This book has covered many techniques to reduce stress and tension. Essentially, they provide alternatives to your old stressful habits. You may have found that just practicing the new skills and observing the positive effects has caused you to give up your old habits. For instance, you may have found that practicing slow, deep breaths rather than short, constricted breaths results in a relaxed sense of well-being. This positive feedback from your body may have provided ample motivation for you to give up your old anxiety-provoking shallow breathing habit. However, if you are like most people, at some point you probably encountered some difficulty in exchanging familiar old habits for new ones. This chapter takes a look at why old habits are hard to part with, even when they are obviously contributing to your stress. It also offers some suggestions for how to deal with your own resistance to change.
If you find yourself skipping an exercise session you have contracted with yourself to do, or you are aware that you are just going through the motions of the exercises, ask yourself some of the following questions:
Chapter 16, Goal Setting and Time Management, covers many topics that could help you get back on track by: (1) clarifying what is most important to you; (2) setting goals; (3) developing an action plan; (4) evaluating how you spend your time; (5) combating procrastination; (6) organizing and prioritizing your time; and (7) dealing with overstimulation.
Taking Responsibility for Your Decisions
It is difficult to learn new habits on your own when, at first, the rewards for your efforts may be minimal. When distractions occur, decide whether you want to be detoured or to continue on your chosen route. If you decide to take the detour, do so with full awareness after weighing the pros and cons. Before going off on the detour, make an appointment with yourself for when and where you are next going to do your exercises. In this way you take responsibility for your decision. In addition, you are less likely to feel bad about yourself for not following through on your original plan, if that is your conscious choice.
What are the reasons you give yourself for skipping your exercises? Typical reasons are: “I’m too busy today,” “I’m too tired,” “Missing once won’t hurt,” “David needs my help,” “This isn’t working,” “This is boring,” “I feel relaxed and unstressed today, so I don’t need to exercise,” or “I feel too bad today to do the exercises.” These excuses are seductive because they are partially true. That is, you may really feel very busy or tired, somebody may need your help, and missing one session probably won’t hurt. The part that isn’t true is the implication that because you are busy or tired or someone needs your help, you cannot do the exercise sessions. A more truthful statement would be “I am tired. I could do the exercises, but I choose not to,” or “I could do my exercises, but I choose to help David rather than do them.” The important point here is that you take responsibility for your decision to choose one activity over another, rather than pretend that you are the passive victim of circumstances such as your fatigue, David’s demands, or any other priorities that keep you busy. You are in charge of your own life balance.
Confront Your Excuses
The excuses you give yourself for not doing your exercises are likely to be the same ones that you’ve used for years to keep yourself locked into a stressful situation. These excuses are based on faulty premises. For example, a busy executive firmly believed she had no right to relax until all her work was done. She thought that if she ever took some time for herself, her department would not achieve the goals and outcomes she had agreed to meet each year. Over the years, she became anxious and depressed, had difficulty maintaining relationships, and developed a number of physical complaints. Her perfectionist belief that she personally had to oversee all of the work in her department before she could ever have the time to relax had caused a gradual depletion of her energy. Realistically, the work is never done; therefore she could never relax.
But she had overlooked her innate right (some would call it an obligation) to relax and replenish her vital store of energy. This woman had defined her priorities as being “executive first” and “me second,” without taking into account the importance of maintaining good mental and physical health by relaxing and getting away from stressful activities for a while. If you, like this woman, say to yourself, “I’m indispensable. Important things won’t get done without me and may even fall apart…,” consider putting your mental and physical health at the top of your list of priorities. The key to productivity and good health is to create balance in your life.
If you are an energetic person who likes to get things done yesterday, when working with these exercises, slow down your pace. Having to prove yourself or needing to rush can only create stress. Enthusiasm may push you to take on too many exercises at once or to do the sessions for too long a time. When you do too much too fast, you run a high risk of burning out and losing interest. Furthermore, you are likely to feel guilty for not keeping up with the rigorous program you’ve set for yourself once your early enthusiasm calms down. Soon you will find yourself coming up with excuses to avoid doing your exercises at all (“I’m overextended already in so many areas of my life. Why should I add to my burden?”). In addition, you may feel confused when you begin to experience having more energy as a result of doing the relaxation and stress reduction exercises. Resist the temptation to pour this extra energy back into your work. Rather, use it for further rest and enjoyment.
If you find yourself saying things like “I just don’t feel like doing it today, maybe I will tomorrow …” day after day, give yourself a good mental kick or “talking to.” It is simply not true that you must be motivated to do something before you do it. Motivation is often sparked by action. For example, if you take a brisk ten-minute walk, you are likely to feel good from the results and want to continue. Tell yourself that you have to do an activity for only five or ten minutes. Often, once you are into an activity, the momentum of doing it will carry you through to its completion.
At the very least, without feeling an ounce of motivation, you can work on a project five or ten minutes a day until it is done. Sometimes, lack of motivation is a symptom of depression. However, depression often improves when you become more active. Tell yourself, “Of course you don’t feel like doing it. So what? Do it anyway!”
Confronting Roadblocks to Stress Management and Relaxation
If you read this workbook without doing any of the exercises, it’s likely that you are only dabbling. Intellectually, you see the value of the exercises, but, somehow, you never get much past the stage of thinking about them; or you may actually do some of the exercises but never apply them to everyday situations. For the dabbler, this is just another book with some interesting ideas, rather than a workbook promoting new ways of experiential learning to deal with stress.
There are some individuals who are frightened by novel experiences, and their fear becomes a roadblock to their success. You might become overwhelmed by some side effect of a relaxation technique, such as tingling in your arms and legs. Unfortunately, you may then stop the exercise instead of going on to find that the tingling isn’t harmful and disappears with time. You can get turned off by a single element of an exercise and, rather than changing the exercise to fit your needs, you may drop the entire exercise. Perhaps you don’t understand a step in the instructions and rather than ad-lib, you chuck the whole thing. It can be a valuable growth experience to work through these difficulties on your own or to find a friend who would be willing to interpret and do the exercises with you.
When Symptoms Persist
Sometimes stress symptoms persist in spite of regular relaxation and stress reduction work. If you are a conscientious person and have been practicing regularly, this can be disheartening. Below, you will find just a few of the most common reasons why this might be happening to you.
Are You Suggestible?
Some people are highly suggestible and once they learn about symptoms, they begin to experience every one they hear about. For example, one very tense policeman joined a relaxation group to overcome his tendency to hyperventilate when under stress. He began to experience all of the physical symptoms described by the other group members: migraines, lower back pain, rapid heartbeat, and so forth. Doing deep breathing or using his coping skills training helped him to combat these tendencies.
Do You Receive Some Benefit from Your Symptoms?
A surprising number of people are attached to their symptoms, which often serve a very definite purpose for them. For example, your headaches may get you out of interpersonal situations you want to avoid without having to take the responsibility of disappointing others. You can find out soon whether your symptoms rescue you from more unpleasant experiences by keeping a log noting when your symptoms first appear and the activities (or would-be activities) that surround them. If you suspect that your symptoms provide you with a “secondary gain” in this manner, refer to chapter 17, Assertiveness Training. It should provide you with the incentive and the tools to learn to be more direct in saying no, rather than having to resort to the discomfort of stress symptoms.
Are Your Symptoms a Reminder That You Need to Change Something?
Your symptoms of tension may be a signal that you are not dealing effectively with something in your life and that you are covering up your feelings. For example, you may be angry with your family but not sharing this fact with them. You might be putting off talking about a particular conflict because you don’t see any way to improve matters. For example, a nurse was visited every other weekend by her very spoiled, demanding stepdaughter. The nurse had agreed to the arrangement when she married and now she felt trapped by it. Over the course of three years, the visits from her stepdaughter invariably produced a migraine headache. To counteract this symptom, she finally negotiated a new contract with her husband that allowed her to spend Sundays on her own, away from home, while he spent the day with his daughter.
The people around you may very well be aware that you are withholding stressful feelings and that something is wrong. Nevertheless, they cannot read your mind and are unlikely to come to your rescue. You know best what you need. Letting others know your feelings and what you want opens the way to engaging them in helping you make a change.
Can You Find Other Ways to Take Care of Yourself?
Your symptoms may be your way of getting others to take care of you when you feel you cannot directly ask for help or for extra consideration. If you are tired and have a bad backache, someone else will have to do the cooking, cleaning, and keeping the house quiet. Ask yourself when your symptoms first began. What was going on in your life that might have contributed to them? One retired woman who had suffered from periodic colitis since early childhood recalled that her abdominal cramping had begun when her younger twin brothers were born. She remembered that the only time her busy mother ever had to hold and rock her was when she was suffering from the early symptoms of colitis. As an adult, she noted that she tended to get colitis symptoms only when her husband was away and left her alone in the evenings.
Does Your Way of Dealing with Stress Remind You of Someone Else in Your Life?
It is possible that you’ve developed a stress symptom similar to that of an important person in your life as a part of your identification with that person. For example, you may have learned not only to be hardworking and successful from your father, but also to deal with stress in a manner similar to the way he does. For example, carrying your tension in your jaw, you may come to the point of grinding your teeth just like your father. Since characteristic ways of responding to stress are generally learned, ask yourself who in your family shares your symptoms. It’s often easier to see how your relatives are not dealing effectively with the stress in their lives than to see it in yourself. The next step is to observe and see if the same is true for you.
If you continue having difficulty reducing the stress in your life, consider consulting a professional. You may be interested in one-on-one psychotherapy sessions, or in joining a relaxation and stress reduction group. Your doctor, company health plan, community health organization, local community college, and adult education programs are all good places to start looking for professional help.
Persistence Pays
Finally, don’t give up. Your ability to relax, learn to handle stress, and heal yourself can be tremendously empowering. Change might not always come easy—you may feel stuck in your old stressful habits—but you can do it. All it takes is patience, persistence, a commitment to yourself … and time.