Getting angry – or even more dangerous – staying angry is a gateway into other detrimental emotions such as guilt, sadness, frustration, and feelings of helplessness.  Not to mention the fact that when we’re angry, we simply cannot be happy.  Happiness and anger are never hand in hand. That’s why anger management is always so important.

The fact is that we must be able to recognize and nip anger in the butt as soon as we feel it surfacing.  Letting it explode only leads to more trouble, we’ve all had that happen.  Letting it fester also leads to trouble, only down the road.  Letting anger stay within you is as bad if not worse as action out in anger, because health problems will rise down the road, and I mean serious health problems.

Therefore it’s imperative that we control our anger before it controls us.

The first key is to know what you’re actually angry with in the first place.

What angers you most?  Do you frequently feel angry at another’s actions or are you mostly angered at your own reactions?  See the difference?  Sometimes our anger isn’t as easy to pick apart because we’re often more mad at ourselves than we are toward the person who gets the brunt of our anger…therefore it’s important to analyze these things in order to understand the true source of our anger.

Practice makes perfect with managing anger. The more you do it the easier it will eventually become to simply move on.  When you go on the journey of learning to control your anger you are in effect learning to grasp control of your life and essentially your happiness.

Stay tuned for more future posts in the nitty gritty of controlling your anger.

One of the pioneers of the study of stress, Walter Cannon, developed a very strong and lasting theory on stress called the “fight or flight” response.  His studying and researched proved that when a person…or any organism for that matter…experiences and sort of shocking even or threat, they or it instantly reacts by getting a surge of hormones to help the body react to the threat.

The hormones permit you to have an abundance of strength, as well as speed to either combat your attacker, or get away from them in an instant.  The body gets a jolt in the heart rate and in the blood pressure, which acts to deliver more oxygen as well as blood sugar that will help support the major muscles from failing or fatiguing.

In other words, you get a boost of energy so that you can kick some butt if you have to, or get the hell out of dodge if you have to.

Part of the natural flight-or-fight response also includes an increase in sweating so that your muscles are cooled quicker and are able to become more efficient.

Also, blood-flow is regulated in order to reduce blood loss in case of damage to any area to the body. Hormones also help give us laser focus on our threat, to the exclusion of everything else. All of this guides us to survive a life-threatening event.

Now, this same reaction can also become triggered when you’re faced with something unexpected or something that frustrates you on the pursuit toward your goal. Usually, if the threat is small, our response will also be small…in fact we may not even notice the stress in the midst of the dozens other irritations of a stressful day.

Unfortunately, this reaction of the body to spring into survival mode also has negative effects on us as well. Most noticeably we become anxious, jumpy or nervous, easily excitable, and irritable. This can diminish our ability to be as effective as we can be otherwise. When we’re plagued with a constant shakiness and a pounding heart, we can find it tricky to perform normal skills.

When our total and complete focus is on survival, it takes away from our capability to tap into our many resources that gets us through the day. It can turn us into virtual walking zombies, making us more accident-prone and less capable of making wise decisions.

If you want to be a productive human being in your day to day life, then you need to be calm and rational, and be able to control yourself socially.

Therefore you must learn to control your fight or flight reaction so that later down the road you don’t suffer from stress related problems…or be plagued by bad health due to stress.

Hopefully this article and the last on the subject have given you a better idea about what causes stress, and made you understand how important it is that you control it.

This has been a big part of the debate on stress for the past hundred years or so.  Most people, professionals included weren’t really sure of what stress is, and frankly, what it isn’t.  And again, since we feel stress at various times, we know what it is to us, and what it feels like, but there’s much that we don’t know including the physiology and psychological aspects of stress.

In earlier studies of stress, founding researchers such as Hans Selye weren’t really sure whether stress was relative or specific.  In other words, Selye himself was under the impression that stress is stress whether it’s good stress or bad stress.  He had this to say on the subject “stress is not necessarily something bad – it all depends on how you take it. The stress of exhilarating, creative successful work is beneficial, while that of failure, humiliation or infection is detrimental.”

Selye’s thought was that regardless of whether or not the situation was a positive one, or negative one, the same biochemical effects of stress would happen.

These days however, a lot more research has been done on stress, and what causes stress, and fresh outlooks have evolved. Stress is now widely considered as negative…and produces an array of harmful biochemical long-term effects. These negative effects have seldom been seen in optimistic situations.

So What Causes Stress Then?

These days our most generally accepted characterization of stress is credited to Richard S Lazarus. He stated that “Stress is a condition or feeling experienced when a person perceives that demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize.”

In other words, when you’re feeling stress, and say “I can’t take it no more”…and feel as though you’ve reached your limit, you’re feeling what Lazarus is verbalizing.

Of course we all respond differently to the stressful events in our lives.  This is partly instinct and partly to do with how you react mentally.  You can train your mind to best respond to the stress in your life, regardless of what causes stress that you’re feeling.

It’s important to realize though that stress doesn’t have to be all negative.  A bit of stress in your daily life is actually good and will challenges you to reach even higher heights.

Just keep an eye out for what causes stress in your life…the negative kind…and then use the posts to follow to combat it before it gets the best of you.

As stated in Tip 1, sometimes it just takes a little bit of a shift in thinking before we can actually stop procrastinating, and get doing those things that need to be done.

One of the ways to motivate you to do the things that need done is to have a nice little reward waiting for yourself at the end of the task.

Now depending on the task, the reward can be as big or small as you want, but the fact that there’s a reward waiting there at all is the part that’s relevant here.

You see, no small task should go unseen by…well…yourself.

Sometimes even treating yourself to that piece of chocolate cake that you’ve been avoiding due to the guilty feelings that you’ll be facing is good enough to get you through a task. Who doesn’t love chocolate cake afterall.

Other times it takes a larger reward.

Going out to eat or even as big as a vacation if the task has been large enough or time consuming enough is motivation enough to keep you trucking on through the task at hand. Knowing that the light of the end of the tunnel is a weekend off at the beach is always very enticing and can make the misery and drudgery of the procrastinated on task that much more bearable.

Now sometimes just the fact of finishing a task is motivation enough.

There are plenty of times when finishing a task that has had such a taxing time on the mind is reward enough, and the additional pat on the back will do the trick.

Listen, sometimes all of our good doing’s aren’t noticed or rewarded by others. That’s just life. That’s why it’s so important that you’re able to do right on yourself, and reward yourself accordingly after you’ve worked like a dog to complete something.

Just don’t get caught up in the rewards, where celebration time outnumbers work time. That has a counterproductive to your overall goal.

So reward yourself kindly, graciously accept the reward, and then get started and get yourself for that next well deserved reward.

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]]> http://www.successfulselfhelp.com/motivation-tip-2-reward-yourself-big-time.html/feed http://www.successfulselfhelp.com/motivation-tip-staying-motivated.html http://www.successfulselfhelp.com/motivation-tip-staying-motivated.html#comments Tue, 18 Nov 2008 06:10:34 +0000 SuccessfulSelfHelp http://successfulselfhelp.com/?p=10 No matter what you do, it will always have a positive effect in terms of glory and/or lessons.

You’re the one who has to figure out the reason regarding what the heck is going on with you.   So, you have to reach down deep – and then analyze and find the positive and good aspects of each and any task.
This is easier said than done most of the time because the positive part is hidden and sometimes hard to find.  This is especially true when there’s something standing in front of you that you just do not feel like doing what-so-ever.

The easy thing to do is to shove off the tasks that you hate doing, but if you’re under obligation then by all means you have to give it your best.  The motivating factor, and one way to look on the bright side of doing something that you really don’t want to do, or that you’ve been procrastinating on is to realize first that once it’s done, then you don’t have to even look at that task again if you don’t want to.

And next, you have to realize that if you’re under obligation to do something, and you actually perform that task, then your reputation has just been raised up a notch or two.  The flip side of that is that you truly don’t want to have a bad reputation with others, especially if those others are helping you pay your bills, so the motivating factor there would be to do what needs to be done so that you don’t end up with a bad reputation.

Sometimes it just takes that one little shift in thinking, where we look at a little bit of the bright side that actually gets us motivated enough to do what needs to be done, and staying motivated enough to carry us on through to reaching our goals.

The important part is that we work through these moments and just keep pushing.  “Keep pushing”…I know that’s very easy to say, but doing it is another thing right?  Well, in my efforts to want to see you achieve your life’s goals then I’ve taken the time to give you the best ways to combat the loss of motivation, and to get you on your feet and winning.

So here are the tips that will help you stay motivated and not giving up at the first sign of trouble.  Good luck, and don’t just read these and then file it away.  Print a few posts every now and then and actually read them each day.  Take some of your favorites and tape them up on your bathroom mirror or bed-post so that you have to look at them every single day.

The word motivation has become a bit of a cliché type of word, that sometimes has no specific meaning whatsoever.

The key to motivation is not always getting motivated…that can happen from watching a movie or episode of a good show.  No the key is in staying motivated, and that takes effort, something that people are all too willing to not put in.  So then, it’s time to get out of the frame of mind that getting motivated and staying motivated are one in the same, because they’re clearly not.

I say clearly because if they were the same, then many more people would be succeeding in life.
Lack of motivation can suck the life out of you, no matter how well your intentions are.  There is much more to this, such as empowering yourself with discipline and habits, and many other core variables that we’ll get into in other areas of this blog.

But for this section, I’ll be dolling out tips on how to get and stay motivated, and hopefully you’ll take my advice above, and not only read them, but put them into action.