It seems odd to be sitting here writing about stress when it’s a warm sunny summer’s day outside. But I guess stress doesn’t take the summer off and maybe in the winter when it’s cold and dark things seem worse. So I shall carry on. I describe stress as being the scenario where the challenge you are facing seems to exceed your capacity to cope. So we can feel threatened and overwhelmed and a feeling that we’ve lost control of the situation.
The day from hell
To illustrate the above and to then explore what we can do about this I thought we’d start with a really difficult day in work. Let’s call it ‘the day from hell’ at work. By the way, a small amount of stress can be a good thing: it provides a sense of urgency and it gets us moving. This can be a deadline, a commitment or a promise. However today is the day from hell which means that it takes off like an out-of-control rocket, we are pulled beyond ‘useful stress’ into a more manic orbit, and we end up in the ‘too much to cope with’ zone for too long.
Stress eats energy
When this happens we then lose three things – we lose energy and feel tired even though it might still only be morning time. We lose short-term memory and forget simple little things. And we lose the ability to problem solve or think creatively. So we become quite primitive and it feels like we are in survival mode: we just want to survive the meeting, the phone call, or the afternoon. In summary, ‘stress eats energy’.
60 second recovery
To look at what we do about this let’s return to the day from hell. In reality there’s probably not much we can do about the pace of a really hectic working day but we can do something about our response to it. In this regard ‘discipline’ is our most useful strategy. So for extra busy days we should build ‘recovery breaks’ into the day. It only needs to be about 60 seconds, but, and here’s the discipline bit, the break should be once per hour throughout the day.
Discipline eats stress
So the challenge is, can you take a deliberate recovery break for 1 minute every 60 minutes. This will require a certain amount of discipline and mental toughness. In fact you should be doing this even on good days. Remember the reason you’re doing this is to ensure that you stay mentally fresh for as long as possible throughout the day. You are also doing this to ensure that you leave work with energy for what’s after work, you know what that’s called don’t you? It’s called life! Then, when you create this discipline and you stick with it for a week it means that at the weekends you have energy to burn. Otherwise, you are just spending your weekends in survival mode dreading the following week.
Recovery actions
The issue now is; what do you actually do for the 60-second break? That depends on what you need: sometimes it will be something simple that gives you a sense of control back, other times it will be something that slows down your mental traffic and other times it will be something that energises you. Here are some examples and remember they are only for 60 seconds – tidy, filing, reading, chatting, stretching, walking, water, surfing, improve your posture, and, the best one of all … breathing.
Increase capacity
If you’ve been following this series of articles (you will see all of my articles at the bottom of this article) you will have come across my references to ‘mental fitness’. I am in the fitness business and fitness is about increasing capacity. Stress management is not about reducing stress in work and life; it is about increasing our capacity to cope with whatever is coming next. And when it comes to increasing capacity discipline is your best friend.
Physical is the new psychology
As you can see from the above, almost all of the strategies for stress management and for mental health are physical not mental. You don’t improve ‘mental with more mental’. It’s much more effective to ‘do’ something. So in this sense your body has the answer hence the tag line for this article – calm the body and the mind will follow.
Stopping is not recovering
Stopping work and getting home does not count as recovering. Crashing into bed does not count either because you still may feel exhausted in the morning. Doing something that absorbs you; that energises you is recovering. Finding the discipline to go for a short walk rather than watch television is recovering. Going to your yoga class when it’s the last thing you feel like doing is mental toughness and recovering. Remember discipline eats stress. The key to resilience is working really hard, stopping, recovering properly and then working really hard again.
Work success
So far in this series of articles I have been focusing on an ‘operational’ level, that is how to have high self-worth, how to operate on the edge of comfort, how to have great habits and how to manage stress better. In the remaining two articles I will be taking a more strategic approach and the next one will be about how to release more of your potential to achieve massive work success.
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