Stress Management Part Two
DEFEAT DISTRESS WITH LOVE
“Where there is anger there is always pain underneath.”
—Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
Without suffering or pain, there exists little reason for rage. If you think about a four-year-old girl who is hurt, how does she react? Does she cry out or have a tantrum, or does she talk her way out of whatever she is feeling, find reason, and use her words wisely to express herself?
When you are triggered and distressed, you become like this four-year-old child, where reason, rationale, and compassion get thrown out the window because the stress response sends signals to higher brain centres like the prefrontal cortex to shut down, while signalling lower, more primitive
brain centres such as the amygdala to take over. As the amygdala is activated, negative emotions escalate as hurtful and negative memories are brought forward, signalling the stress response to fire more strongly. Tunnel vision takes over and eventually what may have started out as a bit of
stress transforms into raging distress. Trying to stop this process once it starts is akin to trying to stop a shiver when you are freezing cold, which is close to impossible.
It is possible to get control over the stress response, shift out of this negative state, and access your higher mind, rationale, and sense of calm. It may take a little work to get there, but it’s possible, especially if you learn to heal old wounds with a lot of love.
The Memories That Trigger Distress
Though it is rare that your life is actually being threatened, your brain does not usually distinguish between real or imagined threats. If a threat is perceived to be severe, the amygdala is activated to take over, and fear and fear-related behaviours take precedence over your rational brain and
thinking abilities. If the threat is perceived to be mild, the amygdala will work alongside higher brain centres, which influence the amygdala to fire less strongly, thus provoking a weaker stress response with less associated negative emotions, which allows for better access to calm and rational thinking and behaviours. In other words, when you perceive that a threat is mild and not life-threatening, you are better able to motivate sound action without losing your cool.
The problem lies in the fact that much of the time you are not aware that you perceive a given stress as life-threatening or severe because it is your unconscious mind (not conscious) via your memory bank that is feeling threatened. In such a case, your brain will remember an old memory of being hurt, and a threat that is minor in reality is perceived by the brain as severe. The prefrontal cortex and other higher brain centres shut down, causing the stress response to charge faster and stronger, despite your knowing better.
Most of your memories, especially the ones that are associated with strong emotions, aren’t necessarily accurate but are associated with assumptions and beliefs that you developed during the course of your life. Different situations can bring these memories forward as well as the associated
assumptions, beliefs, and behaviours. A stressful situation might trigger a painful memory, which propels negative assumptions and beliefs that eventually lead to a pattern of behaviour. Thebehaviour may be explosive in nature, one of avoidance, passive aggressiveness, abusive (to Self or others), and so forth. The deeper or more hurtful the memory, the easier it is to trigger the automatic response.
Painful memories can also be brought forward when a situation is barely even stressful because you are not taking care of yourself or you feel vulnerable or physically ill. This can happen when you are sleep-deprived, full of toxic chemicals (from food or alcohol) that create negative physiology in your body, in financial distress, overwhelmed with life’s responsibilities, having difficulties in a relationship or work, or experiencing any other sort of stress that leads you feeling more victim than victor.
The point here is that as long as you are feeling victimized, or you consciously or unconsciously uphold a belief that you are victimized, distress will play a major role in your life. And believe it or not, one way to correct this problem is by having compassion for yourself.
Love Stimulates Happy Memories and Reward
Love induces a positive sense of reward filled with peace, balance, pleasure, and well-being. Feeling loved stimulates your memories of being happy and content. When in the state of love, your brain pulls from your positive memory bank propagating attitudes, beliefs, and emotions that are positive and well-intentioned. Your positive memory bank, like the negative, also brings forward memories, emotions, and conclusions from your past, but they are all positive. Rather than feeding you stories of negativity, victimization, and suffering, your positive memories provide you with memories of being happy, feeling good, and stories of your success.
Tapping into Love
You don’t have to actually fall in love with someone to make this work. In fact, love is a physiological state that can be tapped into in a variety of ways that often have nothing to do with anyone else. You can, for instance, use your imagination to focus on the experience of being loved by someone you adore, by the universe, or by an imaginary being. Love, or the physiological state of love, can be accessed through meditation, the practice of compassion, gratitude, mindfulness, spending time in nature, volunteering, other self-care practices (like healthy eating and exercise), spirituality or spiritual activities, social support, and spending time with pets.
RESTRUCTURE YOUR INFRASTRUCTURE
“It is wise to direct your anger towards problems—not people; to focus your energies on answers—not excuses.”
—William Arthur Ward
If you haven’t figured it out yet, your brain is not separate from your body and neither are separate from your environment. This means that what you put in your body, do with your body, and surround yourself with in your life will affect how you feel, how you think, how you perceive yourself in your world—enough or not enough—and ultimately how you react. A balanced life
translates to a more balanced you.
You can always create balance in your life, even if you do not have time. It may mean making a few changes within the time you have to get the stress response under control in as many ways as possible so that you don’t find yourself so easily triggered. Keep in mind that the more you abuse yourself with poor lifestyle habits, the more you will perceive the world as abusive, take things personally, and feel more stressed.
Move It or Lose It: Exercise
I cannot stress enough how important exercise and movement are to keep your mood balanced. Keep in mind that humans were not meant to be sedentary. We roamed the earth, looking for shelter, scavenging, finding food, and building forts. The term “survival of the fittest” should tell you that being a couch potato is not conducive to the survival of the species. Being sedentary is also not conducive to maintaining a happy mood.
Exercise not only offers a myriad of health benefits, but it also helps control the stress response and aids in raising serotonin and endorphin levels, which stabilize mood. Even if infrequently done, exercise can have a positive effect against the building up of anger. Exercising when you are angry, for example, gives you the opportunity to release pent-up energy and have a chance to think.
Finding Oneness: Spirituality
Feeling like you belong doesn’t just involve finding people to be with you but also connecting to something larger than just you or connecting to your spirituality. Being spiritual is not about being religious, believing in God, or even praying. It is about sharing, giving, and receiving love from something that is beyond you, what you see, and what is in front of you. It is about faith.
Faith helps you get through hard situations, understand that you are not alone, and find meaning. The more meaning you have in your life, the less helpless you feel in adverse circumstances and the more valued you feel in general. Though I am not advocating that you become religious, I am suggesting that if there is something that you feel drawn to—a particular religious or spiritual belief, process, nature, or purpose—then make the time to get involved with it so that you can work on building your faith in something greater that supports you.
Choose Nature over Screen-Time
As a society, we have become addicted to the screen. Perusing the information highway on the smartphone or computer has displaced exercise, meaningful social interaction, healthy eating, and getting appropriate amounts of sleep. Researchers have found that there is a strong connection
between screen time and higher rates of depression, anxiety, poor performance, and lack of empathy. What this translates to is more stress, less patience, and meaner people.
If you want to stay as one of the statistics, go right ahead and be miserable. But if you want to find bliss, you may want to get off your screen and get back into nature. In fact, science is showing us now that nature does reduce stress hormones and improve immunity.
Twenty minutes is all you need, but the more, the better. Work in the garden, walk in a park, visit the ocean, or rest while lying on the ground after a picnic. Take your pick. The key is to spendtime being in nature, feeling nature, seeing nature, eating nature, and yes, smelling nature. If you do, you will feel calmer and less angry. It also counts as a spiritual activity.
In essence, you want to immerse yourself and all your senses in the experience of nature. Smell, sense, taste, listen, look, and enjoy the wonders around you. Aside from turning your mind off of your daily stresses, you will also get exposed to nature’s healing chemicals called phytoncides—chemicals that get to your brain through your nose that stimulate or relax your brain and may even benefit your immune system as they lower your stress response. In short, immersing yourself in nature helps your brain shift into a positive mental state, turn off the stress response, and feel more connected spiritually.
Getting Your Zzzz’s: Sleep
Lack of sleep has negative consequences on almost every aspect of your health and your life. It wreaks havoc on your immune system, hormones, muscle and bone mass, brain function, heart, and weight.
MINDFULNESS TO CALM YOUR MADNESS
“Mindfulness is about love and loving life. When you cultivate this love, it gives you clarity and compassion for life, and your actions happen in accordance with that.”
—Jon Kabat-Zinn
As long as you look outside of yourself to be happy, you will invariably find yourself being unhappy because you will always feel like an empty well needing to be filled. The emptier you feel, the easier you will be to trigger, resulting in negative behaviours, actions, and thoughts, causing you to feel worse. The key to your happiness does not lie outside of yourself, therefore,
but within.
Thus far, I have been guiding you to become aware of how you feel, your body’s sensations, and the intensity of your emotions and thoughts. When you are able to witness such observations of yourself without judgment—understanding that there exists no right or wrong and that you are
simply witnessing you, as if you are watching a movie of you—you will be able to transcend the emotions, the past, and the stress to find you can exist in the present moment, which is full of bliss. Nothing is good or bad, right or wrong. Such witnessing has its roots in the Buddhist meditation practice called mindfulness, a widespread secular practice today, that involves being in a moment-by-moment awareness of your thoughts, sensations, and feelings, as well as of the surrounding environment. Open observation or witnessing ultimately allows for better recognition of pervasive underlying beliefs and emotions as well as patterns that are creating an imbalance.
The practice of mindfulness has many benefits—physical, psychological, and social. Studies have shown that the practice of mindfulness meditation invigorates the immune system, improves positive emotions, reduces the effects of stress, and alleviates depression. Mindfulness has been
shown to help tune out distraction and improve memory and focus. Jon Kabat-Zinn created the mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, a model now used globally, including in schools, prisons, and hospitals. In short, practicingmindfulness can improve your physical, psychological, and mental health and is a perfect
technique to use to manage anger so that it doesn’t manage you.
Un-Attaching without Judgment
Any time you get stressed, or rather, distressed, you become caught up in a story of negativity. You hold on to that story tightly, like a dog with a bone, unable to let go.
When practicing mindfulness, you calmly accept everything—feelings, thoughts, beliefs, sensations, and situations—without judgment, even if negative. You allow yourself to be in the now, the present moment, simply witnessing everything, as if you are watching a movie without being attached to the outcome. You are not attached to what happened yesterday or what will happen next. You are not attached to anything because you are curious about what is happening in the present moment. And when you do so, when you allow yourself to be in the present moment, nonjudgmentally, you free your emotions from taking hold of you.
Normally, you think about what you should have or could have done or what you can do or not do. Your emotions take you back to a past that is over and often no longer relevant, and your anxieties or assumptions cause you to jump forward to worrying about a future that has yet to happen. Every time you like or dislike, love or hate something, someone, or some situation, you
judge. Every time you judge, you get trapped in the past or in expectations of the future because your judgment is based on how the world or circumstances have made or will make you feel. And with this judgment comes a heightened negative emotion. With a heightened negative emotion
comes the stress response. Even the simple use of a negatively charged word can stimulate the stress response, negative emotions, and corresponding negative beliefs and actions.
Un-Attaching versus Detaching
It is important to note that you are un-attaching, not necessarily detaching. When you shift your focus into the present moment, you loosen your grip on giving your thoughts and emotions so much power over you and how you see or define yourself in the world. When you focus, you do so with non-judgment and love, essentially letting yourself be in the world as you are, without
feeling bad about you or anyone else.
In contrast, detaching involves distancing yourself or creating a wall that separates you from something or someone without necessarily changing bad feelings, ultimately creating a big gap of separation that prevents you from experiencing true joy and bliss, communicating well, and forging
intimate relationships. Un-attaching entails observing your emotions or thoughts without giving them any power, as if you were observing the colours in the sky, the aroma of flowers, or the sound coming from the birds singing in the trees. With un-attachment, you are not separate from anything or anyone, but rather, part of a larger whole.
Mindfulness meditation will help you feel un-attached, calmer, and caught up with the drama in your head or your life. Your relationships can improve, as can your physical and psychological health. The first step is to make the decision that you want to be free of these attachments.
Shifting Into Appreciation
When you allow yourself to be in the present moment, un-attached, non-judgmental, and open, you can make the choice to shift into a state of appreciation. If you think about it, stress is a state of “not enough.” When you are worried that you do not have or are not enough yourself, it is rare
that you can also be in a state of appreciation. By shifting intentionally into appreciation, you invariably shift your mind-set away from not being enough to feeling lucky.
The good news is that you can choose to appreciate anything you wish. You can appreciate the moon, the stars, the way your breath moves, the sounds of laughter, that there was a yesterday and that there will be a tomorrow somewhere, that you get to have a today, that you get to experience
all the emotions you are having, that you are living and breathing, that someone gave you life, and so forth. As you shift into appreciation and gratitude, you shift into the lucky state of love.
I recommend that you build a daily practice of appreciation into your life so that it becomes a common state of being for you. You can sit quietly for five or more minutes every day and hopefully every evening to contemplate things you appreciate, perhaps even writing them down in an appreciation journal.
REDIRECT STRESS FOR GOOD
“Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”
—Rumi
Like a gust of wind, stress can be a powerful force that can instigate radial change, new direction, standing up for justice and civil rights, and protecting those you hold dear. It motivates strangers to band together to pick one another up from under fallen rubble or fight together for a common cause, fuel political agendas, promote business transactions, end or align relationships, or enable people to feel more in control of something they normally fear. But like the winds that arise from a tornado, the effects of stress, especially when associated with anger, can be destructive if not
kept under control. So too, if the powerful force of stress or anger is bottled up inside of you and not expressed or moved, the energy will combust internally or explode externally, like a soda can that is shaken and eventually opened. The key is to learn how to move stress with structure and direction so that its effects can benefit you and others rather than destroy.
Move It to Loosen It
When you pay attention to how your body feels when you are stressed, you will notice a feeling of constriction or restriction in your musculature or within your body somewhere, as if your energy is blocked or stagnant. What do you do when energy is blocked? You move it. The best way to move this energy is by moving yourself, whether it is aerobic exercise or meditations in motion as done in yoga, tai chi, qigong, or progressive muscle relaxation. This energy can also be “moved” through the use of music, verbal sounds, or bodywork like massage and acupuncture.
Physical Activity
Aside from being good for your physical and mental health in the long term, exercise, or physical activity, has the added benefit of helping you burn off excess energy and release endorphins and other feel-good chemicals that improve your mood, even when you are in distress. When stressed, consider jogging, walking, bicycling, swimming, or jumping rope. You can rollerblade or dance or play basketball, tennis, or football. Weight training is also a good option. Whatever you choose to do, be careful, as you could be so caught up in your negative thoughts, you may not pay attention to your form and hurt yourself. I personally find physical activity to be a wonderful release from
my anger and frustration.
Meditation In Motion
When you don’t have the option to get to a gym or go outdoors to exercise, you always have the ability to do stretching and relaxation exercises wherever you are. Progressive muscle relaxation, for example, is a highly effective technique that will certainly shift the stress-energy, as will a
variety of breathing techniques and yoga poses. Particularly effective are poses that involve twisting at your core, which is meant to wring out the blocked energy.
Journaling Stress Out
Writing out your thoughts and feelings can be highly therapeutic, and I strongly advocate the use of a stress release journal, which involves writing down the reasons you are upset or stressed along with all your feelings without holding back or judging.
Help Someone Else
One of the most powerful ways to redirect and transform the energy of distress is by using the energy to do good rather than harm. Think about a cause that you can believe in and get involved with, and use your stress to motivate you to love and help this cause. If there isn’t a particular cause that moves you, you can always help anyone who is in need. Get outside of your head and your emotions and look around you. Help an elderly person cross the street or carry their shopping home. Open doors for people and smile. Volunteer. The list is endless.