Lost your job – Follow these 11 tips that will help you cope with the stress

There is little in life that can contribute more stress to the human body than the loss of steady employment. While there are other physical and emotional factors that can contribute to stress in everyday life, few things can match the impact of lost employment because of the ripple effect it has on an individual’s psyche.

Losing a job means that financial security has been put on shaky ground. How will the mortgage payments get made? What about the car, insurance and groceries?

Not only is the near future put into jeopardy, but the long-term future becomes a concern. How will the loss of this job impact future employment opportunities? What about paying for college tuition in the future or retiring comfortably?

Stress cannot easily be eliminated from daily life, but the stress from the loss of a job can be managed so that individuals can cope and eventually move on. For those who have recently lost their job, the following tips should help cope with the stress that will follow.

1. Consider Taking Yoga

Stress can manifest itself in physical reactions inside the body, including inflammatory responses. Chronic instances of inflammation in the body can lead to future health problems including asthma and cardiovascular disease. Yoga’s relaxing poses not only help improve general health and flexibility, they also help reduce inflammation.

2. Go for a Run

Exercise of any kind is a great stress buster, but running is among the most intensive forms of exercise available. Even a 10 minute run can help reduce the feeling of stress by providing a healthy outlet for stressful energy and the release of endorphins that accompanies exercise will help provide a sense of even calm afterward.

3. Don’t Forget to Eat

One major problem with stress is that people begin to lose patience; they become intolerant and lash out at others for little things. Part of this is the result of lower energy, which in turn lowers the level of patience for the little things in life. Eat healthy meals and don’t let dietary standards slip just because stress levels have increased.

4. Laugh Out Loud

Laughing won’t eliminate stress, but it does help people cope with stress and begin to move beyond the physical impact it is having on their life.

Laughing reduces tension in any situation and, when experienced as part of a group, it helps improve bonds with other people.

5. Explore Therapy Options

Talk therapy is a popular option for coping with stress. Again, it isn’t designed to eliminate stress, but with the help of a therapist an individual can learn to cope with stress better.

A therapist can help individuals identify negative thinking patterns and help reframe those patterns to more constructive ones.

6. Experiment with Meditation

The very concept of meditation is to find a “Zen-like” state mentally and physically within which the body and mind are completely relaxed. Meditation helps to relieve stress by lowering blood pressure levels and even lessening the feeling of physical pain.

7. Allow for a “Worry Window” in the Day

It has been suggested in a recent Penn State University study that some people simply cannot stop worrying and stressing about things. However, if these individuals set aside a certain window of time during the day to allow themselves to worry about the issues bothering them, overall stress levels diminished.

This helped them minimize the impact of stress on their entire day by focusing their efforts at addressing those concerns to one period of time.

8. Avoid Venting

When people get stressed and/or upset it seems like a constructive exercise to vent that anger and let it all out. In reality, venting has been found to be detrimental in relieving daily stressors because many people often feel worse about their situation after venting all of their frustrations.

9. Get a Massage

Massages don’t have to be professional or even all that intense. It is more about the relaxation than anything.

Massages help the body relax and ease muscle tension, helping to alleviate some of the physical manifestations of stress in the body.

Additionally, it has been found that a massage can also serve to increase hormone levels in the body positively.

10. Get Plenty of Sleep

One of the worst impacts of stress is the vicious impact it can have on an individual’s sleep cycle. The body needs at least eight hours of sleep each night to regenerate from the previous day.

When the body doesn’t get enough sleep, people feel tired and stress levels increase. Those increased stress levels begin to impact sleep cycles, and soon people are sleeping less and stress is mounting.

11. Don’t Worry, Be Happy

Last but not least, try to keep a positive outlook on things even when stressed by the loss of a job. People might be surprised how often in life negative thinking can impact future outcomes negatively. Assuming something won’t work or will get worse almost sets a person up for failure. Try to stay upbeat and focus on the things that are going right.

If necessary, avoid naysayers and those with negative/destructive opinions, those thoughts won’t make it any easier to deal with stressors.