How Can I Handle Stress During Mental Health Awareness Month?

Summary: To handle stress during Mental Health Awareness Month, you can take the ten proactive steps we share in this article, which are simple, practical, and can all reduce stress and promote positive mental health.

Key Points:

• May is Mental Health Awareness Month (MHAM), an annual observance dedicated to raising awareness, reducing stigma, and recognizing the strength of people who manage mental health challenges every day.
• During MHAM, it’s important to recognize that we all experience stress, and when we don’t have effective ways to manage, reduce, and relieve stress, it can have negative consequences for our mental health.
• Stress reduction is a vital aspect of total health: stress not only causes psychological and emotional problems but also increases risk of chronic physical disease, illness, and disability.

A Little Stress Management Goes a Long Way

When we talk about taking ten proactive stress management steps in this context, we don’t mean to imply you have to do them all every single day. What we want is for you to have ten simple, practical, doable options at your fingertips, ready when you need them. And we don’t mean to imply you have to spend hours doing them.

The point of stress reduction is to decrease the stress you feel, rather than add to it by making you feel obligated to get in an hour of mindfulness a day or make you feel inadequate for not working out for an hour a day.

The specific activities or ideas we suggest below – meaning those that aren’t conceptual – are all achievable in 20-30 minutes, if you want to try them. These activities are simple and should be fun and interesting. The ideas or concepts should make sense right away and help you manage and organize your thoughts around stress reduction. On that note, if it doesn’t make sense, or resonate with you, don’t worry. Skip it and move on to the next one. We’re sure you can fid something on this list that will help.

Ten Ways to Handle Stress During Stress Awareness Month

1. Manage Expectations

In this case, what we mean is set realistic expectations for yourself in terms of the amount and type of responsibilities you can take on without causing yourself unneeded, unproductive, and unhealthy levels of stress. If you’ve taken on more than you can realistically handle, it’s okay to delegate or drop items off your to-do list. You can also take this as an opportunity to say no, set healthy boundaries, and make time for yourself.

2. About Perfection

No one is perfect, no one has ever been perfect, and no one will ever be perfect. If you expect yourself to be perfect, then you’ll disappoint yourself. If you expect others to be perfect, they’ll disappoint you. Therefore, when you’re going about your daily tasks, ask yourself what’s reasonable and what’s possible given the time and circumstances, and learn to accept that as perfect for today.

3. Meditation

Meditation – especially mindfulness based meditation – is much different than most people think. You can meditate in the classical, seated, cross-legged position, and follow traditional practices. Or you can learn 20^th and 21^st century approaches to mindfulness, such as mindful walking. You can also trust us when we say that anything that keeps you focused on the present moment and that only, from exercising to listening/playing music to gardening, will bring you the benefits of meditation: a clear mind, focused thoughts, and a sense of relaxation and peace.

4. Visualizations

If an upcoming event causes worry or anxiety, you can use proactive, creative visualization to play out the situation in your mind – i.e. visualize it – and direct it to the conclusion of your choice. Legendary football player Jim Brown, one of the first pro athletes to use visualization before games, offered this insight: I score a touchdown on every play I run in my mind. We can all take a cue from Jim, and envision future success for ourselves.

5. About Your To-Do List

Here’s something to remember: while some people can multitask successfully, many of us find that when we multitask, all the tasks suffer, and none improve. Therefore, when you think of what you need to do on a given day, arrange them in order of necessity, and complete your tasks one at a time. Avoid the urge to look down the list and worry about #4 before you’ve even started #1. Take your time and do your tasks well, then move whatever is left over: if you prioritize well, then you will have accomplished what you need to, and the rest can wait until later.

6. Exercise and Activity

The right type and amount of exercise and activity that helps you reduce stress depends on your personal history and relationship to exercise. Some people are just getting warmed up after an hour. Others are worn out after thirty minutes. In any case and in virtually every case, studies show that engaging in at least 20-30 minutes of activity or exercise per day – whether mild, moderate, or intense – is effective in relieving daily stress.

7. Hobbies and Interests

Here’s a super-secret corollary to hobbies that many people feel but few put into words. When you lose yourself – in a good way – in your hobby for a period of time, whether it’s ten minutes or three hours, the benefit of your sustained, single minded focus is the same benefit you get from meditation. You don’t worry about the past of future, just on the task at hand, and when your done, you feel fulfilled and more at peace than when you started. In that way, a real interest or hobby is not only fun, but an excellent way to find your center and improve your overall mental health.

8. Talk It Out

Sometimes handling stress is neither complicated nor difficult. Sometimes what you need to do is find a friend, a sympathetic ear, and just start talking about what stresses you out. Think of your speaking your mind – and the act of finding the words to describe your stress/whatever stresses you out – as a physical, psychological, and emotional pressure release valve. When your words hit the air, they can evaporate like steam, and with it, your stress.

9. Adaptability

We recently heard a podcast by a renowned life coach for A-list executives and professional athletes. During the podcast, the coach talks about reviewing each day and assigning yourself and adaptability score, based on something simple: how you expected the day to go, how it went, and how you adapted to how it went in relationship to how you expected it to go. When you can accept that things don’t always go as planned and people don’t always behave as you expect them to, and adapt to the actual situation and the actual behavior of the people around you, then you can avoid the stress associated with disappointment and frustration.

10. Be Kind to Yourself and Others

If you make a mistake, try not to beat yourself up about it. When others make mistakes, try not to judge them too harshly. For your mistakes, treat yourself more like “I’ll do much better next time,” than “Oh my gosh I am such an idiot.” And when others make mistakes, try treating them more like, “That’s okay, you did your best. We’ll figure it out,” than “I cannot believe you would do something so stupid.” At the end of the day, criticism – of yourself and others – increases stress, while empathy, kindness, and understanding reduce stress.

That’s our list of ten – but your list can be as long or as short as you need it to be.

Use all ten of our suggestions, use one or two, or use this as a guide to help you identify the types of things that will help you handle stress during Mental Health Awareness Month. Believe in the process and give our list a try: we think you’ll learn something about stress reduction just by reading it, and even more if you put these ideas into practice.