If you have been reading this blog from its very first post, you may have already learned about the modern stress model or the sequence of events that lead to the physiological stress response.

For those of you who are not familiar with it, here’s the summary:

• Person experiences or thinks of something that is stressful. His negative thoughts and emotions combine at this phase.
• Person triggers psychological stress. He may begin experiencing signs of mental stress.
• Psychological stress, if left unregulated, triggers the physiological stress response. Person may experience physical symptoms of stress such as clammy hands and an elevated heart rate, even if he is at rest.

Why should you practice control over your own thoughts?

If we would look carefully at the modern stress model, we would come to the conclusion that the actual, physiological stress response only comes to the surface during moments of mental stress.

Mental stress on the other hand, doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. A person only experiences mental stress if his thought patterns and emotions are working toward this particular outcome.

With these facts in mind, it becomes very clear that in order to stop physiological stress in its tracks, you need to address the causative agent, which is mental stress.

Why do we think the way we do?

I often encounter individuals who beat themselves up over the fact that they have a tendency to think and feel in certain ways especially when they have to contend with common stressors.

Your habitual responses to stressors are actually determined by 3 different yet interlocking factors:

1. DNA – Your parents’ genes are partly responsible for your tendencies and general temperament.

In addition to the way you were raised, there’s also the fact that you inherited your parents’ chromosomes, which also means that you’ve inherited at least part of their personalities.

So if one or both of your parents are aggressive or hotheaded, you may have the same inclinations because of your DNA.

2. Childhood – Sigmund Freud, the old father of psychoanalysis, often analyzed people’s childhoods to get to the bottom of strange neuroses.

It turns out that Freud was spot on when he determined that early childhood experiences have a lot to do with how we fully develop and mature as adults.

Our individual responses to stressful situations are partly determined by how we were conditioned to respond when we were still young. So keep this in mind when you are raising your own children; your children are not only absorbing the world at large, they are also absorbing your behavior and thought patterns!

3. Life Itself – Our DNA and early childhood experiences comprise only a small portion of the totality called the self. Your experiences as you grow older are also strong determinants of your behavior toward stressful situations.

We can’t do anything about past experiences, may they be good or bad, but we can do something about our beliefs and values in the present time. We must not allow past negative experiences to dictate how we live in the present time.

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Now that you are more familiar with how the mind works and why it operates in a particular manner with regards to stressful situation, it’s time that you learned how to control unstable and stressful thought patterns.

How can you control seemingly unstable thought patterns?

Thought patterns are powerful, but they are never more powerful than the person itself. A thought, no matter how destructive, does not have free will or a life of its own. All negative thoughts are vulnerable and extinguishable, remember that!

Easy Mind Control Exercise

•  Find a quiet place to perform the Easy Mind Control Exercise. Get a piece of paper and write down 5 of the most horrid thoughts you’ve been having for the past few months.
• Below the first 5 items, write down 5 beautiful thoughts, memories or ideas that are directly in contrast with the first 5 items you wrote down.
• Focus your mind’s power on each of the undesirable thoughts and as you do, give your mind a firm command to remove the thoughts.
• Visualize a blank space where each of the undesirable thoughts used to be. Begin placing pleasant thoughts on this blank space, to replace the bad ones that have just been driven out.
• Repeat the exercise until you are satisfied and try again tomorrow.

The first part of our current series on acing the art of stress management, we talked about three important guidelines:

First, you have to become familiar with the actual stressors that are causing you feel chronically stressed on a daily basis. This can be accomplished through regular journaling.

Second, you have to identify the negative beliefs and values that you may have. These beliefs and values may be stopping you from successfully managing your stress. This can be done through consistent self-analysis.

Third, you also have to accept the fact that not everything can be done in one day or one week. Stress management is actually a lifelong endeavor which will help create better beliefs, behaviors and thought patterns.

Today’s discussion will center on some additional guidelines which you can also use to improve your handling of stress management. You can find a few more essential guidelines below:

1.Try One or Try Them All – The fact of the matter is that there is no “perfect formula” for fight stress. I personally believe that stress dissipates more quickly through deep tissue massage because I really feel relaxed and happy after a good massage. But that’s just me; deep tissue massage may not be as effective for you.

This is why it’s so important for people to seek out different methods of stress management.

• Do not limit yourself to only 1 or 2 techniques.
• If something doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t mean that you do not have the capacity to manage your stress.
• It just means that you haven’t found the right combination of techniques to bring you to your desired level of relaxation and happiness.

2. Assemble Your Army, One by One – Managing stress is literally a battle against bad habits and a myriad of stressors. What do you need to succeed in any battle?

Your personal anti-stress army, of course!

• This personal army of yours will be composed of different relaxation techniques and behavioral modifications which you will learn as you progress with your stress management efforts.
• The techniques which you will be using must fit the genetics of your lifestyle and way of life. If a technique just doesn’t fit your lifestyle, it won’t work. Learn to adjust and discard techniques that do not conform to what you feel is the right way to remedy stress in your life.

3. Keep Practicing! – Like I’ve said before, stress management is essentially a collection of different skills that will enable you to effectively combat stress before it makes you permanently sick.

If you want full mastery of a specific skill, you must be willing to practice it until it becomes second nature.

This guideline may seem easy in comparison to my other reminders but in reality, it’s one of the most challenging to carry out.

Why? Because old habits die hard. For example, it can be very difficult for a person to listen more during an argument because the old habit was to outdo the other person in a screaming match.

Apart from learning new skills, effective stress management will also require you to change your attitudes and behaviors toward your stressors. In the previous blog post, I recommended that you start writing on a stress management journal.

Your stress management journal is more than just a laundry list of things to do.

• It’s actually a special picture of how you think and behave in response to different situations.
• You need a source of special insight if you want to discover your true self and reinvent it so you won’t be so stressed anymore.

4. Don’t Forget “Me” Time – In order to carry out your plans to conquer stress, you have to create space in your daily schedule for stress management. Now, I know that many stressed individuals feel that there isn’t enough time in a whole day for everything that needs to be done.

• However, I would like to point out that the statement “I wish there were 2 more hours in my day” is more of a state of mind than reality.
• The reality is that 12-18 hours of waking time is sufficient for most groups of tasks. There’s also enough time for relaxation within this time-frame.

If you cannot fit everything that you need to do within this amount of time that simply means that you have poor time management skills.

Evaluate how much time you spend on your different activities and try to create more balance within your day.