Between your family and your job, the sources of stress are numerous. Of course, some sources of stress are simply unavoidable.

How do you develop successful strategies when stress is threatening to overwhelm you?

The piece that follows offers great tips for managing stress successfully.

1. Keep stress to a minimum in your life: High stress can cause many health problems. Some of the health problems stress can cause or worsen are depression, muscle aches, insomnia, heart attacks, hypertension and stroke.

2. Be sure to get an ample amount of high quality sleep to reduce your levels of stress and avoid the risk of getting sick.

3. Set aside a little time today to plan and prepare for what you intend to do tomorrow : You’ll be surprised by how much stress this can relieve! If you have your outfit picked out or your lunch made, you’ll find that you’ll have less to worry about and therefore less stress.

4. Enjoy the outdoors, spend some time with friends, and get rid of stress: You can go for a jog or a brisk walk in the park with your friends. You can reduce the amount of toxins by sweating them out. Running and jogging are great stress reduction tools.

5. Write your stress away: Sometimes stress gets to the point where speaking about it is difficult, but sitting down and putting it to paper can actually have a more calming effect, which can relieve the stressful situation. Save these writings in the form of a journal that you can use as a reference to see how you handled stressful situations in the past when you run into stressful situations in the future.

Stress can cause some people to cope in a negative way such as alcohol and drugs. This is how they get temporary relief from the stressful feelings that overwhelm their lives. However, drugs and alcohol are never an appropriate solution. In fact, they will often just add more stress to your life.

Stress can be caused by a wide variety of factors, so you should first try to identify exactly what is causing you to feel stressed. If the source of your stress is a thing that you can eliminate, do it. Doing so will make you feel better.

While many people find video games and similar hobbies relaxing, if you start to get overly frustrated while doing them, you should put them away for a while. Remember, the goal is to have a clear mind so you can feel calm and relaxed, not more frustrated, which can only add to your stress.

Stand by a wall or other fixed object, put your hands flat on it, and push as hard as you can, pressing your feet against the floor. This forceful stretching will work tension out of your body and take your focus off of whatever is causing you stress.

In conclusion, many parts of you life can increase stress, and some of them are unavoidable. By using the advice you were just given, you will learn different ways to deal with stress so you can be happy and relaxed.