Stress Management - A Journey Part 1

“You have two choices: to control your mind or to let your mind control you.” — Paulo Coelho

You can read the text, play the video as you read or just watch and listen.

This is part one of a series on stress management.

We will explore how stress or anxiety can affect us as well as simple practical techniques for stress management.

To be more calm and relaxed, that is to manage stress or anxiety, is an art, a skill that can be learned.

The aim of these articles is to show practical ways to deal with psychological, physical and emotional stress and its effects on the human mind and body, whatever they may be. I hope the examples I give will explain how I see stress and some simple ways for those in need (and isn’t that all of us?) to be able to handle themselves and the situations they find themselves in more effectively.

The word 'STRESS' is used to mean many things today. Tension, anxiety, fear, doubt, worry, all this and more. Indeed, the word anxiety is also becoming interchangeable with stress. Anxiety or panic “attacks"are becoming more prevalent. The label is not as important as knowing what to do about the situation.

As far as we can tell, the human body has evolved very little in about the last 100,000 years. Society and the way we live however, has changed enormously and this, I believe, is a vital aspect in understanding many of the problems of how humans manage the stress of contemporary life.

Around 300 years ago everything started to change quite rapidly for humans and indeed the rest of the planet. The Industrial Revolution was a change from a predominantly agrarian and handcraft culture to one where many people made a move to the cities and their growing factories and workplaces. People who perhaps previously had contact with an extended family group or small village life, found themselves surrounded by thousands of other people from a vast array of locations and experiences. This could be quite stressful for many and survival in this rat race could be daunting. One of the many problems faced was dealing with this stress. At the same time society and culture was also changing incredibly rapidly, with no real focus or direction. Fast forward to today.

There is great debate about the word Stress. It is used to mean many different things, often without much thought, and is now part of the vernacular, 'Don't stress!', for example is a common phrase used today, when someone appears to not handle something very well.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines stress as, among other things: 2a a demand on physical or mental energy

2b distress caused by this (suffering from stress).

I will explore a variety of techniques and methods to assist you in your journey but it is important to consider that often it is helpful to have a therapist to help you by guiding you through the various techniques and to deal with particularly difficult areas in your life. If you have questions or comments about anything you read here, please don’t hesitate to make them in the comments section.

Good Stress and Bad Stress

There is good and bad stress. Good stress helps you get things done. Bad stress stops you, sometimes in your tracks.

If you're not stressed, you're dead!

Remember to Breathe

Nobody really likes to admit to being stressed, but let's face it, we all are at some time or another, for some reason or another. Everyone has ways of dealing with it, or not dealing with it. We all have ways of covering it up so it's not too noticeable, avoiding it so we don't ‘have’ to think about it, or face it and pretending that we're not stressed. Have you ever commented to someone that they look a bit stressed and they yell back at you something like “No I’m not!”?

However it manifests for you, there are two things you can do that will help you to manage stress better. The most important and quickest way of dealing with stress is to remember to breathe. Learn some simple breathing techniques and learn how to change your mind. I will cover some of these techniques as we move on.

Have a Positive Mental Attitude (PMA). A positive mental attitude can do remarkable things. When you learn to relax you can start to think about what you do want and that is positive self-hypnosis. You can start to reprogram your mind or as I like to say, give the software (wetware) a version update. Say, update to Version 2.0 of you.

The opposite of course, is having a Negative Mental Attitude (NMA). Many people with depression, bad habits and anxiety spend a lot of their time thinking about what they don’t want. That is, the things that trouble them. It stops them from moving forward. This wasted energy and time does not help them to deal with the problem and only makes them feel inadequate or helpless.

This is a negative form of self-hypnosis.

Once you understand that, everything else is just refinement.

Breathing is the single most important thing you can do as a human being. Some Indian yogis believe that you are allocated a certain number of breaths at birth. That is why they practice breathing techniques which help them breathe more slowly.

Most people can only last for about 3 ^1/2 minutes without oxygen getting to their brain before brain death. At the same time you can last about seven days without water in good conditions; about forty days without food. Without sex, who knows?... Sadly

This obviously makes breathing a high priority. You might be reading this right now and saying “but I am breathing”. You must be. But how are you breathing?

Are you taking fast shallow breaths because you just dashed into the house out of the pouring rain? Take one slow deep breath now. Just breathe in, hold it in for a moment and then very slowly exhale and let yourself relax.

I will probably say this many times. You cannot make yourself relax, you have to let it happen.

Have you been sitting in front of your computer all day, or maybe all night? Take one slow deep breath now.

Are you conscious of your breath because you study yoga, martial-arts, meditation, or are you conscientious about your health and work-out regularly? Take one slow deep breath now.

Are you a bit overweight or ill and finding it quite difficult to catch your breath even after that little jog out of the rain? Take one slow deep breath now.

One way or the other you are breathing. The trick is to find a way to breathe that will help you, not only manage stress better, but also to make you more healthy and more in control of your life. If you have taken those breaths I suggested, you have already started to notice the effect of stress management by breathing.

Now these articles are not only about breathing. They will cover myriad techniques, ways of thinking and ways of managing stress in different situations. Becoming aware of your stress, i.e. noticing the early warning signs of the onset of stress and your learned responses to stress. How you automatically react when someone; a parent, a boss, a loved one; pushes one of your negative buttons and you, seemingly automatically, go through the same old routine of responses till eventually you're wondering 'how did I fall into that trap again? Why do I feel like this?’

How can we positively change the reaction into a response? It may sound pedantic but there is a big difference in the thinking that enables you to make these changes.

When I think of a reaction I think of something like a light being switched on or off. As long as there is electricity and the light bulb keeps working, the light bulb basically has no say in the matter It reacts to your intention. A response on the other hand is entirely different. I have a light in one of the rooms in my house that has two sensors. One of these senses movement, and the other one senses the ambient light level in the room. When you walk into the room at night, it turns on. If you walk in in the middle of the day it evaluates if there is already enough light in the room not to turn on. In this way it saves energy. Rather than being at the beck and call of whether I switch the light on or off, this light evaluates the situation and responds depending on circumstance. This is an entirely different way of dealing with the information it receives. It is responding rather than reacting like the old school light switch. When we react, things can often happen without sufficient thought or consideration. This is a more instinctual way of doing things but under certain circumstances it can cause a lot more problems than it fixes. When we respond we are evaluating the situation and coming up with some kind of solution, a strategy, to help us to deal with it. When we maintain a calmness we can respond positively in nearly every situation. It is often just a case of pausing, —————- taking a few beats and indeed a few deep breaths while we consider what our best option is in the particular circumstance. Obviously, in certain life or death situations we want the instinct, the autonomic nervous system to kick in and to pump adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol into our system so that we can escape or fight off something dangerous. The Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn process. We will go into more detail on this in a later article.

By the same token, if this same adrenaline is in our system all the time it causes a continuous anxiety/stress problem. These are the kinds of things we need to deal with. This often happens when people worry incessantly or there are outside pressures which appear insurmountable.

In the next article I will discuss why Adrenaline is not a dirty word and how it saved my life.We will also explore more techniques you can start to use to improve your overall well-being.

If you haven’t already started, I encourage you to learn some simple relaxation breathing exercises. There are some resources you may find useful on my Substack, Don’t get Stressed About Relaxing. For example, here are two simple relaxation exercises.

I have been a Stress Management Consultant and Hypnotherapist for nearly 40 years, working with thousands of people and showing them simple effective ways to deal with stress.

If you find these articles useful, please consider subscribing or buying me a cup of chai. Thank you.

If you are interested in making an appointment with me, please DM me here on Substack.