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STRESS! How YOU Can Get a Handle On It
It's the dreaded "S" word -- you live with it...it varies every day...although you can learn to deal with it, it never really goes away. What is it? It's STRESS! If you let it overpower your life, it can literally make you ill. The following articles will give you a few ideas on how you can ease the stress in your life, and bring about more peace and tranquility.
Better Ways to Cope with Stress: Your Way Out of the Toxic Triangle
Depressive symptoms, unhealthy eating habits, and heavy drinking unite to create a space that is so poisonous for women that I have called it the toxic triangle. Eating, Drinking, Overthinking will help you understand your own relationship to the toxic triangle. It is not just for women who have clinical depression, diagnosed eating disorders, or alcoholism. It is for women who dance around the edges of the toxic triangle, with moderate symptoms of depression, unhealthy eating patterns, or heavy drinking. Eating, Drinking, Overthinking teaches women how to transform their vulnerabilities into strengths, to help women develop the tools to change the way they cope with stressful circumstances. Here are some of the major steps toward positive change:
1. Step back and notice what you are thinking and feeling.
One way to do this is to use mindfulness techniques, which teach us to notice our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and memories without immediately categorizing them as good or bad. We learn to be more compassionate toward ourselves, responding to our thoughts and feelings as a friend might, rather than as a slave to a master. By being able to step back and notice, rather than be overwhelmed or ruled, by our feelings, we become better able to choose how we want to feel and act in difficult situations.
Mindfulness techniques also teach you to be more aware of the present moment. By practicing "being with" our feelings and thoughts we can become less frightened and overwhelmed by them, and thus less motivated to escape them with unhealthy behaviors. We can also learn a great deal about ourselves, particularly the ways we have internalized social pressures to cast ourselves in a certain way (for example, in terms of how much we weigh) or to behave in certain ways (such as always putting others’ needs before our own).
If mindfulness techniques don’t appeal to you, just try keeping a diary of key events in your day and how you think and feel about them. There may be something specific that triggers these urges and feelings – a difficult interaction with another person, going by a restaurant, being alone at home. Or they may come from out of the blue. It doesn’t matter, just write down what is going on, and then get quiet for a moment and tune into what is going through your head.
It is likely that you may begin to recognize the theme of relationships or a certain relationship in your diary accounts. As you begin to recognize the role of key people in these difficult times, use your reflective abilities to consider what it is about them that contributes to your sad or anxious feelings, or to your desire to drink or eat.
2. Conjure up an image of the Positive You.
Shut your eyes, get quiet, and conjure up a very positive image of yourself. Watch that Positive You get up in the morning, get dressed. What are her interactions with her family like? What does she do for the rest of the day? Does she go to the same job you have? Her interactions with other people? What kinds of things does she do over the course of the day? How does she feel? At the end of the day, what does she do?
Now turn your attention back to the Real You and tune into how your body feels. Is there a sense of happiness or excitement at the prospect of the Positive You? Or frustration and defeat? Concentrate on what’s going through your mind. Some of the characteristics of the Positive You are likely to represent impossible goals that you have internalized based on society’s messages about what you – and other women – should be.
Then rewind the tape of the Positive You’s day. Shut your eyes, and before you play the tape again, say to yourself, "Be gentle. Be kind. Accept who you are. Be realistic." Then try running the tape again. How does the Positive You look different this time? Are there things about her that now look more like the Real You? Which characteristics of her or of her life bear little resemblance to the Real You? For example, perhaps the new Positive You still has quite a different relationship with her husband than you do. Or perhaps she has a pleasant evening without alcohol, when the Real You seems to need a drink to relax. Does she have energy and interest in what she does, while the Real You is always tired and unmotivated?
Rerun the tape a couple of more times, and each time begin by telling yourself, "Be gentle. Be kind. Accept who you are. Be realistic." Notice which differences between Positive You and Real You keep coming back over and over, because those are likely to be the changes you do want to make for yourself. Get a piece of paper and write each change down in the language of approach goals – new behaviors or ways of living that you want to move toward, rather than things you want to avoid or give up.
3. Make a plan to move toward the Positive You.
Now you’re ready to begin working toward these positive goals. Make a list of simple, everyday things that you find enjoyable, and that are relatively easy to do. One of the most important steps to moving away from bingeing and toward a more positive you is to find things to do that can take your mind away from your urges, filling up the time during which you would normally binge. Plan activities for the times between meals and snacks when you otherwise don’t have anything to do. When you feel an urge to binge on food or alcohol, go back to something you’ve done, and enjoyed, before.
The activities you have come up with so far are meant to lift your mood, take you away from negative overthinking, and fill the time you would otherwise have spent bingeing. These are small steps, although critical ones, down the road to the Positive You. Now you are ready to take bigger steps – ones that will begin to overcome the larger problems in your life that drive your unhealthy thoughts and behaviors, and that help you reshape the Real You into the Positive You.
Take one of your major goals, or a significant change you want to make in your life, and consider how you would apply each of the following steps.
a. Generate as many possible activities to move you toward your goal as you can think of without judging whether any of them is "good" or "bad."
b. Rank order each of these activities, thinking about how easy it will be to accomplish it, and how effective it would be in moving you toward your goal. If you find yourself thinking, "That won’t work! Nothing’s going to help!" try using your mindfulness techniques to slow yourself down and be more open and gentle with yourself.
c. Once you decide what would be most helpful in moving toward your goal, develop a plan to carry it out. For example, if you’ve decided you need to take some courses to improve your job skills and get a new job, then the first step is to investigate a local educational institution. The second step is to sign up for a relevant course. The third step is to take the course. It may also be helpful to consider the available resources for each step. For example, you may need to look into financial aid.
d. Schedule the first step in your plan. Scheduling simple activities such as "Look up courses in the course catalog" may seem silly, but the act of scheduling will make you more committed to carrying out the activity, and will help insure that you find the time to do it.
e. Once you go through with your scheduled activities, evaluate how well they worked. How did they make you feel? Did they accomplish what you wanted them to?
f. At this point, you may need to revise the plan, especially if you didn’t get as far along the path to your goal as you hoped. Again, be gentle and generous with yourself – you don’t get to the Positive You overnight, just as you didn’t travel into the toxic triangle overnight. You may need to go back to Step 1 and repeat the process of generating ideas that move you toward your goals.
g. Whether or not everything you tried was successful, reward yourself for just trying! For example, treat yourself to a meal at your favorite restaurant or to coffee with a friend.
Women’s empathy and strong emotional ties to others can lead them into the toxic triangle, but they can also help them escape it.
Tickle Your Stress Before It Tackles You
Regardless of who you are or what you do, chances are you spend a lot of time racing the clock, worrying about getting everything done, and feeling out of control. A recent Gallup poll found that 40 percent of Americans feel stressed every day and another 39 percent are sometimes stressed. Most people don't have a good handle on their stress. They focus on the unpleasant, and usually unexpected things that happen daily. That's not just stress, it's life.
There is a major difference between stressors - those things that happen every day that have the potential for driving us crazy, or making us angry, frustrated, and hurt - and stress, the way we choose to respond to these stressors.You make a choice about how situations will affect the rest of your day. Why not make humor choices and practice them every day?
Humor Makes Life Easier
Humor can be a powerful and effective mechanism for coping with stress, especially when combined with other means of stress reduction. The real power of humor and laughter shows up when you learn to use it under stress. It keeps things in perspective, helps dispel negative emotions, and puts you in a frame of mind that can help you better cope with the situation. Combining stress management techniques with a humorous outlook on life won't make you stress-proof, but it can make the bad things easier to endure.
If you're willing to laugh at the little disasters in life, you'll find that other areas of your life will also become easier. Laughter, especially when you laugh at yourself, does many important things:
- It empowers you. When you laugh at your setbacks, you no longer feel sorry for yourself. You feel uplifted and encouraged.
- It helps you communicate more effectively.
- It makes you more likeable.
- It helps you cope. "Nothing erases unpleasant thoughts more effectively than concentration on pleasant ones." (Hans Selye, stress researcher)
- It provides perspective by removing you from your problems. Everyone makes mistakes, and we need to remember that, "I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent." (Ashleigh Brilliant)
- People tend to be less threatened by you.
Using Humor Effectively
You may agree that laughing will help with your stress but agreeing with this doesn't always help when the kids fight, miss the bus, and leave you late for work. To use humor effectively to cope with stress, you need to understand your own humor and how willing you are to laugh, have a humor plan, and practice using humor skills until they are comfortable.
Everyone has his or her own sense of humor. If you're not attuned to yours, you'll end up missing many opportunities to use humor skills to deal with life's little stressors. Being an adult is serious business, but so many people have lost the sheer capacity for fun, joy, and laughter. Even when the opportunity is there, we miss it. Many adults have this problem that can be called "humor impairment." Simply defined, it means the inability to find humor even in situations that are funny to most people. Stress can cause humor impairment. Fortunately, it is possible to change.
Finding the Funny in Life
You don't have to laugh out loud to find something funny, but you do need to recognize the types of humor you will be able to use most effectively to manage stress. Do you like slapstick humor or verbal humor? Do you understand what kinds of humor offend you? Do you like jokes that focus on things you have in common with the comedian? Do you like humor built on current events?Do you like wordplay and puns? Do you like to see props and gimmicks? Do you find humor in things that weren't necessarily meant to be funny? Answering these questions will help you identify what humor to seek to help reduce stress and have more fun in life. You also need to ask yourself how long you hold on to misery before letting loose with humor.
Making a Humor Plan
You'll need a plan to deal with your daily stressors. First, make a list of all the things that happen regularly that almost always set off your stress response. Make your list as specific and detailed as possible. Things you might include are: people, habits, personality quirks, situations, things, and events. Write these things down so you have a good idea of the types of things you need to combat with humor. You'll also need to make a "happy" list - anything that makes you happy or makes you laugh. When you have to deal with one of your stressors, combat it with your tools for humor.
Adding Humor to Your Life
You'll always have stress in your life. The key to using humor to deal effectively with your stress is to put more humor in your life. If you're surrounded by things that make you laugh, they can make the bad things easier to take. If you savor humor, it can be a lifesaver. Don't take life too seriously; it's only a temporary situation.
Related articles on myparentime.com:
Below are some books that discuss how to deal with stress. Use Amazon.com's secure server to order:
Visit the following Internet sites for more information on how to deal with stress:
Click here to read other articles by Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Ph.D.
Click here to read other articles by Nancy Recker, CFCS.
"Better Ways to Cope with Stress: Your Way Out of the Toxic Triangle," Copyright © Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Ph.D., the author of "Eating, Drinking, Overthinking: The Toxic Triangle of Food, Alcohol, and Depression — and How Women Can Break Free," is a professor of psychology at Yale University. She has been conducting research on women's mental health for twenty years. The former director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan, Nolen-Hoeksema was awarded the Leadership Award and Early Career Award by the American Psychological Association and received an Excellence in Research Award from the University of Michigan. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and young son. Reprinted with permission.
"Tickle Your Stress Before It Tackles You," Copyright © Nancy Recker, CFCS. Reprinted with permission.
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