Why does stress feel so disempowering? I'd wager it has to do with the fact so much of stress happens automatically. None of us consciously decides "hey, today I think I'm going to be stressed! I think I'm going to tense my shoulders and breathe way too quickly and run a thousand negative thoughts through my head every single minute until I fitfully hit the hay tonight!" Instead, we simply find ourselves unconsciously experiencing all of the above signs and symptoms of stress. Stress hits us like a wrecking ball, and like a wrecking ball it often feels like there's no way to stop stress from devouring our lives.
Think about it- if stress were a conscious response then all we'd need to do to dispel it is make up our minds that we are going to constantly feel relaxed and at-ease. Yet because stress is an unconscious, automatic response, we need to take more pointed action if we're going to prevent it from dominating our lives.
And the first step towards banishing stress lies in understanding what stress actually is.
Your Biology Betrays You
To understand stress we need to take a step back. A big step back, a step back to the early days of the human race, back when the stress response was more likely to save your life than ruin it.
If you were one of the first humans to walk this earth you faced far more danger than you likely encounter today. You had to worry about all sorts of animal predators, you had to worry about rival groups of humans who were at war with your people, and you had to even worry about your own people doing you in if you couldn't follow the rules to the letter. Death was an ever-present reality back in those days, and if you wanted to survive you needed an appropriate way to deal with the many life-threatening dangers you'd encounter during your day-to-day life.
Thankfully you had a way to deal with life-threatening situations wired right into you, right into the inner workings of your biology. It's known as the fight-or-flight response, and it's the beating heart of stress.
The fight-or-flight response is simple to understand. When you're confronted with a threatening situation you body remixes the hormonal profile swimming through your blood stream, overloading you with adrenaline. This new hormonal cocktail narrows your senses, shuts down your brain, and turns you into an automated life-saving machine, a machine that's ready to either fight for its life or run faster than it ever has before until it outpaces the danger at hand.
Guess what? Even though you probably don't encounter many saber-toothed-tigers in your modern day-to-day life, you still have that fight-or-flight response hardwired into your biology and it still activates every time you feel threatened. And while the harsh light of logic may deny the life-threatening nature of those modern stimuli eliciting the stress response within you, your body still reacts to feeling overwhelmed in the same way- by initiating the fight-or-flight response.
In other words- stress is an automatic biological process that used to save your life and is now likely ruining it. If you're going to dispel stress for good and all, you need to learn how to interrupt your automatic negative responses before it sends you spiraling down, down, down.
How Can I Possibly Control an Unconscious Biological Reaction?!
This is a fair question, and to understand the ways you can interrupt the stress response and reclaim your life you need to understand the way your automatic responses work. All that probably sounds sort of high-minded and difficult to understand, but it's actually simple and easy to grasp.
You see, the stress response is really only made up of a few different elements- a stimulus, a reaction, and a response.
· You encounter a stimulus you feel threatened by.
· You unconsciously react to the stimuli (experiencing fight-or-flight).
· You respond negatively to the stimuli because you're caught up in the middle of fight-or-flight's adrenal-overload, creating additional negative stimuli driving you further and further into your stress-state.
Beating the process and reclaiming a relaxed life of ease relies on precisely throwing a wrench in this process right where it can gunk up the gears most effectively. But where could that be?
· You can't really control the fact you're going to encounter threatening stimuli.
· You can't really control the fact your body is going to immediately initiate fight-or-flight when you encounter this unavoidable, threatening stimuli.
· You can, however, control your response to the stimuli by dispelling fight-or-flight after it initiates but before you respond.
Creating this gap between reaction and response is the key to dispelling stress from your life, and it's easier than you might think.
First, Create Space
Instead of automatically responding to the stimuli threatening you take a minute to get away from it. If you can physically escape the stimuli do so, even if it means going to the bathroom or the conference room by yourself for just a minute. If you can't physically escape the stimuli then take a quick, quiet moment by closing your eyes and taking a deep breath, escaping internally.
When you take a minute to escape the stimuli threatening you, whether internally or externally or a combination of the two, you give your body a chance to stop perceiving itself as threatened and as such shut down its fight-or-flight response. You can shut down the response nearly as quickly as it ramps up. Even a minute of space can dramatically alter the hormonal cocktail coursing through your veins.
Second, Be Present
When you escape you need to focus on something other than the stimuli threatening you. After all, you haven't really escaped it if you continue to think about it over and over again. Focus on your breathing, notice what the inside of your eyelids look like, admire the designs at play in the conference room chairs... it doesn't matter what you focus on, as long as it isn't whatever got you worked up in the first place.
Third, Feel Through the Moment
Put your hand on your heart and soften it. Send compassion to yourself and to the stimuli threatening you. Almost nothing is really evil at heart- the saber tooth tiger of days-gone-by was more hungry than malicious, and your boss is probably feeling as stressed and pressured as you are. Feel compassion for the source of your stress and you will no longer see it as a threat, dissipating the chances your fight-or-flight response will initiate towards it again and enabling you to respond positively to it.
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