What is Holistic Stress Management and Why it is Important
You’re stressed and you’ve been told to ‘just relax’. Helpful 🙄. The thing that you are least likely to be able to do when you’re stressed and overwhelmed is to relax. You probably wouldn’t know where to start.
You tell someone that you’re stressed and they tell you that the answer is to stop drinking. ‘You should definitely quit the bottle of wine you’re sinking nightly just to get through the week' or 'Why don't you swap the gin for peppermint tea?’
Hmmm, yeah, right. Though it would undoubtedly help, it wouldn’t solve everything.
‘Try going to the gym after work to sweat out the stress of the day.' Though it’s true that we sweat out cortisol (stress hormone) and we should be exercising regularly, high intensity exercise actually stimulates production of cortisol as well. That aside, if you feel anywhere remotely able to go to the gym after a stressful day at work then you’re doing well. For most people there is Just. No. Way.
I cannot reiterate enough that, when you are in a state of chronic stress, making changes is hard. Especially when you’re trying to do it on your own. And often the changes that you need to make are the things that you perceive to be helping or getting you through.
Having suffered with workplace and emotional stress for 20 years, I can say wholeheartedly that just changing one thing, though it may go someway to helping, will not alleviate your stress levels long term and it will not set you up to be able to manage what life throws at you. Changing one thing won’t build your resilience and change your stress response. There is no single magic bullet when it comes to dealing with stress.
‘Holistic’, put simply, means 'whole'. My approach to stress management is ‘holistic’ or ‘multi-modal’ meaning that we focus on all aspects of life in order to bring balance to support your wellbeing. We target stress from all angles. Traditional Life Coaching techniques, time-management tools and working on improved cognition are just some of the aspects we focus on. Making beneficial lifestyle changes supports our ability to cope with demands put on us and enables us to take on, and achieve, more.
We look at work/life balance and how much time we are making for ourselves. In today’s world it is commonplace for us to rush around and not be aware of what we need. It is also normal for us to ignore what we need because we’re too busy and often giving others all of our attention first. By managing our time and actually slowing down, we can get more done. My ultimate aim as your Stress Management Coach is for me to help you to become more in tune with your body so that you recognise what you need and when. That way you can prevent stress and respond appropriately to how you’re feeling. When we listen to what is going on, how we’re feeling and what we need, we get the answers. We can relax, become more focussed, more productive and importantly, much happier.
Everyone is different with differing stress levels and different triggers. There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to stress management. Stress management is about learning techniques which build your resilience. It is personal. After our coaching sessions you will go away armed with your own toolkit that you can use whenever you feel you need to.
If you need help dealing with stress, please get in touch for a chat.
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