Four tools for stress relief right now

We all face stress in our daily lives. Here are ways to relieve it in the short and longer term.

Tool #1: “STOP”

This is a strategy for “in the moment” relief.

When you start to feel you might lose control, go through the steps in the “STOP” mnemonic to bring yourself back to capacity again. 

It works like this:

S = Stop, take a short pause. 

Take a short pause or if you sense emotional flooding, take a time out. This might mean removing yourself for a while from the source of conflict or overwhelm (“Let’s just take a short break and get together again in 10 minutes shall we?”).

T = Take some breaths

Taking some long, deliberate breaths. Being mindful of your breathing helps connect you back to the present and releases stress. It helps reactivate the parts of the brain responsible for attention and emotional regulation.

O = Observe

Engaging in observation of what’s happening and what is around you reconnects you to the present and re-engages your capacity to respond. You can observe what is around you; what is happening; how you feel; and observe the options available.

Speaking out what you feel (even to yourself) can help bring your brain’s capacity for higher functions back online. In company, the same technique can be used professionally by observing what is ‘in the room’: “I’m feeling things are getting a bit tense right now. Does anyone else feel it?”

P = Proceed

Having regained composure, breath, and awareness, and having observed how things are, decide how to proceed and then move forward.

The key to this technique is to get into the habit of taking a short pause.  By separating the stimulus from the response, we give ourselves space to handle our emotional response consciously, rather than allowing a conditioned, unconscious response to take control.  

Tool #2: Five Finger Present-sensing

This is a strategy for releasing the gradual build up stress, for example while waiting for an event like a work meeting, court appearance or interview.

It works like this: 

Use your thumb and fingers on one hand to represent each of your five senses. Go through them observing what you sense in the moment right now, and say it out loud or quietly to yourself. 

For example,  starting with your thumb as your sense of sight, notice what you see and say it to yourself, “Right now I can see the light reflections in my glass of water”. Then move to your index finger as, say, hearing, and do the same thing: “Right now I can hear the birds singing outside”. Keep going through all your senses, counting them off against your fingers.

This exercise takes us out of our mind’s anxious thoughts of the future and brings us back to the present moment. 

It is very difficult to feel the stress of a future event once you have moved your attention to the present.  Moving your attention back to what your five senses are experiencing now helps ground you and relieve your mind of its anxiety about the future.

Tool #3: Non-violent communication

This is a tool for relieving the stress of verbal conflict.

Non-violent communication or NVC is a well established methodology that uses particular language patterns to move through conflict in a non-confrontational and non-blaming way. 

It works like this:

Let’s take a common verbal response to someone doing something that annoys us, like being interrupted or spoken over. We might in our annoyance say, “How dare you speak over me and dismiss everything I was trying to say! You make me feel worthless!”

This will likely trigger an argument: “I wasn’t being dismissive, it’s your fault for going on and on.” This escalates conflict.

The NVC response to the same situation would be to say, “When you start speaking before I have finished, I feel unheard.  Please wait until I have finished before you continue the conversation.”

The basic pattern is:

(1) name the behaviour +

(2) take ownership of one’s own feelings and response +

(3) make a polite, reasonable and achievable request that provides a solution to reduce the conflict.

Using language that is not directly blaming (i.e. not “you make me…”) but instead takes ownership of the felt response (i.e. “I feel…”), helps reduce rather than amplify conflict.  Because the language makes a request (“Please can you…”), it gives a solution to move the situation forward.

Tool #4: Focus energy on what you can influence

This is a tool for living life with less stress. It’s taken from Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Imagine a zone of influence containing the things in our lives that we can control, even if this needs some effort or discipline. For example, our diet or the amount of exercise we take. Then imagine beyond this things which we may be concerned with, but we cannot influence at all, such as a foreign war or overseas famine. If we concern ourselves too much with things that we cannot influence, we tend to increase our stress and anxiety, which become triggered by the lack of control and agency.  So it is better to focus our energies on what we can influence.

This is not a mindset of complacency about the larger problems in the world: we can still view these with compassion and take steps to support those in need (such as giving to charity). It is instead a mindset of focusing our life’s energy in places where it can generate genuine change. This perspective helps us become more conscious and purposeful about where and how we choose to employ our effort and emotional capital.

The more emotional capital we spend on things that we cannot influence, the more likely it is that we‘ll suffer from greater on-going stress and anxiety, and be under-resourced in our immediate circle of influence, with our own work, life and goals.

It may be true that stress in our lives is inevitable. But our response to it is not. With the right tools, we can choose to grow our capacity to respond in more purposeful, resourceful ways. We can become skilled at handling stress.