How Well Do You Know Your Stress? (Stress Series 3/4)

When stress strikes and impacts your body and mind, how do you handle it?  Learning about your reactions can help you manage it and build resilience in its presence.

Here are 3 leading ways to get to the root of stress:

1. Explore your stress through questioning. Ask yourself:

A. How do I respond under pressure? Maybe you confront, avoid, break down, become irrational.

B. What does stress do to me physically? Beating heart, tightness in your chest or shoulders, sweating, knots in your stomach, or headaches.

C. How does it affect me emotionally? Do I get sad, angry, worried, or have a pervasive out-of-control feeling?

D. What are my go-to distresses? Are they positive: Laughing, meditating, practicing yoga, reading, socializing, or negative: excessive eating, drinking, procrastinating, watching tv, overworking, being rude to others?

E. Do I have a different reaction or destresser for a different trigger or context? Perhaps when it is dealing with family, you engage in emotional eating, but when dealing with a work event, you get angry and condescending.

It is ok to not have all the answers, but embarking on a journey of self-discovery can be the most important expedition you go on.  You can start by prioritizing your self-reflection by journaling daily, thinking regularly on these questions especially during mundane activities like brushing your teeth, or by reading about how other people handle the causes and effects of stress so you can provide a comprehensive solution.

2. Know your values.  Stress can occur when one of our values is being violated so knowing your values can help with an adequate response.  For example, you may be anxious about giving feedback to your team member.  Upon further scrutiny of the situation, you realize that the value that is being tested is your concern with fairness, so you want to make sure you are doing right by your teammate. You ask yourself, “by prolonging the conversation, am I being fair?”  You may realize that when you frame the situation through the fairness value you are much quicker to provide feedback so she can improve and help the team.  Or perhaps, you criticize yourself harshly and are stressed because it is violating your value of self-compassion.  When you can identify the principles that are being tested, you know how to put strategies in place that allow you to use your emotions wisely under stress.

3. Increase your response range. When we are stressed, our brain is wired to be more reactionary and our decision-making faculties are impaired.   We can resort to binary choice-making which limits the options available to us.  In tough decisions, we can reach premature conclusions rather than opening ourselves up to more and better options. A good way to combat this problem is to force yourself to generate several responses, even when you think you only have a few, challenge yourself to have at least 10 and then you can winnow down to a realistic and empowering three. Knowing that you have more options will reduce your stress. 

When confronted with a stressful situation, carefully appraise your core strengths and resources rather than panicking or disconnecting from reality.  Identify the source of the stress, think about the values that are being tested, and increase your range of responses so you can defeat anything that comes your way.

Quote of the day: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” – Mark Twain

Q: Which value, when violated, causes you the most stress?  What’s your best distressing technique?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear!

[The next blog in this series 4/4 will focus on dealing with stress in the workplace]

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with others to understand their sources of stress and have a game plan for working with it for increased performance, contact me to learn more.

What do you know about your stress?

Top 8 Ways To Deal With Stress (Stress Series 2/4)

In the last article, we talked about different kinds of stress and associated positive and negative impacts.  The focus of this article will be on ways to manage worry effectively.

Let’s Jump Into Leading Techniques to Deal with Stress:

1. View it positively. How you see it makes all the difference.  A study tracked 30,000 adults in the US for eight years and began by asking people, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" and "Do you believe that stress is harmful to your health?" Researchers then used public death records to find out who died.  The results showed that people who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year and viewed it as harmful to their health had a 43% increased risk of dying.  People who experienced a lot of anxiety but did not see it as harmful were no more likely to die.  In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little strain. Changing how you view stress can literally mean the difference between life and death. 

Furthermore, when you tell yourself, this is my body helping me rise to the challenge, you channel that energy to work for you and not against; you turn stress from debilitating to enhancing. Reframing it can provide a different look and open up an array of healthy possibilities to stare down the tension from an empowering position.

2. Get help. When you share with somebody how you are feeling instead of bottling it up, you can relieve some of the effects. When life is difficult, your stress response wants you to be surrounded by people who care about you, there is a built-in mechanism for resilience found through human connection.   When you reach out to others to seek support, you can bounce back more easily than if you choose to isolate yourself. You may be surprised that the very worry that you are convinced only relates to you is shared by others and more common than you think.

3. Play and laugh.  The best antidotes to stress are play and laugher.  It is hard for the human brain to think about more than one thing at any given time.  You cannot be both pepped up and driven down at the exact same moment so when you find ways to laugh, you are reducing the stress emotion.

4. Get busy. Winston Churchill famously said, “I have no time for worry.”  If you are doing something that involves planning and thinking, it is hard to fit in worry. Sometimes, taking your mind off the nagging worry will allow you to return to the problem on your own terms. What kind of project or task can you work on that will occupy your full attention?

5. Rehearse the worst-case scenario.  Instead of having these uninformed nebulous catastrophic thoughts bounce around in your skull, you can think through the worst-case scenario which can shed new light.  Perhaps we realize that it is not as bad as we are portraying it, or we discover the power we need to get through the toughest times. When we visualize, more information can surface to assuage our concerns and we can plan to mitigate those circumstances.

6. Know it will pass. Believing in the idea that the stress is temporary and that there is nothing life could bring to you that is beyond your strength to endure.  You can also ask yourself… how much is this thing that I’m worrying about really matter in the grand scheme of things?  How much am I willing to pay for this worry, how much have I already paid? 

7. Engage in future think. Picture yourself in the future, perhaps 1-3 years from now, and how you will not care about this trivial matter.  It helps us visualize not being in this painful moment but in a more joyous time. When we are so ensconced in the short-term, we are filled with all kinds of emotions, but when we can shift our mind to the long-term, the more rational side can balance the emotional side.

8. System design. If there is a problem that is causing you stress, you can address it by designing a system to combat the problem.  This can involve the following:

A. Have a process: When people panic they make mistakes, they override systems and disregard rules.  If you have a familiar process, you will be less stressed because you have prepared for this before and know exactly what to do. 

B. Get started: Maybe the first thing you do is write down what is causing the problem. You do not even need to devise a solution, you just need to begin. You can even pretend you are somebody else objectively collecting facts for the problem.  When you devote your time to research, worries tend to evaporate in light of knowledge and clarity.

C. Break down the stress:  When you can dismantle something or look at it from a new angle, it loses its force over you.  Don’t focus on the big goal, break it down into small pieces, and pay attention to taking the first step. 

Other techniques can include: getting adequate sleep, regular exercise, mental downtime, taking vacations, doing controlled breathing, practicing yoga, mindfulness meditation, getting acupuncture treatments, walking in nature, journaling, being of service to others, and practicing loving-kindness to name a few.

The main takeaway is that we are not powerless to stress.  When we proactively manage it, we will regain control and find more ways to be happy and fewer ways to worry.

Quote of the day:  “It is not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.” -Hans Selye, Father of Stress Research

Question of the day:  What technique do you use that is not on this list? Comment and share below, we would love to hear from you!

[The next blog in this series 3/4 will focus on ways you can learn about the sources of your stress]

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with others to understand their sources of stress and have a gameplan for working with it for increased performance, contact me to learn more.

Reduce your stress with these techniques

Making Sense of Stress (Stress Series 1/4)

There are no shortages of common sources of stress including work, children, finances, relationships, illness, overcommitment, loneliness, family dynamics, lack of work-life balance, and uncertainty, all exacerbated during these quarantine times.  While stress is a ubiquitous part of life, its negative effects do not have to be. The very way we look at stress can completely change its hold over us.

Stress, or this agitation in the body, usually happens when demands exceed capacity. It can come in many different forms. There is the type of stress which you bring onto yourself such as showing up for a meeting unprepared or skipping out on a commitment.  This is pointless stress because it can be avoided or minimized with advance planning and prioritization before the situation turns problematic. There is the stress that hits you like a bolt from the blue and even having done everything right, you could not have anticipated or controlled its arrival.  There is high-level stress that can be debilitating to your performance and there is low-level stress that can be enhancing. There is short-lived stress that provides the accelerating force for you to accomplish a task and there is long-lasting stress that chips away at your health and happiness each day.  The intensity and duration of stress matters, and when both are present, it is a recipe for disaster.

Stress: The Destroyer

The one thing for sure is that too much stress, especially of the acute variety can have deleterious effects.  It can muddle our thinking by crippling our abilities to think long-term, and it can compel poor decision making. University of Pennsylvania Professor and Author Annie McKee says, with chronic stress, “we have more difficulty being flexible or open to new ideas, we start seeing things in simplistic ways and we overreact to minor irritants; everything and everyone starts looking like a threat.” In this state, we are more likely to cause problems rather than solve them.  It is an endless loop – we do not think straight and we pick fights; we lash out, hide out, or opt-out. It gives us tunnel vision, the more stressed we are, the more focused we tend to be and are unable to see the periphery.  Neurologist Robert Sapolsky spent more than three decades studying the physiological effects of stress on health.  He concluded that long-term stress suppresses the immune system, making us more susceptible to infectious diseases and can even shut down reproduction by causing erectile dysfunction and disrupting menstrual cycles. Being chronically overwhelmed and fatigued can negatively impact our performance and can lead to mental health issues such as burnout and depression.

Stress: The Builder

Not all stress is bad, however.  A little bit of stress or a lot for a very short period of time can be a good thing.  Our stress hormones keep us alive!  If something was intent on eating us, our stress reactors would kick in and encourage us to run away. Sapolsky explains, stress hormones are brilliantly adapted to help us survive an unexpected threat. "You mobilize energy in your thigh muscles, you increase your blood pressure and you turn off everything that's not essential to surviving, such as digestion, growth, and reproduction.”  You think more clearly, and certain aspects of learning and memory are enhanced. All of that is spectacularly adapted if we are dealing with an acute physical stressor. Other than keeping us alive, moderate stress can help us develop coping skills and even kick us in the butt to boost our output.  Being unproductive can cause a feeling of stress and sway us in the direction of aiming to get work done. Having that deadline that is tight, but not too tight can spur creativity and motivation. Additionally, those stress states help us appreciate the periods of tranquility and the proactive steps we can take to spend more time in those peace zones.

It is important to notice the difference between stress that causes us chaos and stress that brings great results.  Fostering the good kind of stress and using techniques to minimize and avoid the bad type of stress will take you far. Regardless of the approach, we should never allow the stress termites to eat away at our lives. We have more power available to us than we realize and there is always some type of strong response we can offer.

Quote of the day: “Stress is caused by being here but wanting to be there” -Eckhart Tolle

Q: How have you used stress to achieve peak performance?

[The next blog in this series 2/4 will focus on 8 ways to deal with stress]

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with others to understand their sources of stress and have a gameplan for working with it for increased performance, contact me to learn more.

Embrace the good kind of stress while mitigating the bad type.