If you could learn a simple, powerful way to reduce stress on a daily basis, would you do it?
Of course the vast majority of us would.
It’s normal to have a degree of stress every day. It doesn’t matter if it’s from our jobs, our kids, our friends, our significant other, or from any other source.
Since stress is normal, it’s important to know how to manage it. When stress starts getting uncomfortable and hard to control, it really, really sucks! It starts triggering a host of uncomfortable symptoms in your body, such as shakiness, nervousness, heart palpitations, or even a full-grown panic attack.
As you may already know, high stress levels are bad for your health. Excessive stress is linked to heart disease, diabetes, depression, stroke, inflammatory conditions, and a lot more. This is one of many reasons you want to have some methods for stress relief.
Since it’s so important to know how to reduce stress, we’re going to teach you one of the most powerful methods to do so. In addition to the powerful method we are going to teach you, we’re also going to give you some additional stress reduction tips to fit into your lifestyle. Plus, we will give you further reading if you’re interested in learning a lot more.
Let’s begin!
We Are Often Our Own Worst Enemies With Stress
Unfortunately, we often are our own worst enemies when it comes to stress. Many of us, for instance, have self-defeating thoughts that make our stressful situations much worse.
No matter what we don’t like about ourselves — whether it’s our performance at something, our appearance, our perceived flaws, or anything else; our negative thoughts about ourselves become our worst enemy.
If you find yourself constantly attacking yourself as your worst critic, rest assured, you are not alone! Unfortunately, this is extremely common.
If this is you, there is a book you will love called Self Compassion and Mindfulness for Healing and Acceptance by Jason Jacobsmith.
This book will teach you some basic meditation techniques, and it will teach you how to become more mindful and self-compassionate to reduce stress on a daily basis. It clears up many misconceptions about meditation and teaches you exactly why meditation is excellent at clearing your mind and reducing stress. Even if you have never meditated before, or if you have any hangups about this subject, this book will teach you what you need to know in clear, easily understood terms.
But of course, we have some great tips here for you to read as well. This article will expand on many concepts you can find in Self Compassion and Mindfulness for Healing and Acceptance to help you reduce your stressful thoughts forever.
Specifically, we will now discuss the power of reframing negative thoughts. This is easily one of the most powerful and underrated techniques to reduce stress!
Reduce Stress by Changing Your Mindset and Reframing Your Thoughts
Your mindset is the key to how you see the world. It’s almost like an operating system for a computer, except it’s for your brain. Your brain and nervous system control your body, so your mindset is the essentially the key to where your body goes and what you do with it.
Now, to illustrate the point we’re about to make, let us give you a quick psychology and anatomy lesson.
Anytime you have a stressful thought, your brain triggers a hormonal response through your sympathetic nervous system. This triggers catecholamines (stress hormones) to be released from your adrenal glands, which are on top of and connected to both of your kidneys.
You most likely have heard of cortisol, the primary catecholamine (or stress hormone). And you undoubtedly have heard of adrenaline. When these two hormones are released, they increase your blood pressure, heart rate, breathing, and blood flow to your muscles, they slow your digestion, as well as a host of other responses.
If that’s more anatomy than you want to learn right now, then just know that your brain directly releases stress hormones when you have stressful thoughts.
These stress hormones make you ready for a “fight or flight” response, but when they are released in excessive amounts, they are extremely uncomfortable and bad for your physical and mental health.
You can shut a lot of this process off by avoiding stressful thoughts as much as possible. And believe it or not, yes, you can train yourself to do this.
We will now teach you how to do this.
A Powerful Method to Reduce Stress by Reframing Negative Events
In the book Self Compassion and Mindfulness for Healing and Acceptance, Jason Jacobsmith discusses the importance of reframing thoughts to significantly reduce stress. This is an extremely useful, powerful, and underrated technique that many people have never thought of.
Now, to do this properly, it is a several step process that takes some awareness, repetition, and practice.
But once you do it, if you keep at it by making it a habit, you’ll be amazed how powerful this is at relieving stress.
This is a several step process. Are you ready?
- First, you must notice the labels you stick on your experiences.
- Then you must challenge the unhelpful judgments and assumptions we make about yourself and your perception of reality. These, combined with the labels you put on your negative experiences, are your trigger thoughts.
- Then you must redirect the excessive focus you put on negative events and reword them into positive terms. This is known as reframing.
Are you following us so far?
We’ll give you two examples to make this clearer.
The First Example:
Again, the first step is to be aware of our trigger thoughts that start the process of negative thinking.
For instance, all of us have worked with someone we don’t like. In this case, the trigger thought might be “I really hate working with him/her.” This causes a mindset of anger and annoyance, along with a release of stress hormones.
Here’s what you must do in this situation.
- Identify the label you create when you think of this person. In this case, you associate your thoughts with this person to that of hatred – “I really hate working with him/her”. This is bound to cause stress! Here’s your trigger thought.
- Next, challenge the unhelpful assumptions that you make. Do you really hate this person? Can you learn something from working with them? Is there something you can do to make the relationship better?
- Now, replace this trigger thought with something much more helpful such as “I may not enjoy working with this person, but I can bear it. I have done this many times before and I can do it again.” This is your reframe.
Do you see the difference already?
You must practice this! Write this down if necessary, and say it to yourself every time you have the initial negative trigger thought.
We’re not saying that you can totally remove your dislike for this person just by reframing your thoughts, and we’re not saying that every negative experience will automatically become a positive. We are saying, however, that you can turn many negative thoughts into neutral or positive thoughts and learning experiences.
And this mindset makes a huge difference in your view of the world as well as how it affects your daily stress.
Now, let’s go through another example.
The Second Example:
Trigger thought: I’m going to get fired from my job if I can’t do this.
Reframe: This is a stressful task, but how likely is that to happen? I have a valuable set of skills and it would be very inconvenient for them to fire me. The boss likes me and will probably forgive me if I make a mistake.
A lot of people think that just because they can’t get something done perfectly, or if they make a mistake, they’re going to get fired. Many play up this fear to an astronomical level, yet the threat never happens. Even if they do get fired, they find a new job within a month. The stress of the threat is more dangerous than the actual event!
Now, if you find yourself in a situation like this, ask yourself this: what are the chances of getting fired? We’re not saying that it’s impossible, but it’s not nearly as high as you think in most cases.
Would it make sense for your boss to fire you? Would it be convenient for them?
And if you got fired tomorrow, what would you do? You probably live in a first-world country that would take care of you, if necessary, while you looked for a new job. You have skills to offer to the world (you have to in order to have a job!), and you would be able to find another job in a reasonable amount of time.
Thinking this out should be very helpful and comforting. If you reframe your thoughts in this direction, it will dramatically reduce the stress you undergo when you face this type of adversity.
How to Practice This Technique
The classic technique is to create a two-column chart in a pocket notebook. Any time you have a negative (triggering) thought, write it down on the left column. Then, write down a reframed, positive thought in the right column for that trigger thought.
This makes it easy to identify a negative trigger thought with some time. Every time you have this thought, you can look at your chart to remind yourself of the proper reframe.
Over time, this becomes a very positive habit. After a short while you won’t need to have your chart with you all the time, but it’s great to keep around as a reference regardless.
Practice this for anywhere between a week to a few months and see if it helps you.
Assorted Tips To Reduce Stress:
Now, just because we like you and we want you to be as stress free as possible, let’s give you a few other stress reduction tips:
- Exercise bare minimum three days a week. Anything from a daily walk to a dance class to heavy weight lifting; all of these are excellent at reducing stress.
- Eat a clean diet. Reduce the amount of sugar in your diet. Eat fruits and vegetables. Have low glycemic carbohydrates. Eat adequate protein. Protein keeps you full and spares your muscles from breaking down.
- Make sure your diet has enough Omega 3 fatty acids. This is crucial and is a totally overlooked problem with the modern diet. The research is very clear about this issue.
- Make sure you are getting enough Magnesium in your diet. Magnesium deficiency is directly linked to high stress levels. Since magnesium, like all electrolytes, had to come from the body to enter the bloodstream, blood levels of magnesium can be normal but your cell levels can be low.
- Meditate. We’ve said it enough, we know, but pick up a copy of Self Compassion and Mindfulness for Healing and Acceptance to learn some basic meditation techniques very quickly. Meditation is excellent at making you more mindful and thoughtful, and thus it helps dramatically relieve stres.
- Control your finances and get out of debt. An excellent book on this is Rich Dad Poor Dad, which is being sold for dirt cheap at the moment.
- Have an emergency fund in case things go wrong. What’s better, going on an expensive vacation and buying the newest IPhone, or having enough money saved up that you can handle a job loss for several months? This can be huge for reducing your stress levels.
- Become more productive and learn how to destroy your procrastination habits. Action is the opposite of depression.
All of these are crucial lifestyle tips that will help you dramatically reduce stress.
Please note that no health-related information here is a replacement for informed medical advice. If you have any concerns, be sure to see your doctor before you begin any type of exercise or supplementation.
Conclusion:
If you take nothing else from this article, just remember that reframing your negative thoughts can have a serious effect on providing stress relief.
Again, if you liked this article, there’s much more on meditation and how to reduce stress in Self Compassion and Mindfulness for Healing and Acceptance. There is a lot of excellent information on meditation, mindset, and stress reduction. If you read through the book and apply the techniques within, you can expect to reduce your stress significantly.
We can’t promise you’ll never have stress ever again (organisms literally die when there’s never any stress!) but if you can reframe and eliminate your ruminating thoughts, we can promise some significant stress relief.
That’s all, everyone. Hopefully, this article helped you think in the right direction to reduce your daily stress! If you enjoyed this article, be sure to follow us on Twitter, and sign up for our email list for a lot more incredibly helpful self-improvement tips, as well as discounts and promotions on all of our books!
