How do I know if I am less stressed?

You may have asked yourself recently, “How do I know if what I am doing is working? I am not sure if I am less stressed.” I am going to share my own personal strategy of determining this, but there are other ways of doing it. Feel free to use mine or adapt this in a way that works for you. 

The first step is to be aware. In our 21 Days to Less Stress Program, I teach emotions on a 0-10 scale. We go into this more in the program, but for the purposes of this blog, you can think of it like this: 

• Zero is you are calm, relaxed, balanced. 
• Ten is the most intense version of your stress (stress being a generic term for whatever emotion you are feeling). If you can’t arrive at a particular feeling, use a phrase such as “I-want-to-scream feeling.” These are YOUR feelings, they need to make sense to YOU for this, not anyone else. 

The second step is to take action. Stress doesn’t magically disappear. You have to actively reduce it. Some action is visible to an outside observer (like going for a walk) and some is not (like reframing your thinking). 

Then you go back to your 0-10 scale and reassess. Has your stress increased, stayed the same, or decreased? (Hopefully the latter.)
 

You continue doing this until you are where you want to be. If your stress is really high (say an 8), it might take several rounds of an activity (i.e. breathing) or often multiple activities (such as walking, then journaling, then calling a friend) to bring your stress down to a desirable range. The goal is to get as close to 0 as you can. Zero to three is the optimal range.