We all live with stress but we handle it differently. But then, maybe stress from work, daily hustle or bills are kinds of stress we have little or no control over and we always have to find a way to deal with it. But what do you do when the reason for the stress is what you have little or no control over. Let’s do a little bit of breakdown of the title; knowing your stressors. Let’s talk about stress, stress can be defined as a type of change that results to physical, emotional or psychological strain on its carrier. According to Wikipedia, it is defined as an organism’s response to a stressor such as an environmental condition and the response could either be biological, psychological or physiological. What then are stressors? When you have a situation that is threatening your well-being or position in life, that situation is a stressor. Before I go further, my friend inspired this post because I saw her update sometimes in February and I knew there will be other people who are probably going through stressing situations. One sad truth is this, situations are not only stressors, even humans can be. We all probably have that one person whose sight or their name just being mentioned just suddenly triggers something in our body system. Sometimes it could be fear, hatred or even sadness, such a person is automatically your stressors.

Like I explained earlier, some of our major stressors could be money, work, people, fear, uncertainty or even lack of control over a situation but there are things we don’t even know are stressors but they really put us in an uncomfortable situation. And that’s what we will be talking about today. The stressors majorly deal with your mind, if it persists, affects your mental health because you start to think and worry which is not good for anyone and if not taken care of as soon as possible, it affects every other thing including your physical health. I believe you now see why it important to identify and also be able to deal with your stressors. The causes of stress differ from person to person even though we all have general stressors. Let me share a personal experience.

I am a person that once I have my mind made up on a project, I don’t stop thinking about how to execute the project. I had this project I wanted to execute late last year, and I worried a lot about it because I wanted to execute the project before the New Year. Well, I didn’t achieve that but I kept worrying about finding a solution. Of cause, when you worry so much about a particular problem consistently, it draws you away from every other thing and it was affecting my productivity. After I spoke to a friend about it, he kept encouraging me not to be stressed out over something I had little or no control over. A funny thing happened in January of this year, I executed the project I a week, the project was originally planned to be executed in six months. The most amazing part is that it was without stress. A lot of times when we worry about something, we might not even think perfectly about the solution to that situation because we are already stressed out.

Let me give you another gist, this one is about a human. Remember I sad this post was inspired by a friend, so on my friends status, someone was asking her for help on how to deal with a person that his sight really stresses her out. My friend being a smart human, gave really smart advice to the lady and so, we will be talking also about how to also deal with your stressors as recognition of one’s stressors is the first step towards effective stress management. Strange as it might seem, most of the times, we don’t know what causes us stress. So what then do we do or how do we know?

Each time things are not going the way you want, take time out to check in with yourself, pay attention to your body and genuinely, list them out and then answer the following questions.

1. How are you feeling at the moment?
2. Do you develop tense shoulders or even get a headache?
3. Do you become irritable and have negative thoughts?
4. Do you have tensed muscles or relaxed muscles?
5. Are you holding your hands open or curled in fists?
6. What’s your breathing like? Deep, shallow, heavy, really fast?

By the time you’re done answering these questions, it will be easier to know when you’re stressed or finding some situations difficult. Now that you know how to identify your stressors, let’s talk about how to fix it. I listed a few that I believe will help.

• Always be prepared in advance for stressful situations as they are a part of our lives.
• Set realistic goals and let go of perfectionism and other unrealistic expectation you might have.
• Resolve conflicts you might have with anyone, practice forgiveness and set-asides time to talk through issues. This particular method helped me resolve the differences I had with a friend that has lasted a while now this year also.
• If it’s someone that his/her presence makes you uncomfortable, even though you both don’t have any conflict or anything, the best option is to avoid the person.
• Track your thoughts. Negative thoughts are automatic, and tracking your thoughts will give you a good picture of how your thoughts impact your daily living.
• Always find time to relax. In fact, add relaxation strategies to your everyday life. There’s a popular saying in Nigeria, they say that “wahala no dey finish”. It simply means that we will continue to solve problems till we kiss the earth goodbye so always find time to relax.
• Lastly and most importantly, always reach out for help whenever you need it. A lot of times, most of us like to form “hard guy, hard girl”, and we really need all the help we can get. Also, do not forget the GOD-FACTOR. We all need him in our lives and there are some stressors that only he can help resolve.

They say that the first step to solving a problem is accepting that there is a problem and identifying it, we have identified it and we now also know the solution, I believe that you will find it a lot easier now to identify your stressors and also, how to deal with them. Kindly, drop a comment of how this helps and don’t forget to share.