Stress and Worry
The purpose of this article is to share effective techniques for dealing with stress.
Turn to professional help if you have a long period of sadness and feeling down (over a few weeks).
Why do we have stress?
Stress comes from our savannah days, thousands of years back, as a survival mechanism — you see a movement in a bush and you figure out there might be a tiger. These were actual life threats.
Nowadays most of the threats are not life threatening. For example, worries about status, income and education might affect our biological need to reproduce, but are not an immediate danger. Other threats are completely imaginary, for example when we think our manager hates us, but we don’t know it.
At different times, some levels of stress are good because they push us to do things. For example, feeling hungry or cold will move us to do something about it.
Another positive stress is eustress, that energetic feeling that you cannot wait to do really well in a certain activity like a test or a football game.
Distress is anxiety, the negative type that occupies our mind, like a computer processor that is 95% busy with a background task and eventually hurts our performance.
What is your stress?
Different people feel stress in different ways. What is yours?
- Do you find yourself in a worry process too often? Meaning, you imagine future scenarios and how bad they will turn out?
- Ruminating past events? Thinking over and over things that already happened and you cannot change?
- Thinking a lot about things out of your control and influence, such as the gas price?
- Not finishing all the planned work for today?
- An ongoing conflict with a peer at work or with your spouse?
- Personal values breached? Lack of culture-fit?
- Anxiety when having to perform?
- Imposter syndrome, thinking you are not doing well and will eventually get caught, despite evidence and positive feedback from the environment?
How do we often deal with stress?
There are many strategies or behaviors we adopt for dealing with stress, some help reduce the physical stress and some are not helpful at all, and we might even think they are part of our identity. For example:
- Breathing — inhale slowly and exhale more slowly, e.g. 4 seconds and 8 seconds respectively
- Meditating
- Massage
- Self-monitoring — examining our own performance, how our body reacts, temperature, sweat, voice pitch and speed, looking for symptoms like a stomach ache
- Self-talk “You can do it!”
- Taking a vacation from work
- Overprepration, perfectionism
- Waiting for that perfect moment to act, for all stars to align
- Excuses for expected low performance or after the fact, like “I am not feeling well”, “I didn’t have time to practice”
- Procrastination, postponing what we need to do
- Outsourcing decision-making to others, believing they know better
- Pleasing others
- Avoidance, not even trying, not showing up, depending on others to do things for us
Why do so many strategies fail?
Some strategies give momentary relief, like giving an excuse, but the problem is still there, not dealt with. We also invest in temporary detours.
Others actually exacerbate the issue, like “You can give this talk in front of 100 strangers!”.
Over time it can reduce our self-esteem and result in physical symptoms.
Resisting thoughts is unsuccessful. Here is a simple exercise:
- Think about a pink elephant for 10 seconds
- Now, try not to think about a pink elephant for 10 seconds
- Now think for 1 second about each of the following: car, flower, iPhone, sun, grass, school, music — hey, did you notice you didn’t think about the pink elephant?
Who decided what to think about? That’s right — you.
Worry process
Pause to think — how much do you believe worrying is helpful?
In what way?
How much is worrying controllable?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_3KhfaG64s
Spoiler — worrying is not helping us.
Concern does help us because it causes us to identify a problem, need or desire, plan what to do, act and iterate.
Worrying is not changing reality. It takes a lot of time and energy without any outcome — it’s about the past that we cannot change or about the future we cannot control.
You can think of worrying this way:
Imagine yourself on a sunny day, sitting on top of a green hill above a lake.
In the valley below, there is a train passing, it is black with black smoke. It is the worry-train.
Do you let it pass or do you prefer to join the ride?
Worrying is controllable
With practice, worry can become more and more controllable:
- Fact: thoughts are random. We have about 70,000 per day — accept the randomness. The thoughts are not reality and are not “you”
- Decide to postpone a specific worry for tomorrow at 19:30. When this time arrives and you don’t feel like worrying — even better
- Understand that your future worry is only one story out of many — we interpret reality through our minds, strategies of coping, past experiences and assumptions. If we could always tell the future, we’d be fortune-tellers
- Question if these are facts or interpretations. Do you know, or do you assume or predict?
- Detach from the thought — imagine a thought is a cloud in the sky that the wind is carrying, let it come and let it go without holding on to it
- Focus outwards, not on yourself — whatever the situation is, look at the task at hand or the people you interact with, rather than self-monitor
What else to do
What we can control, what we can influence, what is outside of our control.
(renamed from the traditional “Circle of concern” to “Circle of worry”, as concern is something we can do something about). The circles are mentioned in Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in the “Be Proactive” chapter.
- Focus on things you can control and influence — analyze, make a plan, act and iterate — this is dealing with the issue
- Every evening, write down 3 things you’re thankful for, small victories and successes
- Be in contact with others — humans and animals
- Engage in physical activity
- Plan enough sleep
- Help others
- Be in nature
- Do meaningful things (to you)
- Take control over the calendar, e.g. block focus time for yourself for thinking, specific preparation or strategy
- As a manager, set psychological safety in your team
- Set work-life boundaries, e.g. emails and calls after work and on weekends
- Set boundaries, e.g. expectations meetings, explain behaviors that cause you difficulties
- Remove notifications and badges like the number of unread emails
Accept
You cannot change others, including your manager.
You can only change yourself.
