Dealing with stress
How to deal with Stress
Breathe
When we are stressed we tend to breathe into our chests and our breathing tends to be faster and quite shallow.
If we slow our breathing and breathe into our stomach the part of our nervous system that we use when we rest and sleep is activated and this starts a reaction that calms us down.
- Sit up straight and put your hand on your belly
- Take a deep breath. Fill your stomach with air pushing your hand out. The important thing is that you are breathing into your stomach, not just taking deep breaths into your chest; your chest should be still.
- Do this slowly in and out four or five times and notice the impact on how you feel.
This simple technique is so effective even people with serious anxiety disorders say it is one of the most useful techniques they learned to help manage their anxiety.
Move
If you’re sitting at your desk, staring at your screen, feeling stressed, it’s unlikely the solution will come to you. Many schools of psychology including NLP teach us to do something different with our body if we are feeling bad, our nervous system reacts to the movement and helps us to feel differently. It’s one reason why regular exercise has a positive impact on our state of mind. How many times have you got up from your desk gone to make a cup of tea and then had a brilliant idea on the way back? How many times have you slept on an issue and the solution came to you in the morning? This is it in action.
If you are feeling down or stressed, look upwards. Looking downwards is how you access your feelings and self talk which isn’t useful if you’re stressed. By looking upwards you can change how you feel. Even better move your body. If you’re sitting or lying down move around, go for a walk or move to a different environment and if you are pacing around feeling stressed, sit or lie down and use the breathing technique.
Become aware of how you talk to yourself
We all do it you are not mad. The question is does your self talk help you or not? Do you praise yourself for a good idea or beat yourself up over all the little things that don’t go well? Your self talk has an impact on how you feel and what action you take.
Notice when you’re using words like must, should, need and have to. ‘I have to finish this today’ ‘Look at all these things I must do’. How much do we enjoy being told what to do? Your mind is the same. These words used in excess add to your stress levels and don’t help you to feel great about yourself.
Replace these with words like could, might or possibly. This brings to mind the possibility of choice; the message is received as a suggestion rather than an order. This will impact what you do, how you feel about doing it and haw you feel about yourself.
Try using this in your communication with others too and notice how positively messages are received if you replace necessity words with choice words.
Become a fly on the wall
This is a skill perfected by people who work in stressful situations all the time. People who work in the emergency services and the army for example know how to detach emotionally from a situation so that they can make a level headed assessment of what’s going on. This is a skill we can all learn and use in stressful situations.
Practice on a memory first; remember something that happened recently, something where you remember experiencing some feelings or a reaction. If you are seeing it through your own eyes, seeing as you saw it at the time, it’s as if you are reliving it and you are probably feeling the feelings too.
Now remember the same scene, but this time you can see yourself in the picture, like in a photo or a movie. It’s as if you are a fly on the wall watching yourself in this scene.
Notice where the feelings are, you may find that they have gone.
Being able to do this in real time when things are stressful will help you to feel calmer and get a new perspective on the situation. Practice it on mild situations first, then when the big things happen your mind will know what to do. Of course you don’t want to be detached all the time, when nice things are happening it’s great to be there and experience it fully. The key is having the flexibility and choice to do it when you want to.
Stress is catching; you can watch it spread around a family, office or even the country. If you can start to change your reaction to stressful situations others will do the same. You don’t consciously choose to be stressed, it happens unconsciously, yet there are some conscious things you can do to help dissolve the impact when it happens.
The problem with stress and anxiety is that you feel we have no control over what’s going on, that everything is happening to you, and yet by practising some of these techniques and getting control of how you feel, you may just get some clarity on what you can do to improve your own situation in not so easy times.
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| About The Author
Karen Meager is a qualified Counsellor and Psychotherapist (DipNLPt). Karen specialises in Neuro Linguistic Psychotherapy – a short term, solution focused approached to therapy. Her practice is based in Frome, near Bath, Somerset. |
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