Stress increases the levels of a natural hormone, cortisol, in our bodies. In situations of physical danger, cortisol helps prepare our bodies for a fight, flight or freeze response. While most of us hopefully aren’t regularly in physical danger, everyday stress and the increased cortisol that results can still profoundly affects our bodies. Stress can change our heartbeat, breathing and posture. It also causes unconscious physical responses like chewing fingernails or a restless leg. Our physical response to stress doesn’t dissipate immediately but can remain for extended periods. Often, when we are exposed to moderate stress regularly, like in a stressful job, our cortisol levels build up over time until we start feeling highly stressed, as though we are in physical danger. Fortunately, because stress has a physical component, taking physical action can help relieve stress. There are several techniques that can help you reduce stress immediately.

Deal with emotions

Expressing our uncomfortable emotions as and when they arise can sometimes be inappropriate. Yelling at a selfish stranger or telling an annoying colleague exactly what we think of them is often unwise. So we learn to suppress those emotions in the moment and not act them out. This is a fine short-term strategy but suppressed emotions don’t simply disappear. Unless they are dealt with, those emotions stay within us and can build up over time. The more they build up, the more effort we exert to suppress them and the more exhausted we become. Sometimes these emotions build up so much steam that we lose control. The good news is that if we stop fighting emotions and allow ourselves to feel them without feeding them with a story, they often subside. The following tools can help us fully process emotions and let them go:

• Examine your emotions
  • Sit still and allow yourself to feel the emotion that is bothering you. Avoid telling a story about the emotion and instead focus on where in your body you feel the emotion and what it feels like. Does it have a shape or temperature? Does it move and change over time? Stay with the physical feeling for as long as it feels necessary.
  • Our emotions are tied to physical sensations and changes in our bodies. Emotions are often triggered by physical sensations that our brains interpret and respond to, often by identifying a name and possible cause. Sometimes our brains misdiagnose emotions and often by naming and blaming we solidify the idea of the feeling in our minds, making it seem more solid and uncontrollable than it really is.
  • By takings some time to step away from the ideas around the emotion and feel into the sensations arising in our bodies, we can find that emotions are not as solid or as powerful as they can seem. This technique allows us to let our emotions be and naturally work themselves out.
• Go for a long walk.
• Talk to someone about how you feel.
• Allow yourself to cry.
• Do something creative like draw, write or paint.

Long-term strategies for dealing with stress

All of the methods to deal with stress in the moment are also excellent techniques to help deal with stress long term. Finding those that work for you and making them a daily habit can help reduce stress significantly over time.

Good nutrition, enough sleep and an exercise routine can help you better respond to situations that would otherwise create uncomfortable emotions and prevent those emotions from arising.

The following methods can also help to eliminate stressors long term:

Attack the Causes of Your Stress

• Identify the cause of the stress and plan ways to work through or around them.
• Putting off a stressful task means it sticks around, continually causing stress until it is dealt with. Dealing with the source of stress immediately might increase your short-term stress but can significantly reduce your overall stress levels.

Use Empathy

• Stress can often arise when someone does or says something that bothers us or makes our lives harder. It is common to assume that the harm was intentional and respond with confusion and anger. The truth is, however, that most people who cause us difficulty are not aiming to do so. They are usually acting out of ignorance, carelessness or self-interest. Even when someone does deliberately harm us, they are often acting out of feelings of hurt or fear, whether justified or not. If we can understand the reason for the other person’s actions, then the confusion, anger and resulting stress that we feel often dissipates.
• Whenever you find yourself angry or confused about another person’s actions, try to imagine things from their perspective and figure out why they might have done or said the harmful thing. It doesn’t have to be a good reason. If you can develop a habit of this, you can avoid much unnecessary stress.

Track Your Stressors

• Keep a diary during periods of stress to identify which situations create the most stress and how best to respond to them. This can help you find patterns in your stressors and your responses to stress so that you can better deal with them.
• Record your thoughts, feelings and information about the stressful situation, including:
  • the people;
  • the location;
  • the surrounding circumstances;
  • how you reacted;
  • whether you tried any techniques to reduce stress; and
  • whether any of the techniques that you tried worked.

Develop Healthy Responses to Stress

• Avoid the urge to fight stress with unhelpful strategies like junk food or alcohol. These things may provide momentary relief by distracting you from stress but do not deal with the cause of that stress. The underlying stressor remains and may resurface later when you may be dealing with another stressor, making it even harder to deal with.
• A healthy, balanced lifestyle is the best long-term method for moderating stress. A consistent healthy pattern of nutrition, exercise, and good sleep combined with enough time for rest, recreation and people you love can provide a protective buffer from stress, allowing you to respond effortlessly to stressors that might otherwise be overwhelming.

Get Help

• Talk to friends or family.
• Ask your school or employer for stress management resources.
• Speak to your doctor.
• Seek out a therapist or psychologist.

Establish Boundaries

• Create spaces where you can be free of common stressors, for example:
  • Don’t blend work and home time.
  • Turn off notifications on your phone and computer.
  • Keep your work area separate from your recreation area.
  • Turn your phone off when you don’t need to use it.
    • Only open your email service during specific windows of time when you wish to read emails.
    • Set a hard deadline for work during the day, after which you are free to rest and enjoy yourself.

Avoid Overload

• Take breaks during the day.
• Take time to rest.
• Take vacations. Having time to relax and unwind refreshes your energy and motivation and lets you return to work ready to perform at your best.
• Look into ways to improve your work situation:
  • Talk to your supervisor.
    • Rather than lay out complaints, devise a plan for managing stressors you have identified so you can perform at your best.
    • It can help to clarify what’s expected of you.
  • Ask colleagues for help and advice.
  • Consider ways you can make your work more meaningful.
  • Consider changing your physical workspace to make your work easier.