Stress And Anxiety Management From The Root - Making Stress Work For You
by Reeta Luthra

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Stress and anxiety can trap you in a cycle of poor decisions, erratic behaviour, anger, confusion and despair. Even physical illness.

However, stress and anxiety themselves are not illnesses. They are the emotional messengers of your thoughts urging you to make fulfilling decisions. They contain clues to helping you get what you want. By learning to understand the messages within your stress, you can learn to make it work for you.

1) The Purpose of Stress: Your In-built Alarm System

Stress is based on the universal Flight or Fight impulse. This inbuilt response increases adrenalin, sharpens the senses and provides the energy and alertness to escape from frightening or threatening situations. Its purpose is to ensure and promote your survival.

Originally this impulse helped people to escape from the threat of wild animals. As societies have evolved over generations, the threats have changed to the point where this basic response is often inappropriate. Modern day "threats" are more psychological than physical. They include things such as divorce, overcrowded trains, deadlines, information overload and financial worries.

So what you have now is an inbuilt impulse designed to protect you, but it only offers two ways to respond - Flight or Fight.

If someone has a heavy workload and their mind tries to alert them to take some action, the adrenalin rises and physiological changes occur preparing the body to decide between Flight and Fight. But in a situation like this, you can rarely do either, so the pressure (stress) you feel is effectively a build up of adrenalin and energy that is unreleased because there is no suitable inbuilt alternative response to your situation.

Exercise or meditation can help to release this stress but the effects can be temporary if they do not deal directly with the "threat" that led to the stress response in the first place. Continuing to ignore this threat leads to psychological denial and burying of the problem and this can lead to problems such as road rage, high blood pressure and over-eating.

Understanding that the pressure you feel is due to a chemical side-effect of a situation that your mind has interpreted as being threatening brings you to the next step in making friends with stress.

2) Understand the Language of your Body

Many people do not recognize that they are under stress until the physical effects start to show up. Panic attacks, hives, acne, sweaty palms, insomnia are just some of the ways that it shows up in your body. They are all signs that something is happening in your body at a deeper level. By the time this happens, you can be sure that there has been a build-up of unreleased pressure over a period of time.

Training yourself to notice fluctuations in your body's messaging system helps you to catch stress before it impacts your body.

You can do this by consciously making the effort to recognise when your body is calm and when it is stressed. At various points throughout the day, just stop and take five minutes to focus your attention on your body and see how it feels. Focus on your head, your stomach, any areas of tension, your breathing. The aim is to become more familiar with the changing state of your body in different situations.

With practice, you will be able to tell just when your mood changes and catch the stress thought that caused it to change.

Having noticed the stress warning arrive in your body, the next step is to classify the intent of this message.

3) Recognize the Alert

Stress represents a level of imbalance. Not all imbalances are bad and fluctuations are vital throughout the day.

You need some stress in a rugby game or when you are rushing to catch a train. But if you feel out of control and unable to do anything as your mountain of debt grows unchecked, then your stress levels are negatively imbalanced.

You need to ask if the level of imbalance you are feeling is appropriate to what you want from the situation you are in. An easy way to answer this is to observe your behaviour.

If you are capable of clear decision-making and focused thought and if your actions are in harmony with the goal of your situation, then your stress level is working with you. The adrenalin being produced is finding a suitable outlet.

If you are irritable, angry, judgmental or teary, if your thoughts are confused and spiralling into pessimism, if you are taking things out on someone else, then your stress is asking you to understand the nature of the threat it is warning you about.

4) Identify the Threat

Mark is married with a young family. He is a good salesman but he notices his stress levels rise uncontrollably in the last two weeks of every month. He has always vaguely put this down to "work pressure". But now, he starts to pay attention to the signals of stress arriving in his body and discovers it is always when something reminds him about the monthly performance review.

Thinking about this, he comes to realise that he is living with a fear of losing his job due to poor performance. This fear gives him the drive to excel at his job, but it also makes him miserable.

Mark has identified his threat. The fear of losing his job.

Sometimes you will find the hidden message quite easily. But sometimes this step is the hardest because the conflict caused by the Flight/Fight response is immobilising and frustrating.

If you are unable to find the threat or if it is too complex for you to untangle, then it is advisable to ask a therapist to help you break it down.

Once you have identified the threat, you will notice your stress levels change as your mind and body becomes aware that you are going to listen to its warning. This change can go up as well as down so it is vital to complete the next step.

5) Implement an Appropriate Response

Having identified the threat, it's now time to look at it squarely to determine what it actually represents. Sometimes you will notice that the threat is absurd and nothing to fear at all. Other times, you will need to create your own response to add to the Flight or Fight options that you already have.

To neutralize his stress, Mark has to neutralize his fear of losing his job. Sometimes, logic helps. If he has ample savings, then simply knowing the reason behind his stress can be enough to eliminate the stress response without any further action. Alternatively, he can learn new skills that will increase demand for his services. He will know that logic has worked when he is able to think about his threat without experiencing a stress response.

When logic does not help, it's often because of an emotional blindspot.

Mark may have an underlying belief that as a man, he MUST provide for his family or be labeled a "Loser". A belief like this one actually contains a level of stress that is so integrated into his identity that it often lies just outside conscious awareness. This belief will prevent Mark from seeing all his options clearly because this blindspot actually adds another level of stress to his existing fear of losing his job. Even worse, a belief like this one spreads its hidden stress to other areas in his life without him realizing - showing up in his relationship with his wife for example.

Recognizing that you have an emotional blindspot means that when this stress is cleared, the relief will be felt across several areas of your life.

As it is a blindspot, you will have become used to coping with the negative feeling it gives you and so it could be difficult to have enough detachment to enable you to isolate and identify it on your own. Additionally, if you have any reason to suspect that your emotional blindspot is there because of a deep-rooted or traumatic incident in your past, be cautious and considerate to yourself if dealing with this on your own. The emotional release may contain layers beneath it that could overwhelm you. For these reasons, it can be prudent to find a reputable therapist to help you.

Once you have identified the blindspot, you are ready to neutralize its stress. One of the most effective ways of doing this is through EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques). You can do this alone or with the help of your therapist.

EFT is a very natural and non-invasive method of realigning the disruption that stress creates in your body. It works on similar principles to acupuncture but there are no needles and just a handful of meridian points. Essentially, it involves gently tapping a few meridian points on the face, body and hands while you are emotionally tuned in to the problem.

If this sounds too easy, it's because this is a method of re-balance that is built in to your body the same way as your Flight or Fight threat response system. Its purpose is to help you and practice literally makes you better.

Stress is the body's way of letting you know that you are not in balance. Sometimes the imbalance is advantageous and other times it is insidiously harmful. Catching the signs early, recognizing their appropriateness to your goal and addressing their hidden message means you can harness the power of stress and use it to enrich your life in ways that put you back in control.

Left unchecked, stress compounds upon itself. Over time, it shouts at you louder and louder to take notice of its hidden message. If you continue to ignore it, eventually it can show itself in physical illnesses - anything from a headache to a heart attack or ulcer.

It is never too late to address the symptoms of stress, but prevention really is better than cure - so take the steps now to find out what your stresses are trying to communicate and see how you can make them work for you.

© Reeta Luthra 2008

Author's Bio
Reeta Luthra is a Therapist and Peak Performance Coach specialising in personal achievement and in the application of drug-free treatments to disorders that have physical symptoms but psychological causes. She uses EFT, NLP as well other psychotherapy techniques extensively in her work to encourage people to break free of limiting behaviours. Her website is at: http://www.paradoxofreality.com