Sunday Stress-Buster

First, an important distinction:

• Acute stress (for example, when stepping out of your comfort zone, engaging in competition, or otherwise focusing on something that requires your full attention for best performance) is generally a good thing. It helps you do you your best. It’s sometimes been called “eustress”, “good stress”.
• Chronic stress (for example, when snowed under at work and you do not love it, when dealing with a serious illness, and/or faced with financial problems) is unequivocally a bad thing. Our body is simply not made to handle that much cortisol (the stress hormone) all the time.

Know the dangers of too much cortisol

We covered this as a main feature last month: Lower Your Cortisol! (Here’s Why & How)

…but it bears mentioning again and for those who’ve joined us since then:

A little spike of cortisol now and again can be helpful. Having it spiking all the time, or even a perpetual background low-to-moderate level, can be ruinous to the health in so many ways.

The good news is, the physiological impact of stress on the body (which ranges from face-and-stomach fat deposits, to rapid aging), can be reversed—even the biological aging!

Read: Biological age is increased by stress and restored upon recovery ← this study is so hot-of-the-press that it was published literally two days ago

Focus on what you can control

A lot of things that cause you stress may be outside of your control. Focus on what is within your control. Oftentimes, we are so preoccupied with the stress, that we employ coping strategies that don’t actually deal with the problem.

That’s a maladaptive response to an evolutionary quirk—our bodies haven’t caught up with modern life, and on an evolutionary scale, are still priming us to deal with sabre-toothed tigers, not financial disputes, for example.

But, how to deal with the body’s “wrong” response?

First, deal with the tiger. There isn’t one, but your body doesn’t know that. Do some vigorous exercise, or if that’s not your thing, tense up your muscles strongly for a few seconds and then relax them, doing each part of your body. This is called progressive relaxation, and how it works is basically tricking your body into thinking you successfully fled the tiger, or fought the tiger and won.

Next, examine what the actual problem is, that’s causing you stress. You’re probably heavily emotionally attached to the problem, or else it wouldn’t be stressing you. So, imagine what advice you would give to help a friend deal with the same problem, and then do that.

Better yet: enlist an actual friend (or partner, family member, etc) to help you. We are evolved to live in a community, engaged in mutual support. That’s how we do well; that’s how we thrive best.

By dealing with the problem—or sometimes even just having support and/or something like a plan—your stress will evaporate soon enough.

The power of “…and then what?”

Sometimes, things are entirely out of your control. Sometimes, bad things are entirely possible; perhaps even probable. Sometimes, they’re so bad, that it’s difficult to avoid stressing about the possible outcomes.

If something seems entirely out of your control and/or inevitable, ask yourself:

“…and then what?”

Writer’s storytime: when I was a teenager, sometimes I would go out without a coat, and my mother would ask, pointedly, “But what will you do if it rains?!”

I’d reply “I’ll get wet, of course”

This attitude can go just the same for much more serious outcomes, up to and including death.

So when you find yourself stressing about some possible bad outcome, ask yourself, “…and then what?”.

• What if this is cancer? Well, it might be. And then what? You might seek cancer treatment.
• What if I can’t get treatment, or it doesn’t work? Well, you might die. And then what?

In Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT), this is called “radical acceptance” and acknowledges bad possible/probable/known outcomes, allows one to explore the feelings, and come up with a plan for managing the situation, or even just coming to terms with the fact that sometimes, suffering is inevitable and is part of the human condition.

It’ll still be bad—but you won’t have added extra suffering in the form of stress.

Breathe.

Don’t underestimate the power of relaxed deep breathing to calm the rest of your body, including your brain.

Also: we’ve shared this before, a few months ago, but this 8 minute soundscape was developed by sound technicians working with a team of psychologists and neurologists. It’s been clinically tested, and found to have a much more relaxing effect(in objective measures of lowering heart rate and lowering cortisol levels, as well as in subjective self-reports) than merely “relaxing music”.

Try it and see for yourself:

The Science Of New Year’s Pre-Resolutions

There’s a military dictum that “prior preparation and planning prevents piss-poor performance”.

Would it surprise you to know that soldiers going on the attack are not focused on the goal? Rather, they are focused on the process.

With drills and mnemonics, everything that can be controlled for in advance is; every action, every reaction, everything that can go wrong, and all the “if x then y” decisions in between pre-battle PREWAR and PAWPERSO and post-battle PACESDO (all mnemonic acronyms; the content is not important here but the principle is).

In short: take Murphy’s Law into account now, and plan accordingly!

The same goes for making your plans the winning kind

If you want your resolutions to work, you may need to make pre-resolutions now, so that you’re properly prepared:

• Do you want to make an exercise habit? Make sure now that you have the right clothes/shoes/etc, make sure that they fit you correctly, make sure you have enough of them that you can exercise when one set’s in the wash, etc.
  • What grace will you allow yourself if tired, unwell, busy? What’s your back-up plan so that you still do what you can at those times when “what you can” is legitimately a bit less?
  • If it’s an outdoors plan, what’s your plan for when it’s rainy? Snowy? Dangerously hot?
  • What are the parameters for what counts? Make it measurable. How many exercise sessions per week, what duration?
• Do you want to make a diet habit? Make sure that you have in the healthy foods that you want to eat; know where you can and will get things. We’re often creatures of habit when it comes to shopping, so planning will be critical here!
• Do you want to cut some food/drink/substance out? Make sure you have a plan to run down or otherwise dispose of your current stock first. And make sure you have alternatives set up, and if it was something you were leaning on as a coping strategy of some kind (e.g. alcohol, cannabis, comfort-eating, etc), make sure you have an alternative coping strategy, too!

See also: How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol

We promised science, so here it comes

Approach-oriented resolutions work better than avoidance-oriented ones.

This means: positively-framed resolutions work better than negatively-framed ones.

On a simple level, this means that, for example, resolving to exercise three times per week is going to work better than resolving to not consume alcohol.

But what if you really want to quit something? Just frame it positively. There’s a reason that Alcoholics Anonymous (and similar Thing Anonymous groups) measure days sober, not relapses.

So it’s not “I will not consume alcohol” but “I will get through each day alcohol-free”.

Semantics? Maybe, but it’s also science:

A large-scale experiment on New Year’s resolutions: Approach-oriented goals are more successful than avoidance-oriented goals

Why January the 1st? It’s a fresh start

Resolutions started on the 1st of January enjoy a psychological boost of a feeling of a fresh start, a new page, a new chapter.

Similar benefits can be found from starting on the 1st of a month in general, or on a Monday, or on some date that is auspicious to the person in question (religious fasts tied to calendar dates are a fine example of this).

Again, this is borne-out by science:

The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior

Make it a habit

Here be science:

How do people adhere to goals when willpower is low? The profits (and pitfalls) of strong habits

As for how to do that?

How To Really Pick Up (And Keep!) Those Habits

Trim the middle

No, we’re not talking about your waistline. Rather, what Dr. Ayelet Fischbach refers to as “the middle problem”:

❝We’re highly motivated at the beginning. Over time, our motivation declines as we lose steam. To the extent that our goal has a clear end point, our motivation picks up again toward the end.

Therefore, people are more likely to adhere to their standards at the beginning and end of goal pursuit—and slack in the middle. We demonstrate this pattern of judgment and behavior in adherence to ethical standards (e.g., cheating), religious traditions (e.g., skipping religious rituals), and performance standards (e.g., “cutting corners” on a task).

We also show that the motivation to adhere to standards by using proper means is independent and follows a different pattern from the motivation to reach the end state of goal pursuit❞

Read: The end justifies the means, but only in the middle

How to fix this, then?

Give yourself consistent, recurring, short-term goals, with frequent review points. That way, it’s never “the middle” for long:

The fresh start effect: temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behavior

See also:

How do people protect their long-term goals from the influence of short-term motives or temptations?

Finally…

You might like this previous main feature of ours that was specifically about getting oneself through those “middle” parts:

How To Keep On Keeping On… Long Term!

Enjoy!