Stress Management

You might ask yourself: Do I have good human stress management techniques for myself?  How do I manage my stress and what works best for me?  Am I able to detect my stress levels when they are elevated pretty early on?  Am I very familiar with the things that cause me stress?

     Human stress management will contribute greatly to your mental well-being and mental health.  Without your mental health being in good shape, it can cause other aspects of life to crumble.  Good mental health will allow you to grow faster and grow more whether it is personal growth, growth in knowledge, or career growth.  It will allow you to achieve more whether we are speaking in terms of a day or within your lifetime.

     In order to keep your mental health well, it is important to recognize when you are beginning to take on more stress than you are able to handle.  How would a person identify when they are beginning to become stressed?  There are multiple techniques, but I will cover one technique that seems to work well.  This exercise may only need to be done once or done on occasion to remind yourself.

I. Muscle-tensing: Purposely pick a muscle on your body and tense it up.  You may decide to tense up your biceps for example.  Tense up your biceps and hold it for ten seconds.  Then relax for ten seconds and try to tense it up for 15 seconds.  While you are tensed up, try to truly feel and recognize this sensation of when it is tensed.  Also, try to really feel the sensation of when you are relaxed and what that feels like.  Do the same thing with different muscle parts of your body.  Try it with your quadriceps.  Then repeat with your back muscles.  Then try tensing up all your muscles and see what that feels like and then relaxing and consciously memorize what that feels like.  By going through this exercise, you may learn the difference of what your body feels like when it is relaxed and recognize when you are tense or becoming tense.  Quite often, in times of stress, our bodies will tense up without us even being aware of it.  Now, when you are becoming tense in the future, hopefully your mind will help you consciously identify when you are starting to tense or become stressed.  If you are able to identify this regularly, you will have the opportunity to correct whatever it is you may need to and minimize your stress.  It is often the prolonged tensed states that can begin to cause problems.

     Now that you have a chance of identifying when you are stressed, what can a person do about it? Here are some techniques that we can briefly cover for now but there are many options out there and finding a few that work well for you would be the goal:

A) Breathing – after you recognize that you may be more tense than desired, you can consciously slow your breathing.  You may take longer, slower, deeper breathes in and then slowly exhaling out at a controlled rate.  You can do this for a few breathes, 10 breathes, or for as long as you need to. You get better with practice like many things.

B) Positive Self Talk – You can mentally or even verbally tell yourself statements that you may need to hear.  You may say to yourself in a calm soothing fashion such as:

“Everything is going to be okay.”

“This is no big deal.”

“I will get through this.”

“I got this.”

These are some examples but whatever works best for you would be the way to go.  You can do this separately or in conjunction with the slow breathing technique.

C) Relax your muscles – Consciously make sure your muscles are relaxed if appropriate.  Mentally check to see if any part of your body is tensed up for some reason.  If you are tense, try to relax your muscles and shake out your hands, arms, or legs if you need to in order to ensure they are relaxed.  This can also be done in conjunction with the two options mentioned above.

D) Meditation – whether it is a few minutes or for 30+ minutes, many people have expressed that meditation is helpful to centering themselves and finding calm.

E) Yoga/Chi Gong/Tai Chi – it doesn’t hurt to try different things in order to find out what works well for you.  Yoga is a common one for many to de-stress but there are others out there that may work and can double up as exercise.

F) Regular exercise – it is widely believed that regular exercise helps with stress management.  Many people notice this after any cardiovascular workout that is done.  Picking up this good habit would help with one of the other foundational blocks we’ll cover later.

G) General Self Care – This can be whatever activity that places you in a great state of mind and can range in activities like having your nails done, back massage, or simply getting some time to yourself.

H) Shift your perspective – You can consciously shift your perspective on a particular outlook.  Say for example, you may have exposed yourself to an unusually large amount of negative news on TV recently.  It may be impacting your mood.  If you catch yourself feeling overly down, you can shift your perspective.  You may think of all the human interactions that occur on a daily basis and that 99% of those interactions among people are neutral or positive compared to the tiny percent where it may be negative.  Shifting the perspective or outlook can pull you away from the negative focus (that maybe news outlets report and focus on) and remind you that there is an overwhelmingly large number of events that are just fine or even positive.

I) Ho’oponopono - sometimes the cause of our stress can be due to anger, grudges, or other types of emotional stress.  You can look into this Hawaiian art of forgiveness and do some research on your own.  My personal takeaway from this is to seek to forgive if possible.  Any of that negative energy that a person may hold on to can potentially cause some self-harm.  So, letting it go may be best for all parties if possible.  You can look to forgive others as well as forgiving yourself.  The mantra is something similar to: "I’m sorry, Please forgive me, Thank you, I love you."  You can say you are sorry even if there is nothing for you to be sorry about.  It is almost like recognizing that there was something wrong, something that happened, something that caused disharmony, and now balance and harmony is being placed back.

J) Rationalization - depending on the situation, sometimes rationalization can help reduce stress.  One might automatically say something like "why does this have to happen to me?" when the person is in a rush driving somewhere and there happens to be heavy traffic.  It could simply be that is happens to be almost 5:00pm on a weekday.  Or it happens to be a long weekend and a lot of people are traveling.  Another example might be if you happen to cross paths with someone who is particularly unfriendly or unkind.  That person might simply be having a bad day or it could be that the person had a really challenging childhood and it almost isn't their fault because they don't really understand or were not taught any better way to behave.

K) Choosing Positivity - Focusing on the positive aspects of your life or of a situation is your choice.  Generally, most situations have some pros and some cons.  Choosing & practicing on being grateful for what you do have versus focusing on what you don't have can potentially make you feel better and lower your stress.

     What happens if someone has poor stress management abilities?  Everything might be fine for someone but eventually there may be too many things to juggle or too many things to juggle for too long and things might fall apart.  Having the ability and skills to manage your own stress will allow you to maintain your mental clarity.  That will, in turn, give you a chance to correct your situation.  It can buy you more time to stay calm, combat anxiety, and possibly remove things that causes you stress in a gradual manner or to cope with them in a healthy manner.  Without the ability to manage stress, even the successful things you had in your life could crumble.  You may no longer be in the proper mental head space and multiple things could fall apart.  Ideally, your stress is recognized and dealt with properly.  It all starts with first recognizing it.  Having good stress management techniques will allow you to do more and juggle more if and when you need to.  In a calmer and less stressed state of being, it will likely increase your chances of being a better person and allow you to be your best self.

What might you do to increase your personal stress management skills?