Face it. You're going to experience stress. It's just a part of life. And while there's nothing you can do to avoid stress entirely, there's a lot you can do to change your experience of it. 

There are two kinds of stress. Stress that pushes you, helps you grow, and possibly even energizes you, and stress that grinds you down. The good news is that many of the stresses in your life aren't automatically one or the other. Two people can experience the exact same thing and one can feel challenged and energized and the other can feel frightened and anxious. 

If you want to wrangle that negatively stressful experience and move it in the direction of something energizing and growth-inducing - or at least stop it from being quite as anxiety-inducing - here are some factors to keep in mind. 

Build your foundation

When you feel like you're tumbling ass-over-teakettle through your life, any new stress that comes up is that much less likely to feel manageable. So it plops resoundingly into the anxiety-inducing stress category. 

Imagine changing that scenario to one where you have both feet planted on the ground and a large buffer zone between you and feeling overwhelmed. Think that might change the way you experience a new stressor? 

Here are three ways to start building that solid foundation. 

Get grounded

Picture a catherine wheel firework. It's spinning around in a circle, throwing sparks off in all directions. When we get spooled up and tense, we're a little like that. We're using up all kinds of energy being stressed - throwing it off in all directions - which means we have less energy to put into engaging stressful situations. 

Anything you can do to feel more grounded and calm is going to improve your ability to handle stressful situations. Meditation is a great tool for this. Other possibilities include movement oriented practices like tai chi or chi gong, singing or chanting, or journal writing. 

Change what you can

Another part of building that foundation is making whatever changes you can to reduce the current stress in your life. 

A lot of the stress we experience is like junk food. It adds nothing to our lives, and we don't need to experience it. 

As a starting point, do a stress audit in your life. Where are the stresses? Are you over-committed? Do you have a particularly challenging person in your life? Are you saying yes when you should say no, or no when you should say yes? 

Once you get a snapshot of where the stress is coming from, look for opportunities to make changes. What burdens are you currently shouldering that you don't need to take responsibility for? Can you prioritize your commitments so you're not creating a false sense of urgency by giving everything a default sense of high priority?

Build your belief

This might actually be one of the most important pieces of building your stress management foundation. The more you believe you can handle whatever is coming your way, the less stressful it is. 

How to build your confidence that you can handle change/problems/difficult circumstances/etc. could be the focus of an entire blog in itself. To start things off, here is a good post with 63 ways to building self-confidence. 

Wrangle your stress in real-time

Building a foundation is great, but stress happens in real time. What can you do to wrangle that stress as it unfolds? 

Step back

Before you can do any stress wrangling, you need a little room to maneuver. Stop, step back, and get a little distance from the source of your stress. Remind yourself that the stress you're feeling isn't a finite reality - it's simply your current version. 

Once you remind yourself to step back, you can try some of the following ideas. 

Check your story

A small, manageable fire of stress often becomes an inferno because of the way we pour fuel on the fire. Let's say you get laid off. That's stressful, to be sure. But you can make it exponentially more so with the stories you tell. 

Your simple, objective current reality is that you were just laid off and need to look for work. You can make your here and now feel much more stressful by layering it with stories about how you can't do anything right, that you're probably going to end up losing your house, that you'll never get another good job in this economy, that you and your family will wind up living under a bridge...you get the idea. 

In his brilliant (if a bit dense) book The Mandala of Being, Richard Moss says there are four places we go when we leave the present moment. Those are:

• Stories about ourselves
• Stories about other people
• Stories about the past
• Stories about the future

Make it a regular habit to check your story. Are you adding fuel to the stress? Use those four directions to help you recognize when you're getting sucked into stress based on something other than the current reality you can know and prove. 

Breathe

Yes, this seems perhaps too obvious, but next time you feel stressed, stop and check your breathing. I'll bet you dollars to donuts it's shallow. Stop and spend sixty seconds breathing deeply. Let yourself un-tense.

I would love to say that all of this is the magic solution, and that if you just do these simple steps you'll never feel your blood pressure jack up when faced with stressful situations that kick up fear and anxiety. But I can't.

What I can say is that, if you start putting some of these ideas (and others like them) to work on a regular basis, you will reduce the amount of toxic stress in your life. You will feel more able to handle the challenging situations that come up, and you will feel more energy. 

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by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst