• Difficulty concentrating
• Headaches
• Jaw pain
• Change in appetite
• Frequent mood swings
• Feeling overwhelmed
• Trouble sleeping
Tips to Reduce Stress
Exercise. Regular exercise is one of the best ways to relax your body and mind. Focus on setting fitness goals that you can meet.
Relax your muscles. When you're stressed, your muscles get tense. You can help loosen them up and refresh your body by stretching, getting a massage, or taking a warm shower or bath.
Slow down! Modern life is so busy, and sometimes we just need to slow down and chill out. Look at your life and find small ways you can do that.
For example:
Reflect. Consider starting a journal. At the end of each day, writing down three things that went well or for which you're grateful.
Go easy on yourself. Accept that you can’t do things perfectly no matter how hard you try, and you can’t control everything in your life. Don’t forget to keep up your sense of humor! Laughter goes a long way toward making you feel relaxed.
Try the 4-7-8 breathing exercise. Mindfulness is key to both preventing stress and calming it in the heat of the moment. With this exercise, try inhaling for four seconds, holding your breath for seven seconds, then exhaling for eight seconds. Repeat. Calming your heartbeat can calm your mind.
Unplug, literally or metaphorically. What do you do when your laptop or phone gets glitchy? You power it down, give it a minute, and let it reboot. Next time you’re feeling stressed, try the same trick with yourself: unplug, recover, and reboot. This might mean snoozing your phone notifications for a while to give yourself a break from that stimulus, or maybe it’s more about no social events and a nice quiet night in.
Stand in a power pose. Never heard of it? The theory is that by standing in a power pose (think Wonder Woman with her hands on her hips and her chin and chest held high), you can induce that positive “I’ve got this” energy you need in stressful times. Pro tip: a power pose can be done almost anywhere, try a power pose in those moments full of last-minute nerves, like before a big day at school, social events or — as silly as it sounds — at the airport before a flight!
Say "no". It's important to carve out time for indulging in the activities you love — whether that's watching TV, reading a book, painting or music, or anything in between — and a key to finding such time is learning to say "no" to the things that cause you to stress. Learning to say "no" will give you the space to say "yes" to other, more personally important and enriching activities that bring you joy.
Clean your space. It's a weird phenomenon, but cleaning your space of clutter really does spark joy. If you're feeling stressed, look around where you spend most of your time and ask if it's as tidy and neat as it should be. Put on some tunes and scrub the place down. A clean and organized environment can make for a clean and organized mind.
