Deborah Mitchell - The Womens Guide to Stress Relief in 7 Easy Steps: Learn How to Live a Calmer, Happier, and Healthier Life

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Dedicated to Antonio Carlos Jobim, my 4-legged feline stress reducer

CONTENTS

Chapter 1:

Chapter 2:

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

Step 4:

Step 5:

Step 6:

Step 7:

INTRODUCTION

When I first mentioned to my female friends that I was doing research on a book about women and stress, every one of them, without exception, had a comment that was something similar to (1) Stress! Thats the story of my life! (accompanied by a sigh, shrug, or a mournful look), or (2) I wish I knew how to could cope with it better.

This unscientific survey, along with my personal experiences and my then limited knowledge of the scientific literature on the topic of stress, were more than enough to convince me that this book had to include input from two sets of experts: the scientists/researchers who do the legwork and publish their findings about stress, its causes, and how to help manage it; and women who experience and deal with stress on a daily basis.

Researchers have foundand many women would agreethat men and women do not handle or react to stressful situations in the same way. Myrna, for example, is a thirty-five-year-old divorced mother of two girls, six and eight, who gets up at five A.M. every weekday to get her children ready for school, then prepares herself for the thirty-minute drive to the high school where she teaches biology. By the end of the school day Im exhausted, she says. I love what I teach, but the demands of managing teenagers and commanding their attention are mentally and emotionally draining.

Once she leaves school, there are more demands on Myrnas psyche. She picks up the girls at her mothers house, makes dinner, helps with homework, grades papers, pays bills, monitors baths and bedtime, and tumbles into bed, too exhausted to cry or scream, although she feels like doing both.

At that moment, and for many, many more moments like it every day, I just want to stop and cry or talk to someone, just keep talking and crying until I get it all out. I have female friends who often feel the same way about their lives. Yet when my boyfriend, who is an account executive, gets stressed, he just wants to kick back with a ballgame on TV or play golf instead of talking about it. He deals with stress by zoning out, while I need to let it out.

How do you deal with stress? Do you understand the origins of your stress? Do you know the impact stress can have on your body, mind, and spirit? Do you believe there are ways to effectively and healthfully eliminate, reduce, and manage stress? Are you ready to learn more about these techniques and how other women have incorporated them into their lives?

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

If youve answered yes to any of those questions, youve come to the right place. Consider this book your resource for managing and banishing stress. First, however, you will need to identify the stressors in your life. Sure, you think you know them all, but you may be surprised at what youre hiding from yourself! Therefore, part of the goal of part 1, Understand Your Stress, is being honest with yourself and about your stress. In these first two chapters, you will learn (1) why women experience so much stress in their lives, (2) how to identify the stressors in your own life, (3) about DROP, a new perspective that can help you eliminate or manage the stress in your life, (4) what perceived stress is and how it affects your health, and (5) about the toll chronic stress can take not only on your mind but on your body and spirit as well.

Then in part 2, Manage (and Banish) Your Stress, you will learn how you and other women can cope with and manage stress in many different ways that will fit into your current lifestyle, perhaps using techniques you never imagined. Before you even start part 2, I will ask you to make a plan using what you already learned in part 1 about identifying and eliminating stress. The plan will incorporate many of the stress-reducing tools explained throughout the seven steps in part 2. Each step also shares stress-reducing plans other women have used to restore balance and sanity to their lives, providing you with ideas you can consider as well.

PART 1

Understand Your Stress

How well do you understand stress? Although stress is something you experience every day to one degree or another, it is much more than a response to situations, people, or other things in your life that keep you feeling tense, frazzled, or on edge.

In fact, the roots of stress go deep, and the results often branch out and impact every corner of your life. Before you can effectively face, manage, and banish the stranglehold stress may have on your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being, you need to better understand this thing called stress. Thats the purpose of part 1.

CHAPTER 1

Why Women Are So Stressed

On the surface, the questions Why are women so stressed? or What causes stress in women? may seem easy to answer. My kids and their demands stress me out. I have too much to do and not enough time to do it! I dont know, but I just seem to be crazy busy! I cant find the time to relax! My life is unmanageable. These are some of the common responses to these questions, but do these comments really answer the questions?

Yet often women need to go beneath the surface and dig out the real stressors in their lives. This is a critical first step, because you cant work to eliminate or manage the stress-producing or stress-triggering events or circumstances in your life if you dont know what they are. To accurately identify the stressors in your life, you need to be completely honest with yourself and your feelings and this self-examination may not be comfortable at first. But is living with chronic stress comfortable? No! As you probably already know, the first step is the hardest, but I know you can do it!

This chapter has two goals: help you and other women identify why you feel so stressed, and introduce a way to eliminate stress using the DROP approach. (Theres a detailed discussion of DROP later in this chapter.) So get ready to understand the anatomy and natural process of stress, to identify the stressors in your life, and how you can start to eliminate and/or manage them in effective, healthful, and enjoyable ways.

WHAT IS STRESS?

We all know what stress is, right? Not having enough time to do everything you need to accomplish, bills you cant afford to pay, sitting in traffic jams, going through a divorce, losing a loved one, having your car break down, losing your job. True, all of these can be stressful situations, but everyone responds to circumstances such as these in a different way or, more precisely, to varying degrees.

Tara, for example, a forty-five-year-old claims adjuster, unexpectedly lost her job during a recent restructuring of her company. Stressful? It could have been, but Tara, who had been thinking seriously about moving from Ohio and applying for several positions in North Carolina near her sister and family said it was the kick in the butt she needed. A week before I lost my job, my sister sent me an e-mail and asked me what it was going to take to get me to make up my mind, that she had several job opportunities for me. Well, losing my job was what it took!