You’re up to your ears in it. It’s everywhere you go. It keeps you awake at night, and it really gets you when you’re taking a test. It’s big. It’s small. Your friends have it, too. In fact, your family has it and so do your teachers. You feel like you’re maxed out. What it is—is stress! Stress seems to be everywhere. Some or a lot of the time, you feel overwhelmed or bored in school, upset or angry about a relationship, pressure to fit in, fearful of a new situation, or worried about a situation at home.
But that’s not all. When you feel stressed because you got angry or frustrated about something, words may fly out of your mouth—even to your friends—and those words may not be the greatest things to say. You feel disappointed because you can’t be as good as people expect you to be and when you feel a lot of pressure, it’s difficult to do well in school—or to do anything well.
It’s not just your brain that can’t think clearly when you’re anxious or nervous. Your body feels it, too. Your shoulders become tight and rise. Your jaw tenses, and sometimes you grind your teeth. Not to mention your upset stomach, which feels like it’s in knots when you experience the pressure of everything piling up. You toss and turn in bed because it’s hard to sleep or you’re so emotionally exhausted you sleep a lot. Even when you’re just sitting still, your foot pulsates up and down like it’s running a race. All those clenching, tight muscles and your racing foot are signs that your emotions are over-amped and out of control, which drains a lot of your energy.
On top of that, life isn’t as enjoyable when you’re worried, fearful, or bored. Ever notice that? When you’re stressed, you’re more irritable and cranky. Things just get under your skin and you are quicker to get angry or frustrated. Sometimes it makes you want to be alone and not do stuff you really like to do. Even hanging out with your friends isn’t as much fun. It can feel like there’s pressure coming at you from all directions all the time. Feeling stressed is not a pretty picture.
“I have anxiety nagging at me all the time. This voice inside me says that I should be doing better. I should be doing the right thing. It just takes over. And then, if I do something that I probably shouldn’t have, I worry about it for a week to see if I will get busted by my dad or my teachers.”
So what can you do about your day-to-day stress? Instead of feeling overwhelmed, what if there was a way to transform the stress in your life? What benefits might you gain if you transformed your stress? Let’s take a look now at what that might mean for you.
At the heart of managing stress is how you respond to a situation. Challenging situations, big and small, are a part of life, no matter how old you are. It’s how you handle those situations that counts.
Managing stress means learning to manage your emotions so you can deal with whatever comes your way with more balance, clarity, and self-assurance rather than with anger, impatience, frustration, or anxiety. When you can do this, you’ll feel more confident, less doubtful or fearful, and you’ll have less stress. When you get upset—and who doesn’t?—it doesn’t take as long to bounce back from disappointments and disagreements. You may find that you are more patient when stuff comes up, and you feel calmer and less rattled when doing things like taking a test or having an edgy conversation with someone.
Managing stress means managing your emotional reactions, which can make the difference between getting into a big argument and finding a way to work things out. When you de-stress, you have a better sense of what’s important to you and what isn’t worth your time or energy. You’ve got better things to do! With less stress, you can go about your day with fewer tight jaw muscles and knots in your stomach. Simply put, when you are able to manage your stress, you feel better and do better.
Here’s what less stress means:
What would having less stress mean to you in your life? Take your time with this question. What would your day or even one situation look like, if you experienced less stress? What would you feel like if you had less stress? Take a moment and write your thoughts down in your notebook.
Now that you’ve thought a bit about how you would feel if you had less stress, how exactly can you experience less stress in your day-to-day life? As we’ve said, managing stress means managing your emotional reactions. That’s not always as easy as it sounds. Building your resilience will help increase your ability to better handle all the daily stuff that comes your way and is an important key for transforming stress. HeartMath defines resilience as the capacity to prepare for, recover from, and adapt in the face of stress, challenge, or adversity. The techniques in this book will help you build resilience so you have greater ability to handle situations. We’ll talk specifically about resilience a little later in this chapter, but right now, let’s talk about you because less stress means more you—the real you!
Obviously in a book about stress, we’re going to talk a lot about it. But first, let’s talk about the real you—the person you really are. The person, you, who is full of vitality, creativity, kindness, adventure, and fun. Okay, so that may feel a hundred miles away. We get that. You’ve got some tough stuff going on in your life that smothers all of who you really are—the best you, the resilient you. So before we talk about stress, let’s talk about the real you.
Maybe it feels like you’ve been put down so many times that you’ve forgotten you. And for some of you reading this book, you may have indeed been belittled, put down, and let down for a long time. We want you to rediscover, or perhaps discover for the first time, what makes you come alive. We want you to know, feel, and live all of who you really are every day—or at least a whole lot more often. You have probably had pep talks like this before, but nothing ever came of it. This book introduces techniques that you can use anytime and anywhere to help you uncover, unleash, and unsmother you! Let’s start with an exercise to help you uncover or rediscover the real you beneath all the stress.
Exercise: Finding the Real You
You’ll need your notebook for this, so go ahead and get it out. We’re going to ask you some questions to help you explore what the real you feels and looks like. You might want to find a quiet place so you won’t have distractions or interruptions. This is your time. You might do a little now and come back to it again later. Or you might have some thoughts that come up at another time that you can add to your notebook when you get a chance.
Step 1: Take a few breaths that are a little slower and deeper than usual. This can help quiet mind chatter and scattered thoughts.
Step 2: Ask yourself: Who am I underneath all the stress and day-to-day stuff that comes at me? What makes me come alive (that’s legal and doesn’t get me into trouble!)?
It might be helpful to recall moments when you were “the best you,” even if they were brief moments. Open your notebook and write down every uplifting, inspiring, renewing, fulfilling thing you know about yourself. As you think of other qualities, add them to your list. It’s not that you have to have a long list. Even just a couple things can help you have a target to aim for. The target is simply you and not what others might say about you or think about you.
Here are some other questions you might ask yourself:
Step 3: Consider qualities you see in other people that you respect and value:
What you see in them may be hidden qualities that you have.
Step 4: If you’re having difficulty seeing anything worthwhile about yourself, then imagine the person you would be if you were your very best. Not things like being taller, shorter, skinnier, fatter, or smarter—it’s not imagining the person who has bigger muscles or who wears expensive designer clothes and who has the latest smartphone.
More than likely, the qualities of the person you imagine yourself to be when you are your best are really the qualities you truly possess—for example, fun, creative, kind, honest, hardworking, adventuresome, love to learn (and it doesn’t have to be only learning things in your classes), a good friend, loyal, and so on. Write these down in your notebook.
Step 5: Make a collage or draw pictures that represent the very best of you—the you who is underneath all the stress. Have fun with this. You don’t have to be an artist. Stick figures are fine! Get out colored pencils to help make it fun. Some people make collages with lots of pictures that represent different parts of themselves—their silly and fun side, their strong side, or their wise side. You might find words or phrases in a magazine that describe you. Cut those out, too. Be sure to put the collage somewhere you can see it. That way, on days when nothing seems to be going right, you can remind yourself of who’s really inside so you can find your way back to your real self.
Okay, now that you’re getting to know who you really are, let’s take a look at what gets in the way of you being the real you.
The word “stress” is used a lot in everyday language, but what does it really mean? We say things like, “School stresses me out” or “I get so stressed being around him.” Stress, however, is not the “thing” that just happened or the situation on the outside—stress is the feeling or emotion you experience inside yourself in response to the “thing,” that external event or situation. It’s the emotion that makes you feel lousy, not the “thing” itself. The “thing” (event or situation) is called the stressor. You can think of the stressor as what “triggers” the feeling of being stressed.
Let’s say, for instance, that you’re wearing a favorite pair of jeans, and as you walk down the hall, they get caught on a locker door and rip—and it’s a big rip. No repairing this one! You’re fuming. We’ve all had stuff like that happen. Being mad is one of the feelings we experience when we say we are stressed. The stress is not caused by the ripped pants. The ripped pants are simply clothes and the locker door is simply a door. Stress is typically the feeling or emotion you experience in response to a situation or an interaction. In this case, the stress is the feeling of being mad that you experience about ripping your favorite pants.
Trying to sweep the stressful feelings under the rug doesn’t work very well, especially in the long run. So let’s turn the table on stress and look at it differently. We think you’ll find that understanding stress from a different perspective will help you see that you can handle life’s day-to-day situations more effectively.
The following are a few examples of feelings and emotions people often experience as stress. There are many more. In your notebook, write down any of these (or others you can think of) that you have experienced recently.
But why do you experience stress? Could it be that stress tells you something important?
The feelings of stress are actually warning signs that something is out of sync. If you ignore those signs, especially the emotional signs, you can get so used to the feeling of stress that stress becomes what you typically feel. But that does not mean stress is good for you. It just means that it is what feels familiar to you because you experience it often. When many people in a particular environment, like school, feel stressed much of the time, a climate of stress is created that seems almost natural. That can make it much more difficult for individuals to see their own stress clearly—unless they know how to.
As troublesome as stress is, it can actually be an opportunity for learning if you approach it positively and with an attitude like a detective. That means paying attention to the different “clues”—the signs of stress like anxiety, headaches, nausea, or becoming annoyed. Those signs alert you to the fact that you may be experiencing stress that you are not aware of. The signs of stress in your body can give you valuable clues about what kinds of things trigger stress for you and the unique ways that you respond. When you experience any of the signs of stress, it’s a good time to practice one of the techniques in this book.
You can think of the list of emotions and feelings above as signs of stress. There are other signs of stress, too—mental, physical, and behavioral signs. The lists below give examples of each of these. Something that many people don’t realize is that what is hiding beneath the mental, physical, and behavioral signs of stress is usually an emotional upset, such as the emotions listed above: frustration, sadness, anger.
As you read the following lists of mental, physical, and behavioral signs of stress, write down in your notebook any that apply to you. Add others that you come up with. Think of this as taking an inventory that reveals how your emotions can, in many different ways, affect your mind, body, and relationships. Signs are not bad. They are simply different ways people are affected by stress.
“My grades started slipping at the end of the year because I felt so much stress.”
“I worry about everything and feel so confused.”
“It’s hard for me to focus on my homework.”
“When I get overwhelmed, I just want to leave the world behind and go play Xbox.”
“I can’t sleep and I stop eating when I’m stressed.”
“I get acne and blemishes when I feel a lot of stress.”
“I have mini panic attacks and my throat feels tight.”
“I feel like I have a heavy weight on my shoulders.”
“Family drama! We end up arguing all the time.”
“There’s so much pressure to do drugs and have sex that I withdraw, and then I feel lonely.”
By paying attention to the signs of stress, you can know when something is out of balance in your life. And when you know that something is out of balance, you can find ways to decrease stress and get your life back in balance. You can get back to being the real you.
As we mentioned above, resilience plays a very important role in your ability to manage stress. Understanding how to build your resilience can help you reduce your stress. Remember that resilience is the capacity to prepare for, recover from, and adapt in the face of stress, challenge, or adversity. To understand how resilience applies to reducing your stress, think of your resilience as how much energy you have stored in your inner battery. Although you don’t have an actual battery inside you like your cell phone does, your body works as though it has an inner battery. Just like your cell phone stores energy so you can talk and text, your body also stores energy.
The amount of energy you have in your inner battery affects you physically, mentally, and emotionally. After all, your body turns the food you eat into energy, the very energy that gives you the ability to do all the things you do throughout the day. You need physical energy to walk, climb stairs, carry your backpack, work out, play sports, and dance. You need mental energy to be able to focus and concentrate, think clearly, know what you want to say to someone, and remember things you have learned when taking a test. You also need emotional energy because it motivates and inspires you and makes life interesting and meaningful. Emotional energy is also what connects you to others, gives you the courage to do the right thing, helps you appreciate your successes, and enables you to be kind and caring. It gives you a deeper sense of purpose. Without emotions, you would be like a robot.
Here is a key to resilience that we want you to remember: When your inner battery has more energy stored in it, it means you’re more resilient and better able to handle whatever comes up during the day. It’s an inner energy that’s available so you can bounce back faster when you get knocked off your feet and be better prepared to handle daily stuff—big or small. On the other hand, when your inner battery is low, you have less energy—physical, mental, and emotional—which makes it more difficult to be in charge of how you respond in situations. When your battery is drained, you may find things get under your skin more easily and you become upset more quickly. You may blurt out things or do things that later you wish you hadn’t. It’s more difficult to think clearly and make good decisions, which can make it nearly impossible to handle any situation well.
For example, can you think of someone who knows how to push your buttons, someone who knows just the right thing to say or do to upset you? You get mad or irritated and mumble to yourself about what the person has said or done. Who or what irritates, angers, or frustrates you? For many people, it’s either someone they love and care about or it’s a situation they can’t control. Some people are more likely to fly off the handle when they feel bad physically, such as when they’re sick or when they’re feeling anxious. Other people hang on to anger from past situations and blow a fuse if someone looks at them the wrong way. For people who are impatient, situations that cause delays, such as a slow line at the drive-through window or a traffic jam, can quickly cause anger. Tempers flare at the smallest things. All of these—the people, places, and issues outside of you that push your buttons—your stressors—can quickly drain your resilience, which then can make it even more difficult to “take charge” of how you respond.
Now here’s something interesting that most people don’t fully understand or appreciate—it’s something that can put you in the driver’s seat rather than throw you under the stress bus: emotions have a powerful effect on your inner battery and your resilience. Some emotions, the lousy-feeling ones, drain your battery and your resilience, while other emotions, the ones that feel good, recharge it. This is very important because when you don’t have much energy in your inner battery, meaning your resilience is low, it’s much more difficult to be your best no matter what you’re doing. When your inner battery is drained, it is more difficult to handle situations you may face—like trying to concentrate when you’re taking a test. It’s more difficult to respond appropriately rather than simply react to a situation. The lack of understanding of how to manage emotions is one of the main causes of today’s stress epidemic. People believe that the thinking mind rules. But more often than not, it’s our emotions that determine our choices and behaviors.
Recall a time when you were angry, overwhelmed, anxious, scared, frustrated, or irritated. (We call these types of emotions depleting emotions because they deplete or drain your energy.) You might have noticed that your heart raced and your body was tense. You weren’t just imagining it. That’s what was actually happening in your body. Experiencing strong depleting emotions like the ones mentioned above is like flooring the gas pedal of a car, resulting in a rapid emotional energy burn.
Some depleting emotions run quietly in the background, and you may not even notice them at first. These “quieter” depleting emotions drain your inner battery, too, but it tends to be a slow drain. Every small depleting emotion, even the ones you say are “no big deal”—like feeling worried, sad, bored, or lonely or when you withdraw from the world around you—drains your battery, and these small depleting emotions add up, big time. You accumulate stress when you carry around depleting emotions without resolving them. Depleting emotions aren’t bad or wrong. They’re just letting you know something is out of balance. So it’s very important to stop energy drains, even the quiet ones. By stopping them, you not only minimize the energy drain, but you also put the brakes on stress. This means you have a smoother rhythm and pace throughout the day because you can handle things that come up in better ways.
The trigger feeling often starts with a stabbing feeling of anger, insecurity, or frustration. It’s only human to have these feelings. Again, the feelings aren’t bad. It’s what you do with them that matters. So let’s say that a classmate says something that angers you like, “You’re really stupid.” You feel yourself boiling over inside. If you let the anger take over, it can run freely and flood your thoughts and then affect your actions and decisions in such a way that you end up getting into a fight. If you let an emotion such as anger or irritation build, you can end up even more irritated or angry, which drains huge amounts of energy. When you allow moans and groans to go unattended with thoughts like It’s so unfair or That’s just the way it is along with feelings of blame, resignation, and frustration, your inner battery will be zapped.
On the other hand, feeling calm, enthusiastic, hopeful, and appreciative, for example, not only feels good, but also recharges your inner battery. (We call emotions like these renewing emotions because they renew or recharge your energy.) In the next chapter, we’ll talk more about how that works and how to recharge your battery. We’ll show you how to put renewing emotions to work for you. But before we do that, let’s look more closely at your energy drains. Then we’ll introduce a technique to help you prevent your energy from being drained.
The first step is to identify stressors—what drains your energy—and how they make you feel. Let’s face it though. Most people have difficulty acknowledging their feelings and may fear that others will judge them if they talk about emotions. If you’re like most teens, or people of any age for that matter, you don’t like to admit you’re hurting or feeling bad, that your emotions are running you ragged, or that you feel a slow burn inside. You’d rather ignore such feelings or take them out on others. It’s not “cool” to appear “uncool.” But when these energy-draining emotions are not identified and handled effectively, stress builds and you may blow up, hide under the covers, or freeze like a deer staring into headlights. As a result, your enjoyment of life diminishes and “being your best” is next to impossible.
Identifying your stressors is a very important step, so don’t skip over the following exercise! It will help you better see what triggers stress for you. You’ll need your notebook or journal for this exercise. Find a quiet place that is free of distractions and take your time doing it.
Exercise: What Drains Your Battery?
Part 1: Identify Your Stressors
Step 1: Listed below are things that teens commonly report as stressing them out. In your notebook, write down any that are stressors for you. You may think of others not on the list. Write those down, too.
That’s quite a list of potential stressors, and you may have thought of others. They are the things that keep you from being all of who you really are.
Step 2: Look at each stressor you wrote down and rate it as to how much energy it drains from you, using this scale:
Let’s use homework as an example of how to do the exercise: If you feel a little stress about your homework, rate it as 1 (slight energy drain). If you experience medium stress about homework, rate it as 2 (medium energy drain). If you experience a lot of stress, rate it as 3 (you guessed it—a big energy drain).
For each one you rated as 1, 2, or 3, ask yourself how often you experience that energy drain. For any that you experience often, it’s probably a major source of your stress and a big energy drain.
Part 2
We want you to do one more thing with your list. For each of the stressors, write down a word or two that describes how that stressor makes you feel. For example, do you feel anxious, overwhelmed, bored, angry, sad, worried, scared, pressured, frustrated, or impatient?
Take your time and think how each stressor affects your inner battery and resilience. This exercise will let you know what stressors are draining your energy. After all, before you can stop what drains your energy, you have to know what’s causing it.
The good news is—and it’s really good news—that although you may not be able to change your stressors, you can learn to change how you respond to them. It all begins with you taking charge of your emotions and how you respond in situations. That puts you in the driver’s seat. We’ll now introduce a breathing technique that will help you do just that.
“I really found Heart-Focused Breathing helped me a lot with emotions, my relationships with my friends and family, and just in everyday life, especially when I’m stressed out.”
There are many different types of breathing techniques, such as those used in martial arts and yoga. Each breathing technique has a purpose. You can think of Heart-Focused Breathing as a technique to stop your reaction to a stressor in the moment, which in turn stops the drain on your inner battery. It also creates an emotional pause so you don’t react automatically. You can use this technique anytime, anywhere to help you handle challenging situations. When you do Heart-Focused Breathing, you put your attention around your heart area. This helps you refocus and feel calmer. Heart-Focused Breathing is simple, but it can pack a punch! As simple as it is, it takes practice to get all the benefits.
“I used Heart-Focused Breathing when I was in an embarrassing moment. I calmed down and then I handled the situation calmly.”
First, we’ll introduce the technique. Then we’ll give you some helpful tips about how to do it. And finally, you’ll have a chance to practice the technique.
Technique: Heart-Focused Breathing
Focus your attention in the area of the heart. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area, breathing a little slower and deeper than usual.
Here are a few helpful tips to get the most out of Heart-Focused Breathing:
Now, try Heart-Focused Breathing for one to two minutes: Focus your attention in the area of the heart. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area, breathing a little slower and deeper than usual.
Suggestion: Inhale five seconds, exhale five seconds (or whatever rhythm is comfortable).
After practicing the technique, do you feel calmer and more balanced? Do you have less mind chatter and feel less distracted? Is your body less tense and have your shoulders dropped? What else do you notice? Write down in your notebook anything you noticed or experienced.
When you practice Heart-Focused Breathing, you may not always feel like much is happening or that it’s really making a difference. But it is. It all adds up! So use it even when you don’t feel any stress—and especially use it when stressors trigger you. That’s when it can make a big difference.
If you practice Heart-Focused Breathing throughout the day, you will find that it becomes more comfortable and natural. Then, when you really need it in a stressful moment, it will be easier to do. Although it’s a simple technique, Heart-Focused Breathing can be more challenging to use when you’re triggered unless you practice it when you don’t need it. So practice it a lot and try to make it a new habit. As one person said, “I’m breathing all day anyway, so I’ll make it Heart-Focused Breathing.”
Heart-Focused Breathing can be done anytime, anywhere. It truly can be done “on the go.” Practice Heart-Focused Breathing in everyday situations such as these:
“When I do the breathing, I can think more clearly about what I’m doing in a situation rather than just reacting right away.”
Heart-Focused Breathing will not make miracles happen, but it can lower your stress levels in a big way. Heart-Focused Breathing, however, will work only if you use it. That’s the only way you will get the benefits that thousands of other teens and adults report.
Now that you’ve learned the technique, it’s time to put it to practice for a couple of days. It’s also important to pay attention to what triggers stress for you and how you feel in those moments.
We’ve discussed in this chapter the importance of understanding that stress is how you feel, not the thing that happened. And that’s good because most of the time you can’t change other people or fix situations, but you can learn how to handle whatever comes up. Handling your emotional reactions in day-to-day situations and challenges more effectively means less stress. Heart-Focused Breathing is the first step in stopping energy drains and those automatic reactions.
In the next chapter, we’re going to show you how to quickly recharge your battery. We’ll also talk about other ways that having a fully charged inner battery is important and beneficial.
Before going on to the next chapter, however, do the following action plan for the next two or three days or longer. There’s no need to rush to the next chapter. If you want to manage your stress, the practices in the action plan are a must. Do them every day, wherever you are, whatever you are doing—and no one will even know you’re doing them.
Your Stress-Bustin’, Resilience-Boostin’, On-the-Go Action Plan
Starting with a smaller goal gives you practice. You might think of it as building your resilience muscle. After all, most people don’t walk into the weight room and start lifting two hundred pounds. It takes effort, focus, and practice to gain the ability to lift more weight or, in the case of managing stress, to gain the ability to feel calm or balanced.