CALM UP

STRESS – FRIEND OR FOE?

The ability to manage your emotions and remain calm under pressure has a direct link to your performance. US business consultancy, TalentSmart, has conducted research with more than a million people, and found that 90% of top performers are skilled at managing their emotions in times of stress in order to remain cool and exercise a higher degree of mastery.

It's an open secret the havoc stress can wreak on one’s physical and mental health. A study conducted by Yale scientists found that prolonged stress causes physical degeneration in the area of the brain responsible for self-control.

Stress is a generic term applied to diverse bundles of disharmonious feelings generated when we see a discrepancy between the way something is and the way we think it should be. It's a product of activities of the mind. None of us gets stressed unless and until we think about it.

There are several identifiable stages to the downward stress spiral:

• The Stressor
• Unthinking Reaction
• Impulsive Action
• Negative Consequence
• Stress........ and so on.. down... down... down.....

It is worth noting that, in the case of chronic tension, the original stressor has long been forgotten, and stress has become so inured in the being that the sufferer, like the frog on the stove, no longer notices it's in hot water, and feels “ill” without it.

Traditional psychiatric therapy focuses firstly on medicating the symptoms and endeavouring to rebalance the biochemical mechanics of the disease so that the sufferer can feel “better” and operate at some optimum level in society without frightening the natives. A psychiatrist, at least in the public health system, who goes beyond the mechanics and actually explores the causes of the disease is a rare phenomenon indeed.

Psychological therapies tend to root around in the tangled emotional entrails, trying to find the “cause” (ie the original event), reverse its effects and rebuild the spirit. More modern healing methods tend to go to the heart of the disease as it exists now, seeking to prompt new insights and awareness that will aid the sufferer to find his/her own way forward and out of the rut. These later therapies draw from psychology, spirituality, New Medicine, metaphysics, philosophy, folklore – anything that works in reawakening a sense of possibility and authorship in the person.

THE NECESSITY OF STRESS

The tricky thing about stress (and the anxiety that comes with it) is that, for most of us mere mortals, it’s an emotion we can't completely avoid: mind sees to that. In fact, the very idea of “avoiding” stress is likely to create its own stress on top of what's already going on. We stress about being stressed. We've wired our brains such that it’s difficult to take action until we feel at least some level of tension. The sad mockery is, though, on days when I wake up with the black dog, that it's the stress of having things to do that propels me out of bed. The irony (if irony is the right word), is that the stress that gets me up contributes to the condition that's laying me low. The black dog spends all its time chasing its own tail.

It is also true, though, that performance peaks under the heightened activation that comes with moderate levels of stress. As long as the stress isn’t prolonged, and provided that unnoticed dregs are not allowed to accumulate under the carpet, it’s reasonably harmless (pun intended).

Maybe there's a stress-less way of doing your best?? I think there is, but before we go there, I think we need to look closer at what we've been doing to ourselves with stress, from before we were born. If we know how we created the dilemma, we have a chance to discreate it and find another way.

TalentSmart explains the mind' s mechanics for “needing” stress with the following diagram.

The damned-if-you-do; damned-if-you-don't dilemma around stress goes even further. Dr. Elizabeth Kirby, from the University of California, Berkeley, found that the onset of stress entices the brain into growing new cells responsible for improved memory. However, this effect is only seen when stress is occasional. As soon as the stress, overt or latent, continues beyond a few moments into a prolonged state, it suppresses the brain’s ability to develop new cells. This is one of the mind's ways of affecting the brain so that it can continue to be “right” about its conclusions – “I'm in danger..... This is a dangerous world.... Trust no-one...etc.” Since every body cell has a use-by date, prolonged stress is a killer. But I'm sure you didn't need a qualified expert to tell you that.

“I think intermittent stressful events are probably what keeps the brain more alert, and you perform better when you are alert,” Kirby says. For animals, intermittent stress is the bulk of what they experience, in the form of physical threats in their immediate environment. But animals let go of the stress just as quickly and completely when the danger is over. Watch any National Geographic footage of a impala being chased by lions or cheetahs: as soon as the immediate threat is over for an individual animal, it goes back to grazing as if nothing has just happened. Even given that some of that grazing might be displacement activity, the rate of recovery to a state of equanimity still puts us humans to shame. God, I wish I could do that! (I'm getting better at it....but.....)

Long ago, this was also the case for humans. But as the human brain evolved and increased in complexity, we developed the proclivity to worry and perseverate on events, which creates frequent experiences of prolonged stress.

Besides increasing your risk of heart disease, depression, and obesity, stress decreases your cognitive performance. Fortunately, though, unless a lion is chasing you, the bulk of your stress is subjective and under your control. Top performers have developed sufficient self-awareness to differentiate between imagined and real danger, and they have well-honed coping strategies that they employ under all stressful circumstances. This lowers their stress levels regardless of what’s happening in their environment, ensuring that the dis-comfort they experience is intermittent and not prolonged.

While I’ve run across numerous effective strategies that successful people employ when faced with stress, what follows are ten of the best. Some of these strategies may seem obvious, but the real challenge lies in recognizing when you need to use them and having the wherewithal to actually do so in concert with your present stress.

Calm People Appreciate What They Have

Taking time to contemplate what you’re grateful for isn’t merely the “right” thing to do. It also improves your mood, because it reduces the stress hormone cortisol by 23%. Research conducted at the University of California found that people who work daily to cultivate an attitude of gratitude experience improved mood, energy, and physical well-being. It’s likely that lower levels of cortisol featured in this mood uplift. Now, you can take a cortisol tablet and mask the real cause (psychiatric), or you can look at the dynamics of the stress and find the cause (psychologic), or you can realise that there's a world of possibilities outside the maze you've hemmed yourself into, by-pass therapy and simply go there. I opt to give thanks for the realisation, quit the therapeutic maze-game, and enjoy the healing. Easy. I still indulge in exploring therapy, but more out of curiosity and for insight than out of desperation for a "cure".

Calm People Allow the Habit of Dreading “What If?” To Pass on By

“What-if” is a two-edged tool. Dread-filled “What if?” states of being throw fuel on the fire of stress and worry. Things can go in a million different directions, and the more time you spend worrying about a frightened future rather than exploring the possibilities of real-time transformation, the less time you’ll spend focusing on taking action that will calm you down and harness your stress so that you can harness that energy to explore new possibilities. Wide-eyed asking “what if?” can open you to formerly unseen potential. It's your choice: you can fearfully ask “What-if.....” from a space that separates you from possibility and drops you into a funk of despair where you don’t want—or need—to go. Or you can open your eyes to an abundant universe and calmly ask “What-if...” with innocent anticipation and excitement. Your choice.

Calm People Practice Attitudes that Work

Wide-angle awareness helps make stress intermittent by de-focusing your brain’s attention away from some perceived “wrongness” onto a way of seeing that is less stress-full. You have to give your unkind mind a little help by consciously selecting something less tensing to think about, or better still, holding the current dilemma in a kinder, softer, more compassionate space. Any fresh thought that breaks the treadmill of stinkin' thinkin' will do to break the vicious circle and refocus your attention. When things are going well, and your mood is good, this is relatively easy. When things are going poorly, and your mind is flooded with separating thoughts, this can be a challenge. In these moments, think about your day and identify one creative thing that happened, no matter how small. If you can't think of something from the current day, reflect on the previous day or even the previous week, then consciously bring the good feeling in to your here-and-now. Or perhaps you’re looking forward to an exciting event that you can bring into the now and focus your attention on. The point here is that you coach yourself to have something bright, shiny and real here and now that you're ready to shift your attention to when the thoughts streaming through you turn dark, imaginary and negative.

Calm People Dis-identify and Detach

This is not the same as Separating yourself. Disconnection only creates difference and antagonism – both causes of more stress. Stay aware and engaged, and take a time-out to recharge your energies. Given the importance of keeping stress intermittent, and cleaning away every leftover scrap between bouts to prevent buildup creep, it’s easy to see how taking regular time off the grid can help keep your stress down. Stop the traffic and clean up the mess. When you make yourself available to your favourite stressors 24/7, you expose yourself to a constant barrage of anxiety leading to dis-ease of body and mind. Deliberately taking yourself offline and even—gulp!—turning off your computer and phone gives your body a break from some constant sources of stress. Studies have shown that something as simple as an email break can lower stress levels.

Technology is wonder-full. It enables constant communication and, for some people, an expectation that you should be available 24/7. It is extremely difficult to enjoy a stress-free moment outside of work when an email that will change your train of thought and get you thinking (read: stressing) about work can drop onto your phone at any moment. If detaching yourself from stress-related communication on weekday evenings is too big a challenge, then how about the weekend? Choose blocks of time where you cut the umbilical cord with needing to be needed, and go offline. You’ll be amazed at how refreshing these breaks are and how they reduce stress by putting a mental recharge and emotional cleansing into your weekly schedule. Technology can be a wonderful servant and a tyrannical master – which,  is entirely up to you. If you’re worried about the negative repercussions of taking this step, first try doing it at times when you’re unlikely to be contacted—maybe Sunday morning. As you grow more comfortable with it, and as your family, friends and colleagues begin to accept the time you spend offline, gradually expand the amount of time you spend away from technology.

Calm People Limit Their Caffeine Intake

Drinking caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline. Adrenaline is the source of the primitive “fight-flight-or freeze” response, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. The fight-flight-or-freeze mechanism sidesteps rational responding in favor of a faster reaction. This is great when a miffed bull with a territorial attitude problem is chasing you, but not so great when you’re responding to a curt email. When caffeine puts your brain and body into this hyper-aroused state of stress, your emotions overrun your behavior. The stress that caffeine creates is far from intermittent, as its long half-life ensures that it takes its sweet time working its way out of your body. If you have another cup on top of that, the residual effect kicks in, making your dependence chronic.  It's also worth mentioning that chronic depression, despite how lethargic it can make you feel, is a state of emotional hyper-activity. Stimulants of any sort, natural or synthetic, make the condition worse -- a very bad idea.

Calm People Sleep Regularly

Having spent 50 years doing shift work and 15 years suffering from undiagnosed sleep apnoea and the physical and mental consequences of sleep deprivation, I beat the drum and can’t say enough about the importance of restorative sleep (and nourishing diet) to increasing your emotional intelligence and managing your anxiety and stress levels. When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, shuffling through the day’s memories and storing or discarding them (which causes dreams), so that you wake up alert and clear-headed. Your self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when you don’t get enough—or the right kind—of sleep. Restorative sleep deprivation raises stress hormone levels on its own; even without a stressor present you feel jittery. Stressful projects often make you feel as if you have no time to sleep, and shift-working (sleeping during the day) pits you against your body clock. Take the time to get a decent night’s sleep. This is often the one thing that helps you get things back onto an even keel. A nightly ritual for getting ready for sleep is mightily helpful in easing you into the land of Nod.

Calm People Reframe Negative Self-Talk Into Positive Self-Recognition.

A big step in managing stress involves stopping low-frequency self-talk in its tracks. You do that by Stopping. Yes, just stop. Relax. Chill. Be with Nothing for a while. Your mind might not like it: tough titties. Take it as a good opportunity to watch how your mind wriggles and squirms to get you under its control again. Just watch its tricks. Get to know your out-of-control mailboy. Wait patiently for it to run out of steam, then quietly say "Are you done?" When peace finally prevails, take over the conversation with "OK, now here's how it's going to be from now on...."

The more you entertain low-frequency thoughts, the more power you give them and the lower frequency your being resonates at. That makes you more susceptible to attracting low-functioning people, events and conditions into your constellation, and makes you prey to low-frequency ailments. Up-level your vibes.....

 

Most of our negative thoughts are just that—thoughts, not facts. And they're not even your thoughts! “You are not the doer”, said the fat man with the unruffled demeanour. When you find yourself selling your higher, finer being out to nagging negative and pessimistic things that your inner voice repeats, it's time to stop and write them down. Literally stop what you're doing and write down what you're thinking. Once you've taken a moment to slow down the negative momentum of your thoughts, you will be more rational and clear-headed in evaluating “Is this really true in all cases? When is it true? When is it not true?” 

 

You can bet that statements you or others make are NOT true any time they contain words like “everyone”, “never,” “worst,” “ever,” “it goes without saying”, etc. 

 

If your inner statements still look like facts once they’re on paper, take them to a friend or colleague you trust and see if he or she agrees with you. Then the truth will surely come out. When it feels like something always or never happens, this is just your mind’s innate threat alarm inflating the perceived frequency or severity of an event. Identifying and labeling your thoughts as thoughts by separating them from the facts will help you escape the cycle of negativity and move toward a more realistic new outlook.

Calm People Constantly Reframe Their Perspective to Suit Their Better Selves.

Stress and worry are fueled by our own limited and skewed perception of events. It’s easy to think that unrealistic deadlines, unforgiving bosses, and out-of-control traffic are the reasons we’re so stressed all the time. Well, no they're not. Other people have those things too, and are not stressed by them. And that's rarely a matter of luck; it's always a matter of choosing. Stress is a chosen response, repeated so often that it has become a default reaction. But because it is still the effect of a choice, you can chose differently. Choices can be changed. Always. 

Whether they WILL be changed is up to you and no-one else. You can’t control your circumstances, but you can master how you respond to them. So before you spend too much time dwelling on something, take a minute to frame the situation in a different perspective than the one that's got you trapped. If you aren’t sure when you need to do this, try looking for clues that your anxiety may not be proportional to the stressor. If you’re thinking in broad, sweeping statements such as “Everything is going wrong” or “Nothing will work out,” or “Makers of car keys should have GPS markers built in,” then you need to reframe the situation. A great way to correct this unproductive thought pattern is to list the specific things that you think are actually are going wrong or not working out, and then list some things that are actually OK. Most likely you will come up with just some “wrong” things—not everything—and the magnitude of these stressors placed beside the bigger picture will look much punier than they initially seemed to be. A lot of my counseling involves helping clients achieve precisely this kind of reframing.

Calm People Breathe

The easiest way to make stress intermittent lies in something that you have to do everyday anyway: breathing. A lot of us have forgotten how to breathe. Natural breathing feels like a continuous figure “8”, with no breaks, each in- and out-breath flowing easily into the next. But people under stress catch their breath erratically, hold it, and then breathe like the piston of an engine, sucking small amounts of air into the tops of their lungs, and blowing it out again – panting. Their lungs, minds, spirit and imaginations are full of mostly stale air. Next time you find you've forgotten to breathe for a while, take a note of the immediate situation you're in, how you're feeling in the moment, take a deeper breath, and then run a quick inner awareness check over your body to find which muscles are unnecessarily tensed. As you become more aware, you'll be astounded to discover how many times a day you stop breathing – stop living – and tense up against what's going on with muscles you don't need to be using right now. And you're always out of the present while you're doing it.

Practice the new/old habit of being in the moment with your breathing. It will begin to train your mind to bring its resources solely to the task at hand and get the stress monkey off your back (stress is always focused on something from the imagined past or future). When you’re feeling stressed, take a couple of minutes to focus on your breathing. This brings you back to the present. Close the door, put away all other distractions, and just sit in a chair and breathe that easy “8”. The goal is to spend the entire time focused only on your breathing, which will discourage your mind from wandering. Think about how it feels to breathe smoothly and continuously. There should be no strain or difficulty in this. If there is, let go, let your body breathe for you (it knows how to do it without supervision), and relax. This sounds simple, but it’s hard to do for more than a minute or two. It’s all right if you get sidetracked by another thought; this is sure to happen at the beginning, and you just need to gently and kindly bring your awareness back to your breathing. If staying focused on your breathing proves to be a real struggle, try counting each breath in and out until you get to 20, and then start again from 1. Don’t worry if you lose count; you can always just start again. The reason I urge you to do this consciously is to break the bad breathing habits you've acquired since you were a newborn baby and replace them with a habit of natural breathing. Swapping any habit for a new one requires willingness and commitment.

This task may seem too easy or even a little silly, but by shifting your attention from your thinking to your breathing -- from reasoning to sensing, thought to sense, --  you’ll be surprised by how calm you feel afterward and how much easier it is to let go of distracting thoughts that otherwise seem to have lodged permanently inside your brain. You will NEVER be able to rid yourself of stinkin' thinkin' by trying NOT to think. Try it! Go on, try NOT to think something. You cannot do it.

Calm People Openly Use Their Support System

It’s tempting, yet entirely ineffective, to attempt tackling everything by yourself. To be calm and productive, you need to recognize your weaknesses and ask for help before you get to becoming overwhelmed. If you're one of those people who believes “If you want something done properly, you've got to do it yourself,” you need to investigate how your own arrogant rigidities are limiting your potential. 

 

Everyone – even you – has someone who is on their team, rooting for them, and ready to help them get the best from a difficult situation. Identify these individuals in your life and make an effort to seek their insight. The greatest gift you can give someone is to ask for their assistance. Something as simple as talking about your worries will provide an outlet for your anxiety and stress and supply you with a new perspective on the situation. Most of the time, other people can see a solution that you can’t because they are not as emotionally invested in the situation. Asking for help will mitigate your stress and strengthen your relationships with those you rely upon.

5 WAYS TO EXPERIENCE & CONVEY LESS STRESS

Work can push all our stress buttons: the need to achieve, fear of failing, reliance on others for our own success, overload, self doubt, competition and more. Ironically, how we respond to these stressors has a direct impact on our success and failure.

When we react reflexively, the impact of our reactions is often worse than the initial stress trigger. And while too much stress isn’t good, the sensation of stress is an important personal signal – the perception of stress, like a sore muscle, can help us identify what needs work and attention.

To extract the value of stress but experience and convey less of it:

1. Identify your specific stressors to better manage them: Develop higher self-awareness and take an inventory of what particular situations trigger and amplify your stress.

2. Understand your stress response cycle and how it affects you: Learn how your sensation of physical stress escalates to reactive thinking, impulsive behaviours and unintended consequences that undermine your effectiveness.

3. Shift your focus from stress to progress more quickly: Transition yourself from immediate reaction to stepping back far enough to observe the physical sensations, distil the value contained in the stress trigger and take more awareness-based actions.

4. Cultivate the conditions for enjoyment and satisfaction: Identify the parts of these present circumstances that you enjoy and proactively create around what you like.

5. Make systemic changes to reduce work stress triggers: Make agreements and arrangements with yourself that are appropriate to the circumstances and that reduce stress triggers and address the underlying issues.

Give yourself an initial 21 days to put these stress management tips into practice. Notice how quickly and easily the experiences of stress reduce, and your experiences of success and satisfaction arise more often in your detached awareness.

Then see if you can find gratitude hovering nearby.