How to have more well-being even when facing adversity

Build your resilience

How resilient are you? Does life knock you down often, or do you pick yourself up and dust yourself down when something happens to you? That is resilience. It is the ability to persevere and adapt when things go awry. Often we cannot change what happens to us, but we can change how we respond to it and when we do that, we may impact positively on the outcome.  Therefore, if we increase our resilience, we improve our ability to manage all that we have to manage. Without resilience, we give up or feel helpless and not in control of our lives.

Stress-ManagementWhat does Stress Management Require?

To be prepared to change. We know that practising self-care is key. If we take care of ourselves so we can take care of everything else.

Overcoming Stress

How good are you at looking after yourself? Do you find it difficult? Do you know that how you look after yourself reveals how you feel about yourself? Therefore, if you feel good about yourself, you are likely to take exercise, eat healthily, ensure you have time out to meet with friends or your partner and have an awareness of your limits.

 Signs & Causes of Stress

  • Are you always rushing –  Allow more time
  • Do you rarely say No –     Practice saying No
  • Do you have no ‘Me’ time – Take time for self
  • Do you never ask for help – Seek help and accept support
  • Do you have to do everything perfect –  Realistic expectations

Tips for Reducing Stress

The No 1 challenge for men is to nurture and take care of self. When you actively care for your wellbeing, you ensure the wellbeing of others. Women have a major difficulty in asking for/receiving help and are not conscious of how unworthy they feel to receive. Over caring for others needs to be balanced with caring for self, you are only responsible for yourself, not for everybody and everything else.

Ways to Easily Relieve Physical Stress

  • Eat healthily
  • Find a half hour to exercise makes the rest of the day more manageable
  • Prioritise rest when tired
  • Take time to relax/meditate
  • Do you push yourself too hard much of the time?

Overcoming Stress

When you take care of yourself, you can take care of everything else.

What happens when we don’t look after ourselves? Symptoms of Stress & not taking care can result in a person either Acting Out or Acting In by:

Acting Out

  • Aggressive/Controlling
  • Blames others
  • Judgemental/Rigid
  • Irritable/Short temper
  • Overpowering/Bullies

Acting In:

  • Timid, shy or Passive
  • Blames self
  • Conforms and Compliant
  • Overpleasing
  • Bottles up feelings
  • Hypersensitive to criticism
  • Perfectionist

Stress Management

Ways to deal with stress: The challenge is for us to do something different, for example:

If your response is:

  • Being irritable  – Embrace mistakes
  • Being critical –    Affirm yourself more
  • Being impatient – Be more patient
  • Being anxious – Believe in self

Stress Relief

When you look after yourself, you are more resilient, so ease up on self and let things go. Slow down and take a deep breathe, hit your ‘pause button’ and deal with things when you are calmer.

Ways to Reduce Stress

  • 30 minutes exercise
  •  Read a book
  • Healthy diet
  • Take a bath
  • Schedule Fun/time out
  • Go for a walk
  • Prioritise rest if tired
  • See a friend
  • Accept help/support
  • Ask for help & receive
  • Reward your efforts
  • Meet your own needs
  • Share a worry
  • Schedule a Date night

What new choices will you make? What new actions will you take?

Identify one change you can make to look after yourself better

Examples: I need to …

  1. Start doing
  2. Stop doing
  3. Do more
  4. Do less
  5. Do differently