Feel free to use these exercises in your own personal journal writing. You may choose to cut and paste them into your own Word document for a computer archive or print out one of these pages and keep them in your journal.

ycles of change ask us to take special care of ourselves throughout the month. This is the perfect moment to take time out for time in.

Stress Revisited
by Sue Meyn

Talking about managing stress is so commonplace that I often choose to stay away from the topic. There are often better ways to address those issues that are more precise than all of our talk about STRESS. Today I am going to make an exception, however, and I hope that the journal writing exercises I suggest will be useful to you. Truth is, any kind of stress management helps if we just DO it.

Some time ago I became familiar with a formula for taking a look at your stress that I find quite useful. It helps to narrow ones understanding of stress and put it into more workable terms. Here it is:

STRESS = Pressures Adaptability

There it is. Everyone experiences stress differently and this formula allows each person to plug in their own issues. The two main ways to reduce stress, according to this formula is to 1. Reduce pressures, and 2. Increase adaptability. Makes good sense, doesnt it?

My suggestion to you is to become more aware of the pressures you face in your life. Usually I find that the biggest problem folks have in reducing stress is realizing where it comes from. We are too likely to keep adapting to one pressure after another without realizing that we are becoming more and more challenged to keep up.

In order to focus on the pressures you have in your life I invite you to do some clusteringor mind mapping. If you are unfamiliar with the technique it is really quite easy to do. It allows you to brainstorm on paper and as you do it you get a different picture of what the pressures or stressors are in your life. Begin with a circle in the center of a blank piece of paper. In the center of that write, Pressures in my life. Then draw a line from that circle and write in whatever pops into your mind, circle it and draw another line, either from that circle if it is an associated thought, or from the main circle if it is a new kind of pressure. Just go as long as you can. There is no way you can do it wrong. Once done, I suggest you look over your cluster. Over which pressures do you have control? What are the top three? What can you do, today, to reduce or eliminate one of those pressures? I hope you will take some action!

Sometimes just writing down whats going on in your life can give your more relief that you would think. At a presentation last week I had one young man describe himself as "overwhelmed" before we started the clustering exercise. When we finished he reported with surprise that things werent as bad as he thought. Ah, this writing can be SO helpful. Good luck with YOUR stress management!

back to journaling exercises...

To visit Sue Meyn’s Journal Magic or to subscribe to her weekly Journal Companion, click here.