Navigating Stress: The Importance of Self-Initiative in Becoming A Calm Person

With stress levels rising globally, cultivating a sense of calm amidst the economic and political turmoil and challenging work and family situations becomes an essential skill.

Work overload often becomes a time-sucking black hole. The more stressed you feel about your tasks, the more time you spend worrying instead of tackling them. This cycle just keeps spinning, leaving you feeling overwhelmed and behind. To get out of this cycle you need to restore your inner calmness.

The ability to maintain your inner calm and clarity of thinking when you face stressors can significantly impact your overall well-being and work results.

While external factors may trigger your stress, it's your inner response and self-initiative that determine how you navigate through challenging situations.

Stress and Stressors: Understanding the Impact

Stressors manifest in various forms, but it comes down to your inner reactions that define how stressed you will become.

When you feel stressed, it affects both your physical and mental wellness. However, stress and stressors are not the same. Stressors are around us. Stress is within you.

Stress is your inner failure to deal with stressors and challenges around you without inner reactions.

When you feel stressed and overwhelmed, it's common to experience difficulty concentrating. Lack of focus causes a monkey mind and leads to decreased productivity and effectiveness. Moreover, stress can manifest as tension, due to what you feel headaches, muscle aches and disrupted sleep patterns, further exacerbating our sense of unease.
 

Negative stress creates a vicious cycle where heightened tensions feed into more stress, creating a continuous loop of discomfort and distress.

While positive stress, also known as eustress, can at first create a beneficial feedback loop that promotes personal growth and resilience, it also burns out adrenaline and paves a path to burnout.

When first faced with positive stress, individuals may experience heightened motivation, excitement and anticipation. These feelings can drive them to perform without taking breaks and allowing the physical body to restore itself. This isn't sustainable for your mind either as thoughts and imaginations keep running.

To achieve something you don't need positive stress, instead for personal sustainability you need relaxed focus and awareness-based intrapersonal skills. Those allow you to keep going while using your self-observation abilities and taking pauses to keep your mind and body well.

Positive stress burns you out, intrapersonal skills allow self-leadership.

Addressing stress always requires proactive measures and a willingness to prioritize self-care from your side.

Feeling stress not only impacts your physical health but also poses significant risks to your mental well-being. Stress often leads to burnout and worsens mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression or even physical health.

Burnout needs to be prevented as it often leads to depression as there is 86-92% overlap between the final phase of burnout and depression. So, preventing depression that originates from work needs to start with stress reduction and burnout prevention as early on as possible.
 

Persistent symptoms of stress can also interfere with your daily functioning, making it challenging to fulfill responsibilities at work.

Recognizing the interconnectedness of stress and mental wellbeing is crucial in fostering a culture of support and understanding.

Rather than dismissing stress as a temporary inconvenience, it's essential to acknowledge its potential long-term implications. By encouraging open dialogue around mental wellness, and using intrapersonal skills to regulate your inner domain, workplaces and people in it can overcome the stress problem.

When people know how to self-regulate their thoughts and let go of negative emotions with the help of intrapersonal skills, stress can be dealt with successfully.
 

Being the Calm Person and Embracing Self-Initiative

Self-initiative plays a pivotal role in managing stress effectively. Instead of succumbing to feelings of overwhelm, taking proactive steps to reduce your stress level early on can give you back a sense of control.

A calm person is empowered by practical intrapersonal skills. The initiative is one of the main intrapersonal skills and it allows you to take personal responsibility. Taking responsibility gives you inner freedom. Self-observation is the key here.

When you observe and learn to lead your inner processes you can take the rest when needed or get fully engaged in purposeful physical and mental activity that allows you to provide needed solutions or desired outcomes.

Building Resilience Through Self-Care

A calm person cultivates healthy coping mechanisms to build resilience in the face of adversity. Here are some ways for you to achieve this:

• Journaling allows self-observation, writing down your thoughts and feelings can identify your patterns. When you then later take time to read what you wrote, you can notice where you have inner reactivity and what you need to change in those patterns.
   
• Creativity permits original and innovative work solutions but also allows you to have fun. Engaging in creative activities like painting, music or writing can be a healthy outlet for processing your imagination, thoughts and emotions. Creativity can bring birth to something new/unknown if insight is involved. When you take more time to use your creativity consciously, you will experience a flow state. A state where thoughts and emotions stop and you just feel the joy of using your creativity to create. Achieving the flow state can be learned. Being fully present in your body and experiencing the state of flow allows also the best work results.
   
• Nature walks or quiet time in nature reduces stress and allows you to experience the silent calm background of nature. This silence is consciousness – a state of full presence that we forget while facing stressors in our modern fast-paced society.
   
• Sleep permits you to relax your mind. When you sleep, your brain restores itself. Make sure that your sleep pattern is regular and your resting time is long enough. When there is trouble in sleeping your life pattern is such that stress and anxiousness have taken over your life. 
   
• A healthy diet allows you to keep your physical body well. When your eating patterns are irregular and you no longer notice the state of your physical body, you sooner or later face health issues. Those vary from person to person but the main cause of adopting wrong patterns is often restlessness and stress.
   
• Training your mind and body is equally important. You live in your body and regulate it with your fit mind. A fit mind with great intrapersonal skills always aims to keep the physical body fit. So, take time to train your mind and body every week. And yes, you need to train both of them as fit body alone donät secure a fit mind. The best idea here is to make a training plan and stick to it! Regularity matters and brings results.

A calm person understands the importance of self-care and incorporates activities that promote relaxation and well-being into their daily routine. That is why work-life integration matters, it is a more flexible approach to life than striving for work-life balance. After all, you have one life!

Surrounding yourself with positive and supportive people as it allows you to regulate workloads and responsibilities. When you need time off, ask for it. When others need it, give it.

Also, remember that talking to trusted friends, family members or colleagues can provide a safe space to express your concerns and receive encouragement.

It of course becomes much easier, when also people around you have good intrapersonal skills, calm minds and mental wellbeing.

Learning to keep your mind fit and well is a learning curve. Sharing the skills you have is here caring as most of us have never had mental wellness lessons at school. That is why we passionately write and share stories about mental wellness and stress reduction.

Conclusion

Navigating stressful situations as a calm person requires self-initiative; it is a proactive approach to your wellbeing and a commitment to self-care.

Only when you recognize the signs of stress and warning signs of burnout and take deliberate steps to reduce it early on can you mitigate its potential negative effects on both physical and mental well-being.

Through self-initiative, a willingness to keep your mind well it's possible to cultivate a sense of calm amidst life's inevitable challenges.

Remember, being a calm person is a skill that can be developed and strengthened over time. But this becomes realistic when you know Your True self, become more aware and obtain good awareness-based intrapersonal skills.
 

This stress awareness month related article is written by Kaur Lass; updated 26.11.2024