Manage Stress by Monitoring Your Body’s Reactions to It | Hacker News Reader

Manage Stress by Monitoring Your Body’s Reactions to It

hbr.org

14 pointsprostoalex7 comments

The body provides many signals when you are stressed. But for those who are chronically stressed the signals are always present and therefore undetectable.

It wasn't until my mid-30's where I was able to have some downtime and learn what a healthy mind and body truly felt like. With a healthy baseline I can now quickly detect stress signals. This can be a subtle as feeling my face is wrinkled, a slight acid/burning feeling in my veins, absent mindedness, depression, quick/aggressive responses, flatulence, slight backache/tension, sleeping poorly, etc.

When I detect any of the stress signals I use one of the following techniques depending on the severity: I make "no" my default response to any new requests. I take deep breaths and softly smile. I switch to 100% selfish thinking; "what do I want ?", "what are my short and long term goals and what is my next step towards them ?". I plan. I make the gym and sleep a priority. I triage my todo list, cancel trips, and communicate with anyone who might get impacted. I avoid the news. I drink more water. I focus on anything beautiful immediately in front of me (usually the beauty of my meal since my mind tends to wander while eating).

The "lookouts" they describe sound surprisingly similar to concepts of vipassana (mindfulness) meditation. Being aware of your own responses (physical and mental) at a meta level increases your ability to deal with them.

This is what I thought as well.

Mindfulness is a skill to be practiced. Similar to how your heart strengthens through running and your muscle-mass increases through weight training, your ability to recognize physiological and physical responses to stress will sharpen with continued mindfulness practice.

But terminology soemtimes matters, and some people who would otherwise think "What? Meditate? I don't have time for that nonsense!" will read this and think "Oh, yeah, that makes sense, of course I need monitoring, just hadn't realized I could monitor myself too."

Far better to have one stressful day every 30 than to have none at all. But unimaginably worse to have one stressful day every other day, etc.

We live in a world where we should manage our stress instead of avoiding our stressors.

Not really. It depends on the stressors you have. It isn't like everyone can avoid their stressors, like death of a loved one. Some stressful things aren't really things one wants to avoid either - Entering a new marriage or moving can be really stressful.

I had all three of those particular ones within a short time frame. My father died one May, I got married in July, and moved overseas at the beginning of August.

Other stressors have more flexibility. My ex-husband causes a great deal of stress, and I eventually left him. After that (and before I moved away), I avoided him.

Managing or avoiding really depends on the situation. And really, being able to avoid stress (when possible) depends on a person being able to manage their own stress enough to say enough is enough.

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