First Steps in Stress Management

The first step in stress management is not to immediately find ways to relieve stress and force yourself to relax, nor to hold on until the stress passes, but to tracing the source of stress without judgment - first figure out what the "stress" you feel is, where it comes from, and whether it is really a "problem that needs to be solved."

Last week, when I was doing business EAP docking, I met a boy who was working on products. When he entered the consultation room, his eyes were black and blue. He said that he had been under so much stress recently that he could not sleep for 3 hours a day for a week. He got flustered as soon as he opened the work software. He himself was sure that it was the project deadline that forced him to do it. He said that he tried all the stress-relieving methods on the Internet: meditation, running five kilometers after get off work, and even going hiking on weekends. When he came back, he still couldn't breathe when he thought about the project.

I asked him not to rush to say "stressed" first, but to just take a note and write down whatever comes to mind that might make you uncomfortable, without logic or severity. He wrote half a page and laughed to himself: It turns out that the so-called "project pressure" is a hodgepodge - the uncertainty of the new director's requirements being always vague, the frustration of the last time he revised the 8th version of the plan but it was rejected, and the rent to be paid next month. , the quarrel with his girlfriend last week and the unresolved mood, and even the awkwardness of last week's team building when he wanted to speak but didn't interrupt. All these messy feelings were put into the basket of "catch up with the project", and he tried his best against a fake target, but of course it was useless.

In fact, academic circles and practitioners have different views on the first steps of stress management. The mainstream idea of ​​cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in the early years is to first perform emotional emergency intervention. For example, first use abdominal breathing for 5 minutes to lower the elevated stress hormone cortisol to avoid emotional breakdown before discussing the follow-up. This is true in extreme emotional situations, but the 2021 American Psychological Association (APA) special survey on work stress shows that 62% of people who skip tracing the source and go directly to emotional regulation will have the same stress reaction within two weeks. In essence, they regard "pain relief" as "treatment".

The claims of the mindfulness school are actually closer to the logic of origin, but many people equate mindfulness with "relaxation". In fact, its core first step is "non-judgmental awareness" - you must first see your emotions and sources of stress, instead of suppressing them immediately. There are also many action-oriented stress management schools that advocate breaking down tasks as soon as you feel stressed. However, if you don’t even understand whether the stress comes from the task itself or the internal friction of "fear of being scolded if you don't do it well," the broken to-do list will only make you more anxious.

I also ran into this trap two years ago when I was rushing to write a manuscript. During that time, I received invitations for three columns and two offline sharing sessions at the same time. When I opened my eyes every day, I felt like a stone was weighing on my chest. I sat at the desk for 8 hours and couldn't write a few hundred words. I always thought that I was stressed because I couldn't write. I forced myself to delete and write, and the more I wrote, the more I collapsed. Later, one day I was squatting downstairs to feed a stray cat, and while stroking the cat's soft fur, I suddenly realized: I'm not afraid of writing a manuscript at all. It's because I put the pressure of "preparing to share PPT", "preparing a graduation gift for my sister", and "helping my mother get a hospital number" on "writing a manuscript" is all on the "difficulty of writing a manuscript". It's equivalent to hanging five weights on one hook, and of course it feels heavy. On the same day, I handed over the framework work of the PPT to my assistant, and directly placed the order for the graduation gift that she had been talking about for a long time. I set an alarm for the hospital number to grab it on time the next day, and the outlines of the three manuscripts were smoothed out that afternoon.

Many people tend to make a mistake when tracing their origins: they cannot help but judge themselves. For example, when I wrote and found out that the source of my stress was "my colleague passed by yesterday and didn't say hello to me," I thought, "Why am I so blind, that such a small thing is worth caring about?" However, stress is never a high or low thing. As long as it really makes you uncomfortable, it is a reasonable existence. You can't just say it hurts because it's a small thorn that pricked you, right?

I was chatting with a friend who does exercise rehabilitation before, and he said that pain in the human body is the same. It is useless to complain about waist pain and apply plaster. You have to first find out whether it is lumbar muscle strain, lumbar protrusion, or whether it is caused by crossing your legs every day recently, or whether you have gained ten pounds recently and put too much weight on your waist. Find out the cause before taking action.

Actually, stress is really not that mysterious. Just like if you feel uncomfortable while walking with a bag on your back, don’t carry it and throw away everything in the bag. First, reach out and touch to see which thing has hit you. If you feel it clearly, you can either take it out and throw it away, or put it somewhere else, and the journey will become easier.

It's that simple.