Dealing with stress





I Googled “how to deal with stress,” and the search results were very unhelpful. They focused on helpful things like meditating, doing yoga, exercising, eating healthy, reading, going outside, and getting sleep. Unfortunately, if I did all of these things I'm sure I would be an almost-perfect human and not feel stressed in the first place. Sometimes, knowing that I’m not doing these things is the source of my stress. If I focus on everything I “should do” in the moment of being stressed, I feel more behind. I need to deal with stress in the moment psychologically, and then be calm enough to take care of myself. So here's a running log of some ways I’ve learned to deal with stress:

• Slow down. You need to first recognize that you are stressed through awareness of your body and emotions. It’s a signal to you that you should put your attention somewhere specific.

  • Stress is caused by wanting to move too quickly or do too much in a short amount of time. By slowing down, you can see more clearly what you need to prioritize and why you are stressed. For me, thinking about physically “slowing down” also helps—in theater class, we had a relaxation activity where we imagined we were in a shower and as the water trickled down it relaxed each body part and feature. By the end, I always felt like falling asleep.

  • Two quotes from John O’Donahue: "seven out of every ten people who turn up in a doctor’s surgery are suffering from something stress-related. [...] Philosophically, stress is a perverted relationship to time, so that rather than being a subject of your own time, you have become its target and victim, and time has become routine.“

  • “There’s surface time, which is really a rapid-fire Ferrari time that’s over-structured, and stolen from you, thieved all the time. Dan Siegel, my friend, does this lovely meditation. You imagine the surface of the ocean is all restless, and then you slip down deep below the surface where it’s still and where things move slower.”

  • I feel like “stressed” has almost been normalized into a natural state. Especially as students, we’ve gotten used to thinking that we should be stressed constantly. There are tests, deadlines, pressures, and responsibilities everywhere. But these aren’t "naturally stressful" situations; we’re just stressed because we want to get everything done. The stress doesn’t make this easier. It seems like we would actually perform better if we handled these situations with more calmness and took each thing one at a time.

  • Be patient and try to look at the big picture. The most powerful forces are compound forces, and the key to compounding is time.





• Understand the difference between what you can control and what you can't control. The majority of things are out of your control, so there's no point worrying about them. Basically, you can only control yourself, and even then, only some things about yourself. This takes a lot of the burden off; just focus on what you can do.

• Think about the worst-case scenario. Usually it's not that bad, or as bad as you think. (Also, this really helps put things in perspective. Whatever is stressing you out just shrinks if you can see the bigger picture.)





• Pressure is imagined. I don’t remember where I heard this, but it’s really helpful to me. Repeating it in my head is the closest thing to hypnotism.

  • At first, it sounds like a thought leader tweet or pithy motivational statement. But I think it explains that the things that stress us out—grades, obligations, promotions, competition—are only stressful because we care about them or we care about some future goal. If we didn’t care, we wouldn’t be stressed. The pressure doesn’t exist on its own. I’m willingly putting pressure on myself because I want to achieve something or because I’m comparing myself to others. I can either drop these obligations and imagined pressures, or I can pursue what I willingly chose to challenge myself. Feeling like I have a choice makes me more able to handle pressures.

  • I think there's always a hidden fear behind any stressor. Fear always creates stress as a by-product. The main evolutionary function of fear is to act as a signal of danger or threats. Maybe sometimes when I feel stressed, I can instead view stress as my body and mind warning me about a signal I perceive as threatening. If I can get to the root and source of what I’m afraid of, and why I shouldn’t be afraid, the stress naturally diminishes.

• If you have more than three priorities, you have no priorities. I learned this recently from an interview. You could say three is an arbitrary number, and you’d be right, but personally I think it’s a great cut-off point that forces you to really think and choose.

• Don’t focus so much on the outcome. In the end, you live only in a succession of moments and if you’re focused on the future you’ll miss what happens along the way — something my mom told me





• Take it in small chunks. This is related to the point above about slowing down, but perhaps more specific. Although abstractly thinking about “slowing down time” can be great, taking it in chunks helps you get things done. The whole point of planners is to just chunk up your time.

  • It’s a marathon, so you have to learn to deal with pressure and not expect the number of possible stressors to decrease

• In the back of my mind, I’m sure modern stress is in some way linked to capitalism and the need to be productive. I remember reading a TIME Magazine profile of the Dalai Lama, where he said that Western civilization is too materialistic, which is one of the primary causes of stress, anxiety, and jealousy. I did some uncomfortable self-reflection and realized that I could trace most of my stressors to materialistic pursuits; if I forgot about them, I didn’t feel as stressed.

• Stress is often caused by conscious or subconscious comparison. This is probably a topic for another post, but in the short: you have your value, they have their value; you have your strengths, they have their strengths (which you can try to learn!); you have your future, they have their future.

• Reflect on stressful moments in the past: you got past those, and they didn’t turn out so badly. The more time has passed, the smaller and more insignificant these moments seem. Keeping a journal helps, because I can read old entries and see how stressed I was by petty and laughable things. It helps me realize that I might look back on my current stressors in the same way

*I learned the second and third points from an obstetrician. I was so stressed in high school that I started having health issues, and when I visited her for an appointment, I asked her about how she dealt with stress. Talking about “being stressed” is normalized in high school/college, but at the same time I think everyone really conceals how much they’re actually struggling.