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We All Get Stressed, Here’s How To Deal

We’re in the middle of a pandemic. You’re probably stressed out. It’s natural, and it would be strange if you weren’t a little more worried than usual. At its most basic, stress is “a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances.” Because stress usually results from the situations and events occurring around you, stress looks and feels different for every person. What is stressful to you may not even be remotely stressful to your friend or coworker, and vice versa. That’s why it’s important to learn about stress management techniques.

The Science of Stress

In a study conducted by the American Psychological Association, about 25% of participants cited their stress levels as “extreme.” That’s a massive number. But what is stress, scientifically? Stress is a biological reaction to perceived danger in our environment, developed over hundreds of millions of years, built to keep our ancient ancestors alive. It’s also commonly referred to as the “fight or flight response,” and stress typically displays as a shorter burst of negative energy followed by a period of relief. At times, stress can also be a positive, i.e. when you’re in a potentially dangerous situation and your stress response makes you react quickly to avoid it. 

When individuals become stressed out, or the fight or flight response is activated, a few things happen. First, according to the American Institute of Stress, “the sympathetic nervous systems stimulate the adrenal glands triggering the release of catecholamines, which include adrenaline and noradrenaline.” 

The physical manifestation of this nervous system activation is increased heart rate, quickened breathing, stiffness of limbs, and dilated pupils. If the fight or flight response subsides as usual, it will typically fade in 20 to 60 minutes. But for some people, that fight or flight response doesn’t fade. That prolonged fight or flight response is often defined as anxiety. 

When you experience chronic stress and anxiety, there are several ways it could negatively impact your health. A few symptoms of chronic stress and anxiety are dizziness, change in appetite, exhaustion, or a clenched jaw. Luckily, there are a few stress management techniques that you can implement across the board.

Stress Management Techniques

The Four A’s

The 4 As Of Stress
Image via Health Zone.

One of the techniques you can implement for stress management is called The 4 A’s. The 4 A’s are as follows: avoid, alter, accept, adapt. The first A, Avoid, simply means that you learn to say no and take control of your surroundings — sometimes, you need to say no to that happy hour drink in favor of sweatpants and reality TV. Alter means that you’re communicating your feelings openly and setting up proper boundaries with coworkers, friends and family. Communication is especially crucial here, because if you want someone to change how they behave towards you or what they expect of you, you must communicate with them.

The third A, Accept, means that you can just accept things as they are, without trying to change or control them. Because sometimes things are totally out of our control, and worrying about them only hurts us. Finally, you can Adapt. You can adapt by changing your standards for yourself or reassessing an issue. Are you stressed out because you’ve got unrealistic expectations of yourself? Try reframing the issue instead. When implementing the 4 A’s, you can use one, two, three, or all four of these strategies to help mitigate and minimize stress.

Mindfulness and Meditation

We know, you’ve heard about meditation a million times. But there’s a reason this tactic is so powerful when it comes to stress management. Meditation, or taking as little as a few minutes to practice mindfulness and remove your focus from the issues that plague you, can totally change your outlook on a situation.

How? Meditation has been proven to reduce the inflammation response caused by stress. This means that your body is able to move more quickly out of “fight or flight” mode and reenter a more calm and relaxed state. The positive effects of meditation include a reduction in negative emotions, an increase in patience, increase in self-awareness, and increased creativity. The best part is that this can all be achieved in as little as a 5 minutes meditation session.

A few of our favorite ways to meditate include the Calm app, which is an app that guides you through meditation and also helps with sleep, Simple Habit, which is a more straightforward meditation app specifically designed for busy people, and MNDFL, which is virtual meditation studio that offers live classes and sound baths.

Practice Affirmations 

At some point in our lives, we’ve probably all used the affirmation technique for stress management without even knowing it. Affirmations are positive statements about desired outcomes. Some examples include “I am confident in my ability to sell this product” or “I allow myself to grow and learn.”

It has been proven that psychologically, affirmations are an effective way to reduce stress, improve mood, and heighten performance. In MRI studies, it was also proven that certain neural pathways were activated by people who practiced self-affirmation. Self-affirmation helps us craft our own story and narrative, and can help drive progress even when we feel stalled or stagnant in our personal or professional lives. Overall, they’re a great way to decrease stress, increase happiness, and increase our willingness to listen to others.

If you want to start practicing affirmations, a good way to start is to draw up 1-2 different phrases, and repeat them to yourself a few times over (ideally 3-5 times). You can also utilize an app like ThinkUp, which helps prompt you with affirmations in various categories.

ABCD Technique

Stress Management ABCD Model
Image via Andi Roberts.

The ABCD technique, originally developed by Dr. Albert Ellis, stands for “Adversity, Beliefs, Consequences, Disputation.” These words paint the picture of a situation that triggers stress or anxiety — you encounter adversity, have beliefs about the situation or outcome, and then face consequences based on those beliefs. An example of a situation would be that you received negative feedback in your quarterly review with your boss (adversity), which led you to believe you weren’t a valued employee (belief), and then led you to underperform for the rest of the week (consequence). 

The way to mediate this is by examining the situation through this ABC lens, and then applying the “D” or disputation. Disputation means that you challenge the negative self-talk and negative beliefs causing you stress or anxiety. For the example above, disputation would be thinking something like “Just because I received a few pieces of negative feedback does not mean my contributions are undervalued or not appreciated. In fact, negative feedback is their way of telling me that they appreciate the work I’m doing but have ideas on how to make it better.”

This technique helps to put your stressors and adversity into perspective, and take action to change your thought patterns.

Talk About it

Talking about your stressors or anxiety is immensely helpful. It’s scientifically been proven that talking out loud about stress helps bring relief, even if you’re just talking to yourself. When you feel stressed, either at work or in your personal life, take a minute to breathe deeply, and then reach for your phone to connect with someone you trust.

Sometimes, it’s better if this person does not work with you, and can view work-related situations from an objective lens. When you’re conversing about your stressors, try to be as honest as possible, which can help you get to the root of what is actually causing you anxiety and stress. Often, the root cause of the worry is not immediately obvious.

There is also the great option to talk to a professional, either in a therapy session or via an app. Some apps that are great for virtual counseling include Better Help and Talkspace

Stress Management Tools

Now that we’ve reviewed some techniques to mediate stress and anxiety, let’s dig into the tools that can help manage stress, and even prevent it in the first place. When you’re organized and structured in your daily routines, this can help automatically keep stress at bay. Here are a few of our favorite apps to help keep organized and minimize stress:

Hive

Portfolio View

Hive is a flexible, all-in-one project management tool that serves as your work hub. At its core, Hive is a task-tracking app, and Hive lets you map out all of your to-dos and sort them by project. This level of organization helps reduce stress as it diminishes the “unknown” — you always know what is on your plate every day, week, and month. By connecting different apps like Gmail, Outlook, Zoom, Salesforce, Jira and more in one space, Hive also decreases time spent flipping between platforms and streamlines all professional efforts.

Todoist

Todoist is a to-do list making app that helps you stay organized and helps free up mental space. A less robust option (Hive has more complete features and functionality), Todoist lets you sort lists into personal and professional sections, and create straightforward to-do lists divided by subcategory. By jotting down all of your to-dos digitally, this app helps free up mental space for bigger picture thinking.

EverNote

EverNote is a great option if you need a place to take and organize both personal and professional notes. With Evernote, you can take notes from anywhere, find information faster, and prevent important information from falling through the cracks. Evernote also lets you collaborate with teammates and share content together.

Simple Habit

As we mentioned above, Simple Habit is a great meditation app to use on-the-go. You can spend a quick 5 minutes practicing mindfulness, and return to your daily life with enhanced clarity, organization, and decreased stress.

When you start to get stressed, anxious, or worked up about anything professionally or personally, just remember that it is a human emotion, and you’re not alone. Apply some of the aforementioned stress management techniques to bring clarity and calmness to the situation.

Have any strategies that we forgot about? Let us know in the comments below.