Allen Elkin

Identifying the symptoms of stress is an important first step to reducing tension in your life. Once you identify the signs of stress, use your imagination and the proven tool of progressive muscle relaxation to put your mind and body at ease.How to measure your stressRecognizing stress symptoms and how often they occur can help you deal with stress.

Some types of jobs trigger more stress than others. What follows is a list of ten jobs or work settings that are judged to be some of the most stressful. These particular jobs were chosen because of the degree of dangers or hazards involved, the demands of the job, the amount of control the person has over what he or she does, the levels of responsibility required, and the number of hours worked.

Your attempts at stress reduction can easily fall victim to the same fate. Staying motivated and finding the time to practice your stress-management skills is not that easy. You may also find that, even though you now have the right tools, you rarely use them. This common situation is much like belonging to a health club and never going.

Are you assertive or non-assertive in your interactions with others? Becoming effectively assertive in your interpersonal relationships can result in much less emotional distress. Whenever you act non-assertively, you generally end up feeling more anxious and tense than you would like. You may also feel angry and resentful about not expressing your true feelings.

Defining stress isn’t easy. Professionals who’ve spent most of their lives studying stress still have trouble defining the term. As one stress researcher quipped, “Defining stress is like nailing Jell-O to a tree. It’s hard to do!” Despite efforts during the last half century to assign a specific meaning to the term, no satisfactory definition exists.

Making lists in order to relieve some of your stress might seem so obvious and so last century, yet lists can be one of your better time-management tools. Try working with three lists: A master to-do list. This list is your source list, detailing all of the tasks and involvements that you want to accomplish.

Believe it or not, your own thinking actively plays a role in creating your stress. At the heart of this distorted thinking are thinking errors, mistakes or distortions in your thinking that can result in excessive stress.See if you fall prey to any of the following thinking errors and find out what you can do to fix them.

A worker in a high-stress job typically faces tough demands but has little control over how the work gets done. Workers in these jobs report significantly more fatigue and exhaustion, trouble getting up in the morning, depression, nervousness, anxiety, and insomnia or disturbed sleep than workers in lower-stress jobs.

Stressed? Imagine that. You'll probably feel better if you can release that stress-producing thought and replace it with a relaxing, calm image. Here's how to put your mind at ease: Find a place where you won't be disturbed for a few minutes and get comfortable, either sitting in a favorite chair or lying down.