Do you sometimes feel as if your thoughts are out of control, your mind is always racing, demands increasing, accountabilities overwhelming and life is out of balance? If this is your experience you are not alone! The lifestyle of the 21st century dweller can certainly be rewarding however, the ever increasing daily challenges can be stressful and significantly impact on a person’s health and general wellbeing.
We are biologically wired through evolution to react to stressful situations by one of three ways – fight, fleeing or freeze – as our survival depended on quick action in the face of danger or immediate threat and that mechanism operates with the same urgency today.
Stress therefore is a normal physiological response to events that make us feel threatened or when our harmony is disturbed. Stress today can be both positive and negative depending on what kind of stress it is and how we understand and deal with it. Stress in the short term can be a positive and a motivating force enhancing alertness, helpful in meeting goals and generally managed by most people. Long term, chronic stress however, can impact negatively on a person’s immune system, brain structure and functioning and has been associated with increased biological ageing. Therefore, understanding these implications and developing strategies to minimise the negative is important.
The encouraging news from neuroscience and psychology research provides us with a deeper understanding of how our brain structure functions and proposes that with knowledge we have the capacity to train our brains to respond to real and perceived threats with more discernment than reacting spontaneously. Everything we think or do, our whole world experience, is the result of processing and integrating information within the different components of our brain, which in turn produces our responses to the situation.
Thoughts influence our feelings and actions
How we react to a situation depends on the subjective meaning we assign to it. It is how we think about the event, the person or the dialogue that creates the anxiety, anger, fear or joy, not the event itself. Successful evidence based strategies such as disputing irrational thinking, changing our self talk and developing mindfulness skills, paying attention to the present moment, have been found to help calm our response to stress.
Self talk isn’t trivial and what you say to yourself will either help you in life or hinder your progress, negatively impacting on how well you manage work, family and life situations. To break the negative self talk cycle, do the following:
- stop and take time to be aware of your self talk
- ask ‘is it true’? (What is the evidence?)
- put thoughts into perspective (will it matter in two, five years?), and
- what is a more helpful thought? (What else is it possible to say?).
Practicing mindfulness such as the deliberate focusing on the sight, smell, touch, taste, sounds of a particular task or event stills our mind by jettisoning unnecessary stimuli so that we are better able to regulate our emotions. The stress circuit is broken for a time when we practice mindfulness exercises. It can take less than a minute to prompt our minds to calm, relax and focus. Attentive breathing helps calm the body by slowing heart rater, lowering blood pressure and sharpening focus. Controlled breathing lessens anxiety by overriding the fight, flight or freeze response so when breathing is deliberately regulated, the brain is primed to think first and then plan a response thereby enabling a more considered response.
The key to both regulating and minimising the time spent on managing stress factors in your life lies is in finding what strategies work best for you and then practicing and applying these strategies as consistently as possible to all aspects of your life.
References
Edwards SP 2005 The Amygdala: The Body’s Alarm Circuit. Accessed www.dana.org. 7 September 2016.
Goleman D 1998 Working with Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books
The Hawn Foundation Mindup. Accessed http://www.thehawnfoundation.org/mindup/ 30 August 2016.
The Amygdala and Emotions. Accessed http://www.effective-mind-control.com/amygdala.html 17 August 2016.