Blog 5

The First Answer

 Stress is an unspecified event or action. Your boss calls you to his or her office; a close friend dies without warning; a beloved pet gets hit by a car; or your partner leaves you. Small or big events that are unexpected/sudden create stress. Stress comes from not being able to ‘make sense’ of what is happening around you. 

Stress forms into a pattern that people believe they can control, called coping. Coping is fine short-term, but long term it wears a person out (and maybe the people around them).

Wilderness rescue, EMT, police, military combat are examples, or simply, working in a toxic office atmosphere, where the people scream, backstab, or demean each other. When you feel that you cannot afford to quit, the stress is crippling.

Some people like to maintain a high level of stress to force themselves to focus and overcome. Some people prefer to avoid all stress and conflict. Since stress is akin to emotion, what you do about stress is critical to being healthy. The key is to convert unspecified areas of your life into specifics and let the rest of it go (I will talk about permission to let it go in another blog).

Three options exist to let stress go. “Slip out the back Jack.” No, that’s a Paul Simon song.

Biology, relationships, or environment are ways to decrease (or increase) stress. I want to discuss them one at a time over the next three blogs.

Biology comes first. Stress is a biological reaction. Biology responds based on our environment and relationships, but also because of what you tell it to do.  A simple way to think about it is “Your brain is in your head, but your mind can go anywhere.” Did you ever daydream?

To begin, the simplest mind technique is breathing. When people become stressed, they shorten breathing or hold their breath. Taking eight deep breaths relaxes your biology.

Many people have many ways to do this, but the one that I find effective is: Breathe in through your nose to a count of four. Fill your lungs all the way to your tummy (diaphragm). Exhale for a count of four through your nose. Deep breath in. Deep breath out. Eight times. Watch yourself that you do the full eight breaths. People tend to cut short the last few.

Other biological releases are meditation, reading, massage, exercise, running, walking, or pacing. (Ever notice how, when you get upset, you wear a hole along the same place in the carpet.)

So it depends … the more you practice biological stress reduction the faster it works for you.