Your work is important, but your health is more-so. This also includes your mental health, which is why many doctors will harp on being able to alleviate stress.
However, in order to do so, you need to be able to identify your stress triggers and learn to manage them. What are stress triggers, though? And what can you do once they’re identified?
I’ll give you the rundown on stress triggers and how to manage them in a healthy and efficient manner so you can live your best life.
What are Stress Triggers?
Triggers are situations, thoughts, environments, and events that can bring out a certain emotion or mood with ease. With that in mind, it only takes a hop, skip, and a jump to figure out what stress triggers may be; they’re things that can cause you stress. These can be anything from financial problems to the passing of a loved one to major life changes.
Everyone has different stress triggers because everyone is going through a dissimilar series of events with their own unique personality.
If you want to be aware of stress triggers, you need to know what stress signals are, as they are what identify a trigger.
These signals can include symptoms such as:
- Fatigue
- Headaches
- Irritability
- Anxiety
- Bodily tension
- Mood swings
- Depression
- Withdrawal
- Substance abuse
While triggers won’t have all these symptoms, they’re still major red flags that you should do a bit of introspection to see if you might be going through some underlying stress.
Managing Stress Triggers
There are two ways to manage your stress triggers: reducing them or adapting to them.
Reducing stress triggers are reserved for stressors that you can control in some way. It’s mitigating that which causes you stress, as well avoiding things that are guaranteed to cause you stress in the future. You can do this through practices such as:
- Setting boundaries
- Delegating and prioritizing tasks
- Setting realistic and achievable goals
- Saying “no” to overwhelming and unnecessary requests
- Avoiding taking on too much of a workload
- Avoiding people that upset you
- Avoiding situations that upset you
If the problem you have isn’t able to be mitigated or outright avoided, such as the death of a loved one or a sudden illness in the family, the best you can do is learn to adapt, which is when you change the way you respond to certain triggers.
You can learn to adapt through practices such as:
- Relaxations techniques like yoga or meditation
- Seeing social support
- Seeking professional support (i.e, a therapist)
- Reframing your perspective