The 4 Best Practical Stress Management Techniques

When dealing with stress, it’s usually good to follow practical stress management techniques. These are things that you can do to manage your stress.

In such a case, being proactive rather than reactive is your best bet. Instead of dealing with stress as it arises, you can prepare and minimise the damage it may cause. Being proactive will reduce your general level of stress.

In this post, we’ll be looking at 5 of the best practical stress management techniques.

Stress Management Technique 1 – Exercise

Exercise is a great way to manage stress. When you exercise, you reduce the levels of stress hormones in the body. This includes adrenaline and cortisol, the two primary stress hormones.

Exercise also produces endorphins. These boost your mood and can act as painkillers, both in your body and your mind.

Further, repeat exercise will improve how you see yourself. Your self-image and self-esteem will develop with regular exercise over time. This will generally reduce your stress and increase your quality of life.

Stress Management Technique 2 – Meditation

Meditation will reduce stress. It reduces cortisol, the primary stress hormone, and helps to calm your mind.

After 8 weeks of regular practice, meditation can help to ease repeat stress.

Meditation also reprograms the mind. What this means for stress is that you’ll be better able to recognise stress. From there, you can reframe how you look at stress and how it affects your life.

Stress Management Technique 3 – Pet an animal

If you have a pet – a cat or dog will work best – you can improve your stress levels. Playing with a pet can boost your serotonin and dopamine levels – feel-good chemicals – which help to relax.

The blood pressure of people with pets is often lower than that of people that don’t own pets. You can decrease your blood pressure, which is often linked to stress, by adopting a pet or seeing a friend’s pet.

Stress Management Technique 4 – Let it out

To best manage your stress, you need to get it out of your system. Your approach to this can take many forms. Here are three that work best for most people:

Verbal

You can let out your stress through shouting or screaming at nothing in particular. Try to do this in a place where there aren’t many people around. Go somewhere isolated, such as a park or forest at night, and let it all out.

Definitely don’t target this at a person in the form of an argument. If you’re feeling stressed, let it out before arguing with someone. Otherwise, you’ll both get emotional and it will be harder to resolve any issues.

Physical

Letting out your stress physically is very effective. Exercise is the most common way of doing this.

Hitting a punching back for half an hour with everything you’ve got can be a great method for letting your stress out. Or, you could go push yourself and go for an intense run.

Pen and paper

Journaling or drawing can also be a good way to get stress out of your system.

Sit down for half an hour and write your thoughts out. Or draw whatever comes to your mind. Both activities are therapeutic and will help to calm you down.

Thanks for reading.

If you enjoyed this post or found it useful, share the site with your friends. We have loads of other useful posts if you want to learn more, so have a browse. Cheers!