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Stress Management and Relaxation Techniques

People have been practicing yoga for thousands of years — people  count the rosary, do tai chi and meditate”  Herbert Benson from the best selling book “The Relaxation Response” said.

“What they were doing was using relaxation techniques they believed sustained health and well being — and they were correct.”

Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital MHG believe the use of a virtual environment to teach mind body relaxation techniques can improve access for a variety of individuals

Benson said the relaxation response is best done in the morning before work. He warned against cutting corners — less than 10 minutes a day.

“It can’t be quick and dirty,” Benson said. “The more you do it, the more changes will occur.”

There is a time and a place for relaxation techniques but the best relaxation technique of them all is to be more disciplined about what and how you think.

We have talked about mindfulness forefoot on this blog but here are a few reminders that you might find  helpful.

Here are three  habits and traits you need to build to improve your mindfulness and improve your relaxation.

Stress Management

Be curious: Research has found that curiosity and social anxiety are incompatible. Curiosity opens your attention and anxiety narrows it. So it is likely that if you can increase your curiosity at the right time, this will help you manage your anxiety.

• Tip: Be curious about your anxiety. Take notice of what you are not seeing (what is your “tunnel vision” preventing you from seeing?). When anxiety arises, instead of taking an approach of, “Oh no, not again!” consider saying, “That’s interesting. I wonder what’s going on here?

Relaxation Session for Stress Relief

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• Be Brave : When you are ready to face your anxiety, you should do so with coping skills. Undoubtedly, you’ll need to rally any personal courage that you’d previously been underusing.

• Tip: Focus on the outcome of using your bravery – how will you feel about yourself after you face your anxiety? How will your behavior impact others?

• Manage Your Emotional State: When you practice being aware of the present moment, you are taking control of your attention. When your mind wanders to past problems or to future worries and you bring your focus back to your breath (or to the present moment), you are taking control of your attention (in other words, you are self-regulating your attention).

• Tip: Don’t try to override panic or intense anxiety by learning relaxation techniques. I love these techniques but there’s a time and a place. Research shows learning relaxation techniques for panic can actually be harmful since you cannot override your fight-or-flight response when it’s fully activated in panic. Instead, train yourself to take better control of your attention through regular mindfulness practice.

Related Resources for Relaxation Techniques and Stress Relief

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It is a Japanese term for walking in the woods and since the early 1980s the activity has been recognized as a form of relaxation and stress management by an agency of the Japanese government

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Relaxation and stress management help our physical well-being our emotional well-being and improve the quality of our lives. 80 of visits to doctors are due to stress-related issues.

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Step 1. Be Aware of Your Stress Symptoms

Chnage especially if imposed by an organization can be difficult and it is very common for many to have a natural resistance to change. In changin times like now this continual restructuring is a constant source  of pressure for many. If you are a driving results orintated sort of person it is quite easy to be in denail about your stress levels. We all have an individualised  response to stress so learning to monitor these signs in yourself be it feeling fatigued, not being able to switch off or constantly waking up at night, or even  over eating or drinking. If you become self aware and notice your signs you can guage your stress levels and then  do something about it.

Step 2. Strive to Have a Healthy Lifestyle

The best stress management happens when we are not stressed. By making helathy lifestyle choices we strengthen our capavity to cope.  I am including here things like:

•       Taking part in  exercise and keeping fit

•       Eating regular meals and healthy foods

•       Limiting smoking and alcohol

•       Being with people who you enjoy being with

•       Taking time out for yourself for your favourite past times

Step 3.      Make Sure you have a Good  Support Network

Humans are social animals and being able to connect with others is for most of us is a basic human need. If your default behavior under pressure is to cut yourself off and throw yourself into work then this is only a short term option and is not sustainable. Talking with others can really help us  to regain a sense of perspective and priorities. 2sensible strategies here include :

•             Build a support network in and out of work

•            Have a frustration outlet (one that doesn’t harm others!)

Step 4. Pay Attention to Your Thinking

Reserach indicates that  pressure is real but stress is at least partly optional. Stress is generated from our own thinking which can get negative when we are tired and emotional we tend to creating catastrophes  with a loss of  perspective.  Situations are not usually totally good or totally bad they usually contain a mixture. However we select what we conentrate on. here are some practical change management strategies:

•            Do not lose your sense of humour

•             Use positive self-talk

•             Use relaxation exercises

•             Congratulate  yourself when you do well

Step 5.      Skill Yourself Up on Fostering Resilience and Dealing With Change

Look to read as much as you can on change and resilience, talk to experienced managers  think about a training programme. Leading yourself through change is a critical and defining career skill and one all managers and leaders should seek to develop.

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This continues our Cognitive approach to stress management . First step was to develop thought awareness

The second step is what we call Rational Thinking
The next step in dealing with negative thinking is to challenge the negative thoughts that you identified using the Thought Awareness technique. Look at every thought you wrote down and rationally challenge it. Ask yourself whether the thought is reasonable: Does it stand up to fair scrutiny?

As an example, by analysing your Stress Diary you might identify that you have frequently had the following negative thoughts or patterns, themes

• Feelings of inadequacy
• Worries that your performance in your job will not be good enough
• An anxiety that things outside your control will undermine your efforts
•  Worries about other people’s reactions to your work

Starting with these, you might challenge these negative thoughts in the ways shown:

• Feelings of inadequacy: Have you trained and educated yourself as well as you reasonably should to do the job? Do you have the experience and resources you need to do it? Have you planned, prepared and rehearsed appropriately? If you have done all of these, are you setting yourself unattainably high standards for doing the job?

• Worries about performance: Do you have the training that a reasonable person would think is needed to do a good job? Have you planned appropriately? Do you have the information and resources you need? Have you cleared the time you need and cued up your support team appropriately? Have you prepared appropriately? If you have not, then you need to do these things quickly. If you have, then you are well positioned to give the best performance that you can.

• Problems with issues outside your control: Have you conducted appropriate contingency planning? Have you thought through and managed all likely risks and contingencies appropriately? If so, you will be well prepared to handle potential problems.

• Worry about other people’s reactions: If you have put in good preparation, and you do the best you can, then that is all that you need to know. If you perform as well as you reasonably can, then fair people are likely to respond well. If people are not fair, then this is something outside your control.

When you challenge negative thoughts rationally, you will be able to see quickly whether the thoughts are wrong or whether they have some substance to them. Where there is some substance, take appropriate action. In these cases, negative thinking has been an early warning system showing where you need to direct your attention.

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Socialmoms.com by Kirsten on managing the stress of getting kids back to school. Different seasons bring varying stresses but the daily demands of moms never change. There is no doubt that women have more pressure on.…

Over the last 25 years there has been a growing awareness of the importance of stress management in the workplace. Going back before this and few people would even recognize it let alone admit to feeling stressed. A situation fairly similar to the developing world where diagnosis of stress is more rare even though life may be much harder. Nowadays it is recognized that stress can be a killer and that many of the illnesses we suffer in modern life may in fact be stress related.

To e an effective manager you must be able to manage yourself as well as your time.  When managers are stressed they don’t perform well as managers and don’t make good decisions and are unable to offer support to their teams.

We believe in the workplace that stress is often related to how you use your time. For example if you spend excessive hours at work you are much more likely to suffer from stress. If you know of colleagues or friends who manage more balanced lives and get more exercise then you may instinctively know this bolsters resilience to stress.

If there is such a thing as stress management then it must start with learning how to recognize very quickly that pressure has become “distress”. It  is easy to get tunnel vision when we are under pressure (in fact it is how our brain functions during fight or flight our peripheral vision is lost)

Learning to manage your time can certainly reduce one source of stress work overload. There may be other factors and stress management requires you to carefully analyze your situation and see what particular factors are affecting you . You need to be aware of these factors if you are to manage them..

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Socialmoms.com by Kirsten on managing the stress of getting kids back to school. Different seasons bring varying stresses but the daily demands of moms never change. There is no doubt that women have more pressure on.…

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Often that perception is right, but sometimes it is not. Often we are unreasonably harsh with ourselves or instinctively jump to wrong conclusions about people’s motives. This can send us into a downward spiral of negative thinking that can be hard to break.

Thought Awareness,is a simple techniques s that helps you to change this negative thinking asscoaited with stress.

We have already mentioned that the most common accepted definition of stress is that it occurs when a person perceives that

“demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilise.”

In becoming stressed, people must make two main judgements:

• First, they must feel threatened by the situation, and
• Secondly, they must judge whether their capabilities and resources are  sufficient to meet the threat.

How stressed someone feels depends on how much damage they think the situation can do them, and how closely their resources meet the demands of the situation.

Perception is key to this as situations are not stressful in their own right. Rather, it is our interpretation of the situation that drives the level of stress that we feel.

Quite obviously, sometimes we are right in what we say to ourselves. Some situations may actually be dangerous, may threaten us physically, socially or in our career. Here, stress and emotion are part of the early warning system that alerts us to the threat from these situations.

Very often, however, we are overly harsh and unjust to ourselves in a way that we would never be with friends or co-workers. This, along with other negative thinking, can cause intense stress and unhappiness and can severely undermine self-confidence.

Using thought awareness

You are thinking negatively when you fear the future, put yourself down, criticise yourself for errors, doubt your abilities, or expect failure. Negative thinking damages confidence, harms performance and paralyses mental skills.

A major problem with this is that negative thoughts tend to flit into our consciousness, do their damage and flit back out again with their significance, having barely been noticed. Since we do not challenge them, they can be completely incorrect and wrong. Yet, this does not diminish their harmful affect.

Thought Awareness is the process by which you observe your thoughts and become aware of what is going through your head.

• One approach to it is to observe your stream of consciousness as you think about a stressful situation. Do not suppress any thoughts: Instead, you just let them run their course while you watch them, and write them down as they occur.

• Another more general approach to Thought Awareness comes with logging stress in your Stress Diary. One of the benefits of using the Stress Diary is that you log all of the unpleasant things in your life that cause you stress for one or two weeks. This will include negative thoughts and anxieties, and can also include difficult or unpleasant memories and situations that you perceive as negative.   By logging your negative thoughts for a reasonable period of time, you will quickly see patterns in your negative thinking. When you analyse your diary at the end of the period, you should be able to see the most common and the most damaging thoughts. Tackle these as a priority.

Thought awareness is the first step in the process of managing negative thoughts, as you cannot manage thoughts that you are unawareof.

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1. Stress is an external factor exerting forcing upon the person

This is a very common way of viewing stress. Engineers ofter refer to stress as a load or a demand placed on for example a building. The inference being that when the load gets too great the building suffers strain and collapses. SO in this context stress and presure are very similar. Peopole will descibe stress as feeling under pressure or having too many demands made of them.

2. Stress is a response or reaction to an external factor

This focuses our attention on the way people respond to a situaiton. The response may be physical (sweaty plams, strong emotions, fast breathing)  and you may feel anxious. People describe stress here as feeling tense, apprehensive or irritable.

3. Stresss is an interaction between the person and the environment.

This defintion places more emphasis on the appraisal made by the person of the demands made of them and their capacity to meet those demands in terms of their ability and their resources (physical and emotional). People who think about stress this way would describe themselves as being unable to cope with the demands made of them when under stress.

If you are interested in stress management and anxiety reduction then the last definition is probably the most helpful one.

It emphasizes the need to learn what causes you stress- the demands- and the need to assess the resources you possess, to meet those demands.  Only when an imblance occurs will stress occur ,triggering a stress response.

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Is anxiety a mental illness?

No, it certainly is NOT!

Anxiety disorder is NOT a mental illness, it is a behavioral condition, there is a very BIG difference. Mental illnesses are clinical conditions which have a ‘biological’ basis, anxiety disorders are caused by a ‘resetting’ of the ‘baseline’ anxiety level; this happens through reinforcing the anxiety disorder by repetitive anxious behavior.

There is NO other cause for anxiety disorders, FACT! All of the symptoms you experience are caused by mal-adjusted reactions in the brain causing your mind and body to react with an inappropriate level of anxiety. Doctors pigeon-hole their patients by naming their conditions and, because there is no pigeon-hole for anxiety as such, they label their patients as ‘mentally ill’, ‘neurotic’ or as ‘hypochondriacs’ – They are wrong!

If we understand this then a whole new approach to stress management and anxiety reduction becomes possible.See the video for more explanation of this cognitive approach to managing stress.

Mental illness is very specific and can’t be treated through behavioral treatments alone – they require medicinal treatments also. Anxiety disorder does not require any medicinal intervention, which is why psychologists have been treating anxiety disorders with psychotherapy for decades; it just falls short of providing a complete solution.

So, if anxiety disorder isn’t a mental illness, what can be done to correct it?

This Linden method addresses that issue directly, tackling the problem at the root cause, in the exact place where the anxious decisions are made. This is done without medicine, without medical treatment and without long-winded therapy programs. The Linden Method is so simple to understand and implement and has already treated tens of thousands of people in the last 2 years alone (this is when we introduced the latest version of the Linden Method.)

You can find out more about the The Linden Method here

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