Maintain Your Equilibrium in the Face of Stress

By Jan Bruce

You can think of living your life and chasing your ambitions as stressful, or you can think of it as thrilling. 

When you think of it as thrilling, you are doing what psychologists call "reframing" -- and it's critical to shifting your experience of stress. 

After all, a life without thrill is a boring life indeed. It may be safe, but offers you no opportunity for growth. Facing your fears isn't easy -- but your ability to reframe it as a positive is key. 

But while you want to be thrilled, you also want to feel sane. This is where the rubber meets the road. Maintaining sanity while chasing these lofty ambitions, though, is anything but easy. Growing a career, finding and maintaining love, raising children, building financial security and nurturing a passion are just a few of the enormous undertakings that make up your life's work, and trying to do it all can be overwhelming. 

The question then, is how we turn a situation of constant pressure into one of productivity and -- more importantly -- pleasure.

I teach people the tools and techniques for confronting life's challenges in a responsive, not reactive way -- by identifying the thoughts and emotions that derail your attention and energy. 

By looking below the surface of your own conscious thought process, you can unearth unseen motivations and beliefs that are driving your behavior and limiting your growth. By helping you become an expert on your own thoughts, actions, behaviors, you can stop trouble before it starts, and keep stress under your control.

Your goal isn't to change what's "out there" so you don't feel stressed. It's to build your resilience so that you can stay strong in the face of anything. 

That means not just replacing negative thought patterns and behaviors with positive, supportive ones, but shifting your perspective so that you feel connected to something bigger than your to-do list. 

All of your physical, mental and emotional behaviors together create who you are and how you'll fare in the face of stress. So let's make that version of you the best it can be.

Here are the key strategies for maintaining equilibrium so that you're not entirely thrown off by your efforts, nor mired in anxiety or indecision:

Try to manage your stress, not eliminate it. When I talk about maintaining balance, I mean maintaining the ability to find your balance on shifting ground. 

The goal isn't to eliminate stress from your life, but rather, to make sure that you have tools to handle whatever comes your way so that stress doesn't get the best of you.

Recognize that it's hard work. Though there us an approach that offers an easy, accessible framework for addressing stress and thinking traps, the work can be daunting. 

Making time to exercise or summoning the will to eat correctly, not to mention having the humility to ask for help when you need it, are no small tasks. 

If you can approach your challenges with respect for the difficulty of the task at hand, you might find that you're more accepting with yourself as you try to meet these challenges and more proud of yourself when you succeed.

Consider it practice. There's no final competition, event or performance with this work, no final test of whether you "beat: stress or not. 

Instead, it's something you'll come up against every day. If you view every day as an opportunity to revisit and improve this approach, however, you'll find that you accumulate lots of victories.

Now that you have these tools and perspectives, get to it -- there's no better time than now to start.

CBT: Feel Good About Yourself

Play or Pay: Reframing Magnetic Poetry "Put-Downs"

OK everyone, let's keep those neurons "young" and the neural connections growing by playing and learning. I got a "Magnetic Poetry" "Put-Downs" Kit as a gift on Christmas Day.

Rather than construct the snarky "Put-Downs," as designed, I decided instead to practice a bit of "reframing" as often outlined in the CBT playbook. So, I tried to conjure up positive phrases and affirmations from the original sardonic phrase-set offered. Below is my first attempt at a few "poetic thoughts" and inspiring affirmations. It's amazing how many hours one can spend  messing around with "Magnetic Poetry" on one's refrigerator/freezer door.

My photo here is a bit small. Among the word jazz  riffs I've cobbled together from the magnetic blocks so far are:

"initial misconceptions are when your thoughts probe nothing."

"how about ignoring whatever insignificant panic rises to work?"

"imagine the gene pool and young train of thought are circuses where you never grow up."

"out of chaos inflatable spinning disorder."

"set aside a special time to change your mind and personality."

"I will cherish myself and big ideas."

"a nice window but not enough."

Maybe not genius but Groovedelic for a few hours play.



Navigating Change

Resistance is futile. In life, change is one of the few certainties we can count on; we might as well learn to welcome or at least accept it.

If holding on is fruitless anyway, we might as well let go and flow. What if we stopped flailing and struggling, and instead of desperately fighting the current as we try to swim upstream, we just let go and allow the current to take us?

Remember who we are. The part of us that resists and is threatened by change is the ego or personality -- a minuscule part of who we are. Our true, deeper nature is that of cliff-divers. That part of us has been waiting to let go of aspects we have outgrown, looking for the next cliff from which to dive. It knows that a net will appear or, better yet, wings will sprout, allowing us to soar.

Emotions are just energies coursing through our bodies; let's not give them too much power over our lives. We can learn to take charge of them. The energy of fear is very similar in the body to that of excitement. We can reframe our emotions as if flipping a switch, transmuting energy from overwhelm ("OMG, I have nowhere to live as of the end of November and am on the road until the 20th!") to anticipation ("Wow! What a fascinating turn of events... Wonder where I'll land next?").

Trust. There is always a silver lining, always opportunities for growth, learning and expansion. It will all work out somehow, one way or another, and perhaps we don't need to know all the details right now. Maybe that's not our job.

What is our job, then? We take action and participate fully. We make the phone calls, check out the Craigslist posts; we do what we can. We activate and explore possibilities and pay attention to where doors open and opportunities present themselves. We follow where the energy leads, without attachment to outcome.

We learn to abide. Abiding is not passively waiting, but a conscious and alert state of mind. We remain actively aware, looking out for signs, synchronicities, "coincidences," until we have clarity.

Signs may come from surprising sources -- unexpected calls or emails, even billboards or a song on the radio. Tuning in to the signs is a natural process, but one that requires presence and attention.

Going within helps. Take time alone, ideally in nature. This is a time to dive deep and ponder the critical questions: Who am I, really? Why am I here? What kind of legacy do I wish to leave behind? What can I learn from this situation so that I don't have to continue recreating it?

Deep breathing helps to handle stress and gain perspective. Remember: Who we are is so much bigger than the circumstances of our lives.