Handling Your Stress Is Crucial to Maintaining Your Relationships
When stress gets too much to handle, you may find yourself railing at those you love, work with, and have casual contact with for no reason. Eventually, stress can affect your health if you don’t learn how to manage it.
You may spend hours a day dealing with work stressors, such as meeting deadlines and catering to the needs of your coworkers and clients. So it’s no wonder that stress overflows into other relationships and circumstances when you leave work and finally have the opportunity to vent.
Recent research indicates that work-related stress is the most prevalent cause of unhappiness in other relationships. It becomes a vicious cycle because when you have relationship problems, it also affects your work.
Learning how to handle stress in all areas of your life would be best. If not, it can have far-reaching and profound effects on those you love and are around most of the day. And it can eventually affect your health and well-being.
How Stress Affects Your Behavior
Stress may affect your behavior toward yourself and others, so you may be unable to rescue the relationships. Work stress can hurt your bond with those you love and vice-versa.
You carry work stress home because it’s not usually resolved at work, and you need a place to vent. Unfortunately, that place usually becomes your home; the person is your spouse or loved one.
Even though it may not be your intention, the person you’re venting to about work may feel like he is being attacked. It can hurt the bond with your partner in many ways – even in the bedroom – by killing your libido.
Stress can make you have a shorter fuse so that you blow up about little things in a way that intimidates others. As a result, your partner, kids, and others around you will avoid being around you.
Your behavior at work may also change because of work or relationship stress. Work-related stress can come from many areas – coworkers, clients, long and annoying traffic commutes, and deadlines that never seem to ease up.
Identify the sources of stress in your life.
Stressors in relationships, such as finances, love on the rocks, lack of sleep, and anxieties resulting from relationships and having kids, can also wreak havoc on how you handle stress.
Too much stress may affect your mood and cause a lack of focus or motivation in your everyday plans. You may also feel overwhelmed, restless, anxious, sad, or depressed. Irritability with others may ensue, and they could lose the ability to converse about stress because of anger and mood swings.
Stress may also cause you to turn to alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes. Or, you may binge eat or not eat at all, causing severe nutrition-related health problems. Social withdrawal is also a problem that occurs when stress is overwhelming.
When these red flags appear, and you feel your relationships crumble in front of you, it’s time to think about ways to manage the stress, salvage relationships, and prevent the pressure from becoming chronic health problems.
How Stress Impacts You and Others
You’ve experienced it before. You’re having a perfectly wonderful day, and then someone’s irritability and negativity impact your happy mood and make a dark cloud cover your day.
It’s called secondhand stress, and you can be a victim of it – or be the cause of it for others. Negativity and grumpiness are contagious, and the stress is passed on to others like a virus that makes you sick.
Unless you reveal that you can change someone’s day from happy to irritable, it’s best to know how to manage your stress before it becomes someone else’s.
Stress is every day and can be positive. It makes the adrenalin flow when you need it to meet deadlines and be somewhere on time, but it can also make you anxious and angry and affect your health.
Some stress-management techniques are in order if your stress is getting to the level it’s affecting you and the people around you. Stress-management styles come in many forms, and it’s up to you to find one that works for your psyche.
Your stress may come from worrying about your physical health. When you have health problems, smiling and dealing with others is sometimes difficult. But, you can get help dealing with them and healing, not forcing that stress on others.
Learn to identify your triggers of stress. Triggers might include traffic jams, rudeness of people you’re dealing with, loud noises, or even conversations about subjects you feel strongly about. When you know your triggers, think about how they make you feel – emotionally and physically.
When you develop coping skills to deal with stress, you can calm your mind and body when one of these stressors threatens to destroy your mood. Then, as you continue to develop stress-management techniques, you can nip it in the bud before your mood changes and affects your relationships.
When Stress Strikes – Dealing with It
Before stress overcomes all your good intentions of maintaining a good mood and a great outlook on life, you should know some techniques for dealing with it. It may take practice, but eventually, you’ll be able to gain control with some of the methods you learn quickly.
Visual imagery and deep breathing exercises can help when you’re annoyed with traffic or circumstances beyond your control – like standing in line with a coworker chatting in the break room rather than working to meet a deadline.
Together, these two techniques will physiologically calm your nerves by increasing oxygen to the brain. As a result, you’ll be able to focus and think with clarity rather than letting your temper get out of hand and affect others.
Become self-aware of the situations in your life that can stress you out. Of course, it may be others who are to blame for your stress – but you don’t have to catch the stress virus so that it will affect others in your life.
Managing Expectations
Besides deep breathing and visual imagery, you can keep stress from becoming overwhelming by assessing your expectations of the world. For example, you may expect traffic to run smoothly during rush hour, but realistically, that’s likely to happen elsewhere.
When you base your expectations of the world on ways that don’t reflect reality, you’ll be disappointed, surprised, and stressed. So, you know there will likely be traffic. So, what can you do to counteract the effect?
Listening to a self-motivation book or calming music might solve traffic jams. With all the modern technology available in our cars, using something that gets your mind off being stuck should be easy.
Practice gratitude thinking. When you’re grateful, dopamine is released in the brain. Dopamine is the happiness hormone that reduces stress hormones such as cortisol.
The brain releases the serotonin hormone when you take a negative situation and reframe it with a positive attitude. Serotonin is the calming hormone that can quickly balance feelings and mood swings.
For example, failing to meet a goal can be reframed in a way that teaches you something valuable rather than making you think of the situation as a failure. Successful people learn the most from their losses.
Get Active
When you’re stressed, your energy level plummets. Physical exercise can help put endorphins back in the body to shore up energy levels – and a healthy diet can boost the effects of exercise.
Words are the most potent form of communication we can use with others. When you use positive words, the hormone oxytocin is released, helping you build social ties and promoting optimism when dealing with others.
Managing your mental health can help you react to stressful situations more positively. Those around you will respond by being happy to see and be around you. Likewise, you will be more comfortable and healthier when surrounded by successful relationships.
Stress Management: Setting Boundaries
Boundaries between work and personal life are essential to keep stress levels down and life running as smoothly as possible. Why do so many of us have difficulty putting them if they’re so important?
Even at home, when you should devote your time to personal or family pursuits, you may have to answer work emails or work on a project that needs more time.
Or, your personal life might trickle into your work. For example, you may do personal, online shopping during work hours – or take off early to go to your child’s game. If this happens often, you risk losing productivity hours and your workplace status.
Failing to set and maintain boundaries between work and home can be lethal. While there are bound to be discrepancies and lines may become blurred at times. Time management is the all-important tool in ensuring that one part of your life becomes manageable in the other.
When you determine to manage your time to get everything done, it involves creating a schedule. After that, you’ll have everything in writing that sums up the boundaries between work and home, and the guidelines are easy to see and understand.
Research shows that those who write down daily tasks are eighty percent more likely to achieve their goals. For example, when you have a schedule that lists five work tasks you must accomplish for that day, cross each off as you complete them to get more of a productive vibe.
After your daily, weekly, and monthly schedule, communicate your intentions to others (work and home). Be clear that you expect to meet these boundaries, and others will more likely conform.
How to Maintain Boundaries Between Work and Personal Life
If your work colleagues have become used to you communicating with them on weekends, a state in no uncertain terms that you won’t be available because you’re devoting your weekends to family time. You won’t feel the guilt of ignoring coworkers because they’ll know your plan.
Make yourself accountable for the boundaries you set. Ask for help from others if needed – like asking your colleagues to remind you of your commitment to your family on the weekends if you should call to discuss work.
Check yourself occasionally to tune in to what’s happening in your life. Are you enjoying it more because you’ve set boundaries and kept them strong? If not, look at what’s happening in your life and take steps to renew and reset the boundaries.
We’re not alike, so keep your limitations in mind and know that your boundaries won’t be like everyone else’s. For example, it may not be practical to schedule one night per week of only relaxation – especially if you have kids with busy schedules.
You will only do some things perfectly in the quest to balance your home and work lives. For example, you’ll occasionally check your email on vacation and peruse Facebook at work.
When it becomes challenging to draw the lines between work and personal life, stress may affect relationships, career, and emotional health. That’s why it’s essential to recognize the signs of anxiety (and secondhand stress) before it becomes overwhelming.
By using stress management techniques and setting appropriate boundaries between work and home life, you will finally be able to move forward and become successful on your terms by working with others rather than against them.
Benefits of Healthy Boundaries
Setting healthy boundaries at work and home makes it possible to build your self-esteem and eliminate fears that have prevented you from succeeding. In addition, you’ll be honoring yourself and able to develop healthier connections with others in life.
Recognize your limitations and work within those lines. Set the boundaries between work and home that work best for you. Know that your limits aren’t cast in stone, and change them when necessary. Eventually, you’ll find a plan that works for you.
Acting from a place of love rather than fear can help you set healthy boundaries. By implementing a schedule and communicating with others about the boundaries you have set for yourself, you can create a positive environment for both work and personal.
