These Strategies for Stress Management are Actually Counter-Productive
Alcohol
isn’t
the cure
Alcohol or other substances might seem to relax you
momentarily, but they will not change your relationship with your stress. You
won’t be able to actually deal with what is causing you stress. In fact, you
might put additional strain on your body and mind since the stress will not
actually go away, and the alcohol requires a lot of energy to be processed by
your body.
Alcohol is a depressant and causes the central nervous
system’s processes to slow down. In the long run, overconsumption could interfere
with your brain chemistry and contribute to mood disorders like depression or
anxiety. While you might be using alcohol to try and cure the symptoms of
stress, it actually could lead to these symptoms worsening because of how
alcohol affects your brain and body.
Alcohol also had negative effects on your sleeping and
levels of exhaustion. Often your body and mind cannot rest sufficiently when
you have been drinking heavily, as the alcohol interferes with your REM (rapid
eye movement) and deep sleep patterns. You won’t have as many REM sleep cycles
when you have been drinking as you would without drinking, leaving you waking
up feeling exhausted.
While a drink might make you feel better initially, the
long-term effects of using alcohol as a strategy to deal with stress are very
negative. You should try some of the effective methods listed in the next
section instead.
Coffee makes things worse
Whereas alcohol is a depressant, the caffeine in coffee is a
stimulant, and can increase mental and physical alertness. But because it
increases certain processes in the central nervous system, it can also add to
your stress levels.
Caffeine in coffee actually increases stress hormones in the
form of catecholamines, adding to the stress response in your body and making
you feel worse physically and mentally if you are already stressed. Recent
studies show that coffee makes you feel more stress throughout the day and
also disturbs your sleep at night, leaving you feeling tired and irritable
regardless of what time of day you consumed the coffee.
Also, you might become dependent on coffee as a source of
energy, and you could have withdrawal symptoms if you don’t have your fix of
coffee ready when your energy dips. You start to undermine your body’s natural
energy release systems, and you might feel overstimulated with coffee or
understimulated without it.
If you do have a lot of stress in your life, it might be
time to cut out coffee or limit your consumption in order to feel more relaxed.
Staying with your negative feelings
While it might be tempting when you are feeling stressed to
want to vent your feelings and complain about the situation, lots
of research shows that this might actually make
you feel a lot worse. It feels like the normal go-to response to be
frustrated and angry about the situation, and write in your diary about how bad
it felt and how much stress it places on you. But if you do this for too long,
and if you use this strategy exclusively, you’re likely to only have more
stress in the future.
You need to start infusing positivity into your day in order
to counteract the negative feelings. You should absolutely express your
emotions honestly and clearly, but once you do this, you need to try and find the
positives in your day as well.
You could do this through starting a gratitude journal, where
you look at all of the things that went right in a given day and rather writing
or talking about these more often than you talk about what went wrong.
If you want to have positive feelings and a happy
disposition to your life in general, you can’t spend most of your time
complaining about what went wrong. This will only increase how negative you
feel about these things. You are actually feeding the feelings that you are
talking about most often. So rather be aware of these things and mention them,
but still spend most of your time talking about good things in your life, or
working towards making things better.
If you feel that there are not enough good things in your
life to talk about, then you need to make some tangible changes to make your
life more positive. You don’t want to stay in a negative space for too long,
because it only leaves you suffering and, as mentioned earlier, there is
nothing noble or respectable about suffering needlessly. Take up a hobby that
makes you happy. Do something that brings you joy. Join a group or make some
friends who are positive and make you feel better.
Don’t stay with the negative feelings that make you feel
stressed, and don’t give them more power than you need to.
In times of stress, the
best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts
and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.
Fred Rogers
Trying to numb yourself
There are many strategies which people use to try and numb
or distract themselves from feeling stress. It’s important to note that there
is no real way to completely get rid of stress in this way. You can push the
feelings back and distract yourself from them for a while, but they will still
be there behind the surface. They’ll still be affecting your mental and
physical health, and affecting the way you make decisions. If you start to
spend your time just looking for the next way to numb yourself from stress,
you’ll never actually be finding real happiness or fulfilment in your life. Your
whole life will become an exercise in suppressing things rather than getting
things done and moving forward.
Distracting yourself with excessive TV is one numbing
strategy. While you can get wrapped up in the mindless distractions, they don’t
actually help you alleviate your stress in the long-run. In fact, they cause
many other forms of stress.
Excess television or technology use has been linked to
heightened stress levels and poor sleeping patterns. You won’t feel rested or
relaxed after binging on your favorite show, you’ll actually feel tired and
less motivated. Research
shows that excess technology use has many detrimental effects and increases
stress overall.
You’ll need to find balance in your use of technology in
order to regulate your stress levels. While a little bit each day is fine, it
could make you feel a lot worse if consumed in excess. Watching too much
television or having too much time in front of a screen before you sleep also
leads to not sleeping as deeply and feeling more tired throughout the day.
Eating too much or too little are other ways that people
numb themselves during stressful situations. Your appetite might be suppressed
initially because stress hormones actually act as hunger-suppressants – your
body needs all the energy for the fight-or-flight response and doesn’t want to
digest food. However, if you have chronic stress, you might have a greater
desire for sugary, fatty or starchy foods because of being stressed. These
foods actually seem to release hormones which temporarily counteract many
stress hormones, giving you a short burst of immediate relief from the stress
you are feeling. While you’re eating that cupcake, you actually will feel better. But these effects don’t last long, and
you’ll be back to high stress levels soon after.
In addition, your body will be malnourished because of this
bad diet and you’ll have higher levels of sugars in the blood which could lead
to weight gain, energy spikes or falls, and even hormonal problems. All of
these negative effects on your body mean that you’ll be less prepared to deal
with what is actually causing you stress.
To counteract this, if you know that you’ll be going through
a stressful time, prepare filling, healthy meals, high in protein and
vegetables. You’ll be full before the cravings can hit you, and you’ll be well
nourished so that you can work through the stress in a healthy way.
You might have other ways of numbing your stress, but none
of these will be effective in helping you to deal with the stress. Most of them
will only give you more stress as you carry your problems just below the
surface. You might even develop unproductive, unhealthy habits or dependencies.
Focus on what really works and avoid these quick-fix strategies.
Withdrawing and lashing out
When we are in the fight-or-flight mode, these responses
might seem very natural. We will want to withdraw from our surroundings
(flight) or pick a fight wherever we can to get rid of our excess energy caused
by the stress response. But these strategies will only exacerbate the problem.
If you’ve had a bad day at the office and you come home and
pick a fight with your husband, you’re only adding an additional stressor in
another area of your life. If you have a big project to complete and you decide
to withdraw and avoid the project as much as possible, you’ll only be delaying
your own progress. These strategies might offer momentary relief from the
intense stress response, but they don’t get to the route of the problem and
they won’t take away your stress.
Avoid the urge to lash out, and don’t withdraw from your
problems. Be as clear as you can with those around you about why you are
feeling so stressed, and assure them that it is not their fault that you are
acting this way. Tell them that while you work through the stressful time, you
might not have the best attitude, but that you are working on it.
Now that you know which behaviors to avoid, let’s talk about
which strategies really do help to overcome excess stress in your life. If you
can follow these strategies and confront what is causing you stress, you can
find more peace and harmony and ultimately lead a more fulfilling life.
Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering
is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical
pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates
suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is... The only problem in
your life is your mind's resistance to life as it unfolds.
Dan Millman
Get the full guide on stress management at the resources page.
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