5 Steps to Reducing Stress

Recognizing What Works

Genella Macintyre

• Publisher: Brown Books Publishing Group
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781612548722
• eBook ISBN: 9781612549514
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

In this simple, five-step guide, a psychology expert helps readers understand stress, develop a personal plan to manage it, and live a better life. Five Steps to Reducing Stress provides an essential strategy built upon understanding stress, taking stock, managing your external environment and then your internal one, and taking action. Corporate trainer and psychology expert Genella Macintyre pushes past the usual surface-level explanations for stress and digs deeper into the root causes. This book is a toolbox of practical micro-strategies based on discovering your personal stress-management style and recognizing what works. Journaling exercises and recommended activities provide key reference points. Reclaim your quality of time and quality of life! Praise for 5 Steps to Reducing Stress "Highly recommended! [Macintyre] breaks down the often-overwhelming process of getting out of distress and moving forward with life and living. Practical, bite-sized solutions encourage readers to build new habits, learn stress-mastery skills, and be more resilient." —Esther Orioli, CEO, Essi Systems; author, StressMap ® and Resiliency Map ® "Having worked with military families for many years by assisting them with health and wellness resources, I am very aware of the stress that many of these families face. The easy-to-follow strategies in [this book] are ideal for anyone feeling stressed out and looking for a way to break out of the cycle and feel inspired to live life to the fullest!" —Kim Hetherington, former executive director, Petawawa Military Family Resource Centre "Macintyre's approach to managing stress is a breath of fresh air! Stress is personal, and so is stress reduction—it's not a one-size-fits-all fix. These five steps allow readers to take stock and then take action in a highly individualized way." —Loretta LaRoche, bestselling author, star of seven PBS shows, and international stress-management and humor consultant

STEP FIVE

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TAKING ACTION

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A Little Goes a Long Way in Your Plan of Action

“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up some place else.” —Yogi Berra.

This chapter is about planning what you will do to reduce stress in the long term. As the quote above states, if you don’t have a plan to get somewhere, you’ll end up somewhere else. If you don’t have a plan to manage the stress in your life, you might end up somewhere where stress is managing you. You might end up only reacting to circumstance, and maybe not as you would like, because you don’t seem to have a way to make choices in how to respond. You might be using only Band-Aid solutions to recurring problems when you really wanted to be able to build resilience. You want to be the captain of your ship, armed with enough strategies and intent to weather as many storms as possible. You want to stay on course instead of being buffeted around by each wind of circumstance. This is maybe what you wanted when you picked up the book.

Good news: now is the time to develop the plan that will help you stay on course by reducing the negative stress in your life. “Wait a minute,” you say. “Haven’t we been doing that all along? What’s different now?” Good question. The answer is that now you need to collect the knowledge and awareness you gained about yourself in the previous chapters and put it all together into a clear plan of action. What will you practice? What will you put into your life? What strategies that already work will you consciously utilize? What combination of strategies will you use to reduce the impact of stress under various situations? Will you remember to engage in these strategies? We are taking what works and putting it into a plan of action.

Let’s say you want to improve your health. Just wishing it would happen won’t work; you need to take action and make some changes. I often say I am the fittest person in Manitoba . . . in my mind. In order to improve my physical fitness, I gained motivation and became committed thanks to a visit to my doctor.

She simply said, “With the amount of diabetes in your family history, if you stay in the state you are right now, you will probably get diabetes, sleep apnea, and another whole range of problems. Frankly, you need to lose weight and take better care of yourself.” She was gentle but direct. I like that approach because it works for me. What she didn’t know was that I was pretty much aware of this. However, my good intentions rarely made it to action.

As I drove away, I saw a weight-loss program with a great deal: 50 percent off for members of the local Chamber of Commerce. I qualified. I walked in, saw a coach, and learned about the program. I knew myself well enough to know that getting something accomplished wasn’t going to happen without external support. I am too good at making excuses. So I signed up. The coaching part of the ULoss program was the incentive. I knew that the external accountability would be what I needed. Three years later and fifty pounds lighter, I feel much better. I’m still working on the increased activity and the exercise. I haven’t mastered this, and, to be honest, I haven’t begun to make progress in that area. However, life is a journey. I am finding out what does work for me by doing more of those activities. Most importantly, I’m moving forward.

The Five Steps is a program that can help you develop your plan of action for reducing stress. Much like with improving your health, you need to start somewhere and identify your plan of action. In your action plan, you gain a focus and develop the support and strategies to help you get there. Just as if you were driving to an unfamiliar destination, you need a map to direct you. Your action plan is your map.

A good place to start is to take an overall stress self-assessment. One of the best is Essi Systems’s StressMap® (see Website Resources).

The StressMap® “assesses your stress level, evaluates your ability to cope with stress, and suggests methods for dealing with stress effectively.” The test is extensively researched, statistically reliable, and norm tested. This means it measures what it is supposed to measure, is not subject to big changes from one day to the next, and is measured against a “norm” in North America, giving you a good sense of what your score means in the bigger picture.

At the time of writing this book, the cost of taking this assessment online is $149.00 USD. With that fee, you join the 21 Day Club®. This allows you to take the test again later on to see if your score has changed over time. Included in this cost are free tools and information to help you change your habits to ones that help you manage stress. The website also offers assessments in other areas, including emotional intelligence and resiliency.

To assist you with your action plan, I have developed journal questions that can help you organize your strategies (see appendix). Consider this stress-management journal as a journey you are taking and a plan to increase self-care in order to meet the ongoing challenges of work and life.

Whether you use the StressMap®, the journal in the appendix of this book, or both, decide on what you want to accomplish, find a compelling reason for doing it, develop a plan to get there, and enjoy the ride.

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Physical Interventions to Physical Prevention

Intervening physically in the moment of recognizing stress or stress arising is a powerful access point. If you identify doing something as a way of returning to a more balanced state, then graduating your response from intervention to prevention will be that extra step toward resilience.

This long-term step is powerful. Attending to the state of our body has a direct positive effect on how we cope with stress over the long term. Yet for many, many people, it is a very difficult task. Fueling our body with healthy food and being active have their own challenges and, for many people, become stressful situations in and of themselves. The health and fitness industry is huge, offering countless ways to attain a more physically healthy state. This chapter will focus on how some of the everyday things we can do can become helpful, long-term steps.

Feeling better physically gives us the energy to cope with challenges. Consider how you see the world when you are not feeling well. Personally, I am down and out for the count; everything is an effort. It’s hard to get out of bed, difficult not to procrastinate, and my creative coping is out the window. At this point, I simply rely on the philosophy of “Just keep swimming,” even if the result is just treading water. It is essential, for me, to attend to being active, to build up my energy stores, and to pay attention to the food I eat so that I have the physical fuel my body needs to be able to function well over the long term. When I don’t, life is ten times more difficult. This is true for all of us. When we feel good, we are on our game. You never had your best day sick.

What you need to do in terms of activity and nutrition is a very personalized plan. Perhaps this is a strong area for you; you find yourself active where and when you can. You might even run or walk on a regular basis. Perhaps a trip to the gym is your personal time to feel better, get relaxed, and get stronger. Good for you! Perhaps you have never stepped into a gym and would rather take walks when you can. Perhaps you take the stairs on occasion when the empty elevator was right there. Maybe you’ve initiated a walking meeting at work. Good for you! Regardless of your current state, the physical part of you and the fuel you put into your body matter. A long-term strategy is to start small by making minor changes in these areas to increase the overall ability of your body to do the job it was meant to do. This strategy—one that is uniquely yours—will support you throughout your life.

You might have guessed—oh wait, I mentioned—that the physical access point was, for me, the weakest one and the one to which I paid the least attention. This has been true for most of my life, and even today, this area is still a struggle for me. Just like everyone else, I have my own “complications” with certain areas. One gift of getting older is an increasing desire to be a better me. Remember the advice from my doctor? Getting older didn’t impress me to begin with, and getting older with decreasing health impressed me even less. Yes, I reached my goal weight, but the weight was only a marker, secondary to understanding what changes I needed to make to shift the direction of my health.

There are many programs to support such shifts in activity and nutrition. The challenge is to find a way that works for you. Your best road to success is to know yourself so well that you can identify what works and do more of it. Self-awareness is the basis to the entire endeavor of improving your overall state of mind, body, and soul. My program included coaching. I knew that I needed assistance to help me make the shift. I also knew myself well enough to know I was not going to do it on my own. You might need the same thing, or you might need something completely different.

The changes can be gradual. These are long-term steps, after all. For example, cleaning my house makes me feel good emotionally (“Yeah! I am getting this done!”), cognitively (cleaning out the old, making fresh starts), and physically (the activity makes me feel better). Wait, don’t close the book! I am not saying you have to like housework—I am just saying that I do.

Another strategy came to me when I decided to adopt a wonderful little bichon–Jack Russell terrier cross puppy. Tucker became my travel companion. We stay at a pet-friendly hotel and use a pet-friendly apartment when I travel to our larger city, Winnipeg, where most of my work is scheduled. Tucker goes to doggie daycare when I work during the day, and most importantly, Tucker needs walks. Making sure he was active and had the exercise he needed was a priority. The walking wasn’t something I had to do as part of an exercise program that I probably wouldn’t stick to. Rather, it became something I needed to do for Tucker. The benefits to me fit in nicely, of course.

When you take what you already do, identify those things that work for you, and work those into your overall intention to develop long-term resilience, this can be a powerful stepping-stone to getting where you want to go.

For example, cleaning house not only gets the housework task done but also gets you a clean house as a bonus. You have changed your life positively in two areas. You have become more active, and you have completed a task that you needed to do anyway. Again, housework is just one example of connecting those things that you have to do with your overall plan to build a stronger you. Can you identify something that you already do (such as activity and nutrition) that connects you to your access point? I needed to take care of Tucker (emotional-switch person), so I was then able to implement walks, which I previously excused away (building physical strengths).

Do you like to cook? Could you switch or increase the healthy content of your food? Are you a curious person? Would trying different foods and creating different dishes perhaps connect with a cognitive access point and also increase the quality of the food you use as fuel? Know yourself well enough to identify the activities you will engage in while building your physical resilience.

Making decisions about your activity level and nutrition can seem daunting. As powerful as the physical component is in its ability to make us feel better fast, the opposite is also true. Not attending to your activity level and nutrition makes everything else in life—including managing your stress—much, much more difficult.

This is why an inventory of opportunities is a more effective way to start. Where and how do you start? First, look at your activity level and state of health objectively. Perhaps have a discussion with your doctor about wanting to increase your activity level or eat differently.

Start small. Programs such as Manitoba in Motion are dedicated to helping people become more active. Notice that I am talking about being more active, not exercising. Exercise is something you do in the moment, whereas being active is a long-term strategy and philosophy. Maybe it’s going for a walk with friends. Perhaps it’s a lot of different activities, such as following a program on a DVD. And what about the fuel? What small change can you start with? Could adding in more whole foods be possible? Can you switch out some foods for more healthy alternatives? I am asking you what you can put in versus take out. Remember the theme of this book: do what you already know works for you, and do more of it.

If you tell me to eliminate chocolate, I might eliminate you. Guess what I’m always thinking about then? You guessed it: chocolate. However, if I take opportunities to add in a poached egg instead of fried (I happen to love poached eggs, anyway), then I am finding opportunities to shift to healthier foods. And finding opportunities is like shopping and looking for those great deals. It’s an effort, but for me, it’s fun. Retail therapy has always been a favorite of mine. Now I am shopping for opportunities to make small changes.

What do you do? Take time to examine your physical life. Identify, gently, the changes you would like to make. Start small. Shop for opportunities. Take the elevator, but when you are up to it, take the stairs occasionally. Try an alternative whole food to a processed one. Your task now is to list one goal for your physical health and one for your nutrition (see setting SMART goals in chapter 5). Now look for opportunities to head in that direction. Take yourself up on some of those opportunities, and for goodness sake, do it in service of yourself, to honor yourself, and to have fun.

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From Emotional Switch to Emotional Intelligence

In one of my very first jobs, very long ago, my manager said to me during my first-ever evaluation, “Genella, you are a bit emotional.” Picture her stressing the “bit” part. She added a word of advice: “You need to leave your emotions at the door when you come to work.” Hold on; please don’t picture an employee who acts like an angry mob or a sobbing colleague. I was what I thought was, well, “normal,” but with an inclination to emotional expression.

In his first book on the topic, Emotional Intelligence, author Daniel Goleman showed how our personal and professional success is directly connected to how intelligently we use our emotions. You can imagine, then, how happy I was to find out about this concept. If emotions are a form of intelligence, well then, I was bordering on brilliant. Thank you, Daniel Goleman. Now came the hard part: the intelligent use of emotions. So, I was brilliant but not intelligent . . . Brilliant.

If you have determined that you are more of an emotional-switch kind of person, then the concept of emotional intelligence will no doubt resonate with you. Maybe you are jumping up and down as I was. Well, maybe not. Remember the part about being “brilliant but not very intelligent”? Regardless, if emotional expression comes more easily to you than to most, you are probably more aware of your emotions than others are. If that is true, then you have the foundation to become more emotionally intelligent. What is emotional intelligence, and how is it connected to managing stress?

According to Daniel Goleman, emotional intelligence (EI) is “the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and intuition and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships” (Emotional Intelligence 14).

Additionally, “EI is an array of non-cognitive capabilities, competencies and skills that influence one’s ability to succeed in coping with environmental demands and pressures” (Bar-On). There is the connection: noncognitive capabilities that help us cope. That means we can use emotions, which we often connect with stress, to manage stress. More accurately, and according to our Five Steps model, we can use the emotional access point to initiate a relaxation response by knowing what we are feeling and when we are feeling it.

The original EI model by Daniel Goleman presented five competencies that were connected to each other. Called the Goleman Five Factor,...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Step One: Understand Stress
• Step Two: Take Stock
• Step Three: Manage the External Environment
• Step Four: Manage the Internal Environment
• Step Five: Take Action
• Applying the Steps
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Journal
• Resources and Bibliography
• About the Author
• Back Cover