Imagine there’s a bucket you carry with you which slowly fills up when you experience different types of stress. For example, financial worries, relationship troubles, lack of sleep, work, poor diet… even over training.

As your days go on, this bucket will continue to fill up until it overflows - that can materialise as burn out or in more severe cases a nervous breakdown.

Signs of burnout:

• Feeling tired/drained all the time

• Feeling helpless, trapped and/or defeated

• Feeling alone

• Struggling to see positives

• Self-doubt

• Procrastinating and taking longer to get things done

• Feeling overwhelmed

But imagine if that bucket had a tap… an outlet for the “water”. This tap represents things we can do to release our built up stress such as a healthy diet, exercise and socialising with friends.

So there are two ways you can approach stress - add less to your bucket or add more ways to release your stress. You can’t always control how much stress you face in a day but you can control the way you react and deal with it.

I have formulated 5 key pillars of stress which we are going to discuss and implement over the next 5 days. All 5 are ways to relieve your stress but some go hand in hand with reducing stressors, ie the water going IN to your bucket.

1. Sleep

2. Eat

3. Move

4. Breathe

5. Think

Tomorrow we will discuss how poor sleep is making us ill and practical ways to improve not only the quantity but the quality of your sleep.

To find out more about what Ani does as a Mindset & Wellness Coach you can sent Ani an email via this link