Getting Better

I really started my journey of stress management when I picked out the Calm App a few years back. It’s been a long slow process with a number of setbacks but those setbacks are getting fewer and fewer. Like training a muscle group, training your brain to act differently to stressful situations is an ongoing process. For me, Calm was only the start but it was a start I really needed.

These days I have a number of stress management techniques for when things start to get difficult. I do Yoga exercises 4 or 5 days a week which makes me feel in control of my stress to a greater extent and has the added benefit of making me much more flexible.

The deep breathing techniques I have learnt through Calm have proven very useful here as indeed they have when I have been doing my Bullworker exercises as I find the breathing control very useful for focusing my energy.

An hour in the garden 4 or 5 days a week is something I started about 6 weeks ago and, quite apart from being great for my mental and physical health, it has made a massive difference to our previously very overgrown garden.

My final piece of advice is simply that you will get stressed, sometimes to a level that seems no better than it was before the exercises and the development of your own techniques. Accept that this will happen. Life can be very challenging at times and stress will be worse at certain times but it doesn’t mean you’re not making huge progress. Be kind to yourself and accept these apparent failures as their relative impact is actually evidence that the old level of stress you just accepted as daily reality is now an occasional aberration. Now, that’s progress.