How To Deal With Stress?

The full question was: I constantly feel that I need breaks a lot more recently, I’m kind of a workaholic and I feel that if I don’t do anything…it makes me feel completely useless. How do I get myself more relaxed?

There are two possibilites about this question. It may truly be about stress. Or it would be about uselessness. I wouldn’t be able to dive into self-concept here because it would be far more subjective and definitely recommend a call with me.

Stress release can be managed in many ways. As long as it is not distress release (which can be anything from drugging yourself to ignoring the real root problems), you can increase your distress tolerance for growth. Here are some ways you can deal with stress.

1. Change your physiology. This encompasses changing anything from posture, breathing, movement, etc. When you shift your physiology, you shift in accordance to the change in rhythms (faster or slower). You can also shift your pupil focus so that your awareness goes to the periphery.




2. Change your self-talk. What you say and how you say it makes a difference. If you speak to yourself like an angry parent scolding a child and that makes you feel useless, then changing the voice to Donald Duck’s might do the trick.




3. Change your inner cognitions. We use submodalities in NLP to change the way you see things. For example, a feeling of lethargy may cause you to interpret the world as dreary and darker in your mind than normal. Sometimes, changing the mental lighting changes everything.




4. Change your beliefs. A feeling of being useless is often a learned belief. Is it true? What purpose does “not being used” serve? Recovery? Pause? Does it mean that each second you dont’ do anything purposeful equal to being useless in all your life? Interestingly, taking a break is a good way to enhance memory and recall as determined by Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik. In a sense, maybe taking a break is not as bad as you think. Working hard itself may not always be productive. And this, as I mentioned, will warrant a deeper conversation for such inner limitations to be released for higher productivity. Research psychologist Alia Crum also talked about how stress interpretation allows one to reap positive benefits of stress.




5. Get a self-care routine. Most people know how to work but don’t know how to recover. This is like saying that you are a bodybuilder who never stops working out because you feel useless by not working out. We all know that massive injury happens with overwork and often due to poor form. Focus on your form – business is about productivity and levelling up yourself over time.

I’m leaving out the physical aspects that include nutrition and biochemistry, because it was well covered by Eric Berg already. If you have not watched that video, I highly recommend you check it out.

Meanwhile, if you have questions or comments, feel free to post them below.