Some people deal better with stressful situations and some don’t. Discover the latest wellness scientific evidence to take your self control approach to the next level.
You don’t have to have some creative wisdom to deal with stress. You also don’t have to practice psychological tricks that will make you deal with stress better. So what can you do? Scientists discover that the way you react to stress is linked with your coping mechanism. Let’s check out the evidence and principles to stress management. The last one will surprise you.
1. The movement evidence
You have heard by now that exercise is good. Right? It decreases your chance of cardiovascular disease, plaques, protects against brain aging and cognitive decline. Additionally, it is one of the essential stress management tips you can incorporate into your daily routine.
As you age, you want your brain to work better with every year, with every additional candle you blow on your birthday cake. Well, you will be happy to know that exercise stimulates the formation of new neurons in the brain. Thanks to exercise, your brain makes more of growth chemicals that make your neurons continue to build new connections. So those are all the good things.
However, in this blog you won’t learn about the best exercises for you. Instead, I invite you to make your own decision about what’s good for you. You know you best.
To be successful in stress management, according to science, you need to meet below criteria:
- Exercise must be done everyday for 20-30min.
- When you think exercise, think any and I mean any type of activity. You don’t have to hit the gym or run 150 miles per hour.
- 20-30 min is a time you need to gain cardiovascular benefit hence you need to do it daily to have full benefit of stress management.
- Dedicate yourself fully to this time.
- Take the time out for this. Say no to all things and have dedicated me time. Don’t watch TV, don’t check your phone, don’t chat with others etc.
- This is the most important point – you have to like the exercise.
- So don’t push yourself to do something you really dislike or you find no pleasure whatsoever. To have full success you have to have the pleasure of the type of exercise you’re doing.
Click here to read more about ’10 Myths on Food and Fitness’.
I trust that your imagination is at a great level and you can actually think of some regular, pleasurable activities you can do – remember that the time of day or night is not important. That pleasure also includes sex.
2. Meditation
If meditating 20min a day sounds like a challenge to you that may result in stroke by the end of the week, then this is probably not for you. Not everyone likes it but there are plenty of guided meditation recordings you can start tuning into to understand what this is all about. To apply this to your stress management approach, it needs to be something that doesn’t make you miserable. That voluntary element is key.
Meditation does a number of awesome things for you. Evidence shows that when you meditate regularly it lowers your blood pressure and cholesterol levels ( including the levels of bad cholesterol). Scientists proved that people who voluntarily meditate are already somewhat different from others.
Studies defined meditating people as being of a gold standard considering stress management.
They have done those studies by assigning people to meditating and non-meditating groups while measuring all sorts of indicators and creating specific environments to get out the results over a period of time.
3. Sense of control
By increasing your sense of control you’re going to feel more in control of your life.
I’m sure you know, and perhaps sadly experienced, that a low control, low autonomy at work is a proper predictor of stress and leads to bad outcomes. Situation is different when you have more control.
Scientists show that when you have more control of everyday life, when dealing with stress and stress management, you then have great interventions. You’re more creative, your happiness and wellbeing are increased, your productivity improves, you actively manage your time, priorities, you foster feelings of empowerment and you get a stronger sense of purpose.
You don’t have to go from little to max in the speed of light. Try this: find one thing that you can change to get a feeling of better control. This can be for example:
- Get to bed early to get a good night sleep
- Don’t make impulsive decision, introduce a 2-3 day rule for important matters
- Set a new eating regime (time, portion etc.)
An interesting fact that you should know about!
When you tip the scale too much, wanting to have more control than you do, you’ll end up with a personality disorder.
Scientists who studied women who got breast cancer diagnosis asked questions about their thoughts of the cause of their cancer. The most common answer was stress followed by the ‘I could have prevented it’ statement. In those moments exaggerating a sense of control isn’t a great thing and can hunt you down.
Personality disorder is present when it becomes a coping mechanism where you develop an exaggerated belief that you have control where you actually don’t, and it’s called a ‘John henryism’. People with this outrageous energetic optimism tend to say: ‘when things don’t go as they should, you just have to pick yourself up and work even harder’.
If you think that there is nothing bad about that, then you need to know that I’m not talking about one sentence here and there. Or working hard towards your dream goals. This is about a constant personality style in which people can’t recognise one’s life settings. For example you can’t say ‘just pick yourself up and dust off’ to someone with terminal cancer, to someone who’s homeless, whose house went down after a hurricane etc.
And that’s the inflating sense of control.
When someone is going through adverse circumstances, people with John henryism will blame the victim and set things up to think it could have been better if they would just dust off and move on.
4. Social support
Other things you can do to improve your stress management skills is to have social support. This is obvious from all undertaken studies I’ve heard about.
Good social support means a relationship with a person or people who you love and trust. If you have one then scientists proved that you don’t have as much of a cardiovascular response to scary situations.
Let me stop you right there before you’ll start recalling situations with your social friends and rows over things. I’m referring to a social support, not social group in general. Some social groups don’t do you much good and can make things worse – I know!
It’s been evidenced in professional literature that if you have a person or people who you feel close to and to whom you can bitch and moan about – that’s a stress reduction, stress management at its best!
So don’t mistake social support for being only around others and have a bit of fun.
An interesting fact that you should know about!
Scientists studied the effects of marriage on the immune system. It showed that long term marriage improves the immune system. It also showed that men’s immune system improves a year after they get married. However women are not just satisfied with marriage. It has to be a good marriage. So gentlemen believe the old saying: ‘Happy wife, happy life’.
5. Religiosity
Scientific evidence shows that religious belief is associated with a longer lifespan, healthier outcomes and good stress management.
However, don’t expect that a doctor will say; ‘hey religion is good for your health, maybe it’s time you’ll try this’.
Religiosity tends to increase protection against cardiovascular disease, helps against depression and increases life expectancy. It’s been strongly evidenced that it has no impact on cancer incidents or progression but it’s powerful at preventing the emergence of disease. I won’t dive deep on this topic however you’ll benefit from knowing that there are hierarchies of types of belief in terms of tapping into psychological issues of stress.
This means that you can know someone who:
- believes there is a God – comes with a certain amount of protective power attribution
- believe there is a God who listens to them – control predictability
- Believe there is a God who listens to them and listens preferentially to them – this applies to people who dress like them, eat and pray like them. This creates a higher level of a sense of control with belief of purpose and protection.
6. Cognitive flexibility
This is the most extremely important ability that separates you from others on stress responsiveness and what stress success is.
Cognitive flexibility means that you can recognise when your strategy isn’t working and you make a decision to do something different and you follow through that decision. This is stress management at its core.
When you were young you wanted stresser to go away. As an older person now, your effective stress management is about learning to adapt to the inevitable. This is a very important difference.
There is a Quaker quote you should always remember: ‘In the face of strong winds, let me be a blade of grass. In the face of strong walls, let me be a gale of wind’.
This quote perfectly summarises stress management skills as it’s about accepting things you can’t change but trying and thinking over your limits. If you’re under these circumstances just bend down like a blade of grass because the wind will pass. It’ll be all over and you’ll come back bouncing back up again.
Your successful stress management is your cognitive flexibility. You know the solution, keep trying, if the problem will not go away (which is a big challenge) realise what you know already and try something completely different.
This realisation is your biggest sense of control and your power of stress management, and it’s good. If you’re able to accept the things you truly can’t change. If you have the courage to chage the things that are changeable. And you have the wisdom to tell the difference between the two – this is a very good place to begin to wind up and take control of your stress.
Some awesome resources
Okay, my Rock Star! Did you get some value? I hope you did, because each week I put my heart into making sure you get amazing information from my blog.
While I have your attention, I also need you to know that I have for you fantastic audiobook recommentation that will help you even more on above topic.
Click here to listen to ‘Stress and Your Body’ by Robert Sapolsky.
Robert is one of the world’s foremost researchers on stress and neurobiology. This audiobook comes with pdf format and consist of 24 lectures that guid you through the psychological and psychosocial stress that is a central part of everyday life.
You’ll learn how the stress-response system is actually a natural survival system-giving, for example, a zebra the best chance to escape from a pursuing lion – that can change from a safety mechanism into a real problem for our physical and mental well-being. You’ll see it coming into play against situations it wasn’t designed to combat, such as traffic, troublesome thoughts and memories, and concerns over the economy, environment, and international events. And you’ll gain valuable insights into how and why stress can affect every part of your body-including your cardiovascular, digestive, and immune systems – and learn about its relationship to important disorders and behaviors, like depression, anxiety, and even addiction.
