Has January got ahead of you already? There's still time to get yourself on the right track with some expert advice.

Let's face it, the demands of everyday life can get stressful. Somehow the first month of the year, with all its newness and potential for success, can be rather daunting.

The New Year is never as invigorating as we expect it to be either. I often wonder where I'm supposed to find the extra energy and enthusiasm that the New Year promises. Enthusiasm is one thing, but what happens when that runs out?

While the festive break is a great way to forget about the rat race for a while, it's certainly no winning formula. I don't know about you, but with all the late nights, the partying with friends and general over-indulgence over December, I often come out of the festive season more frazzled than I was going in.

I've come to the conclusion that it's time to get practical and find solutions that will last the whole year.

According to the broad psychological definition of stress, it is a condition or feeling experienced when you feel that demands ? whether personal or work-related ? exceed your personal and social resources.

Ever heard yourself saying 'I don't know what else to do'? Well, that's a sign that you're quite literally at your wits end.

If you're not sure how to continue dealing with the stress at hand, Jessica Fry, neuropsychological therapist, explains that there are three major approaches that you can use to manage stress. Don't despair, rather, mobilise yourself to work slowly on whittling away at those bugbears.

Out of your hands? Maybe, but if you find yourself unable to change a situation, then there is another way to deal with it: through interpretation and power to reason.

While changing our interpretation of a situation can appear less attractive, says Jessica, it can also be massively empowering. For example, changing your attitude toward your boss or a colleague that you struggle to see eye to eye with will improve your own well-being, even if the challenge of dealing with them does not go away.

No choice. When you're left with very little power to change a situation, you're left with one more choice: to accept it. In such a case, our focus is more likely to turn towards coping with acceptance, reasoning out why things have turned out that way and then making plans to move on and grow beyond it.

Take action. When you can see that you can take control of the situation, and possibly confront the problem causing the stress, Jessica explains, you're taking an action-oriented approach. The main goal here is to work towards changing your situation or environment. Achieving the change you set out to make is likely to give you a lot of satisfaction.

Each approach addresses stress in different ways: the action-oriented techniques help us to manage the demands upon us and increase the resources we can mobilise; the emotionally-oriented techniques help us to adjust our perceptions of the situation; and the acceptance-oriented techniques help us survive the situations that we genuinely cannot change.

Weigh up the things that are causing you stress and see if you can see what approach you're taking to them. Can you make changes? Or is the stress beyond your control? Assessing your situation and looking at all the factors that have been influencing your reaction to it can help you find an effective way to approach it.

Whether it be financial or emotional stress, whether the cause may be your family, boss or spouse, the bottom-line is that you can find a way to cope with it and move beyond it.

Watch out for tomorrow's tips on how to take action and make effective change to your every day stress-causers.