CUT DOWN ON STRESSORS WHEN POSSIBLE
Beware the barrenness of a busy life.
—SOCRATES
We can’t remove all stress from our lives (and, frankly, we wouldn’t want to), but we can remove a significant amount of it by identifying our chronic stressors and eliminating them wherever possible. While other chapters have covered strategies for coping with stressors that cannot be eliminated, this chapter will help you to identify areas of your life where you can eliminate or reduce chronic stress triggers and create action plans for enacting these changes in a realistic way.
Pecked to Death by Ducks!
Danielle liked that she was everyone’s go-to person. She ran a successful business, had children, and held positions of leadership in several groups in her spare time. If people needed to get something done, they could go to Danielle, because she was efficient and loved taking on projects. She also felt overwhelmed at times, when all her commitments needed her attention at once. Sometimes she felt invigorated by her many activities, as when, for example, she was working on completing a project she really enjoyed. Other times, she thought of herself as “being pecked to death by ducks”—when she had many different people needing “just one small thing” from her at once or when she noticed a few too many things in her life that needed a minor amount of attention. All these small responsibilities had a way of adding up to a heavy load. Everyone has a limit; when Danielle started experiencing heart palpitations, she didn’t recognize the chance that she was approaching hers. When she had her first panic attack, she had to reexamine her lifestyle.
After talking to her doctor and learning that stress was a factor in her case, she started taking a closer look at her life and her choices. In the process of examining her life, she realized that she pushed herself harder than was necessary or healthy. As part of finding a healthier balance, Danielle learned to examine her body’s signs that she was getting in over her head, and she learned to make changes before she felt overwhelmed and experienced physical sensations that led to panic attacks. She also discovered that she had many responsibilities that were not beneficial to her and only drained her energy. Armed with a new understanding of where her “ducks” were hiding, she took the initiative to cull the clutter of her life and put a stop to the unnecessary “pecks.” This took some energy at first, but she found that she was much less stressed once she did some cleanup. Now Danielle still has a full, busy life, but her schedule is filled to a manageable level, and she enjoys it without the undue stress.
Why It’s Important to Cut Down on All Stressors
Volumes have been written on the importance of remaining unstressed regardless of circumstances, on the concept that a great deal of stress lies in our perceptions, and on the fact that we always have choices to make and options to take. (I explored this truth in Key 4.) However, these elements are only part of the equation. While internal shifts are powerful and can go far in helping us to relieve stress, it is important to remember that cutting out stressors whenever possible is also a valid and important stress management strategy.
When we think about cutting out the things that cause us stress, we often focus on the biggies: the job that causes us endless frustration, the marriage that makes us feel trapped, or the financial straits that keep us up at night. These things are important to tackle, but they often don’t come with easy answers or quick solutions; often we need to work toward amenable solutions with such challenges and move forward in specific steps and phases. Quitting a job may be done in an e-mail that takes 5 minutes to write, or a marriage can end with the words “I don’t—anymore,” but the fallout from such choices (fallout such as the often difficult search for a new job or the process of divorce and emotional healing) means that stress relief doesn’t come in the same short time frame.
Stop Sweating the Small Stuff
Another way to relieve stress—one that is considered less often but can bring more immediate results—is to cut out the small stressors that add up to feelings of chronic stress. These are those little things that we are able to endure but that take a toll on our peace of mind: the annoying friend who can’t take a hint, the messy desk that seems to swallow up important papers, the weekly commitment we always seem to dread.
Life coaches call these things tolerations because, as the name suggests, we simply tolerate them. We may not even pay attention to their presence in our lives, but we feel it. A common focus in coaching is to identify and eliminate tolerations and to work toward keeping them from creeping in and taking over. We all have tolerations in our lives, and they do take a toll.
The Toll of Tolerations
Tolerations aren’t overwhelming in themselves, but they can push us over the edge, taking us from feeling serene to irritated or from stressed to overwhelmed. And as I described in previous chapters, when we are operating from a place of feeling more stressed, things tend to snowball.
Eliminating these small stressors doesn’t always seem worth it when we think about how much more stress we could eliminate by cutting out our larger sources of stress. This is why most of us just let the small stressors continue on as unquestioned parts of our lives. However, they are not as harmless as we may think or as forgettable as we would hope, and they are worthy of the relatively small effort it takes to eliminate them, given the overall toll they can take when they add up. Here are a few specific ways in which we sabotage ourselves by letting these nagging little energy drains remain in our lives.
We Have a Finite Amount of Energy
Just as we have only so many hours in a day, we have a limited amount of energy to spend during those hours. When we allow ourselves to focus on small things that aren’t vital to our lives—especially when those things are experienced as physically or emotionally draining—we are making choices. We may not realize that our expending what seems a minor amount of time and energy in one area of life means that we have that much less time and energy for something else that may be more important. (We may even reason that we’ll make time for or push ourselves to do both things, but this may be at the expense of our peace of mind or precious downtime, which also should be considered important.)
If Crisis Strikes, You Need a Margin of Error
You may need extra time and energy for life’s unexpected hiccups—a surprise trip to the dentist, an unexpected empty tank of gas—as well as for major crises such as serious illnesses and car accidents. If you are working to maximum capacity with a high number of obligations that each carry a low level of importance, you will have a harder time rising to the occasion.
You Want to Operate from Your Least Stressed Place
Because we respond differently when we are operating from a place of stress, these little things can add up to a big difference in our behavior and reactions. Are they worth the state of episodic or chronic stress they can push us into? What about the mistakes we make when we’re not at our best? The relationships we strain when we snap at our loved ones? The enjoyment of life we miss because we are feeling stressed instead of excited by new challenges? This is something to seriously consider.
Even with Healthy Mental Coping, Stress Takes a Toll
We have covered strategies for altering our thoughts and perceptions so that we do not feel unnecessarily stressed. This doesn’t mean, however, that we should not do whatever we can to cut down on the stressors we face. There is evidence that even with the best mental coping strategies, situations that require action from us—situations that are generally regarded as stressful—can still exact a physical toll, even if we do not perceive them as distressing. There is no need to take a risk with the negative effects of stress. If you are not getting a strong payoff from the things in your life that keep you busy and drain your energy, those things should be eliminated. Period.
How to Manage: Cutting Out Stressors
You may already be very clear about the sources of your stress from the activities discussed in Key 1. If you have a list of identified stressors to address, you are ahead of the game! Here are some strategies that can address many of the common, low- to medium-grade stressors we face. Some of the more stressful situations we face in life may require particular responses that are best addressed by resources specifically geared to them (financial planning resources help with pressing money issues; books on health issues assist in dealing with the stress that comes with a serious medical condition), but most of the midlevel stressors that leave us feeling “pecked to death by ducks” can be addressed by using the advice below.
Set Boundaries with Co-workers and Friends
Do you have co-workers who take up your time with conversations that don’t interest you, and do they seem to read body language poorly? Do they push their work off onto you or eat the food you keep in the office refrigerator, or are they generally difficult to be around? Setting boundaries at work is key. In setting boundaries, you simply are clear about what you are willing to do and not do (I touch on boundaries in greater detail in Key 6). Rather than relying on body language to communicate that you would rather not be engaged in conversation, why not politely excuse yourself? Let your co-workers know when they have crossed the line with you. Don’t allow yourself to be sucked in. You can be polite, and still simply avoid them as much as possible, and cut out the stress they bring as a result. This may not be an issue for everyone, but for those of us who are stressed by situations like these, giving ourselves permission to just say no can be quite liberating.
Engage in Stress Management at Lunch
If you feel stressed at work, why not give yourself a midday boost with a regular stress management ritual? Take a brisk walk, meditate, drink tea, and reflect on the things in your life for which you are grateful. If boredom, lethargy, or low-grade stressors plague you at work, giving yourself a pick-me-up can be just the thing to combat them.
Maintain an Orderly Environment
One of the most common tolerations coaches hear about is the messy office desk. Whether you work in a cubicle, a home office, or a corner suite, a disorganized desk can make your job more difficult and sap your time and energy. Taking an hour or 2 to create a system that works well can give you an energy boost and make your job run more smoothly. Decorating and organizing the rest of your office can help as well, since clutter can be a low-grade stressor.
Learn Time Management
Create a system that works. A to-do list can be written in a computer program, stored on a phone, tweeted to yourself, or scrawled on a piece of paper the old-fashioned way. Maintaining a running list, as well as keeping things on a calendar, are important tasks to begin, if you are not already doing so. It is also a good idea to plan ahead, allow yourself more time than you think you need to complete tasks, leave your house earlier than you think you need to, and otherwise organize your time so that you are not dealing with the stress of constantly rushing. This is easier said than done for those of us who are not naturally organized with our time, but it is a skill that can be learned, and it can bring far-reaching stress relief benefits as you find yourself no longer stressing over the clock.
Ask for What You Need
At work, and in all relationships, it helps to be up front and clear about your needs. If you have found yourself becoming upset in the past when someone has not met your needs, think back to how you asked for your needs to be met. Did you ask? Were you clear? Some of us tend to let our own needs come last, feeling that we do not want to inconvenience others, and we end up feeling the effects of too much stress as a result. Others often want to help, but they don’t know how if we do not tell them. So whether you need a quiet space in which to work or you need to feel more heard in your relationships, actually asking for those needs to be met is one of the surest ways to make it happen.
Have a Simple System
In virtually all areas of life, it helps to plan ahead. And these plans need not be complicated. In fact, finding the simplest route from A to B can help to cut out all types of stress. For example, when you are running errands, you tend to hit the places you need to visit in a logical order based on location, right? This principle can be applied to many other areas of life, from meal planning (one night’s roasted chicken can become the next night’s chicken soup) to seeing friends (why not save time and plan a get-together rather than meeting everyone individually?) to planning a stress management routine (exercise can meet fitness goals as well as stress management goals!) and you can save time and energy in the process. While not all of these streamlined approaches will appeal, this type of thinking can yield new ideas that can cut out unnecessary stress more often than not.
Be Proactive
If something in your environment is causing you stress, you may be in the habit of trying to ignore it and just get through the day. You may find yourself reacting mostly to things that scream the loudest and demand your attention the most. Consider taking a little time each week to address one or two things before they demand attention, before they cause so much stress that you can no longer ignore them. In the long run, you will save energy, and you will be able to take the time when it is convenient for you, not when you are facing a small crisis and you have no choice.
Activity to Try: Don’t Say Yes When You Want to Say No
It can be difficult to say no to requests around the office and in other areas of life. We want to be helpful, and we might be concerned about letting others down. Letting ourselves become overly stressed because we have overcommitted ourselves, however, causes everyone stress in the long run, as we may be less than enthusiastic and wind up doing a halfhearted job. Becoming adept at saying no is an important skill for stress management. The following hints will help you learn to say no.
• The first step to saying no, as with drawing boundaries in other ways, is to become clear with yourself that it is okay to do this, and that you really want to say no to this particular obligation. (If you are not sure, vividly imagine yourself at your most stressed, and ask yourself if it is worth the risk of returning to this state.)
• If you really want to say no, just do it. You do not owe the other person an explanation—although in some instances it is a good idea to offer one. (An explanation softens the blow, but with someone who is pushy, it can also represent an opportunity for argument.)
• If you are dealing with someone who does not respect boundaries, no explanation is necessary, and it is preferable not to give one.
• Release yourself from guilt by reminding yourself what you are saying yes to with this no.
Questions to Ask Yourself
• What areas of my life are causing the most stress?
• If I could wave a wand and eliminate three daily stressors, what would I choose to cut out?
• How many stressors could I eliminate in an afternoon?
• Which stressors do I deal with on a daily basis that are unnecessary?
Evaluate Your Answers
The questions above can help you get started in the process of cutting stressors out of your life. First, noticing the most taxing stressors you face can provide you with an area of focus and a jumping-off point. Imagining them as simply gone, without focusing on the obstacles that stand in the way of making that happen, can often be enough to help you move into the frame of mind to find new possibilities. Use the answers to these questions to guide yourself through the process of identifying stressors to eliminate. Then use the following process to move through the next steps, and cut stressors from your life.
Activity to Try: Cut Out Tolerations
1. Make a list of all your tolerations. Identify the ones that cause the most stress, the ones that would be easiest to fix, and the ones that would bring the biggest long-term payoff. Then choose one to tackle, according to whether you want the biggest payoff or the quickest results, for example.
2. Mark your calendar—plan one stressor to eliminate each week.
3. Create a more organized space for yourself. First, cull the clutter. (You can do this in a series of evenings or in one sweeping effort over a weekend.) Then organize what you have left. Finally, reward yourself with a fresh coat of paint, some scented candles, or other inexpensive and appealing decorations.
4. Choose one obligation in your life right now that you are ready to give up.
5. Plan what enjoyable activity you would like to put in its place.
6. If you find yourself thinking that you don’t have time to replace the obligation you just eliminated with something fun—you have too many other obligations to deal with—take this as a signal that you need to cut out at least one more obligation, if at all possible. Keep working at it until you have created space for at least one activity that is relaxing and enjoyable.