Stress Management

Do you feel like you’re juggling everything that’s important to you? Pushing yourself as hard as you can to make sure that you don’t drop the ball? Knowing that you can’t keep it up forever and wondering how long before someone notices that you’re losing your edge?

Overwhelming pressure, high expectations and a grueling pace of living all lead to debilitating levels of stress.

Layer on top of that the need for sleep, exercise, a social life, and a romantic relationship and things can fall apart easily. This is stress.

Am I okay?

We are on the cutting edge of technology, medicine, and science. Yet we are killing ourselves with work, busy-ness, and the ever-elusive desire to get ahead in life.

But something’s wrong, and you can feel it. Despite all your hard work, diligence, and commitment, you’ve started noticing that you’re struggling in ways you haven’t before.

You’re starting to wonder if there’s something wrong with you, because everyone else seems to be making it work–you’re about to lose it.

Even your friends and family are starting to take notice and ask you if you’re okay.

You know something needs to change, but you cannot figure out what to change or how to begin. You need help.

Frank’s Choice

Frank came to therapy after feeling completely exhausted and at the suggestion of his friends and family who had noticed changes recently.

Frank was described by those close as driven, energetic, and active; something was off. Frank had become irritable with his family, forgetful of his commitments, and was struggling to feel motivated to do anything.

Reflecting on his habits in session, Frank noted that he was having a hard time keeping his exercise routine and feeling consistently behind at work. Worst of all Frank felt exhausted when he woke up in the morning, and he struggled with low energy and motivation throughout the day.

Frank said that when he noticed he was distracted at work and his performance was suffering he knew he had to get help.

Stress Management – The Plan

Successful stress management is built on two principles:

1. Logistics
2. Emotional Fitness

Logistics have to do with proper planning to manage the demands on your time and energy. This is more than superficial to-do lists.

Proper planning involves understanding your core values, primary goals in your personal life, relationships, career, and physical health, and having systems and strategies for executing in each of these areas of your life.

This may seem overwhelming at first, but it is because you don’t have clear systems and strategies in place to manage your stress. The result is you feel overwhelmed.

While logistics deal with managing your external world, emotional fitness helps you learn to manage your inner world.

Emotional fitness, like physical fitness, is the ability to take on current challenges as they come and build strength over time.

Fitness is about putting yourself under increasing levels of good stress over sustained periods of time so that you can handle more intense challenges in the future.

The Process of Therapy for Stress Management

In therapy, we help you identify your core values and primary goals. Then we work with you to develop systems and strategies to help you consistently and repeatedly increase your emotional fitness. This allows you to handle life when it inevitably becomes stressful.

This process is different for everyone, as each individual begins therapy with different logistics, levels of emotional fitness, and current levels of stress.