Since stress is unavoidable in life, it is important to find ways to minimize and prevent stressful incidents in order to avoid the negative effects of stress.

We can try some of these strategies:

1) Master efficient management of our time

Mastering time management skills can allow us to have more time with our family and friends. More importantly, it can increase our performance and productivity. This will help reduce our stress levels to a minimum.

Among the techniques that we can use to improve our time management skills are the following:

?Save time by focusing and concentrating on important tasks. We can also consider delegating some of our responsibilities and scheduling time for our selves.

?Keep a record of how we spend our time for work, family, and leisure

?Prioritize our time by rating tasks by importance and urgency. Redirect our attention to activities that are important and meaningful to us.

?Manage our commitments by not over or under committing. Never commit to what is not important to us.

?Deal with procrastination by using a day planner. Break large projects into manageable activities and set short-term deadlines

?Examine our beliefs to reduce conflict between what we believe and what our life is like.

2) Develop healthy coping strategies

It is important that we arm ourselves with coping strategies. One way to do this is by recording a stressful event and taking note of how we reacted and what we could have done better.

With this information, we can work on transforming unhealthy coping strategies into healthy ones. These improvements will help us focus on the positive aspects and direct our attention to the different things that we can change or control in our lives.

3) Consciously choose a healthy lifestyle

Some behaviors and lifestyle choices affect our stress levels. These may not directly cause stress, but can interfere with the ways our bodies seek relief from stress. Try to:

?Have a sense of purpose in life

?Eat a balanced diet for a nutritional defense against stress

?Balance personal, work, and family needs and obligations

?Get enough sleep to enable our bodies to recover from stress

?Get moderate exercise throughout the week

?Limit consumption of alcohol and cigarettes

4) Solicit social support

Social support is the positive support we receive from our families, friends, and the community. It makes us feel cared for, loved, esteemed, and valued. Many studies indicate a strong correlation between social support and improved mental and physical health.

5) Change our thinking patterns

When an event triggers negative thoughts, we experience a range of emotions that include fear, insecurity, anxiety, depression, rage, guilt, and a sense of worthlessness or powerlessness.

These emotions trigger stress, just as an actual threat does. How we deal with negative thoughts and see things can help reduce stress.

At the onset of stress, we should be vigilant and catch ourselves from engaging in negative thoughts to help eliminate stress. We can also use a problem solving process that will help identify all aspects of a stressful event and find ways to deal with it

6)Change your communication style

A change in the way we express things helps us communicate in a way that makes our views known without making others defensive, hostile, or intimidated. Poor communication can result to stress.

Even writers experience stress although they are just using their hands to do the talking. For some people, waiting for 7 or 8 hours is already stressful enough. We should find innovative ways to relieve stress.

Indeed, stress is one unwanted visitor to the lowly-employee in charge of the mails, the CEO of a large organization, or average working parent. Try these strategies and boot out stress from in our homes, most especially in our lives.