4.14 Identify How You Deal with Stress Now
This is an important step to take. Once you can stop and think about the activities that you have been doing to relieve stress, you can target them as something to improve upon once your stress level is lower.
The most common example is stress eating. Ice cream, cookies, eating out at restaurants are all common examples. When these stress eating habits happen regularly, health will dramatically suffer by causing weight gain, high blood pressure and eventually diabetes. For some of you, stress eating may be more obvious than others. Sometimes, however, it is just simply much more difficult to make healthy choices when our stress levels are high. Once stress is controlled, you will have more ability to follow a good healthy eating plan.
Other examples of how people cope with stress include smoking cigarettes, using alcohol, sleeping too much, spending time withdrawn such as watching TV or playing video games, or taking stress out on others.
Figure out what it is that you do to cope with stress and target those behaviors for improvement as your stress levels go down.