4. TAKE ACTION

(2) IDENTIFY THE CAUSE OF YOUR STRESS

Knowledge is the key to managing your stress! So the first step to successful stress management is to identify what is causing your stress. / Some people have a good idea of the causes for their stress, but others are not so sure. One effective method to identify causes of stress is to make a simple daily log of stressful events.  (1) First, make an entry for every memorable negative and positive experience. (2) Second, complete each entry with notation about your stress responses in order to understand the effects of these experiences. / This exercise could be seen as one more task that increases our overall sense of stress, if it becomes a time-consuming project. But brief notations each day over the course of a week or two are enough to identify sources of psychological and physical strain.