Commuting. Living in a city. Relationships. Parenting. Work (or lack of work). Dealing with a rapidly changing society and its technology. We talk about all of these things causing us "stress". But what is stress?
I use a three-part definition. Stress is when:
* you feel out of control of the situation,
* you have negative feelings about that, and
* it winds you up physically.
Now, immediately that gives us several different possible approaches to dealing with stress. We can work on the control, the negative feelings, or the physical effects.
But why do these situations cause these effects?
Not all that long ago, our ancestors lived in a world where they often faced physical danger. In a dangerous situation it was useful for your body to prepare itself quickly to fight or run away. It still is, in situations like the Australian bushfires, or if your child is trapped under something that you normally couldn't lift.
When you're stressed, your heart beats faster, your blood pressure rises, and blood rushes away from your internal organs and into your arms and legs – up to five times the normal blood flow. Your breathing speeds up, your digestion slows down, and more energy floods into your bloodstream. Your large muscles tense. Your senses become sharper so that you can observe danger, and your memory becomes sharper so that you can learn from the situation. You temporarily become a superhero!
The problem is that we haven't had much time to come up with an alternative system to use when the threat isn't physical, when we're stuck in traffic, or interviewing for a job, or asking someone out, or the kids won't do what they're told. We need to drive in a screw and all we have is a spanner to pound it with. (Or maybe it's a tree branch.)
Not only that, but the stress system is set up for short-term use, to get you out of a bad situation quickly. When there isn't a physical threat, you often can't resolve it quickly. Some life stresses go on for years, and if you keep your body in constant stress mode, it starts to wear out, like your car would if you drove it at top speed all the time.
Your body also becomes overreactive, like soldiers who've been on duty for too long and start to shoot innocent bystanders by mistake because they're just so wound up. This is where a lot of allergies, and even some autoimmune diseases, come from. The body's immune system is worn out and confused by being on standby all the time for some physical threat that never actually happens, and it starts treating things that aren't harmful as if they were.
The good news is that there are some tools and techniques you can use to deal better with stress. The even better news is that they're simple. Right here, right now, I'm going to introduce you to some of them.
The Welcoming Practice
The first technique is called the Welcoming Practice. It's very simple, but very effective. It goes like this:
Whenever, in the course of your life, you become aware of feeling an emotion such as fear, anger or sadness, say, "Welcome, [name of emotion]."
You're not welcoming the circumstances that caused the emotion, or the pain that it brings. But in acknowledging the emotion itself, greeting it as part of you, giving it its name, you diminish its power to hurt you.
saying its name, you shift the location of the activity within your brain and so shift your experience. Negative emotions are handled deep in the brain, in the basic structures that we share with reptiles and fish. They're there to help us protect ourselves in dangerous situations, and because the parts of the brain that handle them are right next to those which control heartbeat, blood pressure and breathing and those that release the chemicals that wind our bodies up, it's easy for them to get us ready quickly to fight or run away.
When we use words for the emotions, though, we're using a specifically human part of the brain that is near the outer surface, and setting up a pathway between the inner brain and the outer brain. That pathway drains off the activity so that you quickly calm down. You'll still feel the emotions a little for a while as the chemicals released into your bloodstream get recycled, but it won't be nearly as strong. This gives you the space to weigh up the situation and make good decisions.
In effect, you are stepping back from the emotion and recognizing it for what it is, and it's like turning off an alarm in your car or house – you look at the situation and decide that you've received the message that there might be something dangerous or harmful here, and that what you're going to do about it is not to freak out but to deal with solving it.
That's useful, because it puts you back in control, and feeling out of control is the first part of the definition of stress. It also defuses the negative emotions to a degree (the second part of the definition), and that starts to calm you down.
Practice welcoming the Big Four (sadness, fear, anger and guilt) in the shower each morning. This develops the habit of the Welcoming Practice.
It's All in the Way You Hold Your Mouse
The technique I want to look at now is an even more powerful calming technique which helps you to get back in control of difficult situations. It does this by "importing" a sense of control from a previous situation.
What you do is settle yourself comfortably, close your eyes, and remember a time when you felt in control, or when you'd just achieved something that you felt good about – when you were calm, on top of things, and felt confident in your own abilities. If you have trouble thinking of a memory like that, you can imagine that you're a character from a book or a movie or a TV show who has been in that kind of situation, and think about what that would feel like. Use all your senses to summon up a really clear, strong memory (or imagined memory): see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt, even add in smells and tastes if there were any.
Now turn up the intensity of those sights and sounds and feelings as if you were turning up the volume or the brightness on your TV. Count from 1 to 5, and as you do so, turn up the intensity so that by "5" the memory is really bright and clear and loud and firm and strong. And when you've done that, press one of your thumbs to a finger on the same hand (any finger, whichever you want). Press gently but firmly for a few seconds while you think about and re-experience that good memory, and then let go the pressure and the memory and open your eyes.
It's good to practice several times so that you get a really strong association between the finger press and the good feeling. You're using a process called "conditioning" to set up the link between two things that don't have any logical connection, a set of feelings and a finger press. So, from now on, you can use the press of the fingers to bring back the good, positive feelings and the whole mindset associated with those memories.
I read recently about an interesting experiment with mice. The mice were trained to associate feeling safe with hearing a bell. The experimenters then put them under stress and played the bell – and the mice relaxed. It was as if they'd been given antidepressants. The technique I've just outlined works exactly the same way, except you're training yourself. One of my clients calls it "happy hands" because he likes it so much, having the ability to trigger off good feelings for himself whenever he wants.
Now, when you do this in the middle of a situation where you feel stressed, what it does is put you into a state of mind where you feel confident and competent to solve the problem. You're in control of your own feelings, and that helps you to be in more control of the situation.
Give it a try.
What You Look At is What You See
Now I want to talk about what you can do once you have calmed yourself down a little, ways of mentally cutting the situation down to size.
Stress turns on a big spotlight so that you will remember a stressful situation clearly and avoid it in future. Sometimes, though, we're too good at identifying stressful situations. Anything that reminds us of a bad time can get us stressed. If something bad happened on a sunny day, sunny days can start to make us nervous. It's the flip side of the process that lets you use a finger touch to recall a positive mindset. So the first thing we can do about stress is to stop and ask a few simple questions.
Questions like, for example, "Am I reacting to this or to what this reminds me of?" This is a classic one in relationships – something your partner says reminds you of your mother, and straight away all of the stress of that relationship comes crashing into this relationship. And your partner eyes the smoking crater and thinks, "What just happened there?"
So question two is, "How else can I look at this?" I was in Sydney recently, driving through the new harbour tunnel, and I started thinking about how deep we were under the harbour and what would happen if it leaked. And I started to feel a bit nervous (particularly since I wasn't sure I was going to get to the airport in time to catch my plane). What I did was change the frame: "I'm on an adventure." Your body has a hard time telling the difference between nervousness and excitement. Your mind can tell it, "It's excitement. Trust me."
And question three is, "Am I really not in control?" Because if there are things you can do to change the situation, what you have is a challenge, not a stress. And once you have a challenge, you can start to think about what to do next.
Train yourself in finding positive ways to look at situations. As a hypnotherapist, it's part of my job to find positive ways to look at things, because focussing on what is wrong just produces more of it. This is why "trying harder" doesn't work. The more energy you pump into what is wrong, the more power it has over your imagination.
It's like that episode of the TV show Frasier where Frasier was learning to ride a bike. Early on in the process, he runs the bike into a tree. From then on, every time he rides past that place, he's totally focussed on the tree – and inevitably, his front wheel is magnetically drawn to it. If he'd focussed on the path, he would have breezed right past it. It's a mental trick.
In other words: Whether the glass is half full or half empty depends on whether you're emptying it or filling it.
So, in summary: In a situation where you feel threatened or upset, you now have some techniques to calm yourself down, deal with the negative feelings so that they don't get in the way of working out a solution, and re-assess the situation to decide whether you're really threatened or out of control or not. I hope that's helped you and will continue to help you as you engage with the challenges of 21st-century life.
Reference : www.articlesphere.com
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