You’re stressed. I bet it’s for good reason too.
Now I can’t promise you that things will be alright. Sometimes things end up worse than you expect. And the thing that’s making you stress out? I can’t do anything to make it go away either.
Possibly, probably, neither can you.
You can’t make the presentation, the interview or the exam, go well. You can’t stop your body from ageing. You can’t fix the pandemic.
You can’t control other people. You can’t predict the future. You can’t make your loved ones happy, and you can’t always heal them.
If I can’t help and neither can you, then why on earth am I writing about your stress?
Because, even if you cannot do anything about what stresses you out, you might be able to do something about the fact that it stresses you out.
Now, of course, these words aren’t worth anything on their own. It is only when you experience their truth in your life—when you begin to feel that you really do have a say in how stressed you feel in the moment—that you begin to transform your relationship with stress.
Recently, I had such an experience—one that completely altered the way I think about stress. It was inspired by this Headspace course on stress that I was working through at the time (more on that at the end). Now I’ve designed a thought experiment that I hope will help you experience this for yourself.
At its best, the experiment will create some distance between you and your stress instantly. But even if it doesn’t, you can read on to find the insight that I believe will change how you approach stress for good.
Before we begin, please know that this experiment is really an exercise, it requires your participation. If that sounds silly, know that it’ll only take thirty seconds to try and just play along, won’t you?
Let’s get started.
First, remind yourself what it feels like to be relaxed. Like, really relaxed.
Take a few deep, slow breaths. As you breathe in, experience your body expanding with calm. As you breathe out, experience your muscles relaxing, and your body loosening.
Imagine a calm, soothing place. Perhaps a beach, with the waves rolling in. Or a park, with the soothing hum of birds and insects. Allow yourself to be immersed in the atmosphere. Feel your body sinking deeper and deeper into relaxation.
Now, gently ask yourself this:
“What if the most stressful thing in your life stayed as it was, but you no longer felt stressed about it?”
Don’t answer the question. Just let it sink in. Experience what it would feel like to feel absolutely relaxed—as relaxed as you feel now—through the stressful moments in your life.
Welcome back.
I’d love to hear how exercise went for you; I hope it offered a moment of calm. But no matter how the exercise went, here’s the fundamental insight that it rides on.
The Insight
The insight is that the events in reality and your response to those events are two distinct things. This thought experiment is trying to help create distance between the event that is stressing you out and the way you feel about it.
If I asked you how a person X would feel standing up to a crowd of 10,000 people, you might think that they would be extremely stressed. If I told you that person was Steve Jobs, you’d probably change your assessment. Jobs looked like he belonged on-stage.
No matter what the situation is, it is possible to respond without being stressed. There is no indelible link between stress and an event in your life. It is common to be stressed in certain situations, but it is never necessary. Stress is not the law.
While this might be obvious in theory, it is easy to forget in the moment. This is why it is important to remind yourself whenever the next stressful thing pops up in your life:
Someone else in your situation will react calmly.
You, today, can react a little more calmly.
In the future, you can learn to react with radical calm.
I bet you’ll need to be reminded of this insight from time to time. All of us do. Part of your job description as a human being is to face stressful situations that you cannot change. When you do, it’ll be crucial to remember that your stress is a common and understandable response to your situation, but it is not the only one.
How Does This Help Me?
At this point, you might object:
Okay, I get it. Someone like Steve Jobs wouldn’t be sweating it in my situation. But how does that help me? Even if stress isn’t “theoretically necessary” in this situation, for me it very well seems to be!
That’s a totally fair critique, my imaginary reader. But it misses the point of the experiment. The point isn’t just to notice that someone else wouldn’t stress in your situation, it’s to realize that you could be relaxed in this situation.
Now let me be the first to admit it: you don’t choose to be stressed. You don’t choose stress in the same, simple way that you choose to cut your nails or wear that pink top. Stress has obvious genetic and evolutionary roots. And on top of that, many of us come with a lifetime of subconsciously training in being stressed.
Nobody would choose to be stressed if they could help it. Stress just isn’t the kind of thing you can wish away in an instant.
But still, over a period of time, you can, through effort, choose a less stressed mind. Your brain is incredibly flexible over time, and it will learn to react differently if you train it to. This thought experiment is about helping you realize that this change is possible for you.
There is a version of you, twenty seconds from now, that feels 15% more relaxed than you do now.
There is a version of you in the further future who has a completely different relationship to stress than you.
So how do you become those more relaxed versions of yourself?
How to Practice Being Less Stressed
To get better at responding to the stressful situations in your life, you need to practice responding to the stressful situations in your life better.
I’m not making this up. This is the core tenet of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). CBT is one of the most widely proven and practiced methods for changing your patterns of thought and behavior. And the core approach to dealing with destructive thinking in CBT involves recognising destructive patterns of thinking as they occur and learning to respond in healthier ways.
We can use this core principle of CBT to change our relationship to stress. For this, there are two crucial steps you’d want to master:
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- Noticing when you’re stressed.
- Applying a different perspective to the situation.
To get the first step, you might try a couple things. First, whenever you notice yourself being stressed, actively label it by thinking or saying: “I feel stressed right now”. Second, to improve your ability to notice your stress levels, you might want to set a daily calendar alert: “how stressed are you feeling right now?”.
For the second step, you can follow thought experiment above. It’s basically a mini guided meditation on relaxation. Or, you can make up your own practice. The key is to find distance from your current emotion and practice feeling relaxed. Maybe a few 15-second breaths, a mini-meditation or visualizing a calm environment will help.
You can play around with this, but remember that there is no perfect routine. Just find something simple enough to do consistently.
Why Practice?
How to be less stressed, you asked. Practice being less stressed, I replied. A most mundane solution, I know. Probably along the lines of something you’ve heard before. Maybe you were looking for something more instant or audacious—more Jobs, less Wozniak.
But, how do you think Steve Jobs got there? Jobs wasn’t born a master of the stage. He started out as a very nervous, though charismatic, young man. He grew into his role. His prowess on stage was the result of a lifetime of practice.
And even at the peak of his presentation abilities, when Jobs was already recognized as the master of the business presentation, Jobs would practice each major talk several times before delivering it.
He had written every word down and rehearsed it in the mirror and at family dinners. Every moment of charisma and spontaneity on stage had been earned through hours of practice behind the scenes.
If you’re going to bring that level of mastery to your life, whether it be in presenting ideas or being relaxed in the most stressful situations, you will have to earn it through practice. This piece is my small offering to help you get on your way.
And I hope you will get on your way. I hope that you’ll learn to bring composure to the stages of your life like Jobs brought charisma to his. When you do, you’ll not just benefit yourself. The people around will flourish under your soothing calm, your patience, and your stability.
Those people should admire you, they might envy you, and they will wonder how life comes to you so gently. But you and I, we’ll know.
You practiced.
- If you liked this mix of insight and short, guided meditation, you will enjoy this article on seeing like a child. It’s a practice that could break out of a loop of negative thinking in 90 seconds.
- If you’ve enjoyed reading, consider subscribing to my email list. I share only best ideas on self development, wellbeing and the philosophy of life.
- A fantastic resource to explore stress further is the Headspace course on Letting Go of Stress. The course comes to a great balance between practice and theory and has inspired the ideas here to a great degree. You’d have to subscribe for the course, but you can check out this meditation on stress by headspace for free. (I am not being sponsored by headspace)