You know how it goes: first you get up on the wrong side of the bed one morning, then things become chaotic at work, and finally your car breaks down on a weekend grocery store visit.
In a variety of different ways, life can naturally end up becoming stressful. When it comes to serious incidents like accidents and injuries, you can bring professionals such as Maze Law Offices on board to help you navigate a solution. But for a lot of the more everyday sources of stress, things can be a bit more vague.
Here are a selection of tips you can try that might help to significantly reduce stress in your everyday life.
Focus more on your daily habits then on your grand goals
In recent years, various authors and public figures including James Clear have proposed the idea of focusing on habits (or “systems”) as opposed to goals, whenever you are striving to improve your life in one way or another.
There’s a pretty solid solid argument in favour of this.
When you are fixated on goals – in particular, grand future goals that will take a good deal of time, work, and luck to achieve – you constantly see the world through the lens of a scarcity rather than abundance. Satisfaction only comes when you achieve your goal. If you fail to achieve your goal, you feel awful. And until you achieve your goal, you feel anxious and impatient.
Focusing, instead, on daily habits that will move you in the right direction has a completely different psychological effect. Instead, it brings your attention more into the present moment, and removes a lot of the sense of frustrated urgency.
Instead of scrambling to try and reach a particular weight by particular date, for example, you can instantly focus on meeting your much smaller diet and exercise goals, each day.
Then, results come more or less as a side effect.
Spend some time in nature as often as you can
In the documentary, Call of the Forest, Diana Beresford-Kroeger and various others point out that walking in nature has all sorts of positive and soothing health effects, both physically and psychologically.
For one thing, trees release fine aerosols of healing compounds that have a profoundly rejuvenative effect on us.
But walking in nature is also a great way of helping to reconnect you with the world as it exists outside of human artifice – and can get you out of your own head and help you to feel a lot more grounded, too.
Spending some time in nature as often as you can – ideally every day – can be remarkably powerful as a stress buster.
Get your circadian rhythms right and sleep enough
If you listen to the letter circadian rhythm research being conducted by individuals like Satchin Panda, having a disrupted circadian rhythm, and not sleeping enough, is one of the most detrimental things you can do for your overall health.
Among other things, people with disrupted circadian rhythms and sleep routines experience a dysfunctional stress response.
Start waking up at the same time every day and going to bed at the same time every night. Limit blue light in the evenings, and get lots of it in the morning. Don’t eat a few hours before bed time, and get enough sleep.
