Managing Your Stresses or What is Your Stress Quotient?
How many things are you juggling as a parent? Your job – your finances – running the household upkeep – everyone’s health – managing your child(ren)’s school work – keeping up with the extra-curricular activities – interacting with school – are you exhausted and ready to collapse? Then it is fair to assume you have a very high stress quotient.
What, if anything, can be done to try and regain a healthier balance in life to ward off the eminent danger of dropping any or all of the items you are precariously juggling? First, let's understand the components of a stress quotient.
All of us have stressful environments and stressful events in our lives that we cannot control. Stressful environments include home and relationships, work, personal issues, and community issues. Stressful events can be major incidents or minor incidents connected to changes that impact us. Additionally, time plays a factor; whether the events were 10 years ago, one year ago, or one month ago.
Add to the environment and events, which we can't control, are aggravators that are impacted by our perception of the world, such as over committing or not having effective boundaries and we have a recipe for exhaustion. Finally, let's factor in the fitness component, if it even exists. This potentially could help balance out some of the stressors. Fitness could include supportive relationships, diet, exercise, and hobbies.
Okay, after stating the obvious factors of environment, events, aggravators, and fitness, now what do we do with this? In part two we will begin to look at how we can work with the aggravators, by shifting our perspective, and increasing our fitness in bite size pieces that will seem doable.
