Feeling stressed?
Expand your awareness around stress and develop strategies for coping in stressful situations.
You might be asking, “How will it be helpful to expand my awareness around stress? I know what happens when I’m stressed – I feel irritable, overwhelmed, anxious, I can’t sleep... I need solutions, not just awareness!” I hear you, and my answer is that awareness will bring the solutions. As stress is something we experience in our bodies, connecting with our bodies is a great first step towards finding solutions.
I can’t always control external stressors (things that cause me to feel stressed) but I can control how I respond. The first step is paying attention to the messages from my body: How and where does stress ‘live’ in my body? How do I know when I’m stressed? Are my shoulders tight? Is there a churning sensation in my stomach? Next, I want to learn how joy, contentment, ease or confidence feels in my body: How do I know when I’m feeling joyful or a sense of ease? Is there a sense of expansion in my chest? Maybe there’s a lightness in my limbs?
By understanding and connecting with how stress and joy feel in my body, I build my capacity to regulate my nervous system and put myself in an optimal state to cope with stressful situations. Incredibly, sometimes the simple act of acknowledgement can be enough to shift challenging feelings and uncomfortable body sensations – could it be that my body is relieved that I‘ve truly seen and paid attention to her discomfort and pain? In this way, embodiment leads to self-compassion.
Self-compassion is a key ingredient for reducing stress. Engaging with the critical voices and limiting beliefs that I’ve internalised (usually since childhood) is the next step on my journey of awareness. It might seem counterintuitive but, even if I can reasonably point to an external cause, it’s often my response rather than the external factor itself that keeps me in a state of stress. If I can be more accepting of myself as an imperfect human, if I can judge and criticise myself less harshly, then I will experience stress less often and for shorter periods. “Easier said than done,” I hear you say. Yes, you’re right – it takes time and those inner critics have usually been around for a while. In many cases, they’ve become like over-protective guard dogs who can no longer discern what’s safe and what isn’t. But take heart, for you and I also have internal allies – inner wisdom and resources that can help us develop the self-compassion needed to counteract the critical voices and unhelpful beliefs… and reduce stress!
If you’re curious to learn more, you can book a session, a free enquiry call, or join my upcoming free one-hour online stress-management workshop: Meet your inner hero!
By the way, unpleasant or uncomfortable feelings and body sensations aren’t inherently bad – they’re our body’s way of telling us to pay attention, and they can be life-saving; for example, in a dangerous or high-pressure situation we might need to walk away, run away, argue, fight, use diplomacy, or hide. Being Zen is not always the appropriate or healthy response. In small doses, stressful feelings are normal and healthy – what’s important is that we develop the awareness and capacity to flow between states of ease and discomfort as needed, rather than becoming debilitated by anxiety or living in a chronically stressed state.