In today’s society the majority of our population lead very busy lifestyles, which can lead to stressful times. In an ideal world no one wants to be stressed, but sometimes life catches up with us and everything seems to come at once! In my opinion, the key to managing stress boils down to a few key factors; self-discipline, organisational skills and time management.
Self-discipline is mandatory for one wanting to succeed at anything. Being self-discipline involves following a code of behaviors or training in relation to a specific task or way in which we conduct ourselves.
You cannot be self-disciplined in only certain areas of your life rather; you must be self-disciplined across all aspects of your life to create consistency and avoid daily stressors that are unnecessary.
For example, you have a busy work day where you have an important presentation that you’ve worked hard to prepare for. You have implemented a lot of self-discipline preparing the presentation, with long work hours and commitment to the project. When you go to make your lunch that morning, you leave the kitchen a mess, when you would normally leave it clean. You have left the house with an unclear mind; distracting you during the day and making you feel flustered when arriving at work knowing what you have to go home to. This extra stress could have been avoided by implementing self-discipline of cleaning up after yourself, so when you arrive home it may make things more stressful than they need to be.
Once you are mentally driven and have a degree of discipline to achieve what your goal is the next step is to be organised. To be organised means more than just knowing what time your bus comes in the morning or getting to a function on time, organisation can also mean having a tidy work or home desk. When things are stored in a tidy fashion it makes tasks more doable, for example when you go to find your receipts for your tax return, you want to find them quickly and without any stress.
The last point is time management. These two words sound so simple, yet if you’re not disciplined and organised you will struggle to manage your time.
A Few Tips to Manage Time are;
Have a desk diary with your events, birthday’s, functions and activities scheduled in advanced, making it easier to keep track of social occasions.
A weekly planner – this can be stuck up on a wall where it is easy to see, so that every time you look at it you are reminded of what you have on that week.
Daily task lists- these are crucial for your day to day schedule. Have written down what tasks you need to complete for that day and put them down in order of most importance to least importance. Once you have completed these tasks tick them off as you go.
I believe that these three factors are imperative to be able to minimise stress levels on a day to day basis. As long as you have these factors down pat then you have already minimised your stress levels by half. That being said, it is easy to run out of steam and can sometimes become hard to be self-motivated and disciplined.
Reward yourself often and take time out when you can!
Written by Sarah Nowland – Elite Myotherapist.
