Choose how you respond to stress

Feeling stressed

It’s National Stress Awareness Week (4-8 November), so I want to focus on how we react and respond to stressful situations and look at how we can become more resilient.

Resilience is our capacity to bounce back from adversity. Easier said than done, you might think. Stressful things happen in life to all of us. Stress has the potential to define us – how we live, feel and manage our day-to-day. But we can make choices about how we deal with it.

In this blog I share how you can respond to stress in ways that diminish rather than heighten negative feelings. My practical Stress First Aid Kit is something you can have to hand at all times, ready for when difficult moments come up.

How stress can proliferate

We might have difficulty communicating with a colleague. An important meeting coming up. A deadline we feel anxious about. Or, we might feel low because we give ourselves a hard time about something we said or did that we didn’t like. That’s our actual, direct experience, and we can’t do very much about it. It’s called primary experience.

Unfortunately we often cause ourselves extra unnecessary stress by following that experience up with various thoughts, emotions and judgements.

For example, you feel under pressure because you have a deadline to meet. You might think: “I’ll never get it done on time. Why do I have to do this? It’s not fair!”. These thoughts might be accompanied by feelings of anxiety, inadequacy and resentment, as well as judgements such as: “This job is too much” (judgement about the job) or “I’m useless at this, I’m not good enough” (judgement about self).

These kinds of reactions can proliferate and escalate. One thought leads to others, which lead to more feelings and more judgements. Before you know it you are drowning in a sea of despair! This is called secondary experience. How do you deal with this?

You can choose how to respond to stress

Recognise that you don’t have to cope with all the extra negative thoughts and feelings your mind has come up with. You might still be under pressure to hit the deadline, which you may experience as unpleasant, but that’s all.

Our reactions are not usually conscious, but automatic and habitual. By contrast our responses are conscious, chosen and creative.

When we become aware that our feelings of inadequacy, resentment and anxiety are not actually caused by the deadline but that they are our own personal reaction to it, then choice becomes possible. Shall I allow myself to feel anxious and inadequate as usual or shall I respond in a different way?

Use these steps to deal with everyday stress

Tip: Write this four-step Stress First Aid Kit on a piece of paper and stick it in your pocket. That way you will have it with you at all times.

1.     Notice when something is causing you stress
Look for and notice symptoms in your body, such as tensing in your belly and shoulders, increased heartbeat, frustration, irritability, compulsive thinking.

2.     Catch it early
Stress reactions can speed up and fire off very quickly.

3.     Stop and come back to your senses
This may mean you need to stop what you are doing and do something else. Stop working at your computer. Stop overthinking when you need to make a decision. Pause, bring your attention to your breath, to your body, notice your feet on the ground, notice your legs and belly and take three deep breaths.

4.     Be kind to yourself

Bring a kind, open, curious attitude to your experience. Allow yourself to be human. Remember: we all experience difficult and unpleasant situations. You are not alone. Take a look at my free resource on practicing self-kindness.

You’ll notice in step 4 that one of the keys to reducing stress and increasing resilience is self-kindness (see How do you treat you?). When we become more aware of our habitual reactions, we often don’t like what we notice and tend to judge ourselves harshly. This adds more unnecessary suffering. Bringing kindness to our experience helps us to avoid getting caught up in negative emotions. Self-kindness helps us to become more emotionally robust and resilient.

The Stress First Aid Kit is an immediate antidote to anxiety and stress. Try it out.

I will be at the International Stress Awareness Week Conference on 8 November in London.  As always, if you need a little help, get in touch and book your free initial coaching discovery session.

With warm wishes,

Karen