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How do you manage stress?
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This is such a huge question! How do “you” in the sense of how do people generally is the stuff that fills whole entire books and has practically since humans started writing (see early Greek philosophers, for example, or the Buddha’s teachings). Or even the Old Testament (Job’s lesson in radical acceptance being one). I’ll answer that by saying there are too many different kinds of stresses and too many world views/spiritual traditions to make one solution work for everybody. A good starting point, however, might be Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full catastrophe living, which is pretty much just what it sounds like.
How do I personally manage stress? That’s a little easier, fortunately. I have a whole raft of tricks I’ve deployed over the years, but at bottom they all boil down to
- mindfulness
- compassion (karuṇā, in Pali)
If I am mindful (and boy, that one word encompasses an entire, mostly Buddhist, world view) and practice compassion for any person or group that I’m experiencing as stressful, including wishing them well (mettā practice), then I settle right down. But there’s also meditation, prayer and chanting, brief breathing exercises, taking breaks, eating well(ish), getting enough sleep and leisure time, my animals, gratitude lists, my friends, birding, nature, jazz, journaling, laughing my ass off whenever possible (rants to friends in Signal often–OK, almost always–end with a 😆, my most-used emoji), and the list goes on. Once upon a time, there was even therapy every week.
I covered some of these in Six Tricks.
Back in my first couple of years of clinical practice, before I ever knew what mindfulness was, I formulated Wood’s Rules for my clients, one of which was “If you don’t have a problem right now, then you don’t have a problem.” Its corollary was, “If there’s nothing you can do about it right now, then for all practical purposes you do not have a problem right now.” That actually was mindfulness in a nutshell: Don’t borrow trouble from the future, it said, or hang on to crap from your past.
The second one, compassion, is also complicated but boils down to the maxim that we are no different from other sentient beings, or they from us: We just all want to be well and happy, ‘to get home safe to our families tonight,’ as one of my teachers once put it. It’s just that some of us have got pretty badly confused about what will make us well and happy. If I can understand that whatever harm that other person is doing right now comes straight out of their own suffering (duḥkha), I can wish them well instead of fearing or hating them.
The briefest version of that is:
May [insert name here] be well and happy
-traditional
May they have no fears or sorrows
May they be healthy and free from diseases
May they live calmly and peacefully
May they not be separated from their rewards, justly earned
May I have no enmity
May I have no hurtfulness
May I have no troubles of mind and body
May I be able to protect my own happiness.
Just “May they live calmly and peacefully” alone works wonders in traffic 😆
Anyway. Right now my blog’s focus is on life hacks for ADHD/ME-CFS/chronic illness/disability (you’d be amazed at the overlap!) but I’ll be writing about stress more generally going forward, so if you want the deets, you know what to do:
Reference
Zinn, J. (1990). Full catastrophe living: Using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, pain, and illness (rev. ed.). Penguin Random House.
P.S.: This and every post and comment I write is just that — written by me. I do not use genAI to produce content or images. As in, that’s even an image of my actual signature.
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