Firstly – You are normal!
It’s easy to think that others don’t struggle and there is something wrong with us if we do but nothing could be further from the truth. Many people struggle with the same things as you and this is just part of being a human.
As a professional full-time coach and trainer, every week I talk to scores of people who are looking for a coach to help them with different areas of their life and one thing jumped out at me: Almost EVERYONE, is looking for help in the following areas:
Dealing with stress
Developing positive habits
Relationships
Spirituality
101: Dealing with stress.
There is so much online and so many books about dealing with stress, it’s almost overwhelming.
Let’s break them down into a couple of categories:
1. Techniques to reduce External pressure 2. Techniques to reduce Internal Pressure
There is such a lot about reducing External pressure out there, notably improving diet, exercise, hydration, getting more sleep, meditation, limiting stimulants & substances, social connection, being outdoors, hobbies and creating boundaries, time management, making changes to our environment including home, work, relationships. All those things do really help to limit stress and make the body resilient to the effects of stress.
For now let’s talk about some of the ways that we can reduce Internal stress:
Internal Stress Hack #1: The Reframe
We never experience what actually happens to us… we experience our perception of what happens to us. That gives us incredible power to transform our actual (our inner) experience by the way that we look at things.
By using this idea, we can make a huge difference to the amount of stress we experience without actually changing anything in our lives. To be clear, the best results come from tackling both internal and external pressures, in this post we are focusing specifically on the reframe hack.
Reframing techniques don’t just lesson the mental stress we feel, it can make significant physical changes in the body. The brain is a part of the body and there are feedback links between the brain and the nervous system - if we perceive mental stress the body responds physically with anything from hormones like adrenaline to actual physical pain.
The first stage in reframing is Noticing your thoughts.
Start by just observing your thoughts with scientific like curiosity. It is important to not be critical of ourselves for the sorts of thoughts that we are having, because that completely undermines the process and creates more stress! The very act of noticing them changes them, for example, instead of thinking “I am so stressed, I can’t handle one more thing” with curious observation the thought can become “I am having that thought again of being stressed and not being able to handle anything else happening”.
This is far more than semantics, with the first thought we are ‘one’ with the feeling of stress and the reason for it seems solid and factual (like being sept away by a river). With the second thought, we are one step removed from the feeling of stress and while we can see what has triggered the thought, it’s a bit less solid with the possibility of it not being 100% true (like looking at a river flowing from the riverbank).
It’s a great idea to journal our observations to notice patterns and also our progress.
The second step in reframing is to reality check our thoughts - ask ourselves “is this even true?”.
If we are thinking “I can’t handle one more thing happening” ask:
Really?
I can’t handle even one more thing? If my phone rang now, could I answer it? If my child needed to be picked up from school, would I leave them there?
How do I know that is true?
Can I be more specific about what I am actually feeling?
What would be a more accurate way to describe it?
How else could I look at this?
The final step is to consciously introduce more helpful thoughts about the issue.
The thought that started as “I am so stressed; I can’t handle one more thing” can end up as “I am feeling triggered emotionally because I am experiencing a feeling of overwhelm” – this allows us to put in place strategies instead of being swept away by stress every time a particular trigger is present.
A strategy is a choice that we make in advance like: “when I feel myself being triggered by feelings of overwhelm, I will look at the closest tree and take 10 deep breaths”.
Planning in advance is like a fire-drill for our brains, if we have already decided on a strategy, it’s easy for our brain just to follow what we have previously decided. When our brain is having one of it’s less than rational moments, we can’t access the part that we need to in order to think of a solution.
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