Did you know #StressAwarenessDay is coming up next week? Prepare to handle your stress with these helpful tips!

Stress is a normal reaction—it’s the body’s way of protecting you from danger. A little stress can help you motivate to get the job done, but daily stressors can pile up and push you past what you can cope with.

Your brain is wired to alert you to threats, preparing you to deal with them by increasing your heart rate and blood pressure. This system is sensitive—the more you activate it, the easier it is to activate. Your vitals are supposed to return to normal once the threat, or stressors, are gone. Our modern lives of non-stop notifications and alerts can keep this system activated, leaving you in a state of constant alert and stress, which can impact our bodies, minds, and moods without us knowing it. Left unaddressed, stress can add to problems like high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes.

Managing stress can help you reset your own alert system. CEEK’s Chief Gardener of People, Jennifer Hughes, offers these suggestions:

• Start a Gratitude journal. Write down three to five things each day that you are grateful for (from the mundane to the magnificent). You will start to notice more of the good things, which helps manage your response to stress.
• Practice a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset. Instead of thinking, “I have so much on my plate, I will never get it all done” shift to, “I have a lot of work to do and I can accomplish a great deal when I focus and chunk it out into more manageable tasks.”
• Become more aware of the things that stress you and challenge them. If we peel back the layers and better understand what stresses us, we can challenge ourselves to determine if the stress is real or perceived.
• Just Breath. Really. Jennifer practices by inhaling for four counts and exhaling for four counts three times. Kristen inhales for four counts and exhales for eight counts to lower her heart rate when stressed.

Looking for more ways to manage stress? Check out Steve Wiley’s Navigate Chaos!

Stress will never go away, but you can learn to manage it. We hope this helps you CEEK a Better Way.