The Importance Of Using Stress Management Techniques

How do we apply stress management techniques in our lives?

Stress can start small and quickly grow like a snowball effect. It is then that stress management techniques become very important. If we feel on some level that we don’t deserve to be happy, then we will not take the actions required to de-stress and enrich our lives.

I found that I had huge resistance to the idea of paying someone to do work for me that I felt I should always be doing myself. It was only after I injured my neck raking piles and piles of leaves for hours every weekend, that I decided to pay a yard service to do it for me. When I began to realize how much time I was spending doing the work myself, I also shed light on the lack of value I put on my own time and energy.

I quickly realized that this was just one of many stress managment techniques that could really start to impact my life in a positive way.

Somewhere along the line I had a deeply engrained belief that I was lazy if I let someone else do things for me (even if I paid them to do it!) I actually remember having a steadfast argument with a therapist about how ridiculous it was to pay someone to clean your house. He posed the question why and I had to re-evaluate where that was coming from.

I had no problem thinking about giving gifts to people I cared about, but felt ashamed of the idea of getting certain things for myself.

So I went to work scrunching up all these haphazard belief systems and throwing them in the waste paper basket. I sat down with a clean blank piece of paper and pen ready to write new rules of my own making for a change. I could analyze where my original thoughts had come from, but the truth of it is they were just thrown at me from poor sources I had encountered as I grew up, and as an adult, I would never take advice from the people they had originally come from.

Time to start over! Time to get a handle on stress management techniques to help improve my life. So, I decided to start with one area of my life.

Here’s the thing: I'm a pretty good baker, but alas, not much of a cook in general. I decided just for the fun of it to look into private chef services. Of course my previous training was screeching in my ear the whole while “That’s ridiculous, only rich people can afford that, and that is because they are lazy and stuck up! Blah Blah.” I turned it on mute.

Every one of us is gifted in some arena in our lives. In fact stress management techniques for one person may not be the same for another. Who says that we should have to be an expert at everything? And if someone else does something well, enjoys it and makes a living doing so, then why waste my time doing something badly myself?

I wrote down the problem: I worked long hours and had little time, I needed to improve my health by eating better food, I wanted to find healthy food that tasted good so I could enjoy it, and I had to keep on my current budget…"Don't even bother, no way you can find a solution to all of that!" the old broken record kept going. I turned down the volume again...

I did some research and found a local chef who did house calls. She came with all here own equipment, figured out a menu for you based on your health and taste requirements, bought the food and brought it with her and left a refrigerator full of fresh cooked healthy meals and a clean kitchen.

“Too good to be true!” my voices clambered, “it must cost a fortune, you couldn’t afford it!” THEN I found out the really great part. When I added up the cost of all the food I bought, and un-intentionally wasted (food practically getting up and crawling out of the refrigerator on its own in protest), I discovered it would not cost me any more than what I was spending on ill conceived meals half of which went to waste and none of which really tasted very good to begin with. Not to mention all the time I spent shopping and attempting to cook!

After the first bite I was hooked! Why hadn’t I done this before? Talk about stress management techniques, this was heaven! And guess what, she loves to cook!

Here is my wonderful chef Amy Churchill...

You can read about her business here:

What is the point of this tale? It is one example of many ways little and big, that we can start to look into so we can begin to use stress management techniques to help improve our lives. It's time to break the old chain of low self-esteem related limitations and get creative!

Of course there are many varieties of stress managment techniques that we can delve into.

I will be adding more resources dicussing the use of stress management techniques as I go...