Manage Your Stress Effectively by Mastering These 6 Simple (But Powerful) Science-Based Strategies

The following is adapted from a new best-selling book, The Habit Mechanic, by Dr. Jon Finn.

Managing stress effectively can be difficult. The foundational factor for successful emotional regulation is your brain functioning properly. In a challenging world, though, this is not a given. And, if your diet, exercise, or sleep habits are poor (as they often are for so many people), managing your stress will be even more difficult.

To further complicate matters, stresses do not typically occur one at a time. Individual stress responses can add up and rapidly create a feeling of being overwhelmed. And, as you experience prolonged periods of stress, your brain begins to get in the habit of being stressed.

That’s because you become good at what you practice. Practicing becoming stressed strengthens the neural circuitry connected to threat detection and stress responses. This means getting stressed quickly becomes a very unhelpful habit.

The good news is you can retrain your brain to get better at managing and reducing stress. How? By creating a practical plan that utilizes six powerful strategies.

#1: Control Your Breathing

When we are stressed, one of the clear physical changes is in our breathing. This is the only physical part of the stress response we have direct conscious control of. We can slow down and regulate our breathing. This calms us and reverses the stress response.

Let’s try a powerful breathing exercise you can use to reverse the stress response. If you can, please stand up. If you cannot, sit upright or lie down. Place your left hand on your stomach and your right hand on the top of your chest. Notice your current breathing patterns. How many seconds does it take for you to breathe in? How many to breathe out?

Now I want you to deliberately take control of your breathing and slow it down. For example, try breathing in through your nose (or your mouth) for five seconds. Then breathe out slowly through your mouth (or your nose) for five seconds. Feel free to adjust these numbers so they work best for you. Repeat this process until you create a rhythm.

Consciously controlling the breath in this way can help to counter the fight/flight response. Because you can do this anytime you get stressed, this exercise can become a key part of your stress management plan.

#2: Manage Your Thoughts

When we get stressed, our attention typically drifts and becomes glued onto unhelpful thoughts. For example, we ruminate, beat ourselves up, and worry. So we need to get better at managing our thoughts.

When unhelpful thoughts come into your head, you need to be prepared to challenge them. In other words…do not believe everything you think!

Of course, controlling our thoughts is not easy. We know that trying to suppress threatening thoughts does not work and can make them more powerful. So simply trying not to think about unhelpful thoughts is not very effective. Trying to counter unhelpful thoughts by only thinking positive thoughts, and arguing with them in our mind through self-talk, is also not very effective.

To get more control over our thinking, first focus on welcoming unhelpful thoughts. By doing this, we become less worried or angry. As I am welcoming unhelpful thoughts, I sometimes imagine giving my stress emotion a relaxing shoulder massage to calm it down (Focus Picture).

Also, when I notice an unhelpful thought from my stress response, I say something to myself like, “It is only doing its job” (Focus Words). Typically, I do this with a big smile on my face and sometimes even laugh at myself, because my stress can put some silly thoughts in my head. By doing this, I am “labeling” the thought. This simple process is quick and can be very powerful.

#3: Activate Your Positivity

Focused Reflection (which I’ll discuss in the next step) can help us manage our thinking and actually build new thinking habits. Focused Reflection supercharges our ability to focus on helpful thoughts. The central part of this technique is writing things down.

Before you engage in Focused Reflection, though, it is helpful to deliberately activate brain circuits that naturally make you feel more positive. You can quickly do this by creating a pre-writing routine. Here is one example (but do some personal research to find something that works best for you):

1. Go for a five-minute walk (you can focus on your breathing as you do this) or jump up and down on the spot for 5 to 10 seconds (or more).
2. Then, before you start writing, quickly open and close your right hand several times.
3. At the same time, force yourself to smile.
4. Start writing (using the techniques I will show you shortly).

The reason for using your right hand, and not your left, is that the left prefrontal cortex is associated with positive emotions. The left side of your brain is activated by the right side of your body. So quickly opening and closing your right hand several times should help activate the left side of your prefrontal cortex. Forcing yourself to smile while you write will also have a similar impact!

#4: Have a WABA

One Focused Reflection writing technique I teach people is to have a “Written APE Brain Argument” (WABA). Instead of just rehearsing unhelpful thoughts and stories in your mind, write them down. Then write down structured arguments against each one.

If it is helpful, make a list of some of your worries/unhelpful thoughts. Then, use the following guidance to help you manage and reframe these unhelpful thoughts:

• Life-threatening score: Give each unhelpful thought a score out of 10, where 10 is life-threatening and 1 is an extremely unlikely worst-case scenario. Write down the score. This quickly helps put the thought into perspective.
• More details: Add more details about each unhelpful thought you are experiencing.
• Is this true?: Note whether or not these thoughts are true or correct.
• More helpful thoughts: Write down what thoughts might be more helpful to pay attention to instead.

Creating these types of written reflections is a skill you will get better at with practice.

#5: Find At Least 3 Positives for Every Negative

Along with writing out a WABA, we can also use Professor Barbara Fredrickson’s Grounded Positivity theory to supercharge our stress management writing. Research has shown that people who are thriving and flourishing pay attention to at least three positives for every one negative thought they experience.

Three-to-one is a minimum ratio. Sometimes, we might even need a ratio as high as 11-to-one.

So, every day, write down three positive or helpful things you’ve done and one thing you can improve on in the next 24 hours. Writing down thoughts is a great way to get more control over the words and pictures in your mind.

Why not give it a try right now? Take a moment to write a three-to-one reflection of your day so far.

#6: Refocus and Regulate Your Emotions

Finally, I would suggest refocusing and regulating emotions with long-form Expressive Writing. This will allow you to understand, reappraise, and reframe your thoughts, feelings, and, ultimately, your emotions.

The concept is simple. You write about your deepest thoughts and feelings connected to a prominent trauma or emotional challenge you’ve experienced. Experts in Expressive Writing encourage you to write about the same stressful event for 20 minutes a day for four consecutive days.

I’ve personally benefited from this long-form Focused Reflection technique. I find it helpful to have some questions I can ask myself (of course, these may change each time I reflect). While it’s not an exhaustive list, here are some of the questions I use:

• What event caused you to be stressed and why?
• What reminds you about the event and why?
• How can you reframe these reminders?
• How could the event have been worse?
• What are the benefits of the event?
• What is a more helpful story to tell yourself about this event?

Put the Strategies Into Practice

You now have some knowledge and skills relating to stress management. But this is not enough: you need to practice using these skills every day. This will help you turn some elements of how you manage stress into helpful habits.

For example, now that you understand how to regulate your breathing to help manage stress, why not try practicing 30-second bouts of controlled breathing as you walk around during the day?

Think about how you can incorporate these strategies into your day. Add them to your plan and start intentionally practicing them. As you do, you will find that you manage stress better and spend less time thinking unhelpful thoughts.

For more advice on how to manage your stress effectively, you can find The Habit Mechanic here.