Mind Tools - Effective Stress Management

Your Stress Diary

Keeping a stress diary is an effective way of finding out both what causes you stress, and what level of stress you prefer.

In this diary note down your stress levels and how you feel throughout the day. In particular, note down stressful events. Record the following information:

At a regular interval, for example every hour, record routine stress. Note down:
- the time
- the amount of stress that you feel (perhaps on a scale of 1 to 10)
- how happy you feel
- whether you are enjoying your work
- how efficiently you are working
When stressful events occur, write down:
- What the event was
- When and where did it occur?
- What important factors made the event stressful?
- How stressful was the event?
- How did you handle the event?
- Did you tackle the cause or the symptom?
- Did you deal with the stress correctly?

After a few weeks you should be able to analyse this information. It may be interesting as you carry out the analysis to note down the outcomes of the jobs you were doing when you were under stress.

This should give you two types of information:

You should be able to understand the level of stress you are happiest with, and the level of stress at which you work most effectively. You may find that your performance is good even when you feel upset by stress.
You should know what the main sources of unpleasant stress in your life are. You should understand what circumstances make the stresses particularly unpleasant, and should begin to understand whether your strategies for handling the stresses are effective or not.

It is probably only worth keeping the diary for a short period of time. You will find that the longer the time you keep the diary, the smaller the benefit of each additional day will be. If, however, your lifestyle changes or you begin to suffer from stress again in the future, then it may be worth using the diary approach again. You will probably find that the stresses you face have changed. If this is the case, then keeping a diary again will help you to develop a different approach to deal with them.

Highly Recommended Books

For an excellent book on stress management, try The Book of Stress Survival - How to Relax and Live Positively by Alix Kirsta. This is a very pleasant, well-presented, sensible approach to stress management. It covers many important areas completely ignored by most other books.

Planning to Manage Stress

Making an Action Plan

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