To Stress Or Not To Stress
Bensons work is based on a simple, powerful idea: Just as we have a stress response, we have a relaxation response. In his words, we can learn to trigger this response and facilitate the human mind to bring for the emotions that open us to the positive influences in life.
This is an example of being smarter with feelings, a growing field of science called Emotional Intelligence.
These 8 Tips From A Top Psychologist Will Help You Stay Calm In Stressful Situations
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Stress is a common phenomenon experienced by everyoneadults, teens, and even children on a regular basis. The question that raises a concern here is that how does a person deal with these nerve wrecking moments.
While stress causes some people to break down, others with a calmer outlay are mentally strong enough to last through the added pressure, failure or disappointment. Ongoing stress and anxiety can sabotage your confidence, give you a knotting feeling in the stomach, and impact your general well-being.
So how can you manoeuvre the rough waters of stress while staying calm? Here are a few tips that can help you out:
1. Think of the glass as half fullTo begin with, people dont always appreciate what they have and are preoccupied with what others have. Keep a positive attitude and appreciate what you haveand you will see a different side of yourself, full of life and new opportunities.
2. Use a realistic approachStress can be triggered by a problem that may seem impossible to solve. Learning how to find solutions to your problems will help you feel more in control thereby lowering your level of stress. However, changing a difficult situation isnt always possible.
We have to accept that there are events that you cannot control. You dont need to be over-obsessed with the fact that the problem has no viable solution. Rather, give it your best shot and try to concentrate on the elements you do have control over.
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In The Moment Calming Down
If youre already stressed, one of the best methods to relax is to avoid engaging with the stressor as much as possible. Taking a few seconds to breathe before returning to the issue can sometimes be enough to help you relax.
Before responding in a heated argument or scenario, count to ten or take 2-4 deep breaths.
Pause for a moment.
Stop and excuse yourself for a moment if an argument with somebody is growing heated, for example, by stating something like, Im feeling a little overwhelmed right now. Before we continue discussing this, I need to take a minute break. Move to a new location, concentrate on deep breathing, and repeat a calming mantra like I can handle this calmly. This is something I can handle. Concentrate on your senses. When were worried, our bodies can mistakenly interpret it as an attack and send us into fight or flight mode. This causes the production of hormones like adrenaline, which cause your blood vessels to constrict, your breathing to become quick and shallow, and your heart rate to increase. This fear response, known as automatic reactivity, might develop a habit for your brain over time. Slowing down and concentrating on your specific physical responses can help you learn to recognise what it feels like to be extremely anxious. This deliberate process of detecting whats going on in your body, according to studies, can also assist retrain your brains automatic routines.
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Eliminate Toxic People From Your Life
Are you wondering who toxic people are? These are the people who will always encourage you to live a toxic life. That friend of yours who buys you sweetened soda drinks or processed foods every day, and other associates who encourage you to live an unhealthy life. Its high time you stayed away from such people.
Let The Situation Be What It Is
No matter what we are going through, whether it’s a pandemic looming over us, a marital disagreement, or simply a stressful matter at work, we feel the most anxiety when we are fighting against what is happening.
In most cases, we can’t change what is happening, at least not immediately. By not accepting what is happening, our bodies tense up, our minds go bonkers, and we panic.
When we look at the situation of the Coronavirus, we need to realize that panicking is only going to make matters worse. Our hands are tied right now. Many businesses have shut down or have moved to a remote work situation. We have been asked to stay in our homes and distance ourselves from each other.
The best thing we can do right now is give in and follow those requests. The sooner we do that, the sooner we can put this thing to bed.
So let this be a much needed time to slow down and enjoy some time with your family. You’ll feel the stress melt away when you just let this situation be what it is.
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Breathe Like A Navy Seal
Navy SEALs know a thing or two about managing emotions under pressure. They use a particular form of regulated breathing to stay alert, focused, and calm. Box breathing, or four-square breathing, is a practice you can use discreetly at your desk or even in the middle of tense conversations.
Here’s how it works:
- Breathe in for four seconds.
- Hold air in your lungs for four seconds.
- Exhale for four seconds.
- Hold your breath, lungs emptied, for four seconds.
You can find guided visualizations online to assist you in a box breathing practice if you’re just getting started.
The Antidote: Emotional Savvy
One the one hand, were wired to react in a manner that probably wont help. Yet as Benson and others have shown, were capable of learning alternate responses. This, perhaps, is the reason emotional intelligence is so important today: increasing complexity puts social and emotional skills at a premium.
Thats probably why leaders with more emotional intelligence skills create stronger business value. Salespeople trained in these skills outsell others . Many studies show that children trained in these emotional skills earn higher are more healthy, socially connected, and, at the same time, reach higher academic achievement.
Peter Salovey and his colleague John Mayer were the first to define emotional intelligence with scientific rigor. Since that first paper in 1990, a plethora of research has emerged on the neurology of emotion and the links to learning, leadership, and life.
Perhaps even more importantly, around the world these scientific discoveries are being used to make life better at work, at school, and in communities. People are learning the skills of emotional intelligence and as the case studies show, business are getting demonstrable results, even in hardcore business environments.
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How To Keep Calm In Stressful Situations
Did you just accidentally delete an important file, causing you to lose 5 days of work?
Did an employee just make a mistake that will cost the company thousands of pounds to fix?
Was a VIP client just rude to you in front of your entire team?
These are all scenarios common in the office, which is a place that is often stressful and nerve-wracking.
However, managers do not have the luxury to lose their cool and risk looking unprofessional, even in stressful situations.
As such, they need to practice the following strategies to keep calm:
Stop Yourself
The most important piece of advice when it comes to controlling your emotions is learning how to stop yourself before you say or do something that you will regret.
An effective leader will be able to control their anger, which is best done by shutting yourself down in a stressful situation where you feel out of control.
Whether someone has said or done something, or the anger is out of frustration, let your common sense kick in and give yourself time to think about your next plan of action before you react.
Stop the Guessing Game
A common factor that leads people to spiral out of control and waste their nerves is playing the guessing game and asking yourself the what if question.
What if I will look like a failure?
What if I lose my job over this?
These are all typical questions that can give us anxiety and cause us to lose our cool.
Train your mind to stop with the what ifs and concentrate on the current situation.
Using Meditation To Learn How To Be Calm While Stressed
It is so important to start with believing that you can control your stress, simply because so many people dont believe that they can do anything about their circumstances. Once you understand that you can regain control of your life, it will be much easier to take action and start doing things that will bring about real, positive changes.
Meditation can help calm your mind and body. It can help you reduce feelings of anger and hostility and teach you how to notice things around you without forming judgements. It will change the way you see things and will change the way you process stress-inducing situations.
The best part is, meditation is very simple. Anyone can do it, you just need a quiet place, 15 minutes of time and you can easily implement regular meditation into your routine.
That is all you need to do. Meditation is really that simple.
Some people prefer to meditate as part of their morning routine, while others prefer to meditate in the evening. No matter which way you prefer, the most important thing is to find a time and a space for meditation that fits your lifestyleso you can make it part of your everyday routine.
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Practice Having Compassion For Others
Imagine a day when things arent going well for youyou spilled your coffee on yourself, and its raining. And then a friend calls whos having a true emergency in their life, and you jump up and go help them immediately. What happens to your state of mind in that moment?
All of a sudden you have high energy youre completely at their service. That is what practicing altruism, service, and compassion does to your life.
It increases your well-being tremendously, as many of us have experienced when we perform little acts of kindness. When we feel compassion, our heart rate goes down and our parasympathetic nervous system is more activated.
Kindness and compassion can also help protect us from adversity. In one of my favorite studies, researchers found that people who had been through traumatic life situations had a shorter lifespan. But among these participants, there was a small group of people who just seemed to keep on living. What was going on with these people?
When the researchers dug a little deeper, they found that they were all engaged in helping friends and family in their lifefrom assisting with transportation or shopping to housework and child care. Service is one of the most profound ways to nourish the community around you, but also to nourish, inspire, and energize yourself. Its like that childrens bookwhen you fill someones bucket, it also fills yours.
How To Be Calm In A Stressful Situation
This article was co-authored by Adam Dorsay, PsyD. Dr. Adam Dorsay is a licensed psychologist in private practice in San Jose, CA, and the co-creator of Project Reciprocity, an international program at Facebook’s Headquarters, and a consultant with Digital Oceans Safety Team. He specializes in assisting high-achieving adults with relationship issues, stress reduction, anxiety, and attaining more happiness in their lives. In 2016 he gave a well-watched TEDx talk about men and emotions. Dr. Dorsay has a M.A. in Counseling from Santa Clara University and received his doctorate in Clinical Psychology in 2008.There are 37 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page.wikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. This article received 22 testimonials and 95% of readers who voted found it helpful, earning it our reader-approved status. This article has been viewed 1,945,597 times.
The clock is ticking. Everyone’s counting on you. Which wire should you cut? While most of us never have to deal with the life-or-death dilemmas of a bomb squad, everyday situations such as job interviews, public speaking, and family emergencies can be every bit as stressful if we are not accustomed to dealing with them. Learning how to remain calm in times of stress will not only have immediate soothing effects it can also, over time, help you lead a healthier, happier life.
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Take Care Of Your Body
If you make your personal health a priority, youll be better equipped to handle a crisis. Eat a balanced diet, exercise regularly and receive plenty of sleep. Exercise lowers the level of stress hormones and helps the body function at its highest level. By improving your health, youll increase your self-control, memory and emotional intelligence — important characteristics that will help you respond well to an emergency.
Buy Yourself Time Before You Respond
You’ve probably experienced regret after spewing words you didn’t mean. You want to avoid losing control in the future, but how? I tell my clients to buy time for themselves by asking questions.
Start by empathizing and validating the other person’s view, then pose a question to get more information.
For example, you might say: “Great question. What’s your sense of the situation?” or “What I’m hearing is that you’re unhappy with the results. What else is factoring into your response?”
This gives you space to process your emotional reaction, use the tools above to calm down, control your emotions, and consider how you want to respond.
Fighting your emotions doesn’t work. It will only leave you frustrated and unhappy. Instead, embrace your feelings and manage them appropriately using these simple strategies.
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Ways To Stay Calm During A Crisis
Entrepreneur
When a serious situation arises at work, your first instinct may be to panic. Unfortunately, severe anxiety and stress can result in a complete meltdown. This response can cause long-term damage to your health and lower your ability to perform optimally.
Many of the world’s greatest achievers, including entrepreneurs, athletes and artists, could not have reached their level of success without learning how to stay extremely calm under pressure. They have the ability to develop and maintain a particular state of psychological readiness, a mental preparedness they summon on demand.
Whether youre an athlete or own your own company, poise is a prerequisite to peak performance. When youre composed, sufficiently practiced and self-assured , you are poised for success.
Here are eight tips to help you keep your cool in stressful situations:
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How To Calm Yourself In Two Minutes
Take a moment right now to make yourself comfortable and try these four steps yourself:
1. Freeze yourself.
Remember the game you played as a child when you suddenly stopped mid-motion, like you were frozen in ice? Do that now. Halt your body parts, emotions, and thought processes. Think of yourself as a cartoon character thats been hit with a stun gun. You can even make it a little dramatic if it helps.
2. Focus on your index finger.
. For twenty to sixty seconds, concentrate solely on the back of your index finger. Let your mind and body be consumed by it.
Bring it closer to you. Study the rivets, creases, and those tiny little fingerprint lines. If your situation is noisy, let the sounds around you merge into a single background buzz, and let it fade out of your attention.
3. Take a conscious breath.
Let go of your focus and check back in with your body. Take a deep, conscious breath in, then let it go through your mouth, slowly and calmly, creating a wave of relaxation that starts in your chest and floats out through your being to the surface of your skin.
4. Look around consciously.
As you re-integrate with your surroundings, scan the scene in front of you. Remain as indiscriminate as possible with what you focus on the way you would when waking up in the morning.
Take conscious note of the thoughts that are trying to push back into your head and observe them with an attitude of curiosity.
How do you feel?
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Three Ways To Keep Your Cool Under Pressure
Feeling nervous before a big event is often inevitable. But that doesnt mean youre destined to forget the words to your speech, or embarrass yourself in front of a date. Explore these three ways to keep your cool:
How To Stay Calm And Balanced In Stressful Situations
We all live in very interesting times as the situation worldwide is new and uncertain. Borders are closed, people are advised to stay home, countries are in a lock-down, the media is streaming news and numbers all the time. Many people tap into panic and fear but at the same time they want to boost the immune system. However, staying calm and balanced in this stressful situation will have a great impact on your health and immunity. This might mean to do some inner work and to use the tools you have to preserve your mental health in order to be able to support the people around you.
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