Don’t stress over not stressing – When De-Stressing Becomes Stressful

The Stress Paradox: Why Trying Too Hard to Relax Backfires

We’ve all been there – the stress is unbearable, so you go to a stress class or wellness retreat. You take copious notes, learning all the “rules”, what you should and should not do, feeling like you cracked the code. You come home with the best intentions. All these instructions and hacks, you want to apply them perfectly, so you don’t stress anymore. You’re gonna nail this zen thing, you’re ready – bring it on!

The next time your boss chews you out, you’ll know what to do, except when he does, you don’t even notice how stressed you are until you’re at home sitting on your bed binge-watching Netflix and shoveling the second pint of Haagen Dazs down your throat. And then you remember all the stuff you learned at the retreat, and now you’re beating yourself up for not using any of it right away. So you’re stressed not just because of your crappy boss, but because you allowed yourself to get stressed, you let it get to you without using what you learned.

It doesn’t have to be that way.  We understand that you need to start where you are.  Micro not Macro – Keep it simple.

With stress work it is super important to keep things simple and to start small, and to have realistic expectations. Understanding that it is a matter of progress, not perfection – not expecting too much from yourself at first.  We know that you need to first build up strength and become more resilient, that you need to be more aware and grow the ability to notice what is triggering you, who stresses you out or what? And that is a pre-requisite to applying solutions. We provide experiences that help you build those resources. It is like training for a sport, you gradually build strength and muscle, it does not happen overnight, and you get further by accepting what you can and can not do yet. Or like you’re training for a marathon—you don’t run 26 miles on day one. You build up. Slowly. We don’t start with half-hour meditations, we start much smaller, with micro meditation, micro rest, etc. Taking a 3-minute break a few times a day gets you further than an hour nap if it’s done well. Weaving small restorative activities into your day, like spending 10 minutes mindfully doodling relaxing spiral or circle drawings can process what tugged on you today and will give you more energy for tomorrow. Understanding how important rest is – it is not the same as sleep – both are important – and you don’t need to rest for an hour, results can come from a minute here or there. While good nutrition and exercise, etc are vital, being forceful about it and beating yourself up when you don’t do it to perfection causes more stress instead of helping. Start with what you can manage, maybe today you didn’t eat as balanced, but that is ok, you did your best, and tomorrow it will be easier because you did not burn energy by beating yourself up over it. Life is messy, and that is ok. Comparing your behind-the-scenes to everyone else’s curated Insta highlight reel causes unrealistic expectations of how things “should” be You have no idea what’s going on behind closed doors, how many people are pretending they have it all together, torturing yourself with impossible standards just causes more stress.

Accepting what is real de-stresses us. Acceptance doesn’t mean we can’t change anything, but acceptance of what is, actually is the foundation for changing anything. The work you do is cumulative, trust that as long as you put in what you can, you will move forward. And be clear about how you define progress. The next time this happens you might catch yourself before the second pint of icecream, and with practice you may have processed the boss incident before you head home. The time it takes for us to catch ourselves and tend to the damage gets shorter and shorter. Wheter it will ever not cause damage depends on the stressor, with smaller ones yes, but the reality of life is that there are stressful things that are just part of life and we cannot avoid them all, like loosing a job, or even a loved one, and that will stress us tremendously, but when we have learned how to deal and have built resilience it won’t totally sink us because we have what we need to first survive and then thrive again.