by Joe Robinson
Which stress triggers really drive you up the wall? People jumping out of their skin with crisis mentality? Workload? Interruptions? Relatives? Technology updates every other day? Traffic?
There’s no shortage of candidates, is there? How tired are you of all these people and scenarios being able to manipulate your emotional reactions and set off a racing pulse, churning stomach, and white-hot anger or fear?
No doubt, very tired in more ways than one. Stress burns up the energetic resources in your body, so a steady dose of it will fuel constant fatigue that is cumulative. The fatigue from the stress of the day comes out of your hide the next day and the next if the body doesn’t get back to pre-stressor levels. Does that ring true for you?
However, you could manage all these aggravations, if you knew where the stress was coming from and had the right practices vetted by the science to shut down the overreactive survival equipment. These are things I teach in my stress management programs for individuals and organizations.
UNMASKING THE CULPRIT
So, here's the weird thing about stress. All those triggers I listed above are not driving your stress. The culprit isn't the external event—the deadline or the setback.
Stress is the result of something much closer to home: your reaction to the stressful event. It’s your thoughts in the moment that turn on the stress response. Whaaat?
I hate to tell you this, but you’re stressing yourself out. It’s your reaction to the stressor that fuels your stress. It’s the story you tell yourself about the stressful event that creates the stress.
The good news about that, though, is you can reject the doom-filled story fed to you by your ancient brain, which is trying to induce panic to get you to run or fight, and create a new story of your own. This way, you control the narrative, and, importantly, the self-talk.
It’s not the end. It’s a learning experience. It’s not beyond your capacity to handle. You’ve handled many other difficult things in your life. In fact, every time your brain thought you couldn't handle something, guess what? You handled it. You're still here, still kicking.
To take command, you tell yourself that the frightful stories fed to you are false, coming from a part of your brain that sees every threat as imminent physical death. You can rebut that story and come up with one of your own that reflects reality.
The key to your story is that you will overcome the demands, whatever they may be, by adjusting how you think about them. Instead of seeing them as being beyond your capacity, you reframe them as a challenge within your ability to handle.
Stress management is all about getting perceived control over demands. Tell yourself you can manage it, change how you view the stressor, make new adjustments to the task or how you deal with someone that give you more control, and you alter the perception of the threat to one that you have the wherewithal to manage.
Stress is very relative. What stresses you out doesn’t stress out someone else, and vice-versa. We all have things that used to drive stress but don’t anymore anymore—no doubt, because you found a way to manage or control it. You took away its power. It’s easy to see from this the role we play in creating stress—and can play in eliminating it.
THE ART OF NON-REACTION
Managing stress is the art of non-reaction, defusing extreme fight-or-flight reactions as quickly as possible after they go off. One way you can do this is to see the stressor as a con job unless your physical life is in danger.
Your ancient brain baits you into emotional reactions that bypass the modern brain and go directly to the original brain, home of irrational emotions, which was all we had to run things before the higher organs of the brain evolved that could weigh pro or con and act rationally. You have to find a way to return command back to your modern faculties.
The mission before you is to tell your brain, “I won’t take the bait.” Life is, in essence, a battle to keep the fear default under control so you can function in the world, assess concerns accurately, and find rational solutions.
Not falling for the calamitous alarms of the overwrought security equipment and knowing you can create a substitute story of reality keeps dramas you don’t need down and life manageable.
There will be many opportunities over the coming days to catch yourself in the stress act, not take the bait, and opt out. Stay nonreactive, and you stay healthy.
I’m a mental health, stress management, and work-life speaker and trainer who has brought solutions to individuals and organizations from IBM to Pfizer, LEGO, Cisco, Ocean Spray, Kellogg’s, New York City Public Health, the National Council on Mental Wellbeing, Kaiser Permanente, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and across the world from Mumbai to Bogota. I’m author of Work Smarter Live Better, Work to Live, and Don’t Miss Your Life.
