Why stress management is actually stress inducing
When I started in this work over ten years ago, everything was about stress management. The medical community was starting to understand that chronic stress either caused or exacerbated a wide range of conditions and managing stress had become a new buzzword.
I was all about it – no one likes being stressed! I, in particular, had a tendency to throw myself into highly stressful, 24/7 work that always walked a high wire between being emotionally rewarding and emotionally draining. I was very familiar with the cycle of panic, anxiety and depression that comes from constant physical, mental and emotional overload, and I wanted to help people get off the hamster wheel that leads to burnout.
But as I’ve continued in this work in a variety of formats – leading teams and teaching resilience skills to people across various stages of life and work – I realized something was off. Anything you manage is something you become deeply involved in. Talking all day long about “stress management” put the focus on stress as something scary and dangerous that could spring up anywhere and needed to be wrestled with at all times – and as I started to notice signs of burnout in a job that I was deeply passionate about, I realized that “stress management” was actually stress inducing.
Something had to change.
Gradually, I became more and more familiar with the research on resilience that was filtering up from various domains in clinical psychology and neuroscience as well as the world of elite athletes pushing the boundaries of performance. Resilience is the positive correlate of stress management – focusing on the capacities we want to increase rather than the states we want to decrease.
But the field was still emerging and there were a wide range of often contradictory definitions of resilience and conflicting advice about how to build resilience. I spent years wading through various methodologies rooted both in modern neuroscience and ancient wisdom and trying to find the correspondence between them. I was trying to answer the question: what is the most essential practice that differentiates stress management from resilience?
Finally, it clicked: stress management always put a focus on escaping from stress and making sure you had sufficient time to “rest and recover” by engaging the parasympathetic branch of your nervous system. “Self-care” gave rise to an entire industry devoted to making sure people put aside enough room in their day (and in their budget) to engage in relaxing activities. I’m all about resting, relaxing and recovering – your body and your mind need it and how to achieve deep rest and relaxation will be the subject of another post. But taking time out to rest and relax does not by itself help you build resilience.
Resilience is not about escaping from stress and finding time to recover. Building resilience requires that we respond in the moment that we’re experiencing stress by communicating safety to our brain and body. Here’s a quick hack for communicating safety to your nervous system when you start to notice yourself going into fight or flight:
Purse your lips as you breathe out. This will naturally slow down your exhale in relation to your inhale, which stimulates a parasympathetic response
Notice your automatic thoughts, feelings and sensations. As you notice each one, say to yourself “Isn’t that interesting?” This simple act of noticing and becoming curious activates your medial prefrontal cortex which is involved in self-awareness and emotional regulation, and helps calm your amygdala-driven fear response
Resilience is the ability to expand our “window of tolerance” by engaging the parasympathetic branch of our nervous system in response to increasingly stressful conditions. Conditioning our nervous system in this way doesn’t happen haphazardly or by accident, it requires attention and intention. Over time, we start to flip the script so that instead of viewing stress as a source of danger that we need to escape from, we start to embrace stress as a prompt that helps us strengthen our nervous system and increase our mental, emotional and physiological resilience.
This doesn’t happen all at once, but as it happens it opens space in our mind and body that allows us to truly transform the way we approach our lives and our work.
So I hope you’ll join me in walking away from the stress management model and embracing the practice of building resilience for a better life!