I find myself stressed out many times. The world is not the way I want it to be, and that causes stress. The actual person or situation I am resisting changes on a day to day basis, but my resistance has the quality of an otter that keeps raising its head above the water, only that it is not cute.
A lot of times, I want my stress gone. Right now. I tend to do a lot of things to eliminate stress. Sometimes, it is eating snacks. Other times it is biting my nails. Yet other times, it is reading news. And if that were not enough, I also tend to argue with situations and people in my head. I am not sure why, but it is likely because my mind thinks that one day I will be able to get rid of this stress symptom by arguing it out.
In my experience, all these methods of diverting attention from stress tends to cause even more stress even a few minutes later when we are forced to confront the reality.
Alternate ways of working with stress
In the past few years, I have tried going deeper into the feeling of stress, getting to know it a bit more and what exactly am I feeling. Here is an overview of a few things that tend to work for me. I am putting them out there in hopes that maybe some of these things might be helpful for you too.
The good thing is that all these practices requires less than one minute to do. So, one can try and toss it out easily if it is not worth one’s time.
A few conscious breaths — or even one conscious breath.
In this practice, we don’t try to change anything, but become aware of the sensations on our face and body as the result of in-breath and out-breath. I don’t try to breath more deeply or more shallowly. Just become aware of the sensations the breath causes. Any sensation, that of tingling, ticking, air flowing, prickly etc.
Ideally, you do this for a minute. But it takes about 5 second per breaths. So, you can do this in just 5 seconds. Even with your eyes open, in the middle of talking to people if you want to. Very portable and powerful.
Open your eyes wide.
Typically, we become tunnel visioned when we are stressed, focusing on narrow set of circumstances. Our eyes tend to become narrowly focused too. I also tend to frown when I am stressed.
In this practice, we take one breath with eyes wide open, and become curious about what we see. Right now, when I opened my eyes wide, I noticed the post-it sticking above my monitor. No earth-shattering observation, just the practice of opening your eyes with curiosity can make you aware of your stress and change your physiology in small ways.
Sit or stand with open posture.
We tend to sit hunched down when we are stressed. In this practice, we pull our shoulders back and down and take one natural breath in that posture. (You can do more breaths if you want to.) In just 5-10 seconds, I start to feel more empowered. That is usually not the goal for me — just getting acquainted with stress is useful enough, but if something makes me feel empowered, that is even better.
Act and think in the opposite way for 1 minutes.
Stress typically leads us into think similar thoughts over and over again (tunnel vision) and do similar actions over and over again (e.g., stress eating), without realizing if they are helping or not.
One helpful practice I have found is to put an alarm for 1 minute (keep it short), and challenge myself to think and act in the opposite way for that one minute. For example, if the stress about a relationship is causing you to think of someone as a bad person, consider seeing what was good about the situation and person for that one minute.
Imagine stress being good for you.
Is stress good for you or bad for you? Well, it depends on the quantity first. Too little is not good (no growth), and nor is too much. Usually when we are talking about stress, it is overtaking our life, and that causes overwhelm and burnout. So, that is not good for us.
Even if we fix the quantity of stress, determining if it is good for you or not depends on how you relate to stress. According to some studies, if you think stress is good for you, it is beneficial for you, and if you think it is bad for you, it is harmful for you. Or what they call, it is a self fulfilling prophecy. So, take one minute and imagine this particular stress you are feeling being good for you, imagine it building your character, making your more resilient, you coming out stronger at the end of it (a quality you can keep for the rest of your life). The sky is the limit for what you can think when you want to think opposite.
These ways may or may not be helpful for you, but I have found them helpful in my own life. They take a small amount of time to practice, so it has been worth a try in the beginning, and even when they don’t work for short amounts of time or in certain situations.
I am working on a course to get deeper into each of these methods and practice them as a group and build consistent habit around such practices. Let me know if you would like to explore these methods more. In any case, if you try these practices, I would learn to hear about your experience.