Making Stress Work for You

Article by Reeta Luthra (M.NLP, EFT-ADV)

Stress and anxiety are the body's way of letting you know that you are not in balance.

Sometimes the imbalance is advantageous and other times it is insidiously harmful. Catching the signs early and addressing their hidden message means you can harness the power of stress and use it to enrich your life in ways that put you back in control.

Left unchecked, stress compounds upon itself. Over time, it shouts at you louder and louder to take notice. If you continue to ignore it, eventually it can show itself in physical illnesses - anything from a headache to a heart attack or ulcer.

It is never too late to address the symptoms of stress, but prevention really is better than cure - so take the steps now to find out what your stresses are trying to communicate and see how you can make them work for you.

 

1) The Reason for Stress

Stress is based on the universal Flight or Fight impulse. This inbuilt response increases adrenalin, sharpens the senses and provides the energy and alertness to escape from frightening or threatening situations. Its purpose is to ensure and promote your survival.

Originally this impulse helped people to escape from the threat of wild animals. As societies evolved over generations, the threats changed to the point where this basic response is often inappropriate. Modern day "threats" are more psychological than physical. They include things such as divorce, overcrowded trains and financial worries.

So what you have is an inbuilt impulse designed to protect you, but it only offers two ways to respond - Flight or Fight. With modern day threats, you can rarely do either, so the pressure (stress) you feel is effectively a build up of adrenalin and energy that is unreleased because there is no suitable inbuilt alternative response to your situation.

Exercise or meditation can help to release this stress but the effects can be temporary if they do not deal directly with the "threat" that led to the stress response in the first place. Continuing to ignore this threat leads to psychological denial and burying of the problem and this can lead to problems such as road rage, high blood pressure and over-eating.

Keep in mind that the pressure you feel is due to a chemical side-effect of a situation that your mind has interpreted as being threatening.

 

2) Understand the Language of your Body

Many people do not recognize that they are under stress until the physical effects start to show up. Panic attacks, acne, insomnia are just some of the ways that it shows up in your body. They are all signs that something is happening in your body at a deeper level. By the time this happens, you can be sure that there has been a build-up of unreleased pressure over a period of time.

Training yourself to notice fluctuations in your body's messaging system helps you to catch stress before it impacts your body. 

You can do this by consciously making the effort to recognise when your body is calm and when it is stressed. At various points throughout the day, just stop and take five minutes to focus your attention on your body and see how it feels. Focus on your head, your stomach, any areas of tension, your breathing. The aim is to become more familiar with the changing state of your body in different situations. Your thoughts create your reality and with practice, you will be able to tell just when your mood changes and catch the stress thought that caused it to change.

Having noticed the stress warning arrive in your body, the next step is to classify the intent of this message.

 

3) Recognize the Alert

Stress represents a level of imbalance. Not all imbalances are bad and fluctuations are vital throughout the day.

You need some stress in a rugby game or when you are rushing to catch a train. But if you feel out of control or frozen as your mountain of debt grows, then your stress levels are negatively imbalanced.

You need to ask if the level of imbalance you are feeling is appropriate to what you want from the situation you are in. An easy way to answer this is to observe your behaviour.

If you are capable of clear focus and decision-making and if your actions are in harmony with the goal of your situation, then your stress level is working with you. The adrenalin being produced is finding a suitable outlet.

If you are irritable, angry, judgmental or teary, if your thoughts are confused or spiralling into pessimism, if you are taking things out on someone else, then your stress is asking you to understand the nature of the threat it is warning you about.

 

4) Identify the Threat

Mark is married with a young family. He is a good salesman but suffers from great stress in the last two weeks of every month. He has always put this down to a vague "work pressure". But now, he starts to pay attention to the signals of stress arriving in his body and discovers it is always when something reminds him about the monthly performance review.

He comes to realise that he is living with a fear of losing his job. This fear gives him the drive to excel at his job, but it also makes him miserable.

Mark has identified his threat. The fear of losing his job.

Sometimes you will find the hidden message quite easily. But sometimes this step is the hardest because the conflict caused by the Flight/Fight response is immobilising and frustrating. If you are unable to find the threat or if it is too complex for you to untangle, then it is advisable to ask a therapist to help you break it down.

 

5) Implement an Appropriate Response

Having identified the threat, it's time to determine what it actually represents. Sometimes the threat will be absurd and nothing to fear at all. Other times, you will need to create your own response to add to the Flight/Fight options you already have.

To neutralize his stress, Mark has to neutralize his fear of losing his job. Sometimes, logic helps. If he has ample savings, then knowing the reason behind his stress can be enough to eliminate the stress response on its own. Alternatively, he can learn new skills that will increase demand for his services. He will know that logic has worked when he is able to think about his threat without experiencing a stress response.

When logic does not help, it's often because of an emotional blindspot.

Mark may have an underlying belief that as a man, he MUST provide for his family or be labelled a "Loser". A belief like this one contains a level of stress that is so integrated into his identity that it often lies just outside conscious awareness. This belief will prevent Mark from seeing all his options clearly. Even worse, this belief will spread its hidden stress to other areas in his life without him realizing; showing up in his relationship with his wife for example.

Clearing an emotional blindspot very often results in the relief being felt across several areas of your life.

With blindspots, it is usual to have become used to coping with their negative feelings so it could be difficult to have enough detachment to enable you to isolate and identify them on your own. Additionally, if you have any reason to suspect that your emotional blindspot is due to a sensitive or traumatic incident in your past, be cautious if dealing with this alone. The emotional release may contain layers that could overwhelm you. For these reasons, it can be prudent to find a therapist to help you.

Once the blindspot is identified, one of the most effective ways of neutralising it is through EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques). You can do this alone or with the help of your therapist.

EFT is a very natural and non-invasive method of realigning the disruption that stress creates in your body. It works on similar principles to acupuncture but there are no needles and just a handful of meridian points. Essentially, it involves gently tapping a few meridian points on your body while you are emotionally tuned in to the problem.

If this sounds too easy, it's because this is a method of re-balance that is built in to your body the same way as your Flight/Fight threat response system. Its purpose is to help you and practice literally makes you better.

Stress is the emotional messenger of your thoughts, containing clues to help you towards your goals. By learning to understand the messages within your stress, you can learn to make stress work for you.

 

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