Stress and a better life balance

By Dr Tareq Rasheed
International Consultant and Trainer

Life is not as easy as we wish it to be; stress is always there in all stages of our lives. Kids suffer stress due to lots of homework, studying and exams. Teenagers face stress with their parents as they wish to push boundaries and do whatever they want with no restrictions.

Adults suffer from stress due to work, responsibilities and sometimes long working hours. Even retired people and senior citizens suffer from being sick or feeling lonely. This is life, but successful people always look at stress positively as a step towards success and even when facing very negative stress, they can create a life balance.

Managing stress

So, what are the secrets of managing stress? Stress is defined as a state of worry and mental tension-it’s a natural human response to life challenges. Some positive stress is highly needed to allow people to achieve positive results; this positive stress is related to passion and a desire to achieve. However, when facing difficult situations, negative stress may cause depression, worry and disturbance to life balance: Life Balance is a state of positiveness that helps you to live a healthy life with positive relationships. 

The ability to achieve balance and manage stress simultaneously need some practice and techniques to live a healthy positive life. These techniques include:

1. Time Management and Scheduling: One of the best practices to achieve life balance is to schedule your time. Having a weekly schedule is highly recommended; to work with a daily plan is one of the highest causes of negative stress; you start working to fulfil daily tasks, and in such instances, you are managed by tasks, rather than you managing them

A weekly schedule allows you to have a big picture of your tasks and by scheduling weekly, you are mastering and managing your schedule. 

Defining your relationships

There are five types of relationships: Personal, organisational, family, society and spiritual. You do not need to give equal time to each relation, but you should satisfy the required relation; otherwise, you will suffer high negative stress later. Give your work its time, but your family is the most important relationship to care about. Your friends and society are also part of relationships, these relationships will give you positive energy. So, invest in them. 

Your relationship with God is the most crucial relationship ; it does not take much time from your schedule daily, but will balance your life in the long haul. Of course, do not forget yourself. Include in the week time for yourself; time for self-development, rest and exercise.

2. Fight or Flight: Successful people will always choose confrontation than running away from their problems and negative relationships. Confronation may cause short-term stress, but you will feel positive afterwards. If you choose flight, you will suffer from lasting and long-term stress. Confront very hard situations and you will be able to manage in the long term

3. Self-Awareness: As you increase attuning to yourself and self-awareness, you will be able to conclude that life is too short to waste on negative emotions and stress. The most important thing is your health; we tend to forget ourselves and may face serious health problems. This is when you become aware that nothing in life is more important than your body and mental health

4. Emotional Intelligence: This is the ability to manage emotions positively and is one of the most critical factors for a healthy positive life. Emotional intelligence includes several skills: 

• The ability to manage negative emotions: The strongest negative emotions to manage are anger, depression, worry and boredom. If not managed, these negative emotions will cause negative stress that will impact you negatively in the long term

• Self- Motivation: Learn always to motivate yourself; speak positively with yourself, do not allow negative thoughts to start affecting you. Stop blaming yourself and you will find lots of positivity in your life 

• Motivating others: Be very sociable and learn to motivate others; your family, friends, relatives, colleagues and friends. This will really charge you with very positive energy

5. Setting Priorities: Once you define your priorities in life, you will be able to reduce stress. Always think of important and not urgent issues; your health, your development, strategic relations. At work try to think of the most strategic issues and delegate routine tasks to others, if possible 

6. Learning to say “NO!” What stresses some people is the inability to say no and always saying yes. Try to learn to say “no” to issues which are not important. Do not stress yourself with mundane issues just to satisfy others who may exploit you as being a “yes person”

7. Leading a healthy life through deep sleep, eating healthy food and exercising

A stressless life is impossible; this means carelessness, but being able to live the positive stress that allows us to achieve and proceed is the secret to success. If you manage your time and relationships, you will be able to manage negative stress in the long term.

Life is too short to waste without being goal-oriented. A project is a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result. Life is a project that aims to create a result in this journey.

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine