Did you know that April is “stress awareness month”? No, me neither. And anyway, I’m not a fan of these arbitrarily named periods (although I suppose I could get behind “National eat what you want day” on 11th May).
Why April? Maybe it’s because April also means Easter, school holidays, and chocolate. A heady mix when it comes to generating stress. Not only must we resist inhaling our Easter morning chocolate before breakfast, we need to stock up on Easter eggs in February, because by April, shops have moved on to their Father’s Day range. And on top of that, parents need to cope with children who have eaten too much chocolate; are aggrieved that their sibling found more eggs than they did; or are clamouring for chocolate by 6am.
So actually, you probably don’t need to raise your stress awareness – it’s already through the roof. But bear with me. There are three useful things you can do to make life easier NOW. And one REALLY useful thing that you can put in place to reduce future stress.
So why bother being aware, and what can we do about it anyway?
Put simply - because too much of the wrong type of stress can do us a lot of damage.
It may help here to distinguish between types of stress. The acute and temporary stress upon seeing yet another supermarket shelf stripped of Easter eggs in March is what sends you dashing from shop to shop until you bag that Crunchie Classic. The body then returns to its pre-stress level through a cascade of hormonal and neural systems. This is a healthy kind of stress and the same mechanism that helps us to respond to perceived threats in daily life.
Chronic stress, on the other hand, can negatively affect health when left untreated, potentially leading to high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and many other issues. Many of us may only realise we’re stressed when we start to have symptoms like migraines or exhaustion. Even then, we may try to attribute the symptoms to something else, to put off dealing with the problem. But there are some quick things you can do to help to create a link between what you are feeling and how your brain can make sense of this and respond appropriately. I don’t mean the obvious stuff like sleeping well, eating healthily, and exercising. These are all effective methods to reduce stress, but you will already know that these are often the first things you ditch when you’re under stress.
So here are some ideas which you may not have tried, and which can be surprisingly effective.
Step 1: Label what you’re actually feeling
Feeling “stressed” is often used as shorthand for not being at our best. However, there are many things that can impair our function - anxiety, depression, overwhelm. These all have different symptoms and bring about different feelings, but are often thrown into the “stress” bucket. If you do not know what emotion you are experiencing, how can you control it? This is the key to step one. Describing what you are feeling starts to allow the brain to connect emotional experience with cognitive understanding, and will help you to find the best action to take. Neuroscientist, Lisa Feldman Barrett, explains brilliantly in her Tedtalk how we can be the architects of our emotions. If you need a hand extending your emotional vocabulary and awareness, a great place to start is Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions.
I recently spent a few months feeling overloaded. I knew that some things causing me stress were my own choice, and I felt had no right to feel stressed, or ask for support. So I put off doing anything about it for a while. Then I started avoiding socialising; finding small tasks difficult to complete; and kept hearing myself apologising for “not being myself”. I finally realised (and admitted) that I was overwhelmed. Giving it a label meant that I could explain to friends that I needed a bit of understanding whilst I worked it out. It also allowed me to calm things down enough to start to find a solution, and to move on to step two.
Step 2 – Identify an end date for the things causing you stress.
When our brains cannot see where stress is going to end, the brain systems adapt, and this may lead to a state of chronic stress – which is obviously what we want to avoid.
Set out ALL the things that are causing you stress and try and put a timeline on as many as possible. You may be able to identify a hiatus in a project, a point at which you will naturally gain some respite; or if something really doesn’t have an obvious end point, could you try reframing it, or try a different course of action entirely? Stress or overwhelm is rarely due to one factor. There will be something that will end naturally, or that you can bring to a close yourself. Finding and sticking to these end points allows the brain to make the appropriate connections to let the body start to return to its pre-stress state. And that means you can move onto the step 3.
Step 3 – Work out what it will cost you to stop doing something. then stop doing it.
Look at your list of stressors and decide which are in your control. Could you stop working on a particular project; step back from a commitment to give yourself some time to do something better for you; or finish a task sooner using the 80/20 rule, rather than aiming for perfection?
Ask yourself what it is going to cost you to do this, and then decide whether that is a cost worth bearing. You will often find that acknowledging the cost gives you a bit of perspective and makes you realise that the overall benefit of stress reduction is worth the smaller pain.
And if you cannot do anything else, do this…
Having labelled it, listed it and lopped it off the list, here is something you can do for the future. It is alarmingly simple, and surprisingly effective.
When you are not stressed, start doing one thing that you enjoy and does you good. This thing – a ten minute walk, a five minute meditation, a contemplative cup of tea by the window – is not a “luxury” abandoned the moment you get too busy, but a PRIORITY because you are too busy, because you know it reduces stress and because helps you to be at your best.
The end of a holiday is a great time to kickstart a habit. Once you’ve picked the remaining chocolate out of the dog’s coat, and retrieved the last of the egg-wrappers from the flower-beds, commit to (and start) your stress-relieving thing. This way you have the time and commitment to form a new stress-relieving habit to have well in place before summer half term…
