WHEN YOU’RE STRESSED OUT AT HOME

In addition to mastering the art of being “stuck at home,” (Neurons #16), you could be stuck at home — stressed out about health, finances, kids, career, etc. and constantly seduced to get into arguments and fights. It happens. Being locked up and in close proximity with anyone for an extended period of time challenges our patience, tolerance, state management, compassion, personal discipline, etc.

It also challenges your stress management skills. In the end, it is not just a matter of having good stress releasers, it is a matter of being able to manage your mind regarding your thinking and framing about the stressors. When it comes to stress releasers— there are a great many ways and methods for getting the built-up energy (e.g., anxiety, distress, frustration, fear, sense of danger, etc.) out of your body.

You can talk it out if you have someone who will just listen and let you download or vent. In that way you can use conversation to release what you have been building up inside. By articulating and expressing the internal energy and emotions that have accumulated, you let it go. You can do the same by writing it out. This utilizes the neuro-muscular activity that translates from mind to paper. Of course, once you’ve done that— burn it! Or shred it. By all means, if it involves others, do not send it! You can also act it out. This is especially true of anything cardio-vascular. You can walk, jog, run, dance, bounce on a trampoline, or do almost anything physical to release the stressful emotions and thoughts. A long time ago Jim Fixx who started the running craze in the United States wrote that you cannot run mad for thirty minutes. Finally, you can also think it out. That is a possibility, but it requires a lot of cognitive skill. Here you think out and get distance from your thinking, which is what actually creates the stressful emotions.

One form of stress release that also involves thinking it out involves eliciting a calm and relaxing trance state. While it is easiest to let someone use do the induction, you can learn to do your own self-inductions.

Yet more important that the stress reducers is the ability to catch and change the stress creators in the first place. While tension is in the body and refers to how we tense our muscles to create muscular tension resulting in headaches, backaches, etc., stress is in the mind. Stress is psychological. And if it is psychological, it is self-induced, self-created. Others are not and do not cause your stress regardless of how intensely you might accuse them of doing so. All they are doing is offering a stimulus. What you do with that stimulus— that is how you create your stress.

Stimulus—Response. There are external stimuli that make up the factors and variables to which you are responding. What you think and believe about those factors and variables (the stimulus) is your psychological response which, in turn, leads to your emotional, verbal, behavioral responses. Here every Cognitive Distortion (childish thinking patterns), Cognitive Biases, and Cognitive Fallacies set you up for psychological stress.

This calls for some high level thinking skills so that you can catch the thinking that’s stressing you, cranking up your blood-pressure and inducing you into a state where you are less effective than usual.

Are you exaggerating, over-generalizing, and blowing things out of proportion? Are you negatively framing things, discounting good things, and/or awfulizing? Are you personalizing, emotionalizing, and/or over-identifying? Are you engaged in all-or-nothing thinking, either-or thinking, dichtomizing?

These are the key cognitive distortions that amplify stress and unless this kind of thinking is changed (or challenged), the stress will not go away.