In the previous blogs we covered raising your awareness around your type of stress. Then we looked at small changes we can initially make to take back control over our stress. But in order to make lasting changes we need to add in some other strategies. This week I’ll primarily discuss strategies to make changes to the way we think.

Step 4 Making Some Long-term Changes.

There are a number of strategies we can take to help reduce our stress. But making changes to how we think will have the biggest impact long-term. This will help you fight back and regain control over stress.

Next week I’ll tackle clearing the deck and how you can use it to keep control over your stress each month. But for now let’s look at our thinking and it’s affects on our stress.

Stress And Negative Thinking.

Stress affects the way we think and the way we think affects stress. Our negative thinking effectively enters us into to a negative cycle and helps keep our stress alive. So understanding how we think, noticing any patterns, and learning to challenge our thoughts will help to bring our stress under control. So what kind of thinking patterns might we see when we are stressed?

Thought Traps/Patterns To Watch Out For.

I talked about expanding your brain dump last week to include writing about your thoughts and feelings. This will help you notice any patterns that may be keeping you trapped or making your stress worse. So please continue to do this if you want to effectively challenge and change those thoughts and your stress levels.

When catching your thoughts, you may find that there is a pattern to your negative thinking.  We call these thought distortions and they will dictate how we think and behave in life. There are quite a number of thought patterns and you’ll probably recognize that you use a number of them when you are stressed.

1. All or nothing thinking: You see things in extreme or in black and white terms.
2. Over-generalization: You see a single negative event as proof that other similar events will turn out the same way..
3. Mental filters: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it, then view the whole situation or day as negative also.
4. Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they ‘don’t count’ for some reason or another. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.
5. Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that support your conclusion. This can happen in the following ways: 1.Mind Reading and. 2. Fortune Telling.
6. Magnification (catastrophising): You exaggerate the importance of things usually in a negative manner. You can blow something small into huge proportions. You inappropriately shrink any positives and your achievements or desirable qualities also.
7. Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are.
8. Should/must statements (Perfectionism can come under this heading): You set yourself standards of what you perceive you ‘should’ or ‘must’ be doing. These standards are often too high and unrealistic. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements towards others, you feel anger, frustration and resentment.
9. Labeling and mislabeling: This is an extreme form of over generalizing. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself:
10. Personalizing: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event, when in fact you did not have primary or any responsibility.

Image How This Kind Of Thinking Is Affecting You.

As I said we can get so wrapped up in our negative thinking that it fuels our stress to become even worse. But it also has a knock on affect on our self-confidence, self-esteem, our physical responses, and our behaviours.

We end up not only stressed but also having a greater fear of loss and failure. We have poor concentration, worry excessively, lose sleep, feel unsupported, etc. You can see how this negative thinking cycle can also contribute to our symptoms I talked about in part 1. We need to take back control over our thinking.

Challenge Your Negative Thinking.

It’s time to take a step back and recognize our own thought patterns. We begin with recognizing our thought patterns above but then we need to challenge each of these. So each time you notice one when completely your brain dump please do take the time to challenge them.

We can ask a number of questions to help us do this and to challenge our negative thought patterns. When we do this we bring back some common sense and begin to quieten the automotive negative thought patterns more with practice.

Questioning our thinking is similar to putting it on trail. We have to gain evidence for and against what we are thinking. This can be hard to do automatically at first but the more we practice in refection the better our mind gets at doing it in real time.

You can use the following questions in your journal to begin challenging your thinking.

1. What are the chances of this happening? This is the “for argument” about what you are stressed about.
2. What is the worst thing that could happen? You are adding to your “for argument” here.
3. Even if the worst thing happened what could I do? This helps you plan out strategies to meet the challenge that is causing you stress. (See below for more help with planning.)
4. What are the chances of it not happening? This is the “against argument” about what you are stressed about.
5. Has it ever happened before? Even if it did happen: How did you cope? Who did you talk to or ask for help? This will highlight that you have dealt with similar situations in the past and survived. Plus you can make a plan of action based on previous experience.
6. Now lets’ get some balance and perspective with the next 2 questions: Is this worth all the stress and what it is doing to me?
7. Will I be stressed about this in one year from now? Or five years from now?

Remember the more you practise, the easier it will be to challenge you thoughts in real time. So make sure if negative thoughts come up when you complete the brain dump that you challenge them. Now we need one more step to help challenge our negative thoughts.

The Tapes Inside Our Head.

Negative thinking is like a tape in our head. It can be very stuck at first until we challenge it. It has a habit of outliving and overruling us but don’t give up. Like all tapes, it can be destroyed and even overwritten with some perseverance. It took time for that tape to be created so we need time and patience to change it. As we become aware of the thinking patterns and challenge them so must we rewrite them.

Affirmations are a great way to do this. Which affirmations you use will depend on your thinking patterns. Some examples could include:

1. Relax I’m in control.
2. Yes I’m feeling a bit stressed but that’s normal and I’ve got this.
3. It’s okay I know I can expect some stress.
4. I won’t know how it will go until I get there.
5. I can work out a plan to deal with this.
6. Keep breathing!

Build In Compassion And Express Your Gratitude.

Adding in compassion and gratitude will help boost your stress management skills. Learning to be more self-accepting is a foundation stone for compassion of any kind. When we truly accept ourselves we are naturally more prone to accept others. It can be hard and scary at first to let go of our masks and allow others to see the real us. But our true friends and family will support, care about and love us no matter what.

Becoming more self-accepting makes us more aware of whom we are and allows us to accept that where we are right now is okay. We stop seeking outside validation and others opinions above our own. It also allows us to ask for what we need and to develop a sense of self-belief.  I’ve listed some ways you can work on developing a better sense of self-acceptance here.

Express Your Gratitude.

Gratitude has been shown to be a stress buster. It has been shown to a positive impact on how we cope better on a daily basis. Practising gratitude on a daily basis plays a major role in overcoming trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. Plus is a major contributor to building resilience too. A very simple exercise of recording three things we are grateful at the end of the brain dump will be an easy start here.

Now Let’s Talk About Our Behaviour When Stressed.

Avoidance is one behaviour strategy we tend to use when stressed. When we are stressed it is not uncommon to try to avoid the people and situations that are stressful. It’s time to face the stress and make a plan.

We know that thinking about it won’t make it go away it only makes it worse. So finding ways to deal with our behaviour when we are stressed makes a lot more sense.

If you find certain people and situations makes you more stressed then having a plan of action in place will be more productive. It’s not all about meeting our basic self-care needs or tackling our thinking either. Of course these are part of the plan and action steps we can take to tackle our stress. (I’ll discuss clearing the decks and dealing with negative people next week.) But for now let’s outline some questions you can ask to formulate plans to deal with future stressors.

5 Steps You Could Take To Formulate A Plan Of Action.

1. What is the situation (or person) to be faced that makes you stressful? Work out what events make you stressed the most. Remember we cannot change what we don’t acknowledge.
2. What will happen if I face this situation? Use the questions from the challenge you negative thinking above to help predict the worst possible outcome.
3. Now work out a plan. What steps can you take that will help here? How can I be better prepared? Ask for help, delete some tasks, delegate some things, use relaxation skills, etc. Try and break down the event so you can see how you can tackle each stage of it as it happens.
4. Now put your plan into action. Yes this is facing your fear and doing it anyway. But we if don’t face it, prepared, then we won’t change it or decrease our stress levels.
5. Review what happened. Did your plan work? If not, why not? What did you learn from what happened? What would you do differently next time? Did any one thing help in particular? Now pat yourself on the back and celebrate.

Using The STOP Method To Help With Step 3 Above.

We can use one method to help us in real time called the STOP method. The stop method is quite simple. Each letter of the word gives us an instruction to help when we catch ourselves feeling stressed, overwhelmed and caught up in negative thinking.

1. S = stop what you are doing.
2. T = take a breath, the 3 minute breather is good for this.
3. O = observe what is really going on around you. You could, if you have time, use the questions above from the challenge negative thinking. But you can also engage your senses. I’ve given you a simple exercise for this below.
4. P = proceed proactively. Think about what the best proactive actionable step you could take next that would help your stress. This will depend on what is stressing you. You could try: Complete a brain dump and then take one small item off your list to complete, ask for help, delete or delegate a task? Get up for a quick walk to reduce the stress hormones? Look after your basic needs: Have your eaten? Are you tired? Anxious? Angry? Lonely? You need to make sure you are meeting your basic needs.

Use Your Senses As A Means Of Grounding Yourself And Stress Reduction.

Engaging your senses –sight, sound, touch, taste and smell – is a fast way to relieve stress. The key is to find what works for you in a stressful situation. This may take time and practice to figure out. But it is well worth it in the end.

So what might work for you? Some people find lighting a nice scented candle works, walking along the seashore or pier, listening to calming or uplifting music? Whatever it is, it is worth looking into. For more ideas click the link above.

Or try the 5,4,3,2,1 exercise for on the go stress relief. It uses our senses to raise our awareness back into the here and now. Thus allowing us to relax or enable us to get through a difficult moment. You should feel reoriented and calmer after doing this but repeat again if needed.

Procedure

1. Say 5 things you see right now.
2. Name 4 things you can feel right now.
3. List 3 things you can hear right now.
4. Name 2 things you can smell right now.
5. Name 1 thing good thing about yourself.

Work With Me.

Remember you are allowed to ask for support. No one is an island. If you need extra support then you can also work with me. We all struggle with stress and overwhelm from time to time. If you find this has become a problem for you and you’d like some support then schedule an appointment with me.