Stress relief involves understanding what triggers your stressful responses. These triggers come from your environment, also known as your life. While you probably cannot change everything in your life that causes you stress, you can certainly affect some of those events.
In more formal terms, those stressful events are called “activating events“. This term was coined by the psychologist Dr. Albert Ellis, who developed a model of emotional distress he called “The ABC Model“. In that model, the “A” stands for activating events. Activating events are potentially stressful situations, or “stressors”. These are the stressful triggers that cause you to get stressed. Knowing what these triggers are, you can begin to control the stress that is a part of your life.
For example, if waiting in a line stresses you out, ask the clerk when you do check out when the slow times are at that store. Plan to visit that store during those slow times. If traffic causes your blood pressure to rise, plan a route that avoids congestion. Or just leave earlier (or later).
Obviously, changing your environment may be a big task. You may not always have the luxury of changing your route to avoid traffic or you may not be able to visit a store at any other time. What is key to remember, as the ABC Model explains, is that to get a stressful response to an activating event (the “C” or consequence in the Model), you must also combine the event with your beliefs. Your beliefs about the activating events in your life are what really causes your stress, not the triggers by themselves.
This helps to explain why you may be stressed to no end with a crying child on an airplane while it seems everyone else is oblivious to the ruckus. You can get rid of the stress in your life by either changing the activating events, or changing your beliefs.
The key to all of this is to find the right balance in your life. Changing all the activating events in your life, as well as the beliefs you hold about those events, are impossible tasks. Besides, it’s not good for you to have absolutely no stress. You can’t grow as an individual without some stress to make you stronger.