“The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.”
Stress is a normal part of everyday life but it can easily become overwhelming if we fail to address and manage it in a healthy way. Therapy can be a powerful investment since it not only alleviates your current stress, it leaves you much better equipped to manage future stress as well.
For example, sometimes we become stressed because we have trouble saying “no” to demands of our time or energy. As a result, we take on way too much and neglect our own self-care. Therapy can help a person work through why they feel the need to say “yes” to everything and implement more appropriate boundaries that allow for them to prioritize their own needs in the future.
If you are struggling with stress management, a therapist can work with you to:
Understand That You Are Not Alone
Just speaking to a therapist can help alleviate stress and the feeling of being alone. Therapy allows you the unique chance to always have a safe place to release all of your emotions, even ones that you do not understand or have had to suppress. Therapists have advanced training to understand and process complex concerns, fears, and anxieties.
Clarify and Express Feelings
Your therapist will help you to understand and address these difficult feelings. Therapy does not just allow you to vent about your feelings (although it does help); it allows you to understand them, get to the root of the problem, and find ways to effectively deal with it.
Identify Major Stressors
Therapy can bring awareness to the major stressors in your life. Often, we can’t pinpoint exactly what is creating feelings of stress, especially when we are already feeling overwhelmed. Therapy can assist with identifying specific stressors and singling out which is causing you the most distress so you can more effectively manage your stress.
Identify Unhelpful Coping Mechanisms
We all react to stress in different ways, but we all tend to develop some method for coping with it. Coping mechanisms are created over time as the best way we know how to deal with the physical, mental, or emotional pain caused by stress. Some methods are healthy and overall effective while others may work as a short-term solution for stress but over time they prolong or intensify the negative effects of stress. Some unhealthy coping mechanisms include emotional eating, procrastination, substance use, avoidance, overuse of social media, and self-harm. Therapists help their clients identify any coping mechanisms that have become unhealthy or unhelpful for them.
Implement More Helpful Coping Strategies
After identifying any unhealthy or unhelpful coping mechanisms, your therapist will work with you to develop more healthy, effective coping skills to use instead. They will also help you determine regular self-care activities that you can implement into your everyday life that are doable for you and work with your unique abilities, interests, and schedule. Self-care is an extremely important part of stress management and finding ways for clients to implement self-care into their routine will be very helpful in managing overall stress while coping mechanisms can be helpful to combat stress in the moment.
Learn more about self-care: 10 Ways To Practice Self-care (that won't cost a thing)!
Learn more about therapy: The Truth about Psychotherapy: Confronting Ten Common Misconceptions
IF YOU’D LIKE TO TALK TO A PROFESSIONAL WHO HAS HELPED OTHERS OVERCOME THEIR STRESS AND FIND ACTIONABLE WAYS TO REACH THEIR GOALS, WE WELCOME YOU TO CALL US. WE’D LOVE TO HELP YOU TOO.