Recognising 3 core behaviors that increase stress for you and your family
Family members often know exactly how to cause you stress. Three obsessive behaviours that you, your spouse and your children might be doing cause anxiety can be easily identified and remedied so you can enjoy a stress-free family life. Sometimes your anxiety and stress can go beyond what can be remedied by an activity like <a target='_blank' href="http://competition-fishing.com/sport-fishing/uncover-the-beauty-of-canadian-fishing-expeditions/ or playing golf (or any other activity you find relaxing).
The first is obsessive negativity. When you are obsessively negative, it means that you have a tendency toward being "negative" about people, places, situations, and things in your life. Teenagers can be susceptible to this behaviour.
If you find yourself saying things like Everything always goes wrong or I never do anything right you might be suffering from obsessed negativity. This might be unconscious, but you may be able to trace its roots back to one or more events in your life. This attitude will hold you back and can lead to a spiraling down of your personality as you will see less and less the positive things around you. For your children, this kind of negativity can lead to depression, which can also lead to self-harm and suicide, so it pays to be vigilant.
Obsessive perfectionism is another trap that people can fall into – everything has to be perfect, done in a certain way, to a certain standard. You might find yourself saying that you have to ‘do things right’ or you feel a sense of failure. This constant expectation to achieve almost impossibly high standards will drive your anxiety higher, and you may not even realize it.
Obsessive analysis is the third. You might be obsessed about minute details of processes and procedures, going over them again and again until you are sure you understand it in miniscule detail – often far more than is required. You can’t relax if things go wrong, so you obsess over the processes and procedures.
An excess of analysis robs you of time to enjoy your life. You’re caught up in a loop and you need to break free by reassuring yourself that all is well and undertaking activities that take your mind off it. Understand that not doing the analysis will not compromise your life.
Don’t go rushing off to find a psychologist for you or your kids. If you have already identified blocking behaviours, the first step is to consult your friends and family to get any feedback from them. It will help them if you explain what the blocking behaviour types are so that they can give you a critique based specifically on those things as opposed to trivialities such as your dress sense or whether you can sing! Incidentally, singing lyrics to songs you like can be a great stress reliever.
You will need to approach this with an open mind because the truth can hurt, but this is the quickest way of finding out whether others see you differently to how you expect them to see you. The insights you gain can be used to actively change how you deal with life.
Another technique to identify issues is to keep a diary and note down what you do and when you feel anxious. There are many different triggers for anxiety, and diary will allow you to go back over several weeks and look for patterns.
Other relaxing pastimes you could take up to take your mind off anxiety and involve your family include reading magazines. Your children would appreciate watching blu-ray DVDs.