How to Prevent Stress 

Maybe you can’t eliminate all your stressors, but you can learn how to prevent stress from becoming the overwhelming and negative obstacle in your life.  Learning to take a critical look at how overbooked your daily activities and responsibilities are can help you put you on a path to a more fulfilling and enriched lifestyle. 

Eliminate those activities that are taking up too much time and are no longer a priority in your life.  This can cut down on stress levels. Stopping the stress before it happens is possible with these following strategies.

Know What Stresses You

Include journal writing as a daily activity for a period of time—at least 2 weeks.  Can you notice patterns in your daily schedule and patterns in your interactions with other people that increase your stress levels? Are there certain times of the day that you find your stress levels increasing? By identifying those situations that trigger increased stress, you can begin to make changes and learn how to prevent stress from becoming more common in your daily lifestyle.

Don’t Take on Too Much

If you are like many women, you are trying to do too much in too little time.  You are overscheduled with your daily activities and over committed with your projects with friends.  Time to simplify things!  When learning how to prevent stress in your life, the second step is to purge those responsibilities that are not necessary for you to handle and delegate them to someone else.  You need to remain realistic about what you can do and what responsibilities increase your stress.

Control the Effects of Stress

When you know that a stressful event is going to occur in the near future, prepare for it.  Learn how to reduce stress by including laughter during stressful times. Watching some comedy shows on television or reading some jokes during the days preceding the stressful event.  Laughter reduces the level of stress hormones as it increases the level of health-enhancing hormones.  In other words, with laughter you can build a stronger immune system, and experience fewer physical effects of stress.

Get a Health Check-up

Keep current with your health check-ups. Effective stress management includes listening to your body's messages.  It sends signals telling you that the stressors have been going on too long. It is at this point that the constant stress levels are exhausting your body's system and it is having trouble recovering.  The human body needs healing time to avoid breaking down and becoming susceptible to stress related illnesses.

Exercise reduces stress and helps maintain good health.  Exercise is an important way to rid the body of pent up frustration and the effects that stress has on causing muscle tension.  Physical activity can distract your mind from these challenges and problems and redirect the mind to another activity.  Exercise usually involves a change of scenery as well—out of doors, or at a gym, all of which can be pleasant low-stress environments.  Also, those who get more exercise may be less affected by the stress they face.

Find Support

A support network of friends and family can provide a much needed haven when times are tough.  These enriching relationships should be full of love and laughter and provide a refuge from the daily stressors that are troubling you.  With so much to do in any given day, it can become easy to fall into the trap of feeling down on yourself and becoming your own worst enemy. 

One of the ways to reduce stress is to develop a close knit support network of friends.  Friends can offer much needed honesty and objectivity because these people know you best and have your best interests at heart.  Sometimes talking through a problem helps you better understand how to prevent stress like that in the future.

Stress Management for Women

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