Self-help tips for stress management (part 3)
24th January 2022
This is the third instalment of a series of posts about things you can do for yourself to manage stress. All the suggestions are aimed at building resilience and promoting that open and happy state in which we enjoy life to the full.
In this post, I will talk about the benefits of:
- Going for a walk
- Visualising things going well
- Spending time with other people
If some of these suggestions seem obvious, they are nevertheless worth repeating – and putting into action!
Go for a walk!
If you are feeling jaded, stressed or anxious, going for a walk can do a lot to improve your mental state or mood – particularly if you go for a walk in daylight and can walk in the park or countryside.
Going for walk at any time is good for you, but walking in daylight, particularly within two hours of your normal waking time, is extra good for your wellbeing:
- daylight suppresses the production of melatonin (a hormone which promotes sleep) and helps you to feel wide awake during the day;
- it resets your body clock so that you are ready to sleep in the evening;
- it triggers the release of serotonin, a neurotransmitter, and will improve your motivation and mood.
Walking in a park or the countryside – or even just taking the air in a garden – will bring additional benefits. Compounds produced by many plant species have beneficial effects on our immune, endocrine, circulatory and nervous systems.
An ideal walk length is thirty minutes, but you can, for example, do fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes in the evening, and that will bring the same benefits.
Visualise things going well!
The human brain reacts more strongly to negative events than positive ones. That bias is increased when we feel stressed: our brains actively look for threats – and this maintains and probably increases the feelings of anxiety, irritation and stress.
Research shows that to be happy in our lives, we need, on average, three positive experiences to counterbalance each negative one (Alex Korb, The Upward Spiral).
If you find yourself struggling with negative thoughts, it can be a really helpful thing to start to strengthen your brain circuits responsible for optimism. Alex Korb and fellow neuro-scientist Wendy Suzuki both suggest that we train ourselves to:
- imagine the possibility that positive future events could happen;
- and expect that they will happen.
It can be a lot easier than you might think to imagine positive outcomes. An NLP technique I have used many time is simply to visualise things going well as if watching myself on a TV or in a film. This tells the brain what to do when I am in that situation, and it need only take a few seconds.
For example, if I am not looking forward to a social event I visualise myself having a good time at the event. If I am not sure what to do in a work situation, I visualise myself being creative and confident and see myself doing really well.
So if you have something coming which you are not feeling comfortable about, imagine it going really well – not just OK but really well. If you don’t think that you are good at visualisation, tell yourself how you would like things to go – and you can increase the effect by self-havening at the same time.
This is not to set yourself up for disappointment if you don’t get the outcome you want, but to build up an optimistic mindset and maybe even open up greater possibilities for creating that outcome.
Spend time with other people
Humans are social animals and interacting with other people is one of the best things we can do to help ourselves feel better – especially if we are able to do something enjoyable with them, like going for a walk or a coffee, or playing a game. Spending time with a friend, or even talking to a stranger, has been shown to improve your mood.
Unfortunately, covid 19 limited the amount of socialising we can do with others and this has no doubt increased feelings of stress and anxiety for many While some people react by being desperate to get out and see other people, others may feel less confident about connecting with others. If you are in the latter group, give yourself some encouragement by visualising yourself having a good time.
If you can – and subject to taking covid 19 precautions – arrange to spend time with other people. If that isn’t an option, have a telephone call or a video call with a friend or relative. Maybe that call could be just what they need too!
Discover more things that you can do to help yourself
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