How To Manage Stress
In this guide, I’ll walk you through the science of stress, how to manage stress, how to cope with it more effectively, and the practical tools that will help you to reduce it.
What is stress?
We experience both the physical and mental state of stress when we encounter a stressor. There are two forms of stressors:
A biogenic stressor creates a stress response no matter what (like caffeine or extreme heat and cold.) There is no mental component to these stressors: the stimulus naturally leads to the stress response.
A psychosocial stressor creates a stress response because we interpret it as a stressful event. For example, one person could be incredibly stressed by a confrontation while another person remains unruffled by it.
When faced with a biogenic stressor or a psychosocial stressor that we interpret as stressful, in less than a second, our brain triggers a massive cascade of neurochemicals that are sent around our body, limiting our ability to think clearly, manage our emotions, and respond effectively. Over time, if this happens over and over again, the cumulative effect of this stress response can lead to illness. (Read more about the biology of the stress response.)
There are two approaches that will help you to manage stress more effectively: change the way you face stress in the moment and change the way you think about stress.
How To Face Stress in the Moment
Here are several science-backed strategies that you can use the next time you are stressed.
When you feel stressed, take five deep breaths.
If facing a stressor is like pressing the accelerator in the car, taking a breath is like hitting the brakes. Breathing deeply activates our parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for calming down our stress response. When you notice that you are feeling stressed, pause whatever you’re doing and take five deep breaths. Visualization can also be helpful. Imagine breathing in golden air and exhaling red air.
Move around.
From an evolutionary perspective, the stress response existed to rapidly build energy to either fight off your enemy or to flee from it. In today’s world, our stress response is triggered so often throughout a given day (emails, instant messages, spills, bills, the list goes on...) but unlike our ancestors, we don’t have a specific use for that energy. None of us are charging towards our computers using our energy boost! Some scientists argue that the energy we build up inside of us needs to be ventilated through exercise. Release your stress energy however you can: jumping jacks, a quick walk, throwing punches. Any form of movement will dissipate the energy and also minimize the long-term impact of the stress response.
Additionally, exercise creates an essential growth factor in our brains (known as BDNF) that enhances resilience, neuroplasticity, our ability to learn, and protects us from chronic disease. The more movement you can fit into your day, the better you will be able to handle and recover from stress.
When you notice you are stressed, label the feeling.
Using just a few words, you can quickly pause the stress response. Brain MRI studies have found that labeling our negative emotions reduces the stress response. Just saying, “I feel anxious” or “I am overwhelmed” pumps the breaks on our emotional reaction, making it possible to quickly return to a baseline state where you can calmly address the stressor.
At the bottom of this page, you’ll find a feelings wheel that you can use to help with this time. It’s a highly effective tool for managing stress.
Tell a loved one about your stressors.
Research has found one of the most powerful ways to minimize our stress response is to connect over challenges with family or friends. If you are stressed, don’t follow any instincts to clamp down: instead, share, open up, and let others in. We are far better able to cope when we face challenges with others. One study even found that holding hands with your partner while you’re in pain actually reduces the severity of the pain. Call a friend or other loved one you trust and let them help you.
How To Change The Way You See Stressors
The second strategy is changing the way you interpret psychosocial stressors. This rewires our neural circuits, slowly changing the psychosocial stressor into a more neutral, less stressful event in our lives.
Understand your psychosocial stressors
Some psychosocial stressors are very hard to change our responses to (like grief, loss, and fear), and expecting that of ourselves is quite unrealistic. But there are some stressors that cause us pain that we can more easily address. Today, as you go through your day, make a list of any psychosocial stressors you encounter. Give each a number between 1-10 for the amount of stress they cause.
Tomorrow, look at your list. Are there any stressors that you could reclaim control over? Is there a new way to engage with it that would make it less painful? Who in your life responds to this stressor with less pain, and could you learn from them? Is there someone who could take that particular stressor off of your plate? Don’t accept 7-10 stressors without trying to minimize them in some way. Even a one-point drop is a win!
Say to yourself, “This is a new challenge that I just haven’t mastered, yet.”
The challenges in your life are especially hard right now because most of them are new. Think about your first few months in a new job or school. You are learning everything for the first time. You don’t know who to ask for help. You aren’t sure what ‘good’ looks like. New things are cognitively and emotionally exhausting. But over time, as we all know, new things do get easier. Use the magic word — “yet” — and remind yourself that you just haven’t mastered this, yet, but you will, just as you have done before in other hard, challenging situations.
Adopt a new stress mindset
Our mindsets are the way in which we see the world, and they influence every action and behavior we take. Often, we live with outdated mindsets that no longer serve us. Think of them like your mental software (that’s long overdue for an upgrade!) Here are some of the most common mindsets around stress and your upgrade manual for each.
Shift from “I’m just not a resilient person” to “Resilience is a skill I can build”
Remind yourself that resilience is not something that you are born with. It is a skill that you cultivate. No one was born knowing how to ride a bike, and no one is born naturally resilient. You are capable of learning how to be resilient, and this moment is actually giving you a chance to do so.
Shift from “All of this stress is harming me” to “Stressful moments can help me grow”
Research has found that viewing stress as a danger actually leads to negative effects. People who had a stressful life and believed that stress was harmful had a 43% greater risk of mortality, compared to those who also had a stressful life and believed that the stress wasn’t harmful. You can shift your mindset to focus on what stress has given you from a positive perspective.
Here’s an example: most of us would say that we get through our hard times by relying on what we learned from previous hard times. Whether it was a setback, a loss, or a new start, we gain strength from the fact that we got through it and we learned valuable coping strategies that can be leveraged today. What are you learning from this moment? Believe that you can transform this moment into growth and purpose. Remind yourself that this chance to work through new problems will help you become stronger and to flourish in the long run.
Shift from “Life shouldn’t be this stressful” to “Any good life will have some stress”
Some people have come to believe that the ideal life is free from stress, and their life is therefore, wrong. This mindset is often connected to perfectionism. People believe that their ideal life needs to be free of stress to be perfect, and if it isn’t, there is something wrong with them. In fact, research has found that we only stress about what we care about, so a stress-free life would mean that you don’t have anything that matters to you! Remind yourself that there is no good life where there is no form of stress.
Offer yourself compassion
When you feel stressed, or when you forget to use these new strategies, don’t make it worse by beating yourself up for it! You are human and these are hard times. Not only are you overriding your own habits, but you’re also fighting millions of years of evolution that have given us a brain that focuses on the negative, gets easily stressed, and tells stories that doesn’t serve us. It will take time to unlearn old habits and learn new ones, and self-compassion is essential on the journey.
Self-compassion has been associated with greater life satisfaction, emotional intelligence, social connectedness, happiness, and optimism, and less depression, perfectionism, and anxiety. Give yourself a hug. Tell yourself you’re doing a good job and you believe in you. Cheer yourself on the way you would a loved one. You can be the best friend you’ve ever had!
None of these strategies intend to diminish the very real stressors and challenges that you are facing. We can’t eliminate stress, but we can learn how to think about and manage it more effectively. These strategies will not only help you to face stressors when they arise in the moment, but also support your long-term health and well-being.
The Definitive Guide to Happiness
A groundbreaking new approach based on a decade’s worth of research and brought to life with beautiful artwork, New Happy shows you the proven path to happiness.
