Identify Current Means of Dealing With Stress

Posted on July 18, 2013 by Markus Wilcox, One of Thousands of Christian Coaches on Noomii.

Everybody has coping mechanisms when it comes to dealing with stress, whether they are consciously realized or not. The problem is that many people, over time, have developed unhealthy reactions to stress when they feel overwhelmed. Having unhealthy reactions to stress can cause even more stress to arise in the future – it’s very important to understand your natural coping mechanisms and figure out if they are helping or harming you in the long run.

Sit down and think – when life comes to be too much to bear, what do you do when you need to “get away from it” for a while, even if it’s only five minutes? Having a coping mechanism is not at its heart an unhealthy thing – in fact, the healthiest people in the world often have a bevy of coping mechanisms to turn to should they feel overwhelmed in their lives.

The question here is an important one to answer: what are your coping mechanisms? Are they ultimately helpful or destructive? The task is to find coping mechanisms that better our health and outlook while avoiding the ones that ultimately end up causing more problems.

Check out the following list of common unhealthy coping mechanisms. Do any of them look familiar?

Smoking

Drinking to excess

Using pills or drugs

Sleeping too much

Procrastinating

Zoning out

Withdrawing from family, friends, and activities

Over scheduling yourself to avoid thinking about problems

Overeating

Under eating

Taking stress out on others by becoming angry or violent.

This is most certainly not an exhaustive list when it comes to ways of dealing with stress in an unhealthy manner. Be sure to engage in a holistic and complete examination of your current coping mechanisms and figure out if they are ultimately helping or harming you. You don’t want your ways of dealing with stress today to end up causing you even more stress tomorrow!

The truth of the matter is that most people have fallen upon these methods of dealing with stress at least once in their lives. The problem is that this entire list tends to cause more problems than they ultimately solve. Some of them can lead to illness of the body or mind, while others can have disastrous effects upon your personal life. It’s important to be able to have outlets for your stress that mitigate further problems from cropping up.

The good news is that it is entirely possible for you to be able to deal with your stress without resorting to drastic, harmful measures. It’s just a matter of being able to harness the nervous energy that comes along with stress and directing it toward more positive means of expressing yourself. Once you’ve decided to take control of your life and your stress, you’ll find that this is easier than you ever thought possible!