Working can either be a stress reliever or a stress inducer – depending on your psychological makeup. If you're doing something you love, if you're good at it and if you have the right kind of supportive environment to do it well in, working can be great. Work of the same kind though can be a major source of stress if you're hurrying to a deadline, if you feel the hostility of a coworker or a boss in the air, or if there's something about your office that you just hate.
Well, stress is everywhere – at work, at home when you have marital problems or child raising problems or financial problems – what you need is to learn how to reduce stress. Understand that stress is more of a mental state that influences the physiological.
Fortunately, this is not hard to do. No, we're not talking about heading for the nearest bar and drowning your sorrows in a bottle of alcohol. Instead, you can do something really productive. How about taking up running? Running has proven to be a great stress reducer.
Not only does running help in improving cardiovascular fitness, thereby cutting down your blood pressure, it actually helps you feel happier because vigorous exercise makes your body release hormones called endorphins that have an effect on your body that's comparable to what opium does. Let's look at a few other ways that you can employ to reducing your stress levels.
How about taking up that long-forgotten hobby that you've always had a wish for? What is the one thing that you've always told yourself ever since you were young that you would one day end up doing? It could be anything – learning how to fish, learning how to ride a horse, learning an instrument, running a Marathon – whatever it is that you always told yourself you would do, you need to take it up. In other words, do something that brings you joy. For me, it what taking percussion up again...I love playing the drums. I joined a band , something I used to do in my teens, and play every week. It's a great stress reliever when you belt out some tunes from yesteryear.
If you're middle-aged, just the fact that you haven't done many of the things that you always told yourself you would do in life, can be a major source of stress. Make a list and get around to doing those, and you'll find out that doing something you enjoy will reduce stress. It's all about doing the right thing, psychologically speaking.
Psychiatrists these days keep wondering about why there are so many kids and adults now who have to get diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. What could be driving this problem? It's really possible, they say, the fact that modern life has reduced all of us to desk-dwelling creatures. Technology has made us lazy...
A lack of physical activity can increase stress. Make your mind up to go out and take the outdoors in as much as possible. Go mountaineering, go to the beach, take up some kind of friendly outdoor sport – do what's natural and you'll find that these will reduce your stress as drumming did for me.
