Dealing with Stress by Using its Strength to Take Control

Persistent and powerful feelings of stress come from our minds. If you or someone you know is dealing with stress and anxiety, then this will ring true for you. We all react to stress in our own way, for some the contrast between choices and outcomes becomes stark, yet for others, moments of high stress bring confusion and indecision.

Those dealing with stress will know that working through stress systematically and logically is sometimes like coming face-to-face with a faster, more vigilant, and more powerful side of yourself. It outwits your rationalizations, outpaces your attempts to calm down, and has the potential to make you feel helpless. How can the power of your hyper-aware mind benefit you instead of opposing you? You could have a powerful ally when things got tough.

Stress and anxiety are experienced by everyone and exist in a wide range of states. Dealing with stress is part of being human and is the usual response from a healthy, capable brain that expects trouble. Our brain can flip a switch and bring out a faster, more vigilant, and more powerful side to each of us. This is good when you need its help, but it can sometimes press the “panic” button and all you can hear and think about is the siren.

Having our brain make us aware of when we should feel stress is very useful, it tells us about danger and helps us out of harm’s way in a very loud and overriding manner. When our brain tells us to stress out it is an instinctual reaction, which means that it feels like it is doing its job. The more we push back against feeling stressed, the more our brain can turn up the volume to tell us there is danger and we need to fight or flee.

Have you ever considered dealing with stress in a way that you would a big shaggy grumpy dog? Instead of your brain going into a consuming overdrive of stress and anxiety when danger shows up like the wolf at the door, you can recognize it, greet it, name it, and send it to sit in the corner. As strong as the stressful feelings are that your mind manufactures, those same strong feelings can be used when dealing with stress.

Psychologists know that being mindful helps us to gradually protect and strengthen our brain against stress and anxiety, and there are parts of mindfulness that can be called upon whenever you need to see a shaggy dog instead of a wild wolf. This will help you deal with the thoughts, feelings, and other symptoms that stress and anxiety carry with them.

Take baby steps in dealing with stress

Think of a child learning how to walk. It slowly gets up, takes a shaky step or two, and promptly sits down again or falls over. Like any worthwhile habit, changing a mindset involves these persistent and incremental steps in the right direction. The good news is that there is no hurry and for the brain to unlearn habits and teach old dogs new tricks, like going to sit in the corner instead of barging loudly through your door does take a while.

Now, remember, we are taking small steps here and these mechanisms do not work effectively if you try them all at once. That would be like teaching a toddler how to walk, catch and speak at the same time. Your mind will react very similarly to the toddler and quite possibly throw a tantrum.

So, pick one activity to do at a time and then limit the time you do it to a short interval. This is a small but key step in the right direction. Do not try to rush this but rather take baby steps and set yourself up for success.

Deal with stress by using its strength to calm down. Your brain is exceptionally strong – as you know by the force that stress can hit you with. These exercises can help you to use them to strengthen your ability to deal with stress and anxiety.

Be present and open your senses

Focus on being present. You are where you are – not where your stress imagines you are. When the wolf is at the door it is quickly throwing “what-if” and “then-what” scenarios then you can barely think and can often feel unbalanced as a result. Help your feet to plant themselves by opening up your senses.

Ask what you can hear, what you can see, what was the last thing you ate, and what it tasted like. What do you feel, and what do you know? Stay in the present. Focus on what is happening, rather than your stress-inducing unpleasant future scenario. If this is challenging to do at first, put a time limit on it – two minutes is a good place to start. Use this time to experience the here and now.

It’s important to realize that each time you practice this technique you strengthen your ability to pull back from anxious thoughts that displace your joy and feeling of safety with worry and stress. It will be useful to get into a regular practice once a day, for a set amount of time.

Longer is better, but what is important is that you’re doing it. Give your brain a chance to rewire itself and then strengthen these new thought pathways. Practice each day, you and your brain will enjoy it.

Say it aloud

Start with saying aloud where you are, that you’re safe, what you can see, what you can hear, feel, taste and smell. Go slowly, one baby step at a time. Remember not to feel pressure to modify your feelings or change your thoughts. Feelings and thoughts will come and go, be kind to yourself and know that every thought and feeling passes.

As you experiment and turn on your senses to the here and now, without pushing away your thoughts and feelings, remember that there is no stressful feeling or thought that is more powerful than you. You are always more powerful, stronger, and robust because they are only a part of you.

In dealing with stress, practice patience and honesty and even curiosity. Is there any wisdom revealed by your stressful thoughts and feelings that you weren’t aware of before? Let these thoughts and feelings stay long enough to realize that you do not need them today. Start with noticing an anxious thought, accepting it, and letting it leave when it’s ready to do so.

Watch and learn

Take a watching role. See your thoughts and feelings without interacting with them. Despite the sneaky way stress has of making you feel like you need to bottle up and contain it to deal with it, realize that you can engage by watching your thoughts at arm’s length and that when they are ready, they will pass.

Yes, there will be times when we need to engage with our thoughts and feelings, and there will also be times when we can stand and patiently wait for them to move on. Sometimes it helps to imagine your thoughts and feelings as if they are autumn leaves slowly floating past.

See the storm, and wait it out

Next time it happens, just leave the thoughts alone. Do not change them or try to understand them. They will approach you like leaves on a blustery day, and then they will blow past you when they are ready to do so. The idea is to take a step back, being partly removed from your stressful thoughts.

So instead of trying to stop the power of your stressed-out mind from blowing supersized worries and concerns your way, think of yourself watching the leaves from a car or on TV. The storm can rage, and you are observing waiting for it to quieten down.

Try to identify the stress-fuelled concerns as they float past. Give them a name. Watch them float on by. This may be something like a feeling about safety on the road during the holidays or stress about the upcoming deadline.

Recognize that stress will not hurt you

Another technique in dealing with stress is to recognize that it will not hurt you. As the thoughts are powerful and you may sometimes experience physical feelings that do not make sense, you may think that physical and mental symptoms of being worried mean that something even more serious will happen to you.

You may analyze where the thoughts come from, and how they can be prevented in the first place. Instead, concentrate on not believing the messages they contain, especially if they are catastrophic, filled with doomsaying and promises that the four horsemen of the apocalypse are about to ride over the horizon.

Practice not believing the messages that your stress-induced, worried thoughts contain. Yes, they are there as a warning, so take it as such, and not a prophecy. Next time your heart starts to race, or your thinking starts to cloud as the stress sets in, name it: “My heart is beating nineteen to the dozen, my thoughts are cloudy. This is anxiety. It is not a symptom of a heart attack or dementia. I am safe where I am.”

Exercise and practice trust in yourself. You are a strong and resourceful person. You coped yesterday and the day before that. And you will cope today. Whatever happens to you, you can deal with it. Look at your history – you have done difficult things in the past. And you can do difficult things today and tomorrow.

You did difficult things yesterday, you can do them again today when dealing with stress

Even if this feeling does not feel real, remind yourself of the truth of your lived experiences. Despite your strength, stress brings worry and fear. We all have fears, and they feel real. But they often do not happen. Failure, rejection, making mistakes, and the list can go on. Look back on your life, you have coped then, and you will cope now.

Your feelings of worry and fear do not necessarily bring them into being. Trust yourself, and if you struggle to do so, pretend to. Act as if you believe it, and you will realize sooner rather than later, that you do. And people around you will not notice the difference.

Acknowledging your anxiety without needing to accommodate it is also important for dealing with stress. Do you know the mind-trick about the white horse? Tell yourself repeatedly not to think of a white horse. Try hard not to. Now your stressful thoughts are very similar – the more we try to make sense of and control them the more they feed into that stress. Like not being able to do anything other than think about the white horse when trying not to.

Accepting your stress and anxiety does not make it any stronger. Rather it stops giving it the energy to feed off. When you’re free to think of a white horse or not, you are likely not to. But if you do, that is okay too.

So, look to come to terms with the fact that your stress and anxiety are present, and that they push what-if thoughts and worries through your mind. Do not suppress it. Bring it into a space where you can deal with it. Remember the white horse illustration, what you focus on becomes powerful.

Learn to walk before you run in dealing with stress

Start with baby steps, short periods of mindfulness of two minutes, and slowly build up to longer. When you next notice anxiety and stress approach, watch it come, name the worried thoughts, notice your dry mouth, and accept it. These techniques are like drops of water accumulating in a large bucket. As you initially try them you will likely feel like it is not as effective as you hoped.

The more you experiment with them and use them the more capacity you will have to take the reigns of your strong mind and have it work in your favor. You will realize again that you have what it takes, and always will, to understand that anxiety is a feeling that comes and goes, just like autumn leaves blowing past.