At the beginning of the article, I’ll tell you a little about stress and its types. In continuation, I’ll share two self-help exercises: one for independent work, and the second is an audio meditative practice to improve your emotional state. You can listen to it directly on the website, the audio recording is attached at the end of the article. In a broad sense, stress is any pronounced tension in the body when the body is subjected to any heavy load. And therefore, we cannot say unequivocally that stress is always bad. After all, to live we need a certain tone and composure. And the only thing is what tone it is. Tension and strain can be both beneficial and harmful. And according to this, stress can be positive and negative. Positive stress helps us to be active, collected, productive, and joyful. As an example, we can cite stress such as a new interesting job, an exam tomorrow morning, or even falling in love or a wedding. An important feature of positive stress is that the mobilization of the body and mental strength is short-term and ends in success - we can be very worried before an interview or wedding day, but this event itself does not last long and in the end we successfully complete the interview, or we are happy to complete the organization and wedding celebration. That is, all this is necessary and useful for us, and this is what gives the movement and development of life. It becomes bad only when the tension during stress turns out to be unbearable, too intense. Or when stress lasts for a very long time and becomes chronic. And so, when stress is chronic, the psyche and the body as a whole are no longer able to maintain increased performance. All the body’s resources run out and a simple stage of exhaustion sets in. That is, we can say that stress has three stages: 1. Anxiety, excitement before the upcoming event; 2. Mobilization of all the forces of the body that come so that we can successfully cope with life’s circumstances; 3. And the third stage occurs when stress does not end for a long time and when exhaustion already occurs. Unfortunately, our life does not always offer us to cope only with feasible life events, and it is not always possible to resolve a stressful situation quickly, while the body is capable of it. And very often we find ourselves in a situation of long-term and chronic stress. And what can we do here then? Firstly, in order to cope with stress and not become exhausted, we need resources. We need something that will give us nourishment and have a positive effect on recovery. First of all, we are talking about simple things like sleep, rest, nutrition, training - all this has a very positive effect, including on your mental and emotional state. Also, familiar routine tasks can become a support and resource, especially manual labor: making something, sewing, carrying out skincare procedures, continuing to train in the usual rhythm - all this can also become a support that will help maintain a sense of stability and calm. Secondly, it is also important to understand that negative feelings from stress do not arise from the stress itself, but from how we react to current events. And this news is very good! Because it turns out that since we ourselves are frightening ourselves, it means that we ourselves can stop it and change our way of reacting. For example, in relation to the need to solve a new complex task at work, you can think “Oh, this is so difficult, most likely I won’t succeed, I’ll definitely forget something, and then I’ll definitely be fired!” Of course, such thoughts will make you feel very anxious, scary and bad. And here you can help yourself change this reaction by simply stopping and paying attention to these thoughts. You can even write them down on a piece of paper to make them more visual and to unload all this anxiety from your head onto paper. And then look at what is written out from the outside. And after that you need.