Optimizing the Stress Response

How to make the inevitability of stress in your life actually work to your advantage using some quick and effective stress management tools

1. Address the real source(s) of your stress

Many times our stress response is focused on a symptom. What we are angry, frustrated or hurt about may not be the immediate stimulating event or person at all, but something that situation reminds us of. Ask yourself: What else is this situation like? What other stressful time or person does it remind me of? Often revealing the original source of stress relieves the symptomatic stress we feel at the moment.

When something is going on that makes you feel powerless to affect it, focus on an area where you do have power – and use it. Remind yourself of your purpose in life and your reasons for living and working. Then, do something specific to further it.

2. Talk to an objective party

Talking out the response to someone not involved in it tends to give us perspective. At least it allows a venting in a “safe space” where the anger or frustration you feel can be let off. The objective person does not even have to particularly skilled – as long as they will let you talk and they can listen without being bothered by whatever intensity you bring to the discussion. Some objective friends and associates can help you deal with the stress by reminding you of its short-term nature or by supporting your point of view and reassuring you. In any event, it’s usually better than having a tantrum at work.

3. Choose your attitude

You can fret and steam over things you can’t control, or you can accept things outside your span of influence and spend your time doing great work in your own areas of expertise and effectiveness. This is not to say you shouldn’t allow your voice to be heard in a situation where you have a legitimate point of view- but do it with a perspective of one who has a perspective to share. Much of our stress about things derives from a mind-set we carry around about the way things should be for us. “I work hard so I should be rich” isn’t going to get you rich. The world is quite often unfair, and while that doesn’t mean we should put up with things we can change or abandon lofty dreams, it does suggest we modify our expectations to fit realities we have to accept. Usually, when we do that, we are more rather than less effective at dealing with things that enrage or threaten us. Choosing to be effective at what we can control releases our stress energy in the direction of personal power. Remember the Sufi’s story...

4. Embrace ambiguity

In addition to accepting what we can’t change, we also have to accept that many dilemmas we face do not have any answers – or at least not simple, single, or immediate ones. Uncertainty and ambiguity are a real part of our everyday world – and maybe even a greater part of our complex world of the last moments of the 20th Century than ever before. Research on creative people has revealed how much they seem to enjoy ambiguous and complex challenges. It’s creative and liberating to stop trying to solve every problem or situation we face as if it had an answer. It has been said that:

“If your only tool is a hammer, every problem will look like a nail.”

The key to is expand your thinking tool kit when dealing with complex stressful problems and be open to other possibilities. Ambiguity has its own elegance, and we need to learn to see it, revel in it, and understand it as a source of energy for enriching our creative processes.

5. Leverage change

Those who let change victimize them lose, just as they expect they will. It has been said:

“Whether or not you think you can accomplish something, you are right.”

Change is a chance to assert yourself. It means personal agility and flexibility, but it is an opportunity to reinvent your approach, your skills, your interests and even your relationships. The difficulty we have with change is the same difficulty we have with opportunity – it challenges our comfort zone, makes us think, gets us riled up to work and think differently. In short, it’s often very good for us.

On the other hand, it’s also valuable to establish some things in your life that stay constant. Perhaps you should plan to stay in that house for many years, or establish some weekend routines, or develop a personal set of activities that are comfortingly redundant – like jogging every morning, or taking your family to a movie every Friday night. Perhaps it would help to eat a certain favorite food regularly, visit some special place often, or create some other personal life management activity you can enjoy over and over again. Some people find comfort in spiritual activities, which inject an element of constancy into their lives. If that doesn’t fit you, maybe there is a craft or hobby that would fill that need.

6. Create a Physical Activity Regimen

One of the best ways to channel the physical responses the body has to stress is to be sure to exercise. This can take many forms, and you don’t necessarily have to join an expensive gym to address the challenge. Especially if joining a gym increases your financial stress or adds further stress to your daily schedule!

Instead, consider taking up an at home series of morning exercises that fit your physical conditions – like sit-ups and weight lifting, or using a home exercise device. The idea is simply to spend some time each day generating enough aerobic energy to burn off the dangerous residual chemicals at loose in your body from your automatic stress response. Since that automatic response is the brain’s way of preparing you for combat (the ancient response to threat!), we need to burn off all those hormones and chemicals another way. That’s what the exercise does; it re-balances the body’s chemical condition, just as a physical fight or flight would do. Since physical fighting is generally not an acceptable career or life advancement technique, we suggest the flight strategy – that is burning off the extra adrenaline by doing the same kind of activity running away from the Saber Tooth Tiger would have accomplished.

Certainly, jogging, bicycle riding, swimming, fast walking, and other aerobic activity are the best routes to keeping a balanced body condition, but the exercises mentioned above will at least help the process as well. Two or three aerobic work-outs a week for 20-30 minutes is probably enough to mitigate most of the dangerous chemicals that would be otherwise left to damage body organs and mental state. Of all the stress management techniques, most experts agree this is the most important.

7. Engage in Disciplined Relaxation

The acknowledge expert in relaxation therapies is Dr. Herb Benson, who has written several best selling and important books on the subject; The Relaxation Response (with Miriam Klipper) and The Breakout Principle, (with William Proctor) to name only two. Benson has been saying for years that easy to do short relaxation technologies can undue the typical stress damage in reliable ways. He advocates following some simple procedures to relax the body and the mind and let the stressors and tensions out through quiet, breath management, meditation, and suggestive ideation. His basic point is that the brain and the body are linked in highly interdependent and also manageable ways. More than opinion, Dr. Benson’s research is extensive and highly respected, and his relaxation methods have been widely emulated, because they enhance health and ignite creativity.

Conclusion

Stress can be a source of energy for huge personal growth and transformation. Instead of being hostage to stress, and allowing ourselves to be damaged by it, we advocate recognizing the stressors of life as the fuel for consciously creating change. Change may be the greatest stressor of all, but, it is the best avenue to growth and the eventual achievement of our physical, mental and spiritual goals. Therefore, we encourage the creative use of stress in the ways we have only outlined here, as a way to enhance health, opportunity and creativity in our daily lives.