Stress is woven into everyday life, whether it comes from family, from money or from work — and sometimes from all three at once. Over the long run it can do serious damage, right up to a lasting depressive state. Fighting it back is not always easy, but it can be done. Here are 3 steps to get there.
1. Know what works for you
Start by learning to know yourself: do a little personal research to pin down the small things that make you feel better and give you relief.
Managing stress: your coping mechanisms
Food is often the first release valve, and more often so for women: eating a lot of chocolate buys a short spell of well-being. Unfortunately guilt tends to follow, which lands you back exactly where you started.
One note: eating chocolate is not a bad thing in itself. It contains magnesium, a natural antidepressant and anti-stress agent that eases the transmission of nerve impulses and lets the muscles relax. Anyone with a fragile liver should nevertheless keep to small amounts.
Vary your menus with foods rich in magnesium, spread across the three meals of the day: you get your intake without putting on weight. Even so, a cure through food alone falls short over time, as do other methods of limited effect — alcohol, tobacco, snacking, shopping, television, video games. Studies by the APA (American Psychological Association) put their effect at no more than two hours.
Sport comes highly recommended, along with meditation, yoga, walking, reading, calming music, or any creative activity. These are what work best for people carrying a high level of stress, with an effect that holds for several days. Ideally, eating well combined with a cathartic activity remains the best way to fight stress.
2. The feeling of control
Depending on what we are facing, our stress level rises and falls with the control we believe we have over it: the more things slip away from us, the harder the pressure bites. Understanding a situation and making sure you have a grip on it therefore becomes essential.
Mantras
Telling yourself that “everything is fine, everything is under control,” like a mantra, can help you take the reins again. Those phrases work as self-suggested subliminal messages, and they change for the better the way you walk into a situation.
How much control you have over your stress
According to Steve Maier, of the university of Boulder in Colorado, what determines the body's reaction is the degree of control exercised over the stressful thing. His experiments indicate that only uncontrollable stressors produce harmful effects: the same constraint, lived through with more control or seen as avoidable, is significantly less destructive. The sense of control over a stressor would therefore alter its real impact.
The right frame of mind in the face of stress
By trying to put a situation in perspective and understand it, you gain some hold over how far its consequences reach — on your body and on the tasks tied to it.
The choices you make in life
Believing in your own career counts too: we spend two thirds of our lives at work. Doing something you don't love, don't master and don't control raises the impact of stress day after day. That is what pushes more and more people into starting their own business, sometimes at the price of longer hours and less money, to gain independence and control over their own decisions.
3. Keep a minimum level of stress to keep moving forward
Stress as a way of getting better
Nobody likes being bored, least of all at work: days without a challenge often feel like days lost. At the other end, stretches of heavy workload with short deadlines multiply stressors and amplify their impact. So the point is to find the middle ground — alert without wearing yourself out physically and mentally — by alternating, where you can, periods of intense activity and periods of recovery.
Spontaneous relaxation
In his book The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin describes the key elements used by top athletes such as Michael Jordan, spontaneous relaxation among them: knowing how to manage yourself rather than destroy yourself, so that you keep performing.
Time to recover
Going easy on yourself and giving yourself time to recover restores your strength and creates distance from what is causing the stress, so you can come back to it with fresh approaches.
A good shot of a boost
During those short breaks, there is one simple lift available: watch a video of a cute animal. According to an approach studied by the researcher Deborah Wells, this kind of content is said to help bring blood pressure down and steady the heartbeat within a few minutes.
To go further
- The Willpower Instinct, Kelly McGonigal
- Your Brain at Work, David Rock
- The Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile
- The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin
- 59 Seconds, Richard Wiseman
