Managing Stress - "I Can't Find My Happy Place!" Part II

Ok, contrary to popular belief, managing stressful situations isn’t necessarily about finding your happy place.  While it may work for some,  I’m sure many other individuals find it challenging to focus at all during a very intensely stressful situations, much less imagining some warm tropical beach with the ocean breeze and waves crashing on the shore.  Mental imagery is a good place to start to manage stress.  Here are a couple more ideas that might be able to help you de-stress.  

Awareness and making stress management a priority.  

One of the most important things you can do for stress management is simply becoming more aware of it and making it 1st on your “to do” list, or at least one of the top 5.  Stop letting other things get in the way.  Stress wears you down mentally, physically, and emotionally.  It makes us unhealthy and we tend to make unhealthy choices when under stress or duress.   “I just don’t have time.”, you say.  “I can’t focus on that right now.”  “There are other things that demand too much of my attention.”  

Our capacity for critical thinking, making good choices, emotional regulation, quality of relationships; these all tend to improve when we are managing stress effectively.   Let’s do a little mental exercise to illustrate how elusive our awareness of stress can be.  Do you remember the last time you took a long vacation?  Half way through, you came to the realization you have felt more relaxed than you have in a long time.  Do you remember saying to yourself at the end of your vacation, “Wow, I was just starting to unwind and now that I’m fully relaxed, I have to go back to work tomorrow!”?    For some, it takes a long time for the more immediate effects of stress to leave them.  For many, the absence of whatever is causing their stress is the only indicator in their conscious awareness that they were as uncomfortable as they were.  

There are many different ways to bring more awareness of what might be troubling you.  In my  experience creating quiet time, or placing yourself in  an environment with less stimulation for a period of time allows you to organize your thoughts and to think more clearly and relax.  Its also a very good way for you to take inventory of the things in your life that may be causing you more harm than good.   Meditation is touted by many as a way of being able to focus your concentration and generate better awareness of yourself.  For those of you who may be interested go to this Meditation link to learn more about it.  Make a commitment now to do something about how you manage stress.


Recognizing and modifying automatic thoughts

A great deal of stress can come from our own perceptions.  One of my favorite sayings is “Life is 10% what happens to you, and 90% of how you react to it."   Our own perceptions greatly determine our behavior and how we react to situations.  In turn, our perceptions are influenced by how we talk to ourselves; the internal monologue that goes on in our head every day.  These are called automatic thoughts.   The problem with automatic thoughts is that we rarely are aware that they are happening.

Being able to recognize automatic thoughts is the first step to modifying how you manage and respond to them. For example, let’s say someone close to you makes a comment that triggers an emotion and a reaction. Possible automatic thoughts could be “She doesn’t care about me.” or “He’s trying to get on my last nerve!”  This may lead to feelings of anger, resentment, or sadness.  These feelings then shape how you may react to the comment:  a reciprocal nasty comment of your own, a passive-aggressive approach of ignoring the person and thereby punishing them for their moment of indiscretion, or blaming the person as a whole for being “stupid”, or rejecting them outright.  Another example would be getting a less desirable grade on a paper or an unfavorable review on a project at work.  You might say to yourself, “I’m a failure.”  With that simple statement, you tend to judge and label yourself based on one experience, the other successes you might had the rest of the day.    The key to identifying and modifying automatic thoughts is to examine possible alternatives to the thoughts.  “What evidence do I have to think this way?”  “What are other possibilities?”  (besides taking it personally )  “Is this a fact or an opinion?” ”  “Is there an alternative explanation” “If I believe the automatic thought, how does it affect me?”  And most importantly, “What would be the result if I modified my thinking?”  “What should I do about it?”  


Exploring alternative explanations to what we think when faced with a stressful situation is the first step to changing our perceptions, how our thoughts affect our feelings, and subsequently how it affects our behavior and mental health.   Keeping a daily journal of your thoughts and experiences is also a very good conscious-raising way of identifying and modifying harmful or distorted thinking.  


It has been my experience in working with others over many years in the mental health field that stress and how to manage it is more than what happens to us, it also involves our perceptions, how we organize our thoughts, and the internal mental discussion we have with ourselves that determines our mood for that moment or that day.  I hope you found this information helpful.   In the coming weeks, I will be discussing more mental exercises to help with stress management as well as tools one can use to think more clearly and feel and be more positive in general.  Thanks for reading.  Please feel free to share your thoughts on how you manage stress.




As the people at Walgreens always say to me now when I am checking out, “Be Well!”