The following tips will help you avoid, manage, and overcome stress to take control of your life and live better.

• Change your attitude. Look at difficult situations, for example, a change of role at work as an exciting new challenge rather than a problem. Change your perspective on things. Many times, a situation that looks like a problem at first, changes into an opportunity if you look at it from a new point of view.
• Every day set aside a time for you to unwind, relax, have fun, and just act goofy. Watch a comedy, go out with friends, or just simply put on some relaxing music and close your eyes. Your brain will release chemicals (endorphins) when you laugh and are having a good time. These chemicals create positive moods, relieve us from pain, and have many more beneficial effects on our health.
• If you are feeling stressed, talk about your feelings and the issues that are causing you stress with a person you can trust. This in itself helps you release some of the stress. The person you share your thoughts with can also help you solve the problems causing the stress.
• Try to limit stressful situations as much as possible. If you can avoid conflicts, confrontation, and any such situations do so. Of course, do not avoid taking care of your problems just to avoid stress. Problems if untreated will not go away alone.
• Learn time management skills and make use of task managers to plan your work and to-do lists in advance. You won’t have to worry about forgetting something, since you will dump them out of your mind into the task manager. When you plan your tasks, you will not feel rushed or panicky, greatly reducing stress.
• Eat a moderate, balanced, healthy diet. This will provide your body with all that it requires to function at its best. You will feel more energetic, positive, and better able to handle stressful situations.
• Exercise on a daily basis. This will improve your health drastically, making you better able to handle stressful situations. Exercising is also a wonderful stress relief mechanism. For example, if you play tennis you can visualize the tennis ball as the stressful situation in your mind’s eye. Believe me, you will feel much better after that.
• Sleep at regular times of the day, and try to sleep for 8 uninterrupted hours daily. Sleeping is our body’s natural way of unwinding and coping with the stress of life. If you sleep less because you feel stressed you will only complicate matters further by increasing stress. Remember, when you are feeling stressed your mind does not work clearly and so even simple problems will seem huge.
• Do not set unrealistic goals for yourself. Avoid burnout. If you try to achieve a lot of goals concurrently, you are creating a lot of stress on yourself unnecessarily. Not only is this unfair on you and unhealthy, but you risk burning out, becoming depressed, and in the end achieving none of your initial goals. So slow down, divide goals into smaller more manageable goals, and tackle one goal at a time. This will reduce stress, allow you to perform better, and thus achieve better results. In the end you will achieve all your goals without the negative side effects.