Keeping Calm - Managing Stress

We are living in very interesting times, there is a lot of uncertainty from day to day. For some of us the demands of job have increased, increasing weather disturbances and natural disasters; all these mean that we have increased stress and anxiety.

There are many ways to deal this this continued stress and anxiety: meditation, yoga, walking, going to the gym, movies, hanging with friends, social events and lots more.

One of the techniques I use when coaching clients I named it “Calm Down”, it is a mental trigger that anyone can use when they are aware that they feel stressed or anxious. Now, you can link it to any phrase that you can connect with, that is ok.

Biochemistry

With the advent of fMRI technology, neuroscientists are able to look at the brain in ways that was not possible before. They are able to see what regions of the brains are activated during many different states. When someone is anxious or in a state of stress, the Amygdala is activated, and begins to secrete hormones that prepare the body for “fight or flight”. In this state it is very difficult to have logical or rational thought or even be creative.

One of the definitions of stress: “heightened focus on a negative outcome”, triggers the Amygdala because this state is interpreted as a threat situation.

The first step in calming down is understanding what is happening in the brain. Say to yourself “My Amygdala has just been triggered and I feel stress.”

Mind Map of the “Calm Down” process

Label the Emotion

Labelling your emotions can have a tremendous impact in reducing effects of the emotion and can calm the Amygdala, which in turn begins to reduce the stress.

In a recent study from Dr. Michelle Craske's lab at UCLA, the researchers recruited participants who had a spider phobia and asked them to participate in a behavioral approach task (BAT). In this BAT, participants were told that they would have to take eight steps to get progressively closer to the feared spider. They could stop at any time. In fact, the number of steps completed is one of the main dependent variables of the BAT (the other ones being physiological arousal and subjective ratings of anxiety).

The BAT is a laboratory version of the CBT process of exposure, and as such, it allows researchers to utilize experimental manipulations to identify the effectiveness of various aspects of exposure. In this particular case, these investigators assigned each participant to one of four experimental conditions that differed in their instructions for what to do with the anxiety: 1) label the anxiety felt about the spider, 2) think differently of the spider so that it feels less threatening (reappraisal), 3) distract from the anxiety elicited by the spider, 4) no specific instruction (control condition). Participants then came back for a second BAT session so that the investigators could test the long-term effects of their emotion manipulation.

Interestingly, the investigators found that participants who had been assigned to labeling their emotions had lower physiological reactivity to the spiders, as indexed by fewer skin conductance responses. In addition, the authors found that within the affect labeling condition, participants who verbalized a larger number of fear and anxiety words had even fewer skin conductance responses! These findings suggest that having greater emotional clarity about one's fear can help reduce the physiological manifestation of this emotion.

Slow your Breathing

There are many traditions that use breathing to calm down, steady the mind and relieve stress. Some of the latest research on breathing has shown that slowing the breath does impact the parasympathetic nervous system.

Breathing is intimately linked with mental functions. In the millenary eastern tradition, the act of breathing is an essential aspect of most meditative practices, and it is considered a crucial factor for reaching the meditative state of consciousness, or “Samadhi” (Patanjali, Yoga Sutras). The breath is called “Prana,” which means both “breath” and “energy” (i.e., the conscious field that permeates the whole universe). “Prana-Yama” (literally, “the stop/control,” but also “the rising/expansion of breath”) is a set of breathing techniques that aims at directly and consciously regulating one or more parameters of respiration (e.g., frequency, deepness, inspiration/expiration ratio). Pranayama is primarily related to yoga practice, but it is also part of several meditative practices (Jerath et al., 2006).

One simple technique is counting to 10 on the inhale and counting to 10 on the exhale. If this is too long then you can use a count of 8 for both inhale and exhale.

Re-Label your Emotions

Reframing is a great technique that we use in our coaching practice. One way of dealing with stress is to reframe the named emotion into an emotion that is positive and that you have a positive connection to. This creates a towards state and is the last step in the process. Feeling fear in a situation can be anticipation of something exciting and positive, like the anticipation someone feels before a performance or an important presentation.

Following the process described above can help you calm down and deal with stress. Let us know your comments.