Monday, December 20, 2010

STRESSFUL EMOTIONAL HABITS

Hey, hey! How are you doing today? Hope and pray you are alright.

Gonna talk about stressful, emotional habits today.

When we think of habits, we think of food, cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs. We can also add caffeine, shopping, and sex to that list. These are apparent habits that we are well aware of, and we know the consequences if we continue.

Another habit that may be evaluated is our emotions. When we are presented with a stressful situation, it may be a habit to feel fear or worry.

Some people may even react to stressful situations with anger, frustration, or irritability. These emotions are the cause of our stress. For example, when we work on the car or the house and the job gets complicated, we may get angry, frustrated, or irritable. Sound familiar? This habit of reacting to certain situations is the source of our stress.

Another example may be when we have something big that breaks down, like a car, washer or dryer, air conditioner, or water heater, and we don't have the money to pay for it, we may feel fear or worry. That is another habit we may have of reacting to circumstances that are the culprit of our stress.

When we become aware of the habitual reactions of our emotions, we can take responsibility and change these habits for the better. If we get angry or irritable often, we may have created patterns of anger and irritability, which can be changed through education.

Awareness is the number one key. If we are aware of these adverse emotional reactions, we can take responsibility and change these emotions to the opposite.

We can change anger, frustration, or irritability to patience and tolerance.

We can change doubt, fear, and worry to confidence, security, and hope.

It is not necessary to get angry, frustrated, or irritable. It is not required to have doubt, fear, or worry. We can take control of our reactions.

Sounds simple but is not necessarily easy. The hard part is the 20, 30, 40, or more years of the tendency to react this way.

What can we do to destress our negative habits of reacting?

The first key is awareness. Like an addict, we cannot get help unless we think we need help.

The next step is to talk to a professional or read a book on anger or stress. Bibliotherapy is one of the best ways to change.

Another great way of being aware of our emotions is being aware of our thoughts because it is the thoughts we are having that causes our feelings.

And finally, never-ending goal setting of changing our habits. If we want to change behavior that we have had for years, it may take some time and hard work. Never-ending goal setting is the way to move forward. If we don't move forward, we are stagnant; if we are fixed, our problems get bigger, and if our problems get bigger, that causes an increase in our stress.

If you get angry, frustrated, or irritable frequently, or even once in a while, you are creating great stress on yourself mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Make it a goal to stop negative emotions and replace them with positive ones like calmness, happiness, satisfaction, and cheerfulness.

You can discover your stressful habits by destressing yourself. When you destress yourself, you learn to change your stressful thoughts, feelings, actions, and attitudes to more successful thoughts, feelings, actions, and attitudes, which means changing stressful habits into successful practices.

Have a super duper week, and don't forget to have fun and be playful.


Elizabeth Stanfill If you love what you read here, you may find my books by clicking, books by Elizabeth Stanfill.