Stress

4 Steps to Manage Stress

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Stress is not an ailment, nor is it something we can eliminate. Stress is a part of life and actually, without it, we wouldn’t survive. The body’s stress reaction can motivate us, enhance performance, and prepare us to fight, run away, or freeze in the face of potential, perceived, or real danger. The reaction is natural and has evolved over millions of years to protect us.

How we perceive stressful situations can impact how we respond to them. This 4-step process can help you assess and deal with stressors in your life. By identifying the value you place on stressors, you might perceive the stressor differently so it doesn’t feel so overwhelming. And you can identify the stressors you can’t control. Leaving more emphasis on those things you CAN control.

Try this 4-step process to assess stressors in your life:

  1. Identify Stressors: List 3-5 stressors in your life. Examples: finances, my manager, taking care of my elder mother
  2. Assess: For each stressor, identify its value. Why do you do it? Why do you care? How does it fit with your values, goals? In what way does it support your life at this time? If there is no value, you may want to reconsider the situation. Example: I need money to live comfortably and to help my family; I appreciate my job but feel overwhelmed and find it hard to talk with my manager; I love my mother and would do anything for her.
  3. Adjust: Recognize how you feel about the stressor once you explore why you’re doing it, why you care (or not). Identify the stressors that you can control. Spend more time on those. Let those that you can’t control be as they are. Example: I value and need the to work. I need money. I like my job. I don’t want to let go of any of them. I can’t control my income at the moment, but I can control my spending.
  4. Choose next action: Identify one small step that you can take to address one stressor. Don’t try to take it all on at once. That is overwhelming and can set us up for failure from the start. Example: A small step is that I will make a budget and see where my money is going and where I might shave costs. / Re manager: I will talk with a friend/counselor about my manager and strategize how to address it.

busy woman at computer

Remember, how you view a stressor can shift your perspective of that stressor. It doesn’t necessarily change the stressor, but it can change your relationship to it.

Also, identifying and focusing on what you can control puts you more in the driver’s seat, giving you a greater sense of agency. For example, we can’t control world events, but we can choose how much and how often we read or take in news during the day. We can control how we respond to events and how we take care of ourselves in the process.

Stay focused on the things that give you some peace and clarity. consider what you can control. And even if stressful, remember why it’s of value to you and see what happens.

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To learn more:

  • YouTube for guided mindfulness practices and talks about stress, the brain, and the body

Mindfulness: 3 Common Misconceptions

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What do you think of when you hear the word mindfulness?

Over the past 10 years that I’ve been teaching mindfulness-based stress management, I’ve heard a number of misconceptions about what mindfulness is. These misunderstandings can impair someone’s practice or desire to learn because people think they are “doing it wrong” for one reason or another. (e.g., “Oh, I’ve tried mindfulness but I can’t do it, my mind is too busy.” Exactly! It’s the nature of the mind to think. Thoughts are not an obstacle to mindfulness.) 

Having a realistic understanding of what mindfulness is helps support the practice. 

3 Common Misconceptions of Mindfulness 

Misconception 1: The goal is to empty the mind of thoughts.

That is like asking a bird not to fly. Our minds are meant to think. We have tens of thousands of thoughts a day. Mindfulness helps us cultivate the ability to be aware of our thoughts as they are, not to empty our mind of thoughts. We learn to rest our attention on a primary object of attention (sounds, breath, body sensations, or everyday things like brushing our teeth), noticing thoughts, and guiding our awareness back to the object of attention.

We may start noticing our wandering mind, or our habitual thinking that is not serving us. We can then consider which thoughts we want to feed, and which we want to weed.

Misconception 2: It takes too much time.

group meeting circle

Mindfulness can happen in an instant. Purposely placing our awareness on the moment at hand is a moment of mindfulness. A mindfulness practice can simply be taking a conscious breath (or 2 or 3), feeling our body in a chair at meeting, feeling our feet on the ground as we walk to the water cooler, or bringing our full attention to a conversation. With that awareness, we allow what is there to be there and bring a feeling of curiosity, compassion, kindness.

Practicing mindfulness regularly, while doing everyday activities, or while taking a conscious pause a few times a day can help bring clarity, focus, and more creative problem-solving to deal with life’s everyday demands.

Misconception 3: It’s an end to stress and pain.

busy woman at computer

If we’re alive, we will experience stress and pain to varying degrees, AND we can learn new, beneficial ways to respond. The good news about stress is that the body’s reaction to stress can actually enhance our performance and/or save our life. Chronic stress, however, can impair performance, clarity, and jeopardize our health.

Mindfulness helps us look at how we respond (rather than react) to stress. It helps us learn to notice when stress is arising, so we can take action to intervene as necessary. We can take action when stressed (or preparing for a stressful situation), so we can build stress resilience, endurance, self-regulation.

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To learn more:

  • YouTube for guided mindfulness practices and talks about stress, the brain, and the body

3 Benefits of Mindfulness

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After sifting through 6,000 peer-reviewed articles on meditation and identifying 60 key, solid studies, Daniel Goleman, author and science journalist and Richard Davidson, neuroscientist, confirmed three benefits of mindfulness: focus, connection, resilience. They wrote about it in their book: Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes your Mind, Brain, and Body. And Goleman simplified it in a post: “3 Science-Based Benefits of Mindfulness“.

3 Key Benefits of Mindfulness

1. Sharpens focus so you can prioritize and attend to life with attention and clarity.

“Mindfulness strengthens concentration, and every related aspect of attention from keeping your mind on one thing amidst a sea of distractions, to being more present to what’s going on around you.” Daniel Goleman says in his article. The neural circuitry for selective attention of the brain can be trained. The pathways in the brain are reinforced by what we think about. Where our attention goes, energy flows.

2. Strengthens connection to yourself and others, enhancing emotional intelligence.

Goleman goes on to say, “A cousin of mindfulness, lovingkindness meditation, makes you more open to the needs of the people around you, and more likely to help them out. This kind of leadership builds great loyalty, so people will feel they want to do their best for you, and show up even when the pressure and stress are mounting. When I ask executives around the world to name the traits of the boss they have liked the most, kindness always comes up high on the list.”

3. Builds resilience so you can recover more quickly from events that may throw you off balance.

Challenges are a part of life — sometimes exciting and sometimes downright awful. Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from challenges and difficulties. “Mindfulness and other kinds of meditation calm the amygdala, the brain’s trigger for anger, anxiety, and a host of similar disruptive emotions. The more you practice, the less reactive your amygdala becomes. And if you do get hijacked from time to time (and who does not?), you recover more quickly – the very definition of resilience.”

Of course, no amount of reading about mindfulness can replace experiencing it. Like strengthening a muscle, learning to play a musical instrument, or learning any new skill, we have to DO IT to feel the impact.

Try It! 

You can take baby steps to practice mindfulness. Choose one of the  practices below and try it for a week. Be curious, be consistent. Then try another practice for another week. Take what you like. Leave the rest. You can also do guided practices on my YouTube Channel. Go, try, subscribe.

Practice 1. Conscious Breathing:

At least once a day, take 3 conscious breaths – follow the inhalation in and the exhalation out. String three cycles of breath together. Try this at least once a day. You can link it to an everyday behavior, e.g., as you start your day, or lay down at night, or when you sit down to eat a meal.

Practice 2. Selective Attention: Every day, focus on one thing for a period of time (1, 5, 10, 15 minutes). It can be a simple task — responding to an email or text, talking with someone, taking a bite of food, walking. Focus, bring your attention to the task, stay with what you’re doing. Notice if there is a tendency to want to shift attention. When your attention does shift (and it will), kindly guide it back to the task at hand.

Practice 3: Notice Sensations in the Body: Our body is aware of things often before our consciousness is. So paying attention to sensations in the body is a way to connect to feelings, needs in the moment. Be aware of bodily sensations. Sensations can feel tight, warm, cool, pulsating, painful, pleasant, unpleasant. Notice, name it, allow it, let it go. You can identify a cue when you’re going to “tune in”, e.g., when you wake up in the morning, go to bed at night, get irritated or angry, sit down to eat, talk with a loved one, open your computer. As a result of what you notice, you may decide to take a walk, exercise, get some tea, redirect a conversation, rest. Listen with kind awareness.

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 Guided practices on my YouTube Channel.

Getting to Know your Stressors

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Hiking in the Marin Headlands, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a coyote and I shared the trail for a moment. When I saw him, I froze. We exchanged glances, and he meandered away, seemingly uninterested, unafraid. I, on the other hand, felt threatened. As a result, I experienced a healthy stress response in my body, mind, emotions.

Body: My heart was pounding, my breath was shallow, legs were shaky. I felt as if the hair on my head and body were standing up. I froze, couldn’t move. (classic “freeze” of the fight, flight, freeze response of the sympathetic nervous system)

Thoughts: “I am going to be attacked. Who will find me?” (thoughts went off to “what if… “) 

Emotions: fear, anxiety, terror (I was so afraid! It just happened without any action on my part. My body reacted instantly.) 

The limbic area of my brain had detected threat (my fear of coyotes even though I’ve since learned that they are generally harmless to humans). That perceived threat activated the sympathetic nervous system, the body‘s stress response, setting in motion the secretion of cortisol, adrenaline, and other stress hormones.

As the coyote walked away, I took a few deeper breaths. My body normalized. The relaxation response kicked in, and thanks to the message in my brain that there was no threat, I became “unfrozen.” I slowly backed up a few steps. The coyote turned to look at me a couple of times, one of which I snapped this shot.

Stressors come in all shapes and sizes.

Stress can be an external stimulus, like a coyote, a traffic jam, the illness of a loved one, a looming deadline, an angry text, a difficult conversation, a look. Stressors can also be internal thoughts such as a self-critical voice or a memory of a difficult conversation. What causes stress for one person may be a welcome opportunity for another, e.g., public speaking.

Identifying your stressors can help you regulate your emotions. Consider these questions:

  1. What is a common (or recent) stressor in your life?
  2. Where do you feel the sensations in your body when faced with that stressor?
  3. What thoughts and emotions accompany the stressor(s)?
  4. How do you usually respond to the stressor? Does your response help or hurt the situation?

The situation, or stressor, may not change, but our response can. We can better regulate our response and our emotions. The more conscious we become of our personal stressors and their accompanying sensations in the body, mind, emotions, the more we can learn to respond to them skillfully. The stressor may remain, but it doesn’t have to derail you or the situation at hand.

So back to the coyote — since learning that they aren’t a threat to humans, the next time I see one, the stress response may not kick in. And if it does, I will probably recover more quickly with the help of deep breaths that will activate my parasympathetic nervous system and help calm my body.

To learn more: