STRESS REDUCTION
Does the fast pace of your life leave you feeling overwhelmed?
When you go to bed, do you worry so much that you aren’t able to sleep?
Do you deal with all the tasks at work and at home by overeating, or not eating well?
You are a parent, a coworker, a sibling, a child to adult parents…how do you handle all of these roles?
There are lots of things happening in your life that can create stress. You may have tension and conflict in your relationships. You may feel like that there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. There are lots of things happening in the world that can create stress. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed so many patterns of living, and those changes have been happening for months. The rhetoric around politics and societal issues (racial tension, healthcare, etc.) is harsh and angry.
Living with these situations can leave you feeling overwhelmed. They are always there, and it seems like there is really nothing you can do to change them. So you want to strive even harder, or you want to get away from them. Being caught in this “fight or flight” mode leads to stress.
But you don’t have to let the stress overwhelm you. There are some proven stress reduction practices that can help you develop a different relationship with the stress.
Getting Stuck In Stress
Stress can happen anywhere and anytime. You can experience stress at work or in your relationships. You can experience stress from not having enough time to do all you want or from dealing with a chronic illness. There are lots of different stressors in your life that can result in stress. What makes these stressors lead to stress is how you appraise them and handles them.
For example, if you decide that a situation has some degree of danger, some threat to your security (physical or emotional), or is something you can’t handle, your whole body responds. The simple description for this response is the “fight or flight” mechanism. If someone raises their voice to you in a threatening way or moves toward you in a menacing way, you will respond one of two ways. You may run for cover (or freeze in place) or you will fight back. This is a normal and natural response to any significant stressor, and it can be expressed many subtle ways.
Stress happens when you look around and decide that most of what you experience is threatening or more than you can handle. Stress happens when there is a particular area of your life—work, sleep, relationships, time—that feels like more than you can handle, or you know you are not handling very well at all. When these happen, your body gets stuck in the “fight or flight” mode. Because your body was not designed to live in that state constantly, you end up with stress.
If you feel like you are struggling with stress, you are not alone. A 2019 Gallup poll revealed that 55 percent of Americans experience stress during the day, which is 20 percent higher than the world average. In a 2014 study from the American Psychological Association, 77 percent say they regularly experience physical symptoms of stress and 73 percent say they regularly experience psychological symptoms of stress.
It is easy to wonder what you can do when stress seems so common and so pervasive. There is a stress management treatment approach that can help you develop a new relationship with your stress.
Stress Reduction: Responding Instead of Reacting
It is easy to react to the presence of stress by trying to fight it off or push it away and just pressing on with your life. Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) gives you healthy alternatives to these self-destructive patterns of reacting to your stress; instead you will learn how to respond to it.
MBSR was developed by Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, and now there are over 720 mindfulness-based programs modeled on MSBR in hospitals, medical centers, and clinics across the United States and around the world. Numerous studies show that MBSR is an evidence-based program that can help you with stress, anxiety, depression, and chronic pain.
Mindfulness is simply a moment-to-moment non-judgmental awareness and acceptance of your present experience; it includes body sensations, internal mental states, thoughts, feeling, impulses, and memories. As it relates to stress, mindfulness gives you a different option to trying to control your stress by fighting it or avoiding it. By being aware of the physical and emotional symptoms of stress, in a non-judgmental and accepting way, you develop an entirely different relationship with your stress that gives you a wider range of options for stress management.
MBSR will teach you a variety of practices that include mindfulness meditation, body scans, and ways to explore your patterns of behavior, thinking, feeling, and action. You will learn how to use these practices when you begin to feel stress. You will learn how to incorporate these practices into your daily living so that you can reduce your stress before it becomes overwhelming or chronic.
I have offered MBSR to individuals, couples, families, groups, and even businesses. I have seen the powerful difference it can make in not only reducing your stress but also enhancing your quality of life.
I Still Have Some Questions About Stress Management
You Talk About Meditation; Isn’t That A Religious Practice?
There are lots of religious traditions that practice forms of meditation. Some of these practices are similar to the mindfulness practices of MBSR. However, the goal of mindfulness meditation in MBSR does not focus on a religious or spiritual experience. Instead, it is about becoming more aware of the thoughts and feelings and bodily sensations that are associated with your stress so that you can respond to them in a way that is more helpful.
What Good Does Mindfulness Do? Isn’t That Accepting Your Stress And Letting It Win?
Mindful acceptance is not resignation. It is not saying that there is nothing I can do about this stress so I might as well let it be there and just deal with it. Instead, it is about being honest about what you are feeling and thinking. You cannot deal with something like stress if you don’t know fully what you are dealing with. Mindfulness gives you that knowledge about your stress without getting caught up in it. Think of all the other ways you have tried to deal with stress that don’t work: staying busy, overeating, resisting it, even drug or alcohol use. You already know how harmful these can be; MBSR offers an option that you may not have considered but has proven to be effective in stress reduction.
How Long Does MBSR take?
If your stress has been chronic for a long time, you may be thinking that it will take a lot of time and effort to practice stress management. MBSR is a program that is implemented over a period of 8-10 weeks. If you are able to do consistently the different practices that you learn, you will see significant stress reduction fairly quickly.
Don’t Let Your Stress Stop You From Having A Full Life
Stress doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with you. It means that you are trying to live your life fully, and some of the things in your life are getting in the way. I would welcome the chance to work with you in managing your stress. You can call me at 405-863-5570 or click here for a free 15-minute phone consultation.
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