CLUE IN TO YOUR THOUGHTS
AND FEELINGS
HAVE YOU STARTED to make the connections between your stress-inducing thoughts, your feelings, and your behavior? I hope listing your top five stress triggers helped you do just that. Now you are ready to begin thinking about how to change your thoughts in the moment so that you can feel less stressed in any given situation, environment, or relationship. The key here is to become keenly aware of your thoughts on a moment-by-moment basis when you are in situations that trigger stress. When you are fully aware of your thoughts, you can begin to adjust them accordingly.
The problem is that it’s impossible to be aware of all the thoughts that run through your head every second of every day. Think about it. We talk to ourselves internally more than we talk to anyone else. It’s OK to admit that. I’m talking to myself in my head right now. I’m very hungry and can’t wait to go get something to eat, but I won’t get up out of this chair without thinking it through in my head.
When I finish this paragraph, I’ll tell myself, “Well, let’s go get something to eat. Maybe I’ll try the Chinese place again. The last time was horrible, but, hey, everybody loses a hair while he is cooking now and then.” This inner dialogue will happen all day as I engage many different environments.
It is impossible to monitor our thoughts twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to catch any stress-inducing thoughts we may have. We just talk to ourselves too often. We have too many thoughts about ourselves, our lives, and the environments we encounter. In order to live a less-stressed life, we need to clue in to our thoughts, but we need to be selective about when we do this. It’s important that we become aware of our thoughts when we first begin to experience some sort of internal feeling of stress.
If you pay close attention to your feeling of stress, you will have a chance to recognize the thoughts driving your emotions and change your perspective. This may seem like an easy thing to do, but most people don’t recognize their feelings of stress in a given situation or environment until they are well into the process of stressing out. They ignore the subtle clues, and by the time they realize that they are indeed stressed, it’s too late. They are completely overcome with the physical, emotional, or mental effects of stress.
Sound familiar? If you’re like most people dealing with chronic stress, you probably don’t realize you are stressing out until the headache hits, your stomach is tied in knots, your mind is racing so fast you can’t keep up, or you just feel like an emotional wreck. And if you wait until then to begin to manage your stress, you will surely fail. At that point you are too caught up in the physical, emotional, mental, relational, or spiritual effects of your stress to take appropriate action.
It’s human nature. When your stress feels out of control, your main goal is simply to survive the situation, not necessarily to correct the underlying problem. If you want to live a less-stressed life, it is vitally important that you become keenly aware of your emotions so you can recognize the early signs of stress manifesting in your life.
The only way to become more emotionally aware is to practice. I know this may sound odd, but you can become a student of your emotions in general and your stress levels in particular. You can study your emotional experience on a consistent basis to tease out when feelings of stress are very subtly starting to stir within you. When you can catch yourself on the front end of stress, you are in a good position to begin cluing in to the thoughts that are driving it.
FOCUS ON YOUR STRESS-INDUCING THOUGHTS
You will find a stress log at the end of today’s reading that will help you practice becoming more aware of when your stress starts emotionally. As you become more aware of your thoughts, you will probably begin to see themes or categories emerge that are without question stress inducing. Researchers have identified several different kinds of thoughts that typically lead to stress. I call these “hot thoughts,” meaning they will usually lead to a significant experience of stress. I’ve included a summary of some of these thoughts so you can identify any that are at work in your life.1
• All-or-Nothing Thoughts. Individuals with these hot thoughts tend to see things in absolute, black-and-white categories. Example: “Either I am perfectly competent in everything I do, or I am a failure.”
• Overgeneralization. People with these thoughts assume bad events will happen over and over, or that things are always a certain way. Example: “The neighborhood dogs will always choose to relieve themselves on my lawn.”
• Mental Filter. This type of hot thought causes a person to focus on the negative parts of life and filter out the positive. Example: “My job is awful because I don’t get paid enough.” (But he will overlook the fact that he has good work conditions, hours, etc.)
• Magnification and Globalization. People with these hot thoughts magnify their mistakes and make them a big deal. Example: “I’m terrible with the kids because I just yelled at them.”
• Personalization. These hot thoughts lead a person to accept blame for negative events involving others. Example: “My family would be well adjusted if it weren’t for me.”
Although not all your hot thoughts will fall neatly into these categories, you will probably see some themes that are consistent with one or more of these tendencies. As you begin to clue in to your thoughts on a consistent basis, take note of which category (or categories) seems to best reflect your thought life.
Tomorrow we will talk about what to do with these kinds of hot thoughts when you are able to identify them in the moment. In the meantime, it’s important that you practice cluing in to your thoughts when you begin to feel stress. You can’t monitor your thoughts all day every day, but you can use the feeling of stress as a signal to focus in on the thoughts you are having about yourself, a particular situation, or other people.
Trust me, this is harder than it seems because the more intense a situation becomes emotionally, the more difficult it is to find the energy to attend to your thoughts. Don’t get me wrong: cluing in to your thoughts when you’re feeling stressed is not impossible, but you must intentionally practice these skills.
This is why I created the stress log. This form will help you practice cluing in to your thoughts and feelings on the front end of a stressful experience. This is critically important, so I am going to ask you to complete this form every day for the rest of the program. Because the skill of recognizing your thoughts and feelings during stressful times is obviously of the utmost importance, please take this portion of the program seriously.
The stress log will help you pay close attention to your internal experience by encouraging you to intentionally log your thoughts and feelings every few hours throughout the day, regardless of whether or not you are feeling stressed. Honestly, the program becomes quite demanding at this point. It is hard to remember to carry a stress log with you all day and to fill it out every so often. But keep in mind that your future won’t change until you intentionally change the present.
On the first day you begin filling out your stress log (which I hope is Day Six of the program for you), you need only to log the first four columns. By the end of your reading on Day Seven, you will know how to complete every column of the stress log and will be well on your way to challenging the thoughts that are creating and supporting your stress.
ASSIGNMENT
• Complete the first four columns of the stress log.
• Practice passive or active relaxation for twenty minutes.
STRESS LOG
This stress log will help you practice becoming more aware of the emotions you experience when your stress begins. On Day Six, complete only the first four columns.
