Chapter 10

Stress less

Stress can be good

Before we look in more detail at the stress response that we touched on earlier, we’re going to make a bold and rather wonderful statement: stress can be good.

It’s a statement that usually draws a reaction of surprise when we are teaching the course and, yet, we, all of us, know it to be true. You can probably think of a whole host of times in your life, from giving a presentation to delivering your child, where pressure or stress was exactly what you needed to be up to the task. An actor knows that they need nerves, the adrenaline, to be able to perform at their best; and so it is with all of us. Stress is a vital part of the way that humans function. We need a degree of stress to propel us, to make us strive and compete. And we need stress to protect us from danger.

The Buzz or Burden Continuum²

Realising that the goal is not to eliminate stress altogether is actually very freeing, because we all know just how difficult that would be. More than that, we secretly (or not so secretly) quite like the tingly feeling when our heart is racing just a little fast and something exciting is about to begin! At least, we like it when we believe that we are in control. When we believe we are able to do the presentation, the performance, the interview, whatever it is that has engendered the butterflies. If the task seems impossible, then it’s likely that little or none of the buzz, the good feeling, will be present.

This makes sense when we look at the definition of stress by the leading authority on the subject, Professor Stephen Palmer:³ ‘Stress occurs when perceived pressure exceeds our perceived ability to cope’. The word perceived is, of course, key. So let’s look at what happens when we believe we ‘can’, or at least sense that we could. What is this good stress that is not rendering us incapable and is, in fact, likely to be lending us a hand?

The Buzz/Burden Bell Curve

The line across the bottom of the graph above represents levels of stress against the vertical line, which measures performance.

The graph shows that there is an optimum place, that of Peak Performance, where the level of pressure (or stress) is helping us to achieve, to do and be the best that we can. This can be related to a task or situation that has taken us outside of our comfort zone but cannot be something that we perceive to be utterly unachievable. There are few things in life more stressful than being asked (by ourselves or others) to do the impossible. We know this from the goals section in which we emphasised the need to set goals that are attainable.

At the bottom left of the graph, we have an area called Rust-Out, and this can be almost as damaging to mental wellbeing as chronic stress. It is a place where nothing challenges or excites us, where we feel devoid of purpose and lose sense of our meaning. A place where nothing we are spending our time on makes the boat go any faster. A lengthy period of time in Rust-Out can lead to serious issues of low self-worth and, eventually, to depression, with one of the physical effects being a decreasingly effective immune system.

Further up the vertical line, we start to get a healthy tension. We are challenged, we are learning, we are engaged. Our motivation kicks in and we feel curious again, more alive. Our focus revives and we start to have ideas, moments of creative insight. We’re more attentive to ourselves and others and more able to see the big picture. We are healthy.

At Peak Performance, at the top of the graph, we feel as though we can do anything. This is the person, perhaps, that we know we could be. This is the best self that you know is there, waiting to be unlocked. Take a moment to recall the last time you were there at Peak Performance. How did it feel? What were the steps that had taken you there? If you don’t feel that you have ever been on the line, think about the closest that you have come, one side of the line or the other.

Throughout the book, there are numerous states of mind and emotion that you have been asked to identify, to marker. None is more important than this line – the place of Peak Performance. Snapshot it now. It’s far too easy to be oblivious to this line approaching and to cross it unawares into the side of fatigue and ill-health.

In the West, we have never had so many people working and living on the wrong side of this line. Now see if you can remember a time where you crossed this line. Were you aware of it at the time? Often, as we’ve said, we are not. In many cases, we don’t stop because, after all, it’s just a little more of the same, so what’s the problem? Or it’s boiling frog syndrome and we inch there so slowly that we never even recognise that it got too hot for us to get out. Sometimes, we will have sensed the line, been warned about it even, but crossed anyway, perhaps from a fear of losing credibility or reputation or fear of recrimination from an overly demanding boss. For others your life may have a number of key ingredients and it’s the mix rather than one identifiable demand that pushed you over the edge. It may be that you have been hovering close by for a while then one additional pressure has pushed you over the line.

Now see if you can think of a time when a friend or colleague crossed the line. What changed in their behaviour and emotional state once they had started down the negative slope on the right-hand side of the graph?

The good news is that there’s plenty we can do to manage stress, to make sure that it’s good stress and not bad stress, and that it’s working for us not against us.

The stress that damages us

We mentioned the amygdala back in the Introduction to this book. If you were to take knitting needles and go through your eyes and ears (not one of our practical exercises!), on each side where these intersected would be the amygdala. As we mentioned, the amygdala has two important jobs. Most of the time, it passes on sensory information to the prefrontal cortex, but, in times of threat or perceived threat, it instigates the fight or flight response that we have mentioned several times in the book. The diagram below shows why this is so detrimental to our health and performance. Once this is instigated, the amygdala no longer passes on the information and, the more the stress response is instigated, the harder it is to ‘switch off’.

Fight, Flight versus Conscious Response?

Chronic stress is an ever-present reality of life for many and is a recognised catalyst for depression, anxiety and overall poor mental and physical health. This is why, unsurprisingly, stress has a generally poor reputation and tends to be widely regarded as solely negative.

Modern life in the developed world affords many of us a higher living standard and better lifestyle opportunities than previous generations experienced. But, as our expectations have increased, so too have life’s pressures – the perfect home that we aspire to live in, the regular overseas holidays, the image of ourselves that we feel we must project. Many, in addition, are juggling financial difficulties with the fast pace of our lives. There is an irony in that, while previous generations had to deal with life-threatening demands such as fighting wars and living through harsh austerity, they experienced, many would argue, far less health-damaging stress. This is due, in part, to lower lifestyle expectations than we have today, and fewer demands around living up to an ideal.

The solution starts with awareness. We need to be able to recognise the symptoms of protracted chronic stress compared to a short-lived stressful event which, when it has passed, will return us to our expected steady state.

A deer drinks at a waterhole. A lion arrives and the deer’s fight or flight kicks in. It gives the deer enough adrenalin to miraculously escape the lion. The deer goes back to feeding, her adrenalin level almost immediately back to normal. In the animal kingdom, that is what happens. In our world, it is not, because it is not clear and present danger that is the key factor, but our perceived estimation of danger or stress, the perception that we cannot cope.

We go to the meeting, come out alive, grab our waterhole drink from the coffee dispenser and our adrenalin stays high. What if the director didn’t really like the report? And what about the eight things we haven’t done while we were writing it? And then we remember we were stressed at breakfast this morning and snapped at the kids.

Stress easily becomes a constant, controlling and engulfing us. We begin to function less and less effectively. From there, chronic long-term stress begins to make us ill and, if left untreated, can even kill us. It’s that serious. So, it’s clearly something that we need to understand better and deal with when it begins to create problems for us.

As we said back in the Introduction, the stress response, a primal yet highly important human reflex, has contributed to keeping us safe through evolution. Even in our modern, less predatory world, there are real dangers. Bad things can happen, at which point our involuntary stress response helps to protect us. If we step out in the road and suddenly see a cyclist hurtling towards us, we automatically leap out of the way. It may take us a little time to recover from the shock, for the adrenaline to dissipate, but recover we will and very soon are able to go about our day none the worse for the experience.

But the modern threat is our perceived danger. It is this that is causing us long-term harm. We unwittingly create a state where our stress response is activated frequently or even continually. We create our threats from the worries that sit with us and from the unhelpful thoughts that we generate. We create them by predicting unfavourable outcomes to situations, playing out scenes in our minds that are negative and fatalistic. What if I lose my job? What if I can’t get another? What if we run out of money and lose the house? What if there is a war? What will the recession do to my family? How will I survive in retirement? This kind of worry, focusing solely on imagined negative aspects of our lives, is familiar to most of us.

We wake in the night, worrying about future threats and seemingly insurmountable challenges. This pattern rapidly becomes a habitual state of worry and is manifested as chronic stress.

Stress-based illness is the main cause of working days lost in the UK and many other developed countries.

How chronic stress makes us ill

This habitual state of worry, causing our involuntary Fight or Flight Res-ponse to be constantly active, results in stress becoming our new norm. We forget what it feels like to not worry and stress. It becomes who we are. The ever-present state of worry triggers overwhelming feelings of anxiety that can quickly spiral into depression. Think of the phrase ‘I was sick with worry’. Instead of a state of ease, we ‘rest’ in a state of unease that quickly becomes dis-ease, mental ill-health.

When we perceive danger, stress hormones (including adrenalin and cortisol) are released by the brain to prepare our body to deal with the impending threat. These make their way along blood vessels, reaching the heart. Adrenalin causes the heart to beat faster and raises blood pressure so that we’re ready to face the exertion required to deal with the threat. Cortisol, when constantly released into the arteries, contributes to the build-up of cholesterol, gradually blocking the arteries and raising the risk of a heart attack or a stroke.

At this point, there’s much more happening to us. When your brain senses stress, it activates the autonomic nervous system and, in turn, stress signals are transmitted to the intestinal nervous system. As we said in Chapter 8, that’s when you feel butterflies in your stomach or the churning sensation so linked to dread or worry.

That gut activity starts to alter the contractions that help food to pass through the digestive system, thereby making you more susceptible to irritable bowel syndrome. When the gut becomes sensitive you’re also more likely to experience heartburn or acid reflux. This process can also change the composition and function of gut bacteria. Scientists are now linking these bacterial changes to depression and it has long been known that digestive imbalance issues can lead to a wide range of overall health problems.

And the list goes on. Chronic stress can lead to weight gain, especially through an increase in waistline fat. This is because cortisol increases your appetite, making you crave comfort foods that tend to be energy-dense, high-carbohydrate type junk foods. The brain is preparing us to physically fight the expected danger and is helping us to increase our energy reserves. It’s a pretty impressive process; we’re being prepared to fight or flee. It’s a shame that if we don’t need that physical accelerator at this time we simply store the fat.

This waistline fat, known also as deep belly fat, increases the chances of us developing heart disease and becoming insulin resistant, which leads to diabetes. Chronic stress dampens the function of immune cells, making us more susceptible to infections and also slows down the rate of healing. This explains why workers take time off sick with genuine physical illness that doesn’t properly reflect the stress-based nature of their incapacity. For this reason, the official figures for stress-based working days lost may be drastically understated. People may simply be unaware that their poor health comes as a result of stress, anxiety or depression.

Chronic stress also contributes to premature ageing and is known to be a trigger for skin complaints, headaches, hair loss, lack of sex drive, impotency, muscle pain, poor concentration and fatigue. We can only imagine the additional pressure that such symptoms generate for people already suffering stress.

How to keep the stress demons at bay

The first thing to remember is that, if you consider yourself a worrier, even a ‘born worrier’, you are likely to have practised this so often that you will have become a master at it. It has become your reflex action, your route of least resistance. Now is the time to practise ‘not worrying!’ As you feel the tension start to set in, pick one of the mindfulness exercises from earlier in the book or one of the exercises at the end of this chapter. It’s useful to make one of them your go-to stress buster exercise. That will become your new habit and you’ll be able to gain the desired sense of calm more quickly.

And, if it seems hard at first, remember that Neuroplasticity tells us that the deepest possible change can be achieved. It is new science based on old philosophy – ancient Buddhist texts speak of the ‘accommodating capacity of the mind’, which they call ‘malleability’.

Getting to the root of the stress

• Work on your Unhelpful Beliefs. It is most important to use the ABC Model to identify the Unhelpful Beliefs that are at the root of the stress. Because of the negative spiral in which the ANTs operate, it is likely that you have constructed five or six problems that you have attached to the real issue. There is sometimes an overwhelming sense of release as people on our courses identify the root cause that has been tying them in knots.
• Build yourself a strong Self-Image. Self-doubt is an exhausting and corrosive process. Make sure that your new Self-Image is authentic. Some of the most stressed and miserable people are those struggling to be something that they are not.
• Practise acceptance. It is worth remembering that, even if you have managed to swap all your rigid demands to preferences, there will be times when those preferences will not be met and you will need to practise acceptance and move on.
• Remember to combat moments of stress by countering them with a moment of evidenced success. Say it out loud if you are somewhere that you can. You might say, ‘I know I am facing difficulties with the bid that I am currently writing, but last year I got a bid accepted for twice as much money.’ The two don’t even need to be related – it could be, ‘But last night I won a prize for my karaoke version of Monster Mash!’ I (BW) always start with a loud ‘aha’ in pirate (panto) style because it puts me in the right mood to break the negative feeling. If you catch a worry or ANT, pounce on it and swap with a success. ‘Aha! I might be worrying about the hideous noises coming from the boiler, but yesterday I handed my editor a chapter of this book/taught my daughter her first nursery rhyme/cooked the best bread pudding in the history of cakes!’
• Give yourself recovery time and relaxation. As we have said, we all need downtime. In our modern world of multifaceted environments, with the fast flow of information and social media keeping us constantly alert, this has never been more true. Relaxation is hugely important. One helpful technique is to try to build just a few moments of relaxation into the most stressful of activities, the most stressful of days. For example, while doing a task on your tablet/iPad, find three times to stand and walk three paces, focussing on the soles of your feet. Or set your alarm to go off four times through the busiest days; when it sounds, do a 30-second relaxation, real or imagined. A good one is releasing your leg muscles and bottom muscles as you sit and feel them contact with the chair, or simply have a really good stretch. You would imagine that such minuscule moments of relaxation couldn’t possibly have an effect, but try them. You might be surprised.
• Hit the clear button in moments of transition. Do this so that you don’t carry tension or worry from one task or area of your life to the next.
• Stop multitasking. One of the worst examples of conventional wisdom of the modern age was the acceptance of multitasking as a good thing. Give it up if you haven’t already! I (BW) was renowned for my multitasking skills. Giving them up was almost as hard as getting rid of an addiction! It’s also one of the best things I ever did. Focussing on one thing, in the present, goes a very long way to reducing stress.
• Don’t get phased by decisions. Take your time to weigh up the options and potential consequences, and then choose. Remember that getting into the habit of making little decisions often and quickly will enable you to make important decisions more easily.
• Don’t try too hard. Remember that the state that you are aiming for is relaxed but alert. You can certainly cause stress by trying too hard to be focussed and particularly by concentrating on the outcome rather than the process. Both surgeons and golfers talk about ‘purpose trauma’ that can suddenly make it impossible to keep your hand still as you take up the scalpel or club. Many of us have experienced the same trauma when we have tried to thread a needle or pour water into a bottle. If this happens to you, forget the outcome and bring your attention back to the present, the sensations of the doing.

How to keep the buzz and the flow

A few quick techniques to keep you engaged and motivated and in the right part of the Buzz Burden Chart.

• Look at things and say to yourself, ‘I find that absolutely fascinating because …’ Most of the time, your subconscious will take over and give you a reason! Remember, it is our interest in anything that makes it seem extraordinary.
• If you need to be interested in something that you don’t find fascinating (for example your job or the company you're working for), imagine that you own the company or invented the product that it is centred around – whatever gives you the feeling of having a vested interest.
• If you need to be interested in a person you find less than fascinating, seek out one point of identification, one thing that you have in common. It is a technique used by actors when they have to play characters they don’t feel particularly drawn to.
• Keep engaged with others and the external world. If you’ve gone through a period of stress, you may find that one of the results is that you have isolated yourself. Take small steps to join back into the world of connected living.
• Be inspired! Keep a notebook of inspiring quotes and facts about inspiring people!
• Eat a frog for breakfast. This is a time-management technique that we really love. If you have something to do that you’re dreading, do it first. Otherwise, our cantankerous brain will use up a great deal of time worrying about it and will probably let in the ANTs.
• Be creative! Try to do at least one creative thing a day. Buy a mindfulness colouring book, write a poem, rearrange an area of your house to make it look beautiful. Do one of the creative exercises in Chapter 9.
• Note down five things you’d like to do but haven’t done. Next to each, write the reason that you haven’t done it. Next to the reason, write a counter argument – an argument that you would give to a friend if you were persuading them that they should.

Practise mindfulness

Our last and most important tip for increasing your motivation would also be our most important tip for reducing stress – practising mindfulness. Mindfulness places you in the most exciting time because now is the only thing that is ever happening. Everything that seemed ordinary and even tedious becomes special and fascinating, if you really focus on it. A trivial conversation is only trivial if it is purposeless, devoid of meaning. It takes on a whole new dimension if you are genuinely fascinated by a shopping trip or a friend’s new bag. We work a lot with people with disabilities and, for many, the only time and place they can inhabit is the moment. If you have a conversation about their new watch or the flavour of the cake, it is everything to them, and that is both humbling and refreshing. Sylvia Borstein, in her excellent book Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There, describes mindfulness as awakening to the happiness of the uncomplicated moment!⁴ I think this captures it perfectly. It gives you the ability to have a healing perspective on life: positive, compassionate and accepting.

Much of Chapter 6, Think your Best Think, is about freeing yourself from limited vision, from cognitive bias. Mindfulness, because it returns you to a state of centred neutrality, really helps with this.

For me (BW) mindfulness brings together both sides of the stress/motivation Buzz/Burden line. It gives you increased ability to be focussed, in flow and energised while, at the same time, engendering a fundamental response that is calm. Think about the line of optimum performance, it will always be in the now.

Three mindfulness exercises

Many people have to get past the pressing idea that they don’t have time to just sit there for 10 minutes. You are likely to gain back, as we’ve said, much more than your 10 minutes if the rest of the day contains considerably more focussed thought than it would otherwise have done. But, essentially, it’s about intention and weight of purpose. It is you deciding that, in order to implement change in your life so that you can be happier and healthier and achieve the things that are important to you, it is worth 10 minutes. It’s a tiny slot in a 24-hour day and, really, what could be more important?

Two of the following exercises are done while sitting and one while walking. Only the Body Scan in Chapter 8 needs to be done lying down. This is because it is not about being so relaxed that you fall asleep; it is getting yourself to a state where you are alert as well as relaxed. When I (BW) am sitting, I think of my spine being held, but the muscles around it being relaxed. It is certainly possible to successfully practise mindfulness lying down or, indeed, standing on your head, but either would be considerably more difficult for a beginner.

When we practise, we can have a goal, say to be able to pay attention calmly in any given situation, but it’s important, as you do each exercise, not to have an agenda, not even one of keeping your focus in the place described in the exercise. If you don’t keep your focus, just gently bring it back.

Finally, before you begin any exercise, take a moment to prepare. Preparing is something we don’t give as much attention to as we should. It’s not a coincidence that so many activities that require focus are preceded by ‘ready, steady, go’ or ‘take aim, fire’. It will transition you in and help you to look forward to the exercise. It’s the glorious pleasure of unpacking that begins a holiday, preparing you for adventure. To prepare I (BW) just clear a bit of space around me and look at three gifts that my daughter has brought me over the years for a second or two each. I have a friend who wafts around lavender room spray!

Conclusion

Everything we have covered in the book will help you to be less stressed and more motivated and engaged. You know how to reposition an event or situation if you’re Awfulising. You know how to course-correct, and that is essential. Today is just today. When coaching, we sometimes ask how important an event will seem when looking back on it in two years from now, or five.

You know how to stay positive and curious, to expect that deep investigation will always reveal more. Remember that being able to cope with stress does not mean sailing along on a still, never changing sea. It is being able to return to a state of balance while retaining creative passion. There will be highs and there will be lows. The lows you know to sit with, learn from and move on. And having finally let go of the fear that if you give yourself fully to the highs you will only mourn their eventual passing, you will come to enjoy each and every positive experience with a hopeful and open heart.