Coping Strategies To Relieve Stress

Stress is now one of the most commonly used words in our language and has come to represent different personal conditions to all of us.  Some of us may say that we are ‘stressed’ if we burn our toast in the morning, whilst for others, stress is a very serious and debilitating psychological phenomenon which continually affects behaviour and thinking.

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The Health and Safety Executive offers the following definition: ‘Work-related stress is defined as a harmful reaction people have to undue pressures and demands place on them at work.’  Statistics reveal that almost half of the reported absences from work have been attributed to stress and that’s just the ones that were formally reported.  How many other cases are silent sufferers?

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Such incredible numbers of stress related illnesses, which have increased steadily over the past decade, suggest that business leaders, managers and the workforce themselves actually have little knowledge about how to handle this way of thinking and certainly don’t have an effective and workable coping strategies to offer.  The Health and Safety Executive reports that ‘The main work activities attributed by respondents as causing their work-related stress, or making it worse, was work pressure, lack of managerial support and work-related violence and bullying.’  So if you are not being assisted effectively in the workplace, what can be done for you to help yourself?

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Let’s begin with considering what the difference is between people who feel ‘stressed’ and people who don’t?  

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Some people report that they thrive under pressure and work most effectively in high pressure environments whilst others feel that they do not have the necessary resources to cope and produce their optimum performance.  Why is it that two people doing exactly the same role in the same environment and culture can respond so differently on a personal level?

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The answer is that the difference that makes a difference is the way they structure their thinking.  Because everyone processes their environment differently, the behaviour they produce in response differs widely too.  

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NLP thinking effectively allow you to change the way you represent your external environment internally.  It allows you to create and maintain new coping strategies which are developed through blending resourceful emotional states with more helpful reactive thinking pathways.  The NLP techniques that are available to you are easy to learn and can be used in real time at the moment you most need them. You can become your own stress coach! NLP assists you to build resilience into your reaction to the workplace and everything and everyone within it, preventing stress before it impacts your performance and behaviour.

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When stress has already taken a hold, then that’s when you need support to assist your recovery and expedite your return to full functioning at work. NLP is the perfect solution when you aren’t comfortable with taking prescription drugs to alleviate the physical symptoms of stress related illness.  NLP allows you to take back your personal power and control by ridding you of the unresourceful strategies installed in your psychology and cancelling out the deleterious effects of self-limiting decisions and beliefs.  The result is a more resourceful and resilient way of thinking which makes coping with perceived pressure at work a breeze.  

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Coping with stress is a matter of thinking differently about your environment and allowing your mind to re-programme itself so that resourceful thinking becomes automatic and easy.  New strategies will be created, producing new behaviour that will render ‘stress’ a much less compelling option and once learned, you can manage all of it personally.  Imagine that, a stress free and self-resourcing workforce, producing optimum performance with high morale and motivation.  How much more pleasant would the working day be for you and everyone in your working environment? Everything you will require to set up an effective stress coaching team within your organisation is contained within our NLP Certification Trainings.

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It’s time to take control of your thinking and deal effectively with stress and depression without the need for drugs. Wherever you perceive the stress in your life, you can learn how to remove it. It’s easier than you could ever imagine!

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Here are our top tips for busting the stress from your life! First, you need to notice it:

• STOP for a moment and notice how you are feeling. If you experience stress responses frequently then you may have just got used to feeling them. They will be harming your psychological and physiological health and you don’t notice any more.

• Check your physical health, it’s a great indicator of the stress response. Are your hair and nails healthy, is your weight at the appropriate level for you, is your skin clear and are you sleeping 8 hours each night? How is your blood pressure?

• Check your mental health. Do you feel unresourceful emotions on a regular basis? Does your voice in your head keep talking about all the negative stuff? How are your confidence, self-belief and motivation?

• Check your diet and exercise regime. Are you eating healthy and nutritious foods and taking some exercise regularly?

• Important! Schedule in time for technology detox! No phones, tablets, PCs or TV for at least a few hours per day, especially in the evening.

• Get 8 hours quality sleep.

• Now remove the stress! Take action and do it without drugs! Learn how to self-coach with NLP or engage an NLP Coach that can support you in your removal of stress and depression. You will be investing in yourself.

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Install a new coping strategy:

• First, identify the specific moment that triggers your stress response.

• Notice how you represent it internally, what pictures, sounds and feeling are you aware of in your mind? What are you saying to yourself?

• Now, make those pictures, sounds and feelings small and dark in your mind and imagine zooming them off into the distance and exploding in the sun.

• Now make a compelling picture of you responding to the same trigger with a resourceful state. That may be resilience, confidence, relaxation, focus, whatever works best for you.

• Make that picture with sounds and feelings big and bright and create self-talk that enhances its potency.

• Now every time you have a stress response, bring up the resourceful picture and self-talk and feel the stress melt away. If the old picture re-asserts itself, simply cover it with the new picture and have the old one zoom away into the sun again. Your unconscious mind will soon install this new strategy at the unconscious level and your new thinking will become a habit of choice.  

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You may be excited about learning how to remove stress from your life for yourself or you may be in a helping profession and are motivated to support others to remove stress and depression easily and permanently, and you can have both by attending our Enhanced NLP & Hypnosis Practitioner Certification Training.

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