What is All This Stuff About Stress Management?

I have a love-hate relationship with stress. I can’t stand it, but I can't live without it either. There are times when I convince myself that the tension I feel actually helps me perform better. At other times when I am bogged down with excessive stress, I wonder if it is really all that helpful.

When we are under stress, our body gets tense, and we can feel the tension in different parts of our body. Our heart beats faster, and this causes a rush of blood circulation in large group of muscles like arms and legs. This tension is what makes us uncomfortable, and over time takes its toll on our health, giving us hypertension, ulcers, and much more.

Why does our body behave like this in stressful situations? This is our body's natural response to prepare us for a fight-or-flight response in a threatening situation. The tensed muscles and greater blood supply gets our body ready to take a physical fight or run away quickly from the threat. This was perfectly appropriate and necessary for man’s survival in primitive age. However, we live in information age today, and such response is not at all helpful for the mental tasks we have these days. When we are under tension, the blood supply to brain is reduced, and our capacity to think goes down. We are unlikely to take the right decision under extreme stress. In other words, to be effective, we need to learn to handle this 'extra' stress well, and keep it from going out of control.

Can you do something to bring this stress down and to be less tense in day-to-day life? From my experience, I can say that there are several steps you can take towards this goal.

Learn to Relax

Since stress causes tension in your muscles, an effective antidote to it is to handle the tension directly and learn to relax your muscles. Since relaxation is exactly opposite of tension, when you learn to keep your body relaxed, it gradually gives signal to the mind to calm down and be less stressful. Yoga and meditation are very helpful in lowering stress levels. So is progressive relaxation technique, in which you deliberately tense and then relax different muscles in the body and observe the feeling of relaxation. This trains your body to relax on demand and stay relaxed. There is a lot of material available about it on the net. Try following the instructions in the following video:






Address the Underlying Cause

Relaxation techniques are helpful to directly deal with the stress, but the stress may come back if you do not address its underlying cause. Most often, it is a negative emotion, that fuels stress – fear, anxiety, envy, anger, or hatred. Learn to cultivate a positive mindset to attain a sustained state of relaxation. If you ask me one step that is most helpful in controlling negative emotions, it is to have an attitude of acceptance. 

Fear
When we refuse to accept risk and uncertainty in any situation, it gives rise to fear. We imagine the worst, and shudder at the thought, and feel afraid and tense. Instead, try to accept that uncertainty and willingly take the risk, and it will turn into an adventure. You will find the stress evaporating.

Anxiety
Non-acceptance of failure makes us anxious. Let us mentally embrace the failure, and our feeling will change to one of confidence.

Envy
When we do not like good in others, it gives rise to envy and jealousy in our mind. Instead, if we whole-heartedly accept other’s achievement, it becomes inspiration.

Anger
There are many things in life that are beyond our control, and it makes us angry if we fail to accept them. We can reduce the emotion of anger by just accepting what is beyond our control.

Hatred
We feel hate toward a person, when we do not accept her as she is. We focus too much on the things about her that we don’t like, and ignore all other good things in the person. Just try dropping the expectations and accept the person unconditionally, the feeling will change into a feeling of love.

To conclude, stress is not good for your effectiveness and health, and you should get it under control before it takes its toll.