Learning how to relieve stress

18 May 2012 By Leave a Comment

One could say that healing crises present us with a learning challenge, one that provides potential for personal growth. So it can be with stress too. In order to recognise not only that the symptoms are potentially dangerous and to seek ways to manage oneself differently, but also to take a good hard look at the underlying patterns, we have to to make significants shifts in our outlook on life and how we live it. It might even be that the approaching “stress crisis” invites us to make a choice between an old paradigm and a new one. Since huge numbers of people are now experiencing stress, this could be saying something massive for humanity, if we choose to follow it.

In order to learn how to relieve stress, we may be well advised to take up some relaxation techniques and the process can take us to explore within. It will vary from person to person, but how to relieve stress often involves letting go of bodily tension. One very good technique for this is a body scan which you do with your mind, taking a relaxed posture and then scanning through the body and, in a sense, breathing into and letting go of tension felt in a particular part of the body. Another associated one is to focus awareness on your breath, breathing in and breathing out. Every time your mind gets distracted, often with things that cause you stress, you bring your awareness back to the breath.

The more you practice such relaxation, especially if in meditation, the more you can find yourself experiencing calm and peace. This practice of being present and aware, in a state of peace, can in itself be a breakthrough for people. It does take lots of practice, and a willingness and commitment to stay the course, and gently re-focus the mind every time it goes off course. This self discipine pays didvidends over time. It is not a quick fix, much though many people want that. It is a steady, focused effort to re-direct your life. Hence it becomes life changing, especially if combined with managing the mind as described in the last post. using self awareness to notice and let go of unhelpful patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving.

Here is where you can find a whole new dimension to your life, if you want it, one where you can progressively feel more at peace with yourself and with life. The inner calm I am writing about is there for everybody. It is a natural resource within in us. Life and its distractions, led by the ego, take off where it doesn’t serve us. The wake-up call of the healing crisis of stress, and learning how to relive stress, takes you to now places within and in your relationships with others and where you are going in life.

Our stress-relieving life coaching is particularly designed to help you with this process.

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How to manage stress should include managing thoughts

17 May 2012 By Leave a Comment

In addressing how to manage stress, any strategy ought also to include some thought to how you think. While you or I might work on our relaxation, mindfulness and lifestyle, we could still be putting sticking plaster over major surgery if we don’t also address the underlying patterns that generate stress in the first place, which lie in our patterns of thinking.

Now I am aware that it’s very common for us to attribute stress to environmental factors. “You’re stressing me,” people say, implying that it is the other person who causes them stress, and thus denying personal accountability. Another person might react differently to the same stimuli. Equally, at work, some people find certain work more stressful than others. That’s not to deny that some work can get so unbearable that people go sick or leave in their droves. While accepting that organisations might work to provide support or do things differently for their staff, the focus of these posts is what can we do for ourselves too, to work out for ourselves how to manage stress.

Our thinking patterns can take us where we don’t want to go, outside of our awareness. Let’s say someone is very committed to what they do and works hard and normally achieves good results. However they have a tendency to worry about how they are doing. Normally, the anxious tendency might serve them in that as a result they take more care and attention to detail to ensure things work. However, if the goalposts change, and change often plays a part, then this system can get under pressure. Let’s say what’s needed of them is increased and also the financial rewards are shrinking. They may therefore worry about being able to achieve the raised expectations but also about paying their way, and if they are getting tired of the arrangement then this might mean they are doing things because they think they have to rather than because they want to. Thus there is a tug between competing desires, and with the standards they set themselves. Now, in our hypothetical example, this person might have an inner driver to “be perfect”. He or she might have decided early in life that to meet the needs of others he or she must try hard hard to get things “perfect” and in fact to be perfect as a person. Such a driver can place someone under great strain later in life. We all have our inner beliefs about ourselves, life and other people, and we can put ourselves under pressure in consequence. Our personal make-up can lead us in particular directions where we can find that when the going gets difficult our thinking system puts us under pressure.

The point in all this is to develop and use self awareness to get to these underlying patterns. For example, you might notice what happens for you when you next feel stressed about something. What is the sequence of thoughts? Pay attention to the feelings too, as they serve to alert us to what we need to pay attention to. The skill in awareness work is to catch yourself thinking these thoughts. Then you know what it is you need to work to let go of, as is described in other parts of this blog (see the category “Awareness”, for example).

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Knowing how to deal with stress

16 May 2012 By Leave a Comment

Interestingly if alarmingly stress is now the biggest single factor behind long-term sickness absence from work. It may come as no surprise to many at work today, who report long hours, job uncertainty, re-structurings, lack of a pay increase and other pressures, let alone the demands now being placed on them by their work circumstances. So, if this is the case, the key question must be: how to deal with stress, what could you be doing about it?

As you will find a lot in this blog, we place a big emphasis on self awareness. This is the ability to tune inside and notice what’s really going on. As I’ve pointed out in previous postings, we can “normalise” our behaviour, make it what seems “normal”, and therefore at some level accept what is really not serving us. We can even get addicted to the regular hormone injection that becomes part of everyday living. We thus become de-sensitised to our own bodies, and not notice how we’re feeling. With self awareness, you can learn to spot the warning signs, feel how parts of your body are feeling, and pick up on when your stress levels are rising.

Then, as we teach in The Seven Proven Steps, it’s about learning to be self accountable, to take responsibility for what is occurring, using the will to choose differently, and take action to make changes. It requires effort, but it’s an effort that pays off over time with an increased feel-good factor, but needs to be sustained to see results. A powerful set of techniques to use is associated with mindfulness and deep relaxation, brilliantly described in the very influential book by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living. Derived from meditation, you can train yourself to relax and over time let go of tension in the body, using a body scan technique, and also learn to let go of mental activity by focusing on the breath. Meditation practice goes very well with this, but, although it is a practice I recommend, you don’t have to formally meditate to do this. There is a video of a guided introduction to meditation, including guidelines for practice on this website.

With all this goes other very important changes that are well worth considering. One is to use mindfulness practice, what we call witnessing, to become aware of and choicefully manage the mind, learning to let go thoughts that you associate with feeling stressed, and instead focusing on a calm, centred state that you can develop with the practice outlined above.

You may also need to think of lifestyle changes that might support a more relaxed and healthy way of living. Looking at how you plan the use of your time, having relaxation activities, walking much more, taking time out, not working all hours, having more structure in your life that paradoxically gives you more space, attending to diet and exercise, and living in general more healthily. A read of the above-mentioned book will help with this. But above all, it involves a determined choice to make changes that enhance your well-bing, not a steady march to a certain breakdown of some kind. After all, it is in the end us ourselves who are accountable for how we choose to live.

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Are you unaware of being stuck in the stress mire?

13 May 2012 By Leave a Comment

People can get so caught up in stress behaviour that they don’t know it’s happening, until their bodies start to complain big time, by which time they might be so stuck in the stress mire, stuck in a pattern, that it can seem impossible to get out of. What is so vital is to become aware that “it” has got you and start doing something about it.

Initially you might be enjoying some well-paid interesting but fast-paced work. You might bring to it habits of thinking, feeling and behaving that normalise how you operate. As the work progresses over time, challenges emerge and what was at first really good starts to have it’s downsides. You might be caught in some re-structuring and have a different boss with a different management style, or your customers start wanting different things that force you into working in ways that don’t suit you so much. Or the speed and complexity of the work in more challenging market conditions really starts to put pressure on you in ways you’re not finding it so easy to deal with. The examples can go on.

To compound all this, your mind-set might be geared in particular ways. You might be a bit of a perfectionist, or you don’t let go of things easily, or you get steamed up with others when you feel under pressure, or you like things a certain way when actually you need to be flexible, or you like to focus on one task at a time when the work needs you to carry several things at once. Then you might be one who likes to be “on the go” constantly and yet as you feel more stressed then this “busyness” actually starts working to your disadvantage. You are a constant thinker and have lots of ideas and get very creative and stimulating, and are good at firing up others. Yet under stressful pressure, you now can’t switch your mind off and can’t sleep. You might be one who is often a bit tense, which in positive situations is you getting on the starting block ready to fire off on the great race, but when over time you hold this tension inside you, it becomes instead some unexploded volcano and your body is full of pain. Again, I could go on.

The danger in all this is that at some level you know it isn’t quite right and you want something different, and so there’s a tension inside you between a a part of you that feels you “have” to do the work you’re doing, while another wants something quite different. So there’s a conflict going on inside, The there’s the rest of your life! There’s your relationship and your partner’s complaining you are never “there” and available. She or he wants attention and you can’t (note “can’t”) give it, or part of your mind is always somewhere else. Or you’re too tense and restless. There’s some work needing doing on hte house, and there’s bills that need paying….On it goes.

The point  I’m making in all this is that this pressure is going on, and somehow we’ve not woken up and noticed it, or if we have, we feel unable to stop it. It’s like a fast express running at 100 mph heading straight towards the buffers.

We provide coaching to help people get off this pattern.

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How our minds fuel our stress

12 May 2012 By Leave a Comment

It would seem that we’re getting even more addicted in the UK to sleeping pills, the use of which has shot up since the recession started and is being attributed to stress and anxiety caused by the recession. Nearly two thirds in a recent study are shown to suffer from insomnia, and stress plays a big part.

There’s a multiplicity of factors at play here, and to attribute the cause to one single external factor, the recession, can miss the underlying combination that contribute to stress and disturbed sleep. While job insecurity and financial worries are powerful factors, they are likely to interact with a predisposition, for example a tendency to experience fear and anxiety, as well as other health-related patterns such as weight-gain. What can be very instructive is to look at the thinking and feeling patterns that contribute to stress.

The point here is to look at how we respond to the external stimuli, such as bad economic news, a letter from your credit card company or a potential threat to your job. Firstly you might notice the physical symptons, pounding heart, sweaty palms, a rush of sensation to the head, an increased feeling of anxiety, and so on, which can be characteristic of the flight/fight/freeze stress response, resulting in a massive surge in the release of hormones, useful in an emergency but over time a drain and finally a burn-out to the system. However, with that is what the mind is doing. It is how we are making sense, you might think non-sense, of the external stimuli. Our reaction to the news triggers the stress response, and it is our minds that we need to attend to, as well of course as calming ourselves down and taking regular cardio-vascular exercise, eating sensibly, etc. It can feel as if our body is taking over and we are powerless, and yet by effective stress-manangement techniques we can manage our bodies and tackle the underlying thinking patterns.

Fear has a way of taking us over, but it is not who we are, an illusion of the ego mind. The thinking might be, let’s say, “Oh my God, I’ll lose everything and my partner will leave and I’ll be in the gutter”, or whatever the fears are. By using techniques like mindfulness or witnessing, we can learn to detach ourselves from our thinking patterns and practice a mind management technique to let go of these thinking patterns and start to build a more relaxed approach to our lives and what goes on for us. And of course reach out to others and take practical action to sort the issues out if that’s needed.

Coaching for managing stress and tackling these underlying patterns is part of what we do in our life coaching

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Weathering the depression in our minds to find new light

10 May 2012 By Leave a Comment

Sitting in a local Costa Coffee, I’m watching the rain pouring down. While no doubt typical in meteorological annals for May, it must be depressing to experience this day after day. People’s moods can seem to be linked to the weather, and prolonged bad weather may seem to contribute to depression, as a return to sunny weather can lift people’s spirits. So too can the sheer effort of getting about and doing things when faced with getting an utter drenching may seem to contribute to stress, let alone the prospect of being flooded out. While there’s a debate as to how weather impacts our mood to the extent of depression or stress, on an anecdotal level to look outside and see the rain pouring down might mirror back to us how we’re feeling inside.

Yet it can depend on how we interpret what we see. To one person’s depressed state, the weather might seem to be part of a depressed outlook on life, and yet to another the rain might be welcome relief after a period of drought. In another culture such as India, the monsoon is welcomed with celebration. There people go to colder, wetter climates as a relief from the summer heat. In another way what occurs around us can seem to confirm how we think, although it looks like it is the cause. A predisposition to depression or stress can be stimulated by what’s happening outside.

We can get so caught up in external stimuli, what is happening around us, that it can take an effort of will to turn awareness within and reflect on the ongoing inner dialogue, the ongoing attitude of mind, the state we’re in, how we’re viewing our lives at any one moment. It take a lot further work to go beneath that and become aware of the ongoing beliefs that hold such viewpoints in place.

Yet it doesn’t have to be like this. We do have choice, and we can re-interpret what is going on, and think again. It’s perhaps whether we choose to do this, to shift our interpretations, which can involve the will and being accountable for how we think. Sometimes our investment in our attitude and state of mind is too great, or that we don’t think we can do anything about it, that we’re a “victim” of what’s going on.yet there are things we can do, and it’s not so hard as it looks. It can be about finding ways through the morass to new light on our lives. It even empowers us to create a whole new possibility for ourselves and a new way of living that fulfills our real purpose in life.

I write about this challenge that we go through, and about how to turn our lives round, how to get out of states that aren’t serving us, in my free e-course, “The Seven Proven Steps“, which you can start receiving here.

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Notice stress before it gets you

7 May 2012 By Leave a Comment

One thing that’s been particularly noticed about the current very prolonged recession is how people are working very long hours, perhaps to help their  business, perhaps because it’s being asked of them and perhaps because of some inner driver that leads them to do this. All this of course contributes to stress, which is bigger today than it’s ever been and is acknowledged to be the number one cause of long-term illness in the UK. What however can happen is that these people also forgo their holidays. I’ve often heard in coaching how people miss their breaks, even to almost not using their total leave entitlement.

View from terrace up Lot valley

View from terrace up Lot valley

I’ve been spending a few days taking time out, being in this rural paradise of South West France. I was aware how in the first few days I needed to let go of a lot of accumulated “busyness” in the system. What I was struck by again is how unaware one can be of such body-held stuff until one takes time out to deliberately let go.

This is a particular point about stress, that it accumulates and we don’t necessarily know it until we get sick. One way it shows up is in the impact on the  auto-immune system, lowering our resistance and making us more vulnerable to infections. It’s very common to find people who’ve been working very long hours at high pressure then getting sick. It’s like the body starts to complain. What people do is feed it drugs, coffee, carbs, sweet drinks, alcohol, etc., to dull the system but not dealing with the underlying issue.

The first key step is self awareness, to notice this is happening, and the next key is to engage the will and to honestly do something about it, to be self accountable. I’ve written about these steps in my free online tool, “The Seven Proven Steps“, which you can start to receive here. Relaxation is crucial, hence the importance of taking breaks, but also of practicing some regular relaxation technique. Deep breathing and mindfulness techniques play a part. So too do techniques to manage the mind, since the inner drivers can often take into unhealthy habits, like “I must work hard”, or “I must please others”. Our minds can race away and then we have difficulty sleeping. It’s all a poisonous cocktail.

This is originally why I took up meditation, to manage stress in my very busy job, and then found it had other very powerful benefits too.

One aspect of my coaching is to help people deal differently with stress.

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Building self confidence that works for you

4 May 2012 By

Like a lot of personal development, people start to turn things around in relation to self confidence firstly when they become aware that something isn’t working and it might in part be to do with them, and secondly when they develop the will to make changes. I have written at length on the process involved in turning your life around in my e-course, The Seven Proven Steps.

Depending where you are at in the self confidence journey, the distance can be quite short and for others it needs working on over time and with persistence and determination. It’s one thing to learn and master a particular skill and another to shift a long standing pattern.

There are however certain key areas that stand out along the way.

A lot of self confidence building is about behaviour change, doing things that take us out of a stuck state, often despite our fear and reluctance. It is often by pushing through the comfort zones that we discover something new, dispelling illusion and finding that it’s often quite different from what we feared. Hence often people decide and work on specific actions to move them on. There was a great TV series a few years ago in which people who struggled to create relationships were supported by coaches to improve their appearance, to start getting out and meeting people and arranging themselves dates, and then to turn those dates into success. These were a series of actions that took them outside their comfort zones and into doing things that they previously would have avoided, building skill along the way, and of course confidence! As things began to work and people saw they could make a change, their belief in themselves and their capability rose, and their self esteem rose too.

Hence a lot of confidence building is about self efficacy, one’s belief in one’s capacity to do certain things and to succeed. This needs working on over time to develop confidence. So much mastery of a skill involves practice and perseverance. In this blog you will read a lot about the importance of practice.

Therefore it is to clarify your goals, what you are seeking to accomplish and what other goals might together make up the overall desired result, so that you know where you are going. The important thing would be to not undertake something that is too global and massive that, unless you have great determination and capability, can potentially be self defeating. However there’s a lot to be gained by really working on your vision and your goals, and to support  these goals by some strong action steps that will take you towards where you want to go. Often people need to build up their self confidence.

At the start and along the way we also need to learn about managing the mind, a prevalent theme in this blog. Here we develop our self awareness and start to become highly effective at noticing and interrupting those negative thought patterns that undermine is, challenging our inner dialogue and refocusing on that which uplifts us. As long as we keep thinking we “can’t” for example, we wont. Instead we focus on what is possible and what we have going for us and what we are seeking to achieve and what we doing to get there. It’s like in a way that we are rising above ourselves, our ego self that is.

Hence it also helps to become aware of your strengths and capabilities and what you have accomplished in the past. Even small things can hold vital clues.

This is not a comprehensive treatment of what is possible but more to introduce you to some key aspects of the journey. As I wrote before, using a coach is one classic way to build self confidence and therefore actions can be tailored to this.

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Self confidence can affect our state of being

3 May 2012 By

In previous posts I have been referring to the way that self confidence can be in relation to particular tasks or to certain situations. However, we’ve also seen how self confidence can also relate to our sense of self. This can be about how we feel in ourselves, what we think of ourselves, what we believe about us, and even our perceived inner state of being.

If we find we’re struggling over a particular issue, we might not necessarily see that it is just a matter of mastering a particular skill, lets say, or overcoming our reluctance, fear, embarrassment or whatever. Self doubt can spread into something more generalised, and hence to our state of mind and being. A loss of a cherished job might result in someone finding fault with themselves, that there’s something “wrong” with them, that they’ve “lost it”, are no longer capable, or even aren’t worthy enough. Thus we can plummet into the depths of despair. I’ve pointed out elsewhere in this blog how we can go through particular life transitions in ways that affect our self confidence and our belief in ourselves.

For others, the pattern of low self confidence may be more ingrained. Let’s take an example of people who lack self confidence in social situations. They might avoid social gatherings and not go to parties, networking groups or clubs. They might avoid situations where they feel exposed and vulnerable, as people often say to me in coaching, “the centre of attention”. Interesting that there are those that thrive on being the centre of attention and seek it out at every turn, and others shun it! However, what happens is that people can get such a reaction, that if such a situation occurs, or is likely to occur, the latter will find any possible excuse to escape. This can be very limiting, for example in jobs people might undertake or how they might build friendships and get into relationships.

Lack of self confidence of this kind can be paralysing. One can even not go out much or avoid places where groups of people meet or where they might attract attention.

At this level, it can be well worth while exploring to find out the sources of such discomfort and what has occurred back in time that so limits people. However, again it is worth stressing that with practice in a carefully managed way it is possible to work towards changing one’s thoughts, often with the use of cognitive-behavioural techniques supported by NLP.

In the next post we’ll look more at possible approaches in general terms to support people in building their self confidence. It should be stressed however that it often far more powerful to enlist a coach to help as it can result in far more specific and targeted approaches to really make a difference.

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Feeling a lack of self confidence in particular situations

2 May 2012 By

Self confident people are ones who seem to be full of self assurance. Those who don’t feel so self confident tend to compare themselves adversely to  confident ones. What they might not know is that even the seeming self confident ones aren’t necessarily so!

For a start, while we might be very effective in our day-to-day activities and in our jobs, there are ways that we devise to carry off in the world our seeming competence while inside it might be a different story. It is for example well-known that CEO’s of businesses often believe that one day they will be “found out”, that they don’t have the self belief that they project to the world, and doubt their competence for the job they successfully hold down.Get close to  such people and you can pick up this inner doubt. They don’t have people around them to confide in and so it comes out in working with outside people who are there for that purpose, like an executive coach.

People might feel very self confident in many situations but struggle over individual ones. So it is well-known too how many of us find presentations scary, or might suddenly get so when what we have to deliver is not such an easy one. There’s a book called “And death came third“, which shows that people placed fear of presentations and networking above dying! No wonder people say, “and may the ground open up and swallow me up.” Of course it’s not just fear. There’s embarrassment too: “what will people think of me?” and other such stuff. The point here is that self confidence can be in relation to particular situations and tasks. If we are struggling to master a particular task, we might be full of doubt and this can spill over into how we feel about ourselves in general. Think of such seemingly simple things as learning to drive, particularly if you failed the test a number of times.

People who have lost their jobs can go into severe bouts of a loss of self confidence. Where they were once excellent at what they did, they suddenly doubt all that. Repeated rejections don’t help and we begin to think we aren’t really “any good” at what we do. Not surprisingly people then market themselves ineffectively and aim for lesser roles. People who have split up with a partner can suddenly find that they are alone in a world seemingly inhabited by couples and they doubt their ability to build connections with others. So we can, particularly at certain phases of life, feel we’re “on the scrap heap”.

Another variation is where we find particular physical situations to be ones where we’re not so comfortable. One example is a fear of heights. I know people who project great self confidence in the world but hate flying, not because of the discomfort and dullness of repeated travel but because they have some degree of terror of being in a plane up in the air. It might be claustrophobia, it might be the fear of a crash, or of not being in control, but they can become quite different people. The same can apply for situations where they are near a cliff edge or up a high-rise building.

What we’re looking at here is a lack of self confidence that is in part situationally based. These can be dealt with by a range of techniques in coaching and NLP. However, some of us are more disposed than others to draw our minds into a more broad-based self doubt, as an be seen by some of the examples above. We will devote some space to this in the next post.

 

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