Stress and anxiety sure feel like they cannot be helped or avoided. Why would they? Would it be possible that all of a sudden you no longer have to pay rent, fill your car with gas or run for the bus to work? Perhaps it should be that work should magically be easy and worry free or that by taking the one action you might get this amazing promotion where you somehow don’t have to be as overworked or pressed for time as you are now?  Let’s be honest though it is not as if you are out of options. It is easy to take control, you are in control right now, you can choose to change, to let go of stress. Realizing that you are in control is in fact the first step to releasing your burden that is stress and anxiety.

Stress reduction is about taking control, taking over your mental state, your emotions, your thoughts, even your day to day schedule and your living environment. It is about policing your attitude towards the outside and inside sources of stress in your life and to learn to hold up to pressure as you get better and better at dealing with the unexpected sources of stress and anxiety so that you can deal with them.

Identify what causes your stress levels to be high

Stress reduction must always begin by finding where the stress comes from, be it in your personal or professional life. Now this is not always obvious or in plain sight. Too often we tend to blame the usual suspects for our stress and we overlook our own stressful thoughts and ideas.  Of course one of the usual suspects is work, work, work, work! But the stress is usually too high for than the work would justify. We can also blame ourselves for badly managing our own time, or procrastinating to avoid having to face the stress only to have deadline stress later on.

Your best bet to identifying the cause of your stress is to give your thoughts, habits, behaviors, you may not like the next two:  excuses and justifications, a good look.

• Do you tend to say that you are going though something temporary that is causing that stress? (“it’s just this project that is driving me crazy”) when in fact you can’t remember having let go completely.
• Do you feel that stress is part of work and is something that could not be separated from it at any point? (“this place is crazy”) or that stress is part of you that perhaps you are a worrier?
• Do you sometimes blame your stress on other people or outside events? Do you think high stress is normal and everyone has it?

Your key to controlling your stress is to simply admit to your responsibility for maintaining it, for allowing it to build up unchecked sometimes for creating it by stressing about things that do not matter in the big scheme of things and to decide to change, act differently by learning to reprogram your response to stress.

Dany Leblanc Ch, Nlp

Hypnotherapist