Do you like to sort things out too?
I have a real need to organise concepts, so they make better sense to me. Otherwise I find it difficult to choose what is a good plan forward.
There is so much advice everywhere about what to do when you’re stressed & anxious. What I find is missing is why you would choose one way over another. So that’s what I’ll start to untangle in this blog.
Immediate or long-term strategies to feel calmer
Techniques for managing anxiety depend partly on if you need immediate relief and/or want to learn to stay calm and in control long-term.
First, I’ll separate external stress and internal anxiety though.
Simply put, stress comes from the outside and anxiety from inside of us - from how we think. (See my last blog: “Make sense of stress & anxiety”, Part 1 of 4 of this stress series.).
External Stress
If we are stressed by something external such as too much pressure at work, ideally that stress is handled by resolving the situation.
A lot of the time though, it’s not that easy. Because the stressor is outside of us, it’s not under our control. We can only make certain outcomes more likely.
Sometimes we have no control over the stressor like Covid and its consequences. We can’t change some of the e.g. isolation and changed working situations, so we need to learn to handle the anxiety the stress may have caused us.
Internal Anxiety
Anxiety comes from how we think. Sometimes this comes from an external stressor, sometimes it’s how we have learnt to think or a personality trait.
When we’re anxious, our thinking becomes more pessimistic, and black & white. We also become less able to come up with new, creative ideas.
Have you ever thought over and over again about what you could have said or done differently? Or worried about all sorts of versions of the future? When your thoughts just go round and round in your head, it’s rumination and that causes anxiety.
This does not mean that you should suppress uncomfortable, scary thoughts and feelings. Even if you try, that doesn’t work anyway. Your discomfort tells you something. It’s a signpost that something isn’t right.
Thinking about ways of working something out is useful and constructive. Dealing with that discomfort is helpful; imagining scary outcomes is anxiety provoking.
Ask yourself: Is this true?
I love drama films and TV. My latest favourite is the TV series “This is Us”. I can’t help but crying, laughing, feeling with the people in it.
Maybe you prefer action or horror?
Have you noticed that your heart beats faster when the hero is in a superfast car chase followed by Kalashnikov waiving murderers?
This happens because your brain can’t properly tell the difference between imagination and reality. This also has the effect that the brain treats your rumination as real, and this causes more anxiety.
Of course, you can turn this around too and imagine good outcomes, good performance etc which is something that hypnosis is exceptionally good for.
Fight/Flight/Freeze response
When we are anxious, our nervous system thinks we’re under attack and starts the fight/flight/freeze response.
First is the immediate response from your nervous system and adrenalin, and after a little while cortisone as well. This helps you to fight or run away. If the threat passes quickly, your body goes back into everyday functioning.
If you continue to live with stress, this changed physiology is damaging to both your mind and physical health. Eventually, you become exhausted and burnt out.
Do you want immediate help to feel calmer?
Do you feel that you have too many plates spinning at the same time? Is it hard to sleep because your brain is still going? Does your body feel like it’s buzzing?
Then you may want fast help to get out of the fight/flight/freeze response.
We can’t do that on will power, so saying to yourself to calm down has no effect (as I’m sure you’ve already noticed). This is the brain to body direction.
What we can do instead is mimic what the body does when it is in the rest & digest / calm state. If the body is “doing calm”, the brain fairly quickly gets the message that the environment is safe and calms down. This is the body to brain direction.
Examples of immediate help:
Become aware of what the ground feels like under your feet, the air on your face and arms, the temperature around you, what are some distant noises etc.
This works because the f/f/f response makes you focus on the threat, so you stop being aware of the small, less important things around you.Say out loud 5 red (or any other colour that’s slightly unusual around you) things that you can see. It works for the same reason as above.
Breathe out for longer than you breathe in for a few minutes.
You can do this by simply counting; by tracing your finger along the short edge of an A4 paper as you breathe in along the short edge and breathe out along the long edge; or counting steps – breathe in for maybe 4 steps and breathe out for 6 steps.
One name for this is 7/11 breathing. Breathe in for 7 counts and breathe out for 11. That doesn’t work for me as I have to count so fast that I feel stressed by it, so not great for me - I do 4/6 instead. The point is to breathe out for about 50% longer than you breathe in (make sure you’re still comfortable thought!).You can also burn off the adrenaline that’s fuelling the f/f/f response by exercising. You don’t need much – about 10 mins of fast walking so you’re slightly out of breath.
If you don’t do something more long-term about the anxiety, the f/f/f response will probably come back though.
Long-term strategies to manage anxiety
To feel calmer and more in control of yourself more consistently, it’s not enough to put out the fires of the fight/flight/freeze response.
To feel hope, calm, focus, fully alive, thinking and life-style changes are important.
Handle your primitive brain
As we live with this primitive part of our brain, we need to manage it similarly to what it was designed for.
In Solution Focused Hypnotherapy, we call this the 3 Ps:
o Positive Thinking. This is not about ignoring problems and only thinking “happy” thoughts! This is about being constructive and finding helpful ways to think about what’s happening.
o Positive Interaction. We belong in tribes and need to be with other people. We would not have survived long by ourselves on the savannah…
o Positive Action. We need to do things that are useful to us. In stone age times, this meant hunting and gathering. That was both achieving food and exercise at the same time. For us now, it can be about going to work and go for a walk.
Think in helpful ways
Events, thinking, feelings, behaviours are separate from each other. It often doesn’t feel that way until we decide to become aware of it.
The event can trigger any of thinking, feeling or behaviour first. However for us to change, working on the thinking is much easier than working directly on the feelings. You can also start with changing your behaviour and in some cases this can be very effective too.
For example, if you’re on your way to work and there’s a massive traffic jam on the motorway ahead of you, you will not react until you know about it, so the event in itself is not a stressor. When you become aware of the delay, what you think about it decides how you feel, and then what you do.
One supportive way of thinking could be to realise that there is nothing you can do about the situation so decide to use that time in some helpful way. Fretting about the delay would only make you more anxious and lead to more anxiety. Perhaps you’d decide to listen to an interesting podcast or plan how to do whatever it was you were missing?
Knowing that emotions and thinking are not the same, gives you huge power to decide on how to react to situations.
When emotions come before thinking remember that suppressing emotions doesn’t work – at least not for long, but do be aware of how you interpret these emotions. It’s your interpretation that creates anxiety or calm or any other feeling.
Solution Focused Brief Therapy
I use Solution Focused Brief therapy (SFBT) because research has shown that SFBT is extremely effective in helping people think so they move towards more fulfilling lives.
It focuses on the outcome you would like to see in your life, your strengths and abilities. It helps you notice what’s working so takes you away from black & white thinking. It’s calming for the brain, and renews hope and belief in yourself.
Language plays an important role too as there is nothing we’ve created that didn’t start with us thinking about it. I will write more about SFBT in the next blog (Part 3 of this stress series).
Practising gratitude
Gratitude has also been proven to be highly effective in making people feel calmer. You can have a gratitude diary for example. You write down 3 things you are grateful, thankful, or happy about at the end of the day. This not only makes you feel better, but importantly it helps you see that your life is not so black & white as your primitive mind is trying to make it out. This is also one way SFBT is so effective.
Hypnosis, Mindfulness and Meditation
They are all enormously helpful to relieve anxiety and to live more fully. There are definite benefits and differences between hypnosis, mindfulness, and meditation. The 4th part of this stress series will be about this. My colleague Alison Bale who is a Mindfulness teacher will write more about Mindfulness and Meditation as my speciality is Hypnosis.
Hypnosis puts your mind in a state that helps to release anxiety. You will feel more in control and calmer so you can think more clearly and do more of what you want. It also helps to rewire your brain to think in ways that are helpful to you, much faster and easier than trying to do it in your normal thinking state. That’s why I use hypnosis after SFBT.
Practising mindfulness keeps your mind from ruminating and enhances your experience of life which calms your nervous system.
Meditation is also a very good way to calm your brain long term.
The Take-Away
You can’t eliminate all stressors so to feel well, you need to learn how to manage your mind. It is not about forcing your thinking or suppressing emotions but instead how to not be affected by them so much. To be able to let go of the unhelpful and instead embrace being more free and relaxed.
I described some immediate ways of relieving stress and some long-term strategies to feel calmer. There are of course others too. I hope that this way of categorising will help you choose strategies that suit your situation and support you well.
If you have any questions or thoughts around this, contact me please. I love to talk about this, so I’m very happy to chat.
I also have a free, short (12mins) relaxation download if you want to feel instantly calmer and better about yourself. Go to my homepage and press the button near the bottom for “Take a Break”:
Best wishes
Lena