I’m a psychologist – here’s eight simple steps to break free from YOUR stress cage now
STRESS is a part of life – but when it’s ongoing it can have a physical effect on the body. Symptoms can range from having a short temper to panic attacks, blurred vision, sleeping problems, fatigue, muscle aches and headaches, and it can be confused with anxiety, depression, allergies and even low blood sugar. But […]
STRESS is a part of life – but when it’s ongoing it can have a physical effect on the body.
Symptoms can range from having a short temper to panic attacks, blurred vision, sleeping problems, fatigue, muscle aches and headaches, and it can be confused with anxiety, depression, allergies and even low blood sugar.
But beyond symptoms — which can be distressing in themselves — experiencing stress over a long period of time is just plain bad for us.
It can lead to exhaustion and burnout, while chronic stress can cause or worsen conditions including heart disease, high blood pressure, depression and other mental health problems.
In fact, new research from Trinity College Dublin found higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol were associated with an increased risk of someone going on to develop depression.
But being stressed out of your mind is not something you should just have to put up with.
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New book Stressilient, by clinical psychologist Dr Sam Akbar, reveals how it is possible to beat stress and build resilience — and the key is acknowledging every thought, even the bad ones.
Dr Akbar says: “Psychological flexibility is the ability to respond in a much more effective way to life’s inevitable stresses and the emotions and thoughts these throw up.
“Building up resilience means taking action to live a life which is rewarding and meaningful — to become, in short, stressilient.
“Becoming stressilient is not about avoiding that inevitable emotional pain — it’s about making room for every emotion in the face of stress.
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“It’s about turning towards, not away from, your emotions — whether you like them or not.
“You cannot avoid life’s ups and downs. But we can equip ourselves with the skills to navigate them in order to transform our lives.”
Here, Dr Akbar reveals how to stress-proof your thinking . . .
What is the stress CAGE?
WE can trace a lot of our stress back to negative, unwanted thoughts, but by managing those we can learn to keep our anxiety levels under control.
Attempting to:
Change
Avoid
Get rid of, or
Eliminate unwanted thoughts largely does not work but it does create a stress CAGE, writes Dr Akbar.
The more we push out of our minds unwanted thoughts that are causing us stress — thoughts such as, “I am a loser”, “I am ugly”, “I am fat”, “I am worthless”, “I am a failure” — the more they come back and hit you in the face.
And when you try not to think one of those thoughts, you have to check you are not thinking about it, which means you are, in fact, doing the very thing you are trying very hard not to do.
Here is how to deal with the problem.
Control your stress
YOU don’t have to listen to everything your mind tells you about yourself, and you don’t have to CAGE what goes on in your head either.
You can learn to manage your thoughts better not by CAGING the thoughts, but instead changing your relationship with them.
It is possible to have a negative thought without buying into and believing it.
Mind over matter
THE answer is to create space between the thinker (you) and your thoughts that are causing stress.
Then you can choose what to do with those thoughts instead of just being bullied by them.
If you can learn to manage your thoughts effectively, you can transform your life.
To create that space between you and your thoughts — which can be exploding like bombs all over the place — you need to defuse them.
This means taking the power out of them or untangling yourself from your thoughts
It is not about working out whether or not they are true
Does buying into self-critical thoughts motivate you to work harder?
Possibly in the short term, but this is usually unsustainable over the longer term.
Feel your feelings
YES, even the stressful ones! Acceptance of emotions is not tolerating them while you grit your teeth.
It is not sucking it up, putting up with it, enduring, grinning and bearing it, resigning yourself to it, giving in, giving up or suppressing it.
Accepting your emotions is about making room for what feelings show up, even if you don’t want them, like them or approve of them.
Acceptance is about being willing to feel your emotions, being open to them, accommodating towards them, making room for them, being curious about them — and making space for whatever emotions are present.
Learn from your emotions
INSTEAD of thinking of your emotions as irksome things that are to be controlled, consider them wise guides that have something to teach you about what matters to you, deep down.
After all, you do not feel sad, angry, afraid or upset about things you do not give a damn about.
Label the feeling
WHAT are you feeling?
Say to yourself, ‘I am noticing a feeling of anxiety/ frustration/irritation’ — complete as appropriate.
Learning to label what you feel is a powerful experience if you are not in the habit of doing it.
Try to see if you can learn how you feel inside your body when a certain emotion is present, and how it differs from other emotions.
What does sadness feel like for you? How is it different to boredom or frustration?
Start to learn about what your emotions feel like.
What is a stress CAGE?
We create a stress cage when we attempt to:
- Change
- Avoid
- Get rid of or,
- Eliminate unwanted thoughts
Explore what you feel
Ask yourself: “Where in my body do I feel this?”
If I draw an outline around it, what shape would it be?
What sort of colour is it? What texture does it have? Does it have a temperature — maybe either hot or cold?
Does it feel near the surface or deep inside? Is it moving or still?’
Also, you could try to notice any additional physical qualities your feeling might have.
Breath through it
As you notice all the features of this emotion, see whether you can breathe around this feeling and make space for it to be there.
You do not need to do anything else, just see if you can sit with it.
Make room for yourself
It is perfectly okay to feel whatever it is that you feel.
No emotion is off limits, whatever your mind tries to tell you.
Learning to make room for whatever feelings and sensations in your body might come your way allows you to then ditch unhelpful coping strategies in favour of behaviours that help you learn to manage your stress levels, be the kind of person you want to be and live the kind of life you want to live.
- Extracted from Stressilient by Dr Sam Akbar (Fourth Estate, £7.99), out now.
6 steps to resilience
HERE are Dr Sam’s top tips for building up your resilience to stress . . .
- Create space between the thinker (yourself) and your thoughts to allow you to have a thought without buying into it.
- Do not put pressure on yourself to “think positive” at all times – compulsive positive thinking can sometimes mask darker, difficult feelings.
- Instead of asking, “What can I do to stop feeling this way?” ask yourself: “What am I willing to feel in order to live the kind of life I want?”
- We are not in total command of our emotions. The only thing we can really control is what we do when our emotions show up.
- Develop skills that can help you stay in contact with the present moment. Some regular mindfulness practice will help reduce stress and improve your focus and mental flexibility.
- Do not set goals just for the sake of achieving them. Focus more on the process and values you want to show, as much as on things you want to achieve.
‘The big thing is to reframe my thoughts better’
OFFICE worker Joanna Oliver, 38, lives with her husband in Kings Hill, Kent.
She says: “I have BPD (borderline personality disorder) which means that stress is a big part of my life.
In the past I’ve struggled to handle normal stressful situations at work and in my personal life.
Things such as my partner not replying to my calls and messages straight away would send me into a spin and I would think I’d done something wrong and that he was going to leave me because I was a terrible girlfriend.
In reality, he was just in a meeting or bad service area.
The stress used to take control of me and disrupt my thought patterns and send me into a negative head-space and impact my life.
I’d withdraw socially and not want to do the things that I’d usually enjoy when I’m feeling my best, such as meeting up with friends and family.
When my stress levels are high I’m prone to panic attacks which are incredibly debilitating.
Ever since I was diagnosed with BPD three years ago, I have dug deep to work on my stress levels.
One of the biggest things I’ve learnt is about channelling and reframing my thoughts better, much like what Dr Akbar suggests.
I ensure I exercise every day and I do yoga and meditate when I can, which really helps as I have learnt the importance of the breath.
Before a work meeting or before a social event, I will make sure I ground myself and try to “calm” my thoughts or just accept them.
My husband and I are in the process of moving house and the techniques I’ve learnt have helped me to manage the situation much better.
I’ve learnt to accept that actually, this is a process.
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I’m learning to just take things a day at a time and am focusing on what I do want, rather than what I don’t want.
I’m very interested to try the further techniques suggested by Dr Akbar.”
