Your Five-Minute Daily Program to Stress Management.

Have you ever felt stressed out even when you're well relaxed and bored? I know I have. Stress is unavoidable in life, more so than ever today. We need to find ways to decrease and prevent stressful incidents and decrease negative reactions to stress in our lives.

Here are some ways that can be used to manage stress in our daily life. Some of them are quick fixes; others you can begin to incorporate into your daily routine to keep stress at bay for the long haul.

1) Manage Your Time Effectively.

Time management skills allow you more time with your family and friends as well as increasing your performance and productivity. This will help to reduce your stress.

Here are some ways to improve your time management:

-Start by keeping a record of how you spend your time, including work, family, and leisure time.
-Plan your day out and stick to your plan.
-You can save time by focusing and concentrating, delegating and scheduling time for yourself.
-Prioritize your time by ranking tasks according to importance and urgency and then redirect your time to those activities that are important and urgent to you.
-Manage your commitments by not over- or under- committing. Don't commit to what is not important to you. Learn how to say no.
-Deal with procrastination by using a day planner, breaking large projects into smaller ones, and setting short-term deadlines.

2) Build Healthy Coping Strategies.

It is important that you identify your coping strategies. One way to do this is by recording the stressful events, your reaction, and how you cope in a stress journal. With this information, you can work to change unhealthy coping strategies into healthy ones -- those that help you focus on the positive and what you can change or control in your life.

3) Lifestyle

Some behaviors and lifestyle choices can also negatively affect your stress level. They may not cause stress directly, but they can interfere with the ways your body seeks relief from stress.

Try the following:

-Learn how to balance personal, work, and family needs and obligations in your life.
-Develop a sense of purpose in your life.
-Make sure you get enough sleep, since your body recovers from the stresses of the day while sleeping.
-Eat a balanced diet for a nutritional defense against stress.
-Get plenty of exercise throughout the week.
-Limit your consumption of alcohol.
-Don't smoke. And if you do, investigate ways to attempt to quit soon.

4) Social Support.

Social support is a major factor in how we experience stress. Social support is the positive support you receive from your family, friends, and the community. It is the knowledge that you are cared for, loved, esteemed, and valued. A great deal of research indicates a strong relationship between social support and better mental and physical health.

5) Change Your Thinking.

Sometimes events trigger negative thoughts, which can lead to feelings of fear, insecurity, anxiety, depression, rage, guilt, and a sense of worthlessness or powerlessness. These emotions trigger the body's stress, just as an actual threat does. Changing your thinking and dealing with your negative thoughts in new and different ways can help reduce stress.

-Thought stopping helps you stop a negative thought to help eliminate stress.
-Disproving irrational thoughts helps you to avoid exaggerating the negative thoughts, anticipating the worst, and interpreting an event incorrectly.
-Problem-solving helps you identify all aspects of the stressful event and find ways to deal with it.
-Changing your communication style helps you communicate in a way that makes your views known without making others feel put down, hostile, or intimidated, thus reducing the stress that comes from poor communication.

Everyone experiences stress to some degree. Whether you're a stay at home mom, or the CEO of a huge company, stress will undoubtedly be an unwanted visitor from time to time. When you learn effective ways of coping with and dealing with stress, it is no longer the dreaded enemy.