp agencies I will call the next day. The point of this strategy isn’t to encourage pessimism, but to put your mind at ease that even if everything goes utterly wrong, you still have a battle plan. You can stop obsessing over the worst case scenario because you know how you’re going to respond to it. I call this sewing your own safety net (and yeah, it’s copyrighted, so back off, ‘kay?).

Do something, anything productive. Paralysis amplifies and exacerbates stress. Take some sort of concrete action, no matter how small and indirectly related to the looming task at hand. This doesn’t mean watching a Supernatural marathon on your laptop when you have 75 invitations to address for your sister-in-law’s baby shower, but it might mean going to the gym or grocery shopping before settling in for a Saturday of cleaning out your closets or easing into working on that 30-page research paper by warming up your brain with a blog post or by highlighting relevant passages in a minimum of 10 journal articles.