By Ilenya Marrin

Are You Overwhelmed and Running on Auto-Pilot?

If you are feeling tense, overwhelmed and generally stressed out, are you accepting this as natural or inevitable because of your hectic lifestyle? Do you just keep going and going without regard to your own needs?

Running on auto-pilot while trying to keep up with all the demands — all the “shoulds” — of your work, home, family and social obligations, means you are quite likely at risk of stress-related disease.

Nine Steps to Reducing Stress and Reclaiming Personal Peace

Here are nine practical steps for how to turn off your auto-pilot mechanism, get back in touch with your authentic needs, get a handle on your stressors, and get back some personal peace!

1. Stop action. Take a break. This could be an hour in the tub, a long walk by yourself, or a visit to your favorite indoor or nature sanctuary where you can sit in peace for a little while. If you are exhausted, you may need to get a good night’s sleep first, and then take your break. This by itself is a powerful step toward stress reduction.

2. Get back in your body. Breathe — slowly, consciously. Stretch. Tense and relax all your muscles. Breathe again. You can do this anytime you want a stress relief break.

3. Activate your heart and mind. You could put one hand on your heart and imagine your loving essence opening up. Let that loving energy flow up to link with your dynamic mind. You’ll want both your logic and the wisdom of your loving heart in play. Again, in just a quiet moment, you can activate your heart-centered wisdom any place you happen to be.

You will probably want to take a few notes as you work these next steps. You can write your entire answers in a journal, or simply jot down some key phrases as memory joggers for later.

4. Access your success. Think back to a time in your life when you were busy but not totally overwhelmed and stressed. Recall what was working well for you then. Remember some of the successful ways you took care of yourself despite handling challenges.

5. Dream what you desire. Envision how you would like your low-stress life to be. Imagine you had a magic wand and could create your world exactly the way you want it. Vividly imagine taking good care of yourself, staying calm, or whatever else would spell stress relief for you. What are you doing? What are you saying? How are you feeling?

6. Discover next steps. Let your vision suggest your next steps for making practical changes. You’ll probably find some solutions appearing naturally. If not, look for links between your past calmer lifestyle and your future vision. Ask your heart for suggestions.

7. Do something different. Choose one or two small but key steps. Put them into action. Try them out in your life. Keep your action steps small and doable. Remember the old saying, “By the yard, it’s hard. By the inch it’s a cinch.”

8. Observe your results. Take note of small improvements in your personal peace level. If you like the results, keep doing what works. Otherwise, make adjustments, or try some of your other ideas. It should be easy to fine tune your process because you are doing small steps that build on each other naturally.

9. Repeat this process regularly. Get in touch with your needs and solutions — every week, every month or whenever you find yourself operating on automatic — until you are living your vision of a low-stress lifestyle.

And while you are learning how to stay conscious of your own needs, I invite you to add more self-compassionate stress reduction tips to your toolkit, by signing up for my free newsletter, 17 Simple Stress Solutions, at http://www.powerofpersonalpeace.com/optin.htm

Dr. Ilenya Marrin is a personal peace consultant, inspirational speaker and author of ebooks The Power of Personal Peace: Reducing Stress by Loving Yourself from the Inside Out and 77 Loving Steps for Success.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ilenya_Marrin

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