How to Live a Stress Free Life

Stress is something absolutely everyone has to learn to deal with. Stress comes in many forms. Physical, mental, emotional, and social stress occur in our lives on almost a daily basis. Stress can be both harmful or helpful depending on the context and your own reaction to the stress. This is why the Dialed Action Sports Team believes it is so important to practice and learn how to best handle stress in all of its many forms. While we are not experts and are continuing to learn ourselves, we would like to share a few of our thoughts and techniques for both handling unwanted stress and also using stress to your own advantage.First lets think about how stress can help someone. Often overcoming some sort of stress will leave you stronger and more resilient to future stress. This can be experienced through physical or mental exercise. Just as your body responds to stress on muscles by rebuilding and strengthening, your mind is capable of the same thing. Processing challenging thoughts and ideas, practicing difficult mental tasks, and learning to focus your minds power are all stresses to the mind that can leave you stronger and more capable in the future. The Dialed crew has developed a lifestyle out of challenging ourselves on our BMX bicycles that has turned into challenging ourselves in all aspects of life. We find persevering through challenging activities to be incredibly rewarding.Now lets think about how to avoid and process unnecessary stress. We humans seem to have a tendency to worry about many things, even when they are out of our control, causing un-useful stress in our lives. There are three tools we would like to offer for your consideration.The first tool we like to implement in this situation is acceptance. Once you find yourself in a situation the best thing to do is to accept the moment even if it wasn’t what was planned or what is ideal. This way you can continue on with a positive attitude instead of letting what did or did not happen in the past continue to cause suffering. The second tool we have used to alleviate a lot of worry and unwanted stress is simply to remember the only thing we have to do to survive any given moment is to breath. When we concentrate on this fact any physical pain, any worrisome idea, any trouble at all seems less immediately problematic. We are able to realize the unpleasurable moment we are currently living in will pass as long as we remember our one and only responsibility to survive. This frees our minds from the stress and allows us to focus instead on the beautiful aspects of each passing moment. This was a strategy learned through working out in the gym that has translated very well to all stressful situations.Physical exercise is also a great way to relieve mental, social, or emotional stress. Whenever something is troubling you, try some sort of physically demanding exercise for 20 minutes or longer. A job, a bike ride, or lifting weights are all great ways to work out negative energy. As your body is forced to deal with physical stress, many will find their whatever was causing their mental or emotional stress no longer feels like as big of a deal.All of these tools take time and practice to master. They will become increasingly useful as you continue to implement them into your lives. Give them a try and see what happens.What tools have you developed for handling and using stress in your life?