Stressed? 5 Things You Can Do Now
“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”
They were wrong about stress.
In medical school we had lectures about the dangers of stress. In retrospect, it seems a bit ironic. Medical school is, by definition, stressful. We learned about the impact on blood pressure, heart disease, mood disorders, the gastrointestinal system.
The problem was, we ended up being conditioned to feel stressed about the stress. It was like compounding interest. The more stressed we became, the more we became stressed about being stressed.
Kelly McGonigal turned this belief upside down with the research that she presented in her TEDGlobal talk in 2013. She found that it wasn’t stress that was the killer; it was our belief that stress is bad for us. In fact, she reports that “People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43 percent increased risk of dying. But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health.”
She reported that “the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you.” That is 22,750 people a year!
I love her definition of stress: “Stress is what happens in your brain and your body when something you care about is at stake.”
So next time you’re under pressure and your feeling your heart rate and breathing increase, your mouth getting dry and your palms getting wet tell yourself a different story. Show up with some self-compassion and say to yourself, “Wow, this is something a really care about. It’s good to care.”
Our adrenal glands release the most famous stress hormone, epinephrine (also called adrenaline), and it circulates around for only about 3 minutes unless we get anxious and worked up, which stimulates our adrenal glad to release even more. If you get stressed that you’re stressed, you can keep it going for hours. I know. I’ve done it.
Connecting with other helps tremendously
McGonigal mentions another stress hormone: oxytocin. It is the hormone that makes us look around for someone to hug. It makes us want to connect to others and even help them out. When we connect, we feel like we belong and we feel safe.
COVID has put an interesting twist on all of this. We are more disconnected that ever. It is a time when many of us are feeling unusually stressed. It’s a terrible combination. It has disrupted the usual mechanism of being with people when we are stressed. It has also impacted our ability to reach out and help someone else. Helping others is good medicine but it won’t happen by accident. We need to be more intentional if we want to stay healthy during this time.
Here are five things that you can do about stress:
Remember that it isn’t “stress” that is unhealthy. It is what you believe about it. Tell yourself a different story. Tell yourself a story about how much you care.
Set the intention to show up for yourself with tender self-compassion when you’re feeling uptight. It’s OK to feel stressed. These are stressful times. You are not alone. You’re not weird. Talk kindly to yourself.
Reach out to other people. Helping others drastically decreases your risk. They will appreciate the gift (and you will benefit from it even more than they will.) Even with COVID, there are safe ways to reach out to others.
Read McGonigal’s book, The Upside of Stress.
Go for a walk and look up and look around. Stop and ponder the surrounding beauty.
Ponder for a moment which of these is the one thing that you could do today to take better care of your self.