Stress stress I am always stressed
What will you learn about stress in this blog? I will shortly summarize how stress works and focus on psychological principles and strategies to deal with stress.
All of us experience stress. Let me start by saying that not all stress is debilitating. I always underline this as a leading principle because becoming friends with your stress responses means that you can facilitate the energy that it creates into peak performance experiences. The simplest example is athletes who train at high intensity to focus their performance in one try. Not only do they often succeed, but they can exceed their top performance and break their personal bests.
How to become friends with our stress?
In order to familiarize ourselves with our stress response, we need to learn what happens to our body. A system called the HPA Axis is the star in this process. Our brain is activated to prepare us to react to a threat by sending hormones through our body to eventually produce cortisol that creates arousal and prepares us to act. If we are often stressed this action mode can turn into a chronic feedback loop, which means our HPA axis is overly activated and may have difficulty appropriately shutting off. Prolonged stress has been proven to be detrimental to our physical and mental health.
The key point to remember when we are trying to befriend our stress is that stress = action mode. To stop the action mode from taking over our lives, we first need to sooth our body that is in a state of alert. Why our bodies and not our minds? When we are in a state of alert, our mind will mirror our body’s preparedness to act; analysing threats, making plans, anxiously pacing forward to prepare for the next impact of tasks and stressors. We can’t expect our thoughts to calm down if our body is pumping our mind with energy to be ready for action.
Soothing our body and then our mind
As I mentioned, soothing our body first is a good strategy to start with. The aim is to find clarity of mind, and learn to facilitate the energy produced by our body into our peak performance. In simple words, we control the stress and the stress doesn’t flood us.
Our body can be soothed by stress reducers: going for a walk, reading a book, listening to music, talking, sports (and many more). In case you can’t leave a meeting to go for a walk or read a book in the middle of an intense negotiation :) here are 4 reducers that can relieve the tension from your body in any situation:
Mediation
Mindful breathing
Counting
Visualization
If you are not yet proficient in these 4 strategies, remember, they are trainable. Start by choosing 1 or 2 of them and practicing them daily.
After reducing your body tension you can revisit your thoughts. Check in to see if your logic and thought processes have shifted. Have they maybe toned down from a state of alert and new creative solutions are coming up? You may simply observe that you are free from some overwhelming thoughts.
