Illustration by Vidhya Nagarajan
I’m on deadline, racing to find the right experts who’ll offer fresh new ways to deal with stress—nothing predictable and boring like “deep breathing” or “vis-ual imagery”…
The first suggestion? Deep breathing.
They may be talking about me.
“Focusing on your breath slows you down,” says Laurie Chappell, an education coordinator at St. Luke’s Hospital. “It’s a stillness. And having stillness in your day is profound.”
A certified holistic stress management instructor, Chappell encourages her students to find mental stillness in whatever way works for them—meditation, yoga, running. It’s all part of mindfulness, she says, being present in the moment instead of navigating on autopilot, half of your brain obsessing about the past, the other half fretting about the future.
There’s a trick to mindfulness, though: You can’t judge what comes into your awareness, and you can’t feel guilty about it. You allow yourself to be aware that you are exhausted and therefore did not exercise today. You do not flagellate yourself for this omission; you simply reflect on it. “One easy way is to wake up and ask yourself, ‘How do I want to live today?’” Chappell says. “And then when you go to bed, ask yourself, ‘How did I do today?’”
Chappell’s last tip is gratitude, which moves us away from frantic hypervigilance with a soothing reminder that we’re actually pretty darned lucky.
“That attitude of gratitude is so important,” agrees Ken Potzman, a chaplain for Mercy. He’s also a big fan of—yes—using visual imagery to relax. Take a three-minute vacation, he suggests: a trip when you felt happy and carefree or a scene in nature—which is, by definition, more enduring than whatever’s worrying you.
Potzman also recommends acts of kindness (they take your mind off of yourself and bring a rush of satisfaction), humor (“Get somebody laughing, and you can just see the stress melt away”), and hanging out with children and animals. They’re better at living in the present than we are. And they’re better at play.
“We are a country that spends millions a year on recreation, but nobody gets enough real play,” says therapist and coach Francesca Ferrentelli, who works in behavioral health at SSM St. Mary’s Health Center. “We don’t get enough sleep or exercise, and we don’t eat healthily. So we start out with a deficit.” From there, we overcommit. “Sometimes stress is trying to manage what you have to do with the time and resources you have, whether that’s financial or emotional or time commitment,” she says. People tend to overestimate their resources—and underestimate the toll their activities take. “There is a machismo in this culture: The expectations are unrealistic, and stress is inherent.”
It’s not, however, inevitable. You counter with the basics—none of which are new or flashy. Ferrentelli lists them for me: Sleep enough. Move enough. Eat well. Nurture real friendships—“social networking is not always genuine connection.” Relax, play, laugh. Be realistic in your expectations of yourself and everybody else. Take time to be still, to be aware. Don’t compare your life to anybody else’s; don’t rush to judgment.
Don’t stress.
The Upside of Stress?
“Whenever I tell people I do stress research, everyone is convinced they’re stressed out and it’s killing them,” says Tony Buchanan, principal investigator at Saint Louis University’s Cognitive Neuroscience of Stress Lab. “On the one hand, that’s true. On the other hand, it’s almost like we now have the luxury of allowing these stress-related illnesses to kill us when we’re 90 years old, as opposed to dying of consumption when we’re 20. Try to look at stress as a luxury, that you can enjoy life longer.” Below are two other ways that Buchanan says stress can prove helpful—in small doses, that is. —Jarrett Medlin
Learning & Memory
There’s a key distinction between learning and memory: Some pressure may help you absorb material while studying for a test. But if something stressful happens just before the exam, the stress could impair your ability to recall it.
Adapatation
Stress can play an adaptive role in some situations. Consider a lion’s prey: “It’s going to be adaptive for that organism to remember where they encountered that predator, so they can avoid that situation in the future.”
