Avoid Burnouts By Reframing How You Perceive and Deal With Stress

Whether you’re a college student balancing homework and extracurriculars or a harried employee juggling job and family, stress can easily become an accepted part of life like lousy weather or gridlocked traffic. Fortunately, it doesn’t have the be that way because unlike rainstorms and rush hour, stress is something you have the ability to grasp and control.

As Paula Davis-Laack at Forbes explains in an article posted earlier this week, a well thought-out strategy for stress management can prevent burnout and the crippling symptoms that come with it. Davis-Laack offers a few tips to help get you started. They include:

1. Steel yourself by increasing your self-efficacy

2. Investigate your stress and determine cause/effect

3. Keep the hope, believe that you can get through it

Davis-Laack’s advice is somewhat cursory but still represents a good starting point for de-stressing. Her second point suggests harnessing a useful method of analysis — introspection. Write out what causes your stress and how the worry manifests itself through (in)action. Think of stress less as an exasperated state and more like a personal equation needing to be balanced. Determine the weight of the equation’s many components through reflection. Be meta. Examine stress as stress. Once you know thy enemy, then you’ll be ready to conquer.

Keep reading at Forbes

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