How to manage intense stress and discomfort more effectively

Every month our subscribers receive our 'Yin and Tonic' newsletter. It includes thoughts from our Founder and MD Nick Mayhew (called Yin Wisdom), our upcoming events, tools and tips from our coaches, and more. This month, Nick shares three powerful tools you can use when facing stressful or uncomfortable situations.

If you would like to receive this newsletter, as well as information on our upcoming events, you can sign up here.

Rather wonderfully I get asked this time of year to give presentations to teams for mental health awareness week (as I sit and write this it is the middle of that week!)

It is a pleasure to do this, to explain and discuss both serious mental illnesses and also to talk about the challenges to mental wellness and resilience in work for people, how best to support each other, and what can be done practically.

In the spirit of this, I am going to talk a bit about three different approaches to managing intense stress and discomfort more effectively. These are distraction, reframing and mindfulness. All three techniques are freely available to each one of us - and how hard they are to access will be down to personal preferences and practice. It is hard to say from the research if any are "better", although one of these techniques tends to have a longer-lasting and more generalised effect.

Distraction:

I suppose distraction is the least "medicalised" of the three. It is simply the art of taking your mind off a stressful problem and not thinking about it. While you might accuse those doing this of ignoring their issues - "burying their heads in the sand" is the common accusation - in fact this is a valid, and useful technique.

For distraction to have its effect, your attention and your body need to be fully taken up with the activity. Fitness activities are therefore ideal especially, if you are an outgoing sort, those activities you can do with others around you. When mind and body are fully absorbed in an activity and your heart rate is raised, you will also be recycling some of the hormones that circulate in your body when stress is overwhelming you.  

The true effect of taking a break from stressful problems is that your nervous system gets a chance to recover. If in addition you have managed to inject some endorphins into the system, you should feel reliably more relaxed and able to act on the issues once finished with the distraction.

Reframing:

Instead of being deeply engaged with something different, you can try to think about your problem differently. This is the second technique, called "reframing". This is an act of searching for perspective and can involve lots of approaches. Affirmations may help you feel better. Challenging any catastrophic, self-critical thoughts or beliefs can help. Sometimes just sitting with someone and talking about your options and alternatives can shed things in a new light. You might like something more intuitive like imagery work, or perceptual positioning tools. Reframing is a simple technique, that sits at the heart of cognitive behaviour therapies and transformational coaching sessions. If you can access perspective, this is a great way to reduce stress, stop procrastination and motivate action to continue pursuing your goals. Why not try distraction first and then reframing? For most circumstances, this pairing will work.

Mindfulness:

Finally, we come to Mindfulness. Mindfulness without the philosophy or faith aspects made its way into the heart of medical responses to mental illness over the last 40 years and is thoroughly researched and validated as a successful approach to improved mental health. Do you meditate? I heartily encourage you to find a way into it if you can and note that meditation does not need to mean sitting uncomfortably with your eyes closed trying not to think. There are lots of approaches and there will be one for you. If you find the painful monk pose does not work, you could try mindful eating or mindful walking.

At the heart of mindfulness are a few ways of thinking and feeling that can be truly transformative. The first is the idea, "I am not my thoughts". As a practice, this means to decouple a reactive or emotionally overwhelming thought from acting reactively. The second is to learn to experience the discomfort of reactive or emotionally overwhelming thoughts. This can be referred to as "sitting with the discomfort", or learning to tolerate it. Don't do it for long if you have broken a leg - call an ambulance - but while waiting this might well still help a bit. The third is the idea of regular practice.  The more you practice "I am not my thoughts" the better your brain gets at doing this. Practicing mindfulness extends and expands your ability to deal with higher levels of challenge and this is fundamentally why mindfulness is one of the three techniques that has longer lasting effects. It is readying you for life and all it can throw at you.

Knowing these three simple, non-medical, approaches to long-term stress is incredibly useful for any leader out there, both for themselves and also for any team members who are struggling. I hope this is a blinding flash of the obvious. It is good to be explicit about things like this which may seem like common sense and to add that they are also research-backed and deeply effective to practice. Make them tools and sharpen them each day to improve resilience and wellbeing for you and your team.  

Nick Mayhew,

Founder and MD of Alembic Strategy