Getting to grips with the Locust of Control

The locust of control - naturalists, don’t look too closely, it may be a grasshopper!

When things are bugging you, it’s well worth hopping to it and working on this quick, simple task about your locus of control. That’s locus, not locust, and I promise not to plague you with any more bad jokes based on the similarity between the two. ;-)

What is locus of control?

It’s all to do with how much control you have over something - I use it a lot with clients when looking at things they can do to improve their health, fitness or wellbeing, and in particular when discussing stress management. That’s because one of the main aspects of feeling stressed is that we can feel out of control - anything that helps to tip the scales back in our favour a little bit can be helpful.

There are two parts to your locus of control:

1. External locus - This is the stuff that’s impacting your health, fitness or stress levels that you have no control over. You can’t change it or do anything about it.

2. Internal locus - This is the stuff that you absolutely can do something about; the things you have the power to change.

Taking back control

For the following task, I’ve used stress as the example, partly because as I’ve already mentioned, long-term stress is often connected with feeling out of control, and partly because I know many of us are finding things challenging right now.

You can use it for any health, fitness or wellbeing goal you have though, and in fact, in any aspect of your life where you want to make some changes.

Step 1: Identify the things not in your control

There will always be things we can’t do anything about. With someone struggling with stress, this might be things like:

• Health issues for a loved one

• An existing medical condition of their own

• The state of the economy and possibly even the financial situation of the company you work for

• What the housing market is doing if you’re trying to sell your house

• A worldwide pandemic of a previously unheard of virus

Make a list of the things that could affect your goal that you feel you can’t do anything about.

Step 2: Practice acceptance

I’m not saying this is easy and it won’t work all the time, but if there are things you can’t control or do anything about, there’s no point worrying about them. I’m well aware that this isn’t how stress and anxiety works - it’s not rational and we can worry about things when we know there’s no need. It is still worth practising the art of acceptance though. The same goes for health too - our age, gender, genetics and more can all affect our health and we can’t control them, so we just have to keep practising acceptance that that’s the case.

The simple act of making the list of these things can help you to realise that they’re not within your power and help you to begin letting go some of the worries you have about them. Practising acceptance of them does also, in a strange way, give you more control over them, proving that nothing is truly out of your power to influence positively.

Step 3: Focus on your internal locus

Now it’s time to make your list of the things that are within your control; the things you can do something about to help you achieve your goal. This is the foundation of all of the work we do here at balance - recognising that so much of our health and wellbeing is within our reach by doing the right things. There’s plenty of research to show that the more in control you feel, the better you feel about your wellbeing - you start to see yourself as the pilot of your own destiny.

For stress, this might be things such as exercise, practising coping mechanisms like meditation or breathing techniques, getting into nature, listening to your favourite music and so on.

Whatever your goal, write your list now. Start it as broad as possible - no idea is a bad idea, just get it down as it may well come in useful.

You’ve now got an action plan of things you can do to help yourself, which can feel incredibly empowering.

It can also feel a little overwhelming, as you might have a number of things on your list and not know where to start. Here’s my advice on how to deal with this:

1. Pick the easiest thing on the list to do first

2. Focus on this one thing until you feel you’re on top of it, before picking the next easiest, and so on.

Picking something easy guarantees a quick win, and quick wins will give you a good boost of dopamine, providing the motivation to move onto the next one and keep the ball rolling. It’s that snowball effect; you start small and once it’s rolling, it keeps picking up pace and size and all of a sudden, it’s no longer difficult to do these helpful things, in fact, it’s hard to stop doing them and you feel great!

We’re often tempted to go with the biggest change first, or the one we feel the most pressure to change, like we think that’s what others would expect us to work on, but start simple and get into the habit of being successful.

Step 4: Maintaining momentum

Changing just one or two things on your list might be enough to help you achieve what you’re after, so it’s entirely up to you how many things you work on over time - it’s all about finding the right balance for you. Do consider that it’s always good to have a goal and to be challenging yourself - it’s what gives us the motivation to improve.

If you do happen to master all of the things on your internal locus list, you can always revisit your external locus list and see if there’s anything on there that you now feel you have more power to be able to change for the better..

Coming back to this task frequently and over time, gradully building the size of your internal locus list will allow you to feel like you are more in control of your own destiny. And with more control, comes less stress and a feeling of balance.

Seven reasons why we love books!

It’s World Book Day and as you know, we are absolute book fiends! The feel of the cover, the sound when the pages turn, the joy of getting completely lost inside a written world, there’s so much to shout about so let’s celebrate the wonderful book with a look at the many benefits to be gained by reading.

Relaxation: Books are a wonderful source of escape. Whether you’re climbing through those wardrobe doors into Narnia or summiting Everest with your favourite explorer, they help you to get away from the stresses and strains of life, maybe just for ten minutes or maybe an entire rainy Sunday morning. In 2009, a group of American researchers tested the effects of 30 minutes of either reading, yoga or comedy on stress levels. All three significantly reduced acute stress levels by a similar amount, lowering both heart rate and blood pressure in what is a relatively short period of time; great news for book lovers.

Escape from screens and technology: There’s something so different about reading on paper compared to a screen; maybe it’s the lack of brightness and glare, maybe it’s just the fact that so much of our lives these days is a marriage of our eyes and a luminescent screen. Whatever it is, books help you to feel like you’ve escaped to a bygone era, one where the world moves at a slower pace, everybody knows each other and still says good morning, one where the words ‘Brexit’ and ‘Coronavirus’ sound like the gibberish nonsense of an alien being recently crash-landed just outside the village.

Stories and adventures: books are like keys to the imagination, unlocking doors to incredible and unthought of possibilities, opening your mind to facts, ideas and plots beyond your wildest dreams. Through millennia the human brain has thrived on storytelling to pass on fables of quests, incredible feats, pride in our ancestry and just sheer imagination. For much of that time we had to rely on the spoken word but the book opened up the possibility of sharing those stories and ideas with so many more people. Interestingly, some studies have shown that reading fiction books can help improve a person’s empathy skills, possibly because the book takes the person deep into the thoughts and feelings of another character.

Learning: books teach us so much; non-fiction gives us facts, knowledge, records of people’s experiences and ideas for the future, but fiction can teach us many things too - to think in different ways, about politics, religion, love, art, crime and much more all through a cleverly woven story and all books broaden our language skills, introducing us to phrases, sayings, expressions, other languages, grammar and more besides.

Brain function: I don’t know about you but I always feel so much better able to concentrate through reading; to immerse myself in one thing without interruptions. You don’t get that with technology, you try to read an article but get one of an abundance of different noises to signify a message from a friend, an email offering you the best sale prices on your favourite stuff, or alerts to tell you how many people liked your Facebook post earlier. Only in a book can you truly focus - it’s almost meditative in its quality, your eyes scanning the pages line after line, only occasionally looking away to check how many pages until the chapter ends and wondering when would be best to put it down before it draws you in ever deeper.

Sleep routine: reading an actual book before sleep is our nightly ritual - phones safely stored away in another room, it’s where we can truly start to unwind. And because it’s a habit (and you know how much I love those), our brains know that what comes after reading is sleep. It’s a cue that we use to set up a desired behaviour, a extension of Pavlov’s dogs…words on a page = time to snooze soon. One of the biggest wins of a book over an e-reader is that it doesn’t rely on blue light. The brightness of a screen stimulates the brain into essentially believing it is daytime and can increase levels of stress hormones, delaying sleep.

Pleasure: There’s just sheer joy to be had from reading a book; maybe it’s one you read as a child and reading it again, for yourself or to your children evokes memories of happy times. Maybe it’s the places it takes you; to the ends of the earth, alien worlds, a parallel universe or your favourite town or country, to the middle of nowhere or the centre of the busiest city on Earth. Maybe it’s the enjoyment you get from talking through the twists and turns of the plot with friends, maybe it’s the powerful feelings evoked by the writer; happiness, sadness, fear, passion, intrigue, or maybe it’s just the weight of the book in your hand, the smell of the paper or the fact that it signifies time just for you.

Whatever you love about books, keep reading, they’ll definitely help you to find your balance.

What our house will look like one day!

Have a little.....................………patience

The stripes would fill the screen, constantly changing colour, accompanied by the noise; a mix of screeching, beeping and static, like some sort of futuristic rave. There were no drugs involved here, just the simple insertion of a cassette tape into the Spectrum ZX. The hope was that at some point in the future, it would finish loading and I’d get to enjoy the modern wonder that was the home computer game. Sadly, this didn’t always happen; with personal computers in their infancy, the error screen (like the one above) was all too common. When this happened, my mom would simply say ‘never mind, you’ll have to play it tomorrow instead.’

And this way I learned the art of patience. Fast forward 30 years and that art is all but lost. The mobile phone, not much larger than a credit card, has 15 times more memory than the Spectrum, is thousands of times quicker and more powerful, and with the advent of the internet, means that almost anything is available in seconds at the touch of a button. Where shall we eat later? Who played that character in Lord of the Rings? When can I get that delivered by? Oh, it’ll be here this afternoon.

We live in an instant world and it’s reflected in our behaviours and attitudes. We’re frustrated when we see the dreaded buffering symbol, when the image pauses, even briefly, whilst streaming a video. We send texts, emails and WhatsApp messages and don’t feel it’s unreasonable to expect an instant reply. Our phones tell us when a message has been read and when someone is online, making us irritated when the person appears to be ignoring us. We have no idea of course what they might be up to at that moment; they could be working, spending time with their family, delivering a baby by the side of the road or saving the planet, but we’re free so they should be too.

But wait, there’s power in patience

Take That told us to have a little, Yoda informed Luke that he must work on it and Guinness said that if we could wait for just under two minutes, good things would come. Science suggests they may well be right.

In 2007, Sarah Schnitker and Robert Emmons showed that people who demonstrated more patience tended to experience less depression and negative emotions, possibly because they could cope better in times of stress. The same authors showed in a separate study that people who demonstrate more patience towards others were more hopeful and satisfied with their lives. Those who get less stressed by traffic jams, queuing and malfunctioning technology also report better mental wellbeing in general.

In a 2012 study, patient people reported putting in more effort and making more progress towards important life goals, and it’s even been linked to less incidents of ill health; coughs and colds, ulcers, headaches, acne and poor sleep. At a physiological level, this may be because they have a better balance in their autonomic nervous system. One half is made up of the well-known, ‘fight or flight’ response, known more technically as your sympathetic nervous system and responsible for the increase in hormones like adrenaline during times of stress. This should be balanced by the parasympathetic nervous branch, your ‘rest and digest’ system, that releases hormones like melatonin to help you sleep, repair and recover. When these systems are not well balanced and you’re spending more time on your accelerator and less on the brake, you’re more likely to suffer physical and mental health issues.

Worth the wait

Back to my Spectrum ZX; I remember the joy and excitement when the game had finally loaded. It was extra special because I’d had to wait for it and because there was always that chance that I wouldn’t get to play Space Invaders or Manic Miner. When you think about it, there are countless wonderful examples of where patience is just better…

• Opening your Christmas or birthday presents without already knowing what they are

• That feeling when the ketchup finally starts to drip out of the bottle and onto your plate, even though the palm of your hand is a little sore from all the tapping

• When you counted the cash in your money box and you were finally able to afford the toy/sweets you so desperately wanted

• Waiting for a letter from your friend in response to the one you sent them ages ago

• The first leaves growing on the plant you’ve been caring for from a seed

• The day you notice those muscles poking through underneath your skin, a little more defined than before for sure, or when you get up that hill without stopping and it takes you by surprise.

What about you? Can you think of things that were just more enjoyable when you’d waited?

Getting fitter and healthier requires plenty of patience, firstly to get there, and secondly to keep it up. If you haven’t been active for a while, changes can happen relatively quickly to begin with, but the fitter you are the slower this change becomes and you’ll have to test those Jedi mind powers to the max. Always remember, your health is the sum of your most frequent, recent habits. You can’t get fitter and then just stop, it doesn’t work like that. Your health, fitness and wellbeing is a lifelong quest and the going isn’t always easy, patience is a must.

How do you stay patient?

In his brilliant book, Misbehaving, Richard Thaler discusses the infamous ‘Marshmallow Test’. In a series of scientific studies, children were offered either one marshmallow (or cookie) now, or they could have three if they waited for 15 minutes. Agonisingly, they were then left alone in the room with the single sugary treat calling to them, tempting them to scoff it down. And of course, many did. Thaler points out that if they’d been offered one cookie at 3pm tomorrow, or three at 3:15, they’d have no problem in waiting the extra quarter of an hour. It’s the immediacy of it that makes it challenging; they can have it NOW…so they do.

The human brain isn’t particularly good at waiting when it can get instant gratification and that’s an important message. It means that if there’s an option to eat all the sugary treats straight away, you probably will. Willpower works on making yourself feel bad for wanting to eat it all and guilt isn’t always the best motivator. Thaler gives the example of a man trapped on a desert island after a plane crash, with only ten energy bars for sustenance. In an ideal world he says, he’d have ten safes each locked and set to a timer, meaning only one bar would be released each day. That’s not the case on a desert island though, so he has to use willpower to restrict himself to just one each day, reminding himself about the long-term benefits of doing so, But our brains aren’t wired that way; studies where people are offered a set amount of money now, say £100, or £120 in a month’s time, often find that people take what’s on offer straight away.

What does this mean for you?

• If you buy lots of sweets, biscuits or crisps, you’ll probably eat them all more quickly than if you just bought one smaller portion at a time

• You have to set up the environment to make it less convenient for you to eat too much or poorly - portion things out into individual containers or even place them in different cupboards. Make it less simple to over consume. As well as being impatient, we’re also lazy. Studies have shown we’ll eat less peanuts if we have to shell them, so buying things like chocolates in individual wrappers will likely mean we eat less.

• When it comes to wanting to achieve big goals quickly, our impatience will often lead us to seek quick fixes, even when we know they’re not healthy and they probably won’t last.

Utilise the psychological tools I talk about so frequently, split the big goal down into smaller chunks and focus only on that. Watch how professional sportspeople talk about taking one game, round or stage at a time. They want the big prize, but they know that patience is the way to get it.

Involve someone else to assist you. Give them your portions of food treats to look after and ration out for you, or report your daily exercise or eating/drinking to them.

Put up visual prompts to remind you what you’re working towards. Bring it back to the forefront of your mind at every opportunity, or else it’ll fall somewhere down the pecking order, likely behind that big glass of wine.

And in life in general, next time you can’t remember what film that guy was in, leave your phone in your pocket and stay in the present enjoying the conversation with your friend or partner. When you’re stuck in traffic, take a breath, put a song on the radio, relax and remember that good things come to those who wait.

A balanced approach to IT rage

Technology is wonderful, but these days we have so much if it and use it so often, that occasionally it won’t work as well as we want it to. I can rarely go a week without some sort of issue with computer, phone, iPad or watch and it leaves me feeling like IT is s*IT. It also leaves me feeling frustrated, stressed and angry, so I thought I’d share with you a few ways that we can all manage our IT rage.

1) First of all, try not to do this.

It’s probably going to be a very costly way of getting your stress levels down.

2) What about swearing and shouting?

There are mixed theories on this. One side of the argument suggests that it’s better to let your anger out, but a lot of recent work suggests that it can in fact make anger a learned behaviour, the way you respond when something stressful happens. I’ll be honest, this was my common response when my laptop crashed or phone froze and I lost a big piece of work I’d been doing in the process. Hearing me go nuts at my computer however was not a very pleasant thing for Vicky to experience and so I’ve been working on some alternative solutions.

3) Walk away

If your computer has frozen or isn’t doing what it should, get up and make yourself a cup of tea (a good brew solves plenty of problems), do another task or even go for a short walk. Moderate exercise is great for stress management, especially if you get outside as it can burn off some of the excess adrenaline you’ve built up and being in natural surroundings is known to relax you and improve your mood. When you come back, the problem may or may not have resolved itself, but even if it hasn’t, you’ll find the urge to break the Laptop Shot-put world record may have subsided.

4) Re-boot

In a similar vein to walking away, shutting down and re-starting can have a positive effect. It’s the golden solution to many IT problems anyway, but it also just allows you a pause to calm down a little.

5) Plan ahead

One of the best things I’ve done to make IT failures less stressful is to put in place a series of back-ups to prevent it being a problem. This ranges from more technological solutions like storing back-ups of all files in the mysterious and ethereal ‘cloud’, changing settings to ensure documents are auto-saved as frequently as possible and can be restored and updating software more often, to more simple techniques like copying text from any post I’m about to make to Facebook in case it freezes and I lose it. Even if it does go wrong, it then doesn’t take much to recover or re-do what I was working on.

6) Try some progressive relaxation

Starting at your shoulders, tense them as much as you can for a couple of seconds, then breathe out slowly and focus on relaxing them as you do so. Work down your body, one muscle group at a time; spend a few minutes doing this and you’ll be feeling calmer in no time.

7) Laugh

Watch or listen to a few minutes of comedy; the hormones released can help to leave you feeling better already. Alternately, joke to a family member, friend or colleague about the situation, it may help to take the tension out of the situation.

8) Reframe

More than anything, what we can all probably do better these days is realise that more often that not it just isn’t the end of the world. We can re-do whatever we were working on, we can sometimes recover lost files and it often spurs us into doing something to prevent it happening again in future or trying a different approach. Frame it as learning rather than an annoyance and you may find it helpful instead.

Do any one of these and you’re on the way to slightly better balance.

Paul :-)

Six steps to sleep soundly through a sizzling summer

Higher temperatures make getting a good night's sleep much tougher. Here are six steps you can take to snooze a little better through the warm nights...

1) Keep the curtains closed in the day

Blocking out sunlight can help keep room temperature down. Better still, invest in blackout curtains so that you'll also be able to block out light at night too. Any light source, no matter how small, can cause you body to produce hormones associated with alertness, leaving you wide awake.

2) Shower before bedtime

Use tepid water to help cool your body down. Sleep is a time when we move from the more active (higher temperatures) of the day to the more restful (lower temperatures) of rest and recovery. It'll also leave you feeling clean and comfortable and help you to relax.

3) Invest in a fan

High quality fans can be used to lower the room temperature, and provide a source of white noise, which is known to help you nod off. You can also place them by windows to push hot air out and even stick a pop bottle full of water in the freezer until it's a solid block of ice, then place in front of the fan to drive temperatures down.

4) Opt for less layers

That means bedding and clothes. As mentioned earlier, you want to be cool to sleep well. That high tog duvet you bought for the winter is no use on a balmy summer's night. Instead, use multiple thinner layers and strip off the ones you don't need for warmer nights. On the warmest nights, often just a sheet will do. The same with your PJ's, swap out those flannel trousers for something a bit more comfortable, or you can always go 'au naturel'.

5) Go low

Warm air rises so the nearer to the ground you are, the cooler you'll be. In his book 'Sleep: The myth of 8 hours, the power of naps and the new plan to recharge your body and mind', sleep coach to the world's sporting stars Nick Littlehales suggests that you don't even need a bed, just a comfortable mattress that fits your body's needs.

There's no need to throw the frame out just yet; simply consider using airbeds or bedding on the floor if you're really struggling on hotter nights.

6) Try sleeping outside

Summer is the perfect time of year to have a little adventure; go camping or simply sleep in the back garden with the kids for a little adventure. The air is fresher and you'll feel refreshed and recharged because you've re-synced your body with its natural rhythms of daylight and darkness. Just don't go for the 'au naturel' option suggested earlier unless you've got really high fences, or you may prevent your neighbours from sleeping for months!

Try just one of these to start with and hopefully you'll feel less like this...

And more like this...

Five ways to get a better night's sleep

Sleep does all sorts of wonderful things for your mind and body, yet according to the National Sleep Council, nearly half of the population get less than six hours sleep each night and four in five feel their sleep is disturbed, inadequate or extremely bad.

So here's five handy little tips to help you find better balance with your snoozing...

1) Get into a rhythm. 

Setting a routine for your day with consistent wake-up and bed times helps to train your body and mind. All of us have an in-built body clock, known as our Circadian Rhythm, and by being consistent with when we do things, we help to set our system to naturally wake up and fall asleep when we want it to. It's essentially like writing code for a computer programme.

2) Go dark

Light is a stimulant to you body in much the same way that caffeine is. When your eyes and skin cells detect bright light, they think it must be coming from that giant ball in the sky and that it's time to get up and move around. That's because for the vast majority of time our species has spent on the planet, lightbulbs, computers, iPhones and Kindles didn't exist. The problem now is that these advances in technology are tricking your brain into believing it's time to switch on, when late in the evening the exact opposite is true. Here are a few ideas to help your body to know it's bedtime:

• Set your electronic devices to dim in the evening.

• Better still, set yourself an electronic device curfew time of a couple of hours before bed

• Get yourself a set of blackout blinds or curtains for your room

• Dim the light switches later in the evening

• Read a paperback occasionally instead of always using an e-reader (then recycle it of course)

3) Cut down on the stimulants later in the day

Your body actually starts to wind down for bed mid-late afternoon, so cutting out teas, coffees, energy drinks and high sugar foods after around 4pm can help you to prepare for a good night's kip.

4) Relax

Many of us find it hard to sleep as our brains are still whirring away with thoughts of the day; work deadlines, family pressures, money and everything else that makes life so busy. I know only too well that I can sit working late into the night and when I go to bed, my mind is still running through what I've been doing and what's next. Much like screen-time deadlines and closely linked, it's worth setting a curfew time for work. Choose an enjoyable task to do afterwards; read, listen to music, take a bath, enjoy a hobby, meditate, whatever it is that works for you.

5) Boost your melatonin

Your what? It's a hormone your body produces naturally that is strongly associated with sleep. As the day wears on, levels of a stress hormone named cortisol decrease, largely because the time when you are supposed to have gone and done all of your hard work has finished. As this happens, melatonin increases, helping to relax your body and begin the process of repair and recovery. It's a wonderful system when it works well, hormones acting in pairs to balance each other out nicely.

Darkness is known to boost melatonin levels, so following the tips in point 2 will help, but you might also get some benefits from nutrition too. Certain foods are high in a protein called Tryptophan and this is the thing your body uses to make melatonin. The research is still hit and miss, but the theory is that if you increase Tryptophan levels, you may just boost melatonin and therefore improve sleep. Try these as part of little evening snacks to see if they make any difference for you:

• Milk

• Turkey

• Cheese

• Lettuce

• Wholemeal bread

Summary

Hopefully there are a few helpful tips there to help you find better balance. As always, we'd suggest choosing just one to try first so that you can successfully embed it into your daily routines. Any questions, feel free to post here or get in touch.

Sleep well,

Paul and the balance team :-) 

Stressed? Here's how to find some balance.

Do you often feel stressed? How do you know? What do you feel? How do you feel? What do you see and hear?

The word stress is one that you’ll probably hear many times these days, but its meaning is probably more complex and controversial than you may imagine.

The word stress comes from the Latin word stringere, meaning to draw tight. This is a good analogy, as it’s true meaning is to put strain on something. When thinking of it in relation to you, it relates to anything that challenges your body and takes it out of its comfort zone. This could be a mental stress, challenging your brain, a physical stress challenging your body, or both.

When most people think of and use the word stress these days, it generally carries a negative meaning, yet that does not always have to be the case. There are in fact two distinct types of stress:

Eustress

This is good stress. What’s that you say? How can stress be good? Well let’s look at a few examples.

Exercise - you know it’s good for you, or you do if you’ve been reading the balance blog and Facebook posts! Exercise involves physical exertion, placing stress upon your body. In fact, one of the key principles of exercise that any fitness professional can tell you about is called overload. In simple terms, your body will not adapt and get fitter unless you challenge it. Why would it? If you’ve ever taken up exercise, you’ll know that feeling of discomfort in the first few sessions, then after a while you don’t find it so hard. You have stressed your body enough that it’s decided to change, primarily because it’s quite lazy and doesn’t want to have to work hard. Suddenly you find the same exercise session pretty easy, and the only way to get more changes from your body is, you guessed it, to work harder still. Of course, you need to do this sensibly and gradually or you place your body under too much stress and increase the likelihood of overtraining and injury.

Challenge - ever had a job that was just too easy and you were bored? Many of you will have experienced this and will have spent time trying to get promoted or looking for a career change. You’re basically trying deliberately to add more stress to yourself, but that’s because you need it and want it. Imagine if there was no challenge to life, what would be the motivation to continue? It could easily be argued that stress is actually what keeps you alive.

However, as with all things in life, it’s all about balance. Too much stress, or unwanted stresses can have a negative impact.

Distress

This is the term for bad stress, any stressor that puts your body under too much strain or has a negative effect. This is what most people think of when they use the term stress.

What causes distress?

• Work - being overworked, not enjoying your job, demanding deadlines, pressure passed on by your boss or by targets set for your team, bonus schemes, long hours, there’s a whole host of reasons why work can stress people both mentally and physically.

• Money - life these days can be expensive and throws up unexpected costs when the car breaks down or a utility bill is bigger than you thought.

• Family life - it’s hard to get on with the people you love all the time. Even when you do, you want to look after them and time apart, exam pressure for children, job interviews, university placements, holidays, illness and a million other things can make life feel complicated and stressful.

• Lack of sleep, too much exercise, exposure to electrical and chemical radiation, taking exams, and even sitting down place stresses on your body, the latter putting your knee joint under strain by tightening the muscles that attach around it.

Whether you are affected by stress (I mean distress) depends on a number of things:

1) Your balance of eustress and distress.

2) The coping mechanisms you have in place.

Let’s have a look at these and see what can be done. Firstly, it can be useful for you to identify all of the things that create good stress and bad stress in your life.

Make a list like the one below.

Eustress

• My gym visits

• Taking exams for my courses

• Rehearsing for a play that you’re going to be appearing in

• Preparing to go self-employed

Distress

• Lack of sleep

• Work pressures

• Getting the kids to school on time in the morning

• Flying on holiday next week and hate flying

• Fitting in visits to the family around after-school clubs, visits to the doctors, going shopping, picking up a prescription, posting your tax return on time and a million other things you struggle to make time for

• Spending 10 hours a day sat in front of a computer

Now you’ve got your list, don’t get stressed if you think you’ve missed something, you can add it at another time, it’s worth looking at the balance of good and bad and asking yourself two questions:

1) Can I add more things that will give me eustress to my life?

• Take up yoga or meditate

• Go for a walk outside at lunchtimes or at least get away from my desk more often

• Book a race to raise money for charity

• Spend time playing sports with my children

• Go to sleep half an hour earlier

These are just a few examples, you’ll have plenty of your own.

2) How can I manage or remove the things that cause me distress?

Some would call this stress management or stress reduction, you can call it distress disposal, Fred or whatever you like that makes most sense to you. Let’s choose one possible cause of distress and look at ways to reduce it; in this case the fear or hatred of flying. Hate is a strong word so it must be pretty stressful. What can you do to manage this stress?

1) Avoidance - in this case don’t fly. Go on holiday in the UK? Nah, no sunshine! Drive and take the ferry? Too far and would take up half the holiday.

2) Drink - many choose this as a way to remove stress as it makes them feel relaxed. You need to ask yourself though, is it a good method? One or two drinks may supply an instant feeling of relaxation as the alcohol acts on the nervous system, any more though and guess what, you’re actually placing your body under distress as it then has to cope with the increased level of toxins in the body and the dehydration. Your liver and other organs end up stressed and long-term this won’t be a good solution for removal of stress, you simply replace one stress with another. Some go even further in times of stress and take drugs, the consequences of which are much the same if not even more severe. Getting out of it is not a great way to get over it.

3) Distraction - I know, I’ll read a book, listen to music, do a puzzle, plan a presentation, schedule my exercise for the next 12 weeks before my race. This is a great option if it works, as it uses eustress methods to overcome distress.

4) Rationalise - I could read up about the statistical likelihood of being involved in a plane crash, and reassure myself that I’m far more at risk statistically when going for a walk than I am when flying.

5) Mind tricks - I could use hypnosis, have counselling, practice meditation or anything else that I thought may help me to overcome or allay my fears.

As you can see, I have options open to me and this is a good thing, as it means I can take action and do something. Try it for yourself, pick one of the things that cause you distress and make  list of methods you could use to remove or manage this. You can try them all or even use just one of them, it really is up to you. The key thing you need to ask yourself though is, will the things I have written down have a positive impact on the health of my mind and body, or will they cause me further distress? Opt for the ones that have a positive impact. Smoking, alcohol and junk foods are common ‘stress relief’ methods employed by millions of people across the world, but they’re not effective because they end up loading different and equally harmful stresses onto the body.

The advice above serves only to help you manage stresses you feel you are able to control without seeking further help. What you may have discovered by doing this task is that there are some stresses in your life that you feel are deep-seated, that you can’t think of a way to remove or that you feel are causing you real harm. If this is the case, you should seek medical advice in the first instance and then work with your GP to find suitable solutions to balance your stresses and improve your health. 

Let’s have a quick re-cap:

• Stress can be both good and bad for you. You need good stresses in your life to motivate you, but too much stress or negative stresses can affect you both physically and mentally.

• Spend time considering the balance of your good stress (eustress) and bad stress (distress). Do you need to take action to redress this?

• Add as many things to your life as you can that cause eustress - exercise, get outside, listen to music, dance, paint, read, have a bath, spend time with friends, go for promotion, set yourself a challenge, whatever it is that you personally find challenging but enjoyable.

• Identify ways in which you can manage or overcome things causing you distress. Sense check these to ensure that they themselves will not cause you further physical or mental distress. Choose realistic changes that will help bring you back into balance.

• Accept that 'stress’ is a part of your life, now and forever but recognise it is essential to your life. It will come and go, rise and fall, but you need to find the stress management techniques that work best for you.

• Always seek medical advice if you feel a stress is having a negative consequence on your mental or physical wellbeing. Your GP can discuss a range of options available to you that best suit your needs and circumstances.