Stressors – that’s factors that cause stress – are divided into two main groups:

Stressors you can either avoid altogether or eliminate most of the time. For example, if you find that you always become highly irritated and ‘up-tight’ whenever you visit your in-laws, it would be sensible to perhaps see them less frequently; or if your temper rises to boiling point every time you can’t find a place to park your car in town, consider going in by bus or train instead.

Stressors about which you can do little, or at least not in the short term, and which are essentially beyond your control. Typical stressors of this type include work problems, money worries, or deteriorating family and marital relationships.

Identify your own personal stressors by making a list of those events, situations, and other factors that you know make you feel stressed. In this list also include seemingly minor problems that bother you frequently as it’s not uncommon for these – if they come up often – to be a cumulative source of stress whose total effect is considerably more powerful than you might expect.

Divide your list into two parts: the stressors you can avoid or eliminate and those which you’ll have to grin and bear, at least for the immediately foreseeable future. Review your list carefully, considering each item in turn and thinking about what you can do about it to make things better for yourself. As you go through this exercise, you’re likely to be surprised by how much stress you can avoid by making the simplest of adjustments to your lifestyle or environment. Naturally, you’ll be reducing your total stress level every time you find a way to avoid or reduce the impact of a stressor.

Extremely useful though this eliminatory approach can be, it may still not be enough to bring your stress down to an acceptable level as there will probably still remain a number of major stressors which will not disappear or change overnight. What can be done, however, is to change the intensity with which you react to these ‘permanent’ stressors, so reducing their impact upon you and making their effects less harmful to you in the long term.

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