Self-care
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Stress
Stress is something everybody experiences every day. The positive version challenges and motivates us in solving problems and overcoming challenges tasks. The negative version is when the challenges become too many or we feel unable to handle them. That’s when the stress overwhelms us and we need to manage it.
Make a list of what is demanded of you , what you must do to meet those demands and what conditions you need to be able to do that.
If those demands cannot be met with your exisiting capabilities and conditions you’re literally tasked with the impossible, which is rather stressful. Try adjusting your demands or changing the conditions so that your demands are not only possible but also reasonable. Having reasonable demands means not only being able to work but also to socialise, have fun and rest.
Sometimes adjusting the situation to make it managable in not an option. That’s when we need strategies to manage the acute stress. Physical excercise makes use of the effects of stress on the body, being prepared to fight and flee. After a good workout your body is programmed to go into recovery after the stress-induced actions. That means your body will shift to relaxaton, which is your goal at this stage.
Other methods for lowering the acute stress are box breathing and progressive muscle relaxation.
Techniques for managing your acute stress are not viable, long-term solutions for constant stress. You need to analyze what is causing your stress and do something about it.
Sleep
Routine is very beneficial for sleep. Try going to bed and waking up at the same time.
It’s useful to wind down an hour or se before going to bed. If your mind is still racing from whatever you just did, it will keep racing in bed and that makes it hard to wind down and go to sleep. And yes, exciting games or tv shows may wind you up enough to make it hard to fall asleep.
Avoid eating or drinking just before going to sleep. Your body will get a bit confused wether to focus on sleep or food and your sleep will lose out. It’s a popular misconception that alcohol helps with sleep. Though it might make you fall asleep the actual sleeping will be worse.
Avoid disturbing lights and sounds in your bedroom. A blinking phone charger or ticking clock can get in the way of falling asleep and even disturb you while you sleep.
Do not equate hours slept with quality of sleep. The best metric of how well you sleep is how rested you feel when you wake up. You don’t need to do all of the above for good sleep. If you allready sleep well then you needn’t do any of them. And if you need better sleep you still don’t need to do all this. Try it out, experiment a bit, see what works for you and find a combination that is good enough for you to sleep well.
Anxiety
A lot of overlap between stress and anxiety actually. Most techniques for reducing stress also work well with anxiety. If you are bothered by anxious thoughts, try writing them down. Putting it to paper may make it feel more managable by defining what it is that worries you and finding that it’s usually a handful of worries repating themselves in a way that make them seem like many, many more. And you might go from avoiding the worries to confronting them and trying to find what you can do about them.
Life in general
Create the change you want to see in your world. If you find something difficult at first, that’s quite okay. The norm is to not be good at things before you’ve spent time getting good at them. Attempting a task that seems hard is usually a great way of both getting better at it, making it easier and making you less fearful of failing at it.
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