Avoiding Daily Stress With 5 R's Strategy
It is proven that stress has a major effect on our overall health. In order to live the healthiest possible, people must find ways to eliminate or reduce the stress in their daily lives. The PowerPoint we are to reflect on provides a great method for coping with stress. According to the PowerPoint, adopting the 5 R’s is the best way to manage daily stress. These 5 “R’s” stand for reorganize, rethink, reduce, relax, and release. These “R’s” are different strategies that can be used together or independently to cope with stress.
The first “R “, reorganize, focuses on reorganizing yourself into a healthy, custom lifestyle. This strategy suggests the importance of making life easier on you. For instance, if you take things one at a time, plan events ahead of time, and do your best while letting go of the outcome, your stress/anxiety level will decrease significantly. By reorganizing your priorities you’re ultimately eliminating long term stress.
The next “R” strategy that can be used to cope with stress is rethink.
In order to rethink, a person must start from within. The rethink strategy is all about charging the positive energy within ourselves. By using daily affirmations, visualizing your goal, talking about negative feelings, or even journal writing we can change our way of thinking to help block the stress our of our minds. The third “R” used to shrink the stress is reduce. In order to reduce stress a person must be assertive and practice time management.
With this strategy you can either avoid or abolish a stressor. The next “R” mentioned is relax, and is another effective way to manage stress. This is probably the easiest strategy to implement. This strategy calls for play time and ultimately taking time out of the day to appreciate you. This strategy to me stresses to simple fact that life is short but sweet for certain, and we should stop and appreciate it. The last “R” in the 5 R’s model is release.
This can be achieved by walking the dog, taking a yoga class, hitting a pillow, or even screaming. Anyway to release the tension out of your body can greatly reduce the buildup of stress in the body. In my opinions these strategies are all interrelated. I try to use all of these strategies on a daily basis; however, there are two “R’s” that I have a hard time implementing in my daily stress struggle. Reorganizing and rethinking are the two strategies that I constantly need to remind myself to use. I think they are hard for me, because they are the two hardest strategies to make use of. It’s very hard sometimes to step back, take a look at the mess you created, and reorganize it. In the face paced world that we live in taking things slow isn’t really an option sometimes. For me one of the biggest stressors in my life is taking on too much.
I’ll have a big list of things to do, and they will all catch up to me at the same time. I know that I can reorganize and eliminate a lot of this stress by trying to tackle a problem one at a time and accepting the outcome as it falls. Rethink is also a difficult strategy for me. This is because I am usually very hard on myself even over the smallest things. All this inner negative dialogue eventually brings my anxiety level to a tipping point, and I freak out and have a break down. I try to counteract this process by meditating and being nicer to myself. I’m also learning that it’s ok to ask for help, and rely on others not to respond negatively to it. To conclude I think the 5 R’s model is a great bade model to cope with stress, however, I think the hard part is remembering to use it in stressful situations.
