Whether you say this to yourself or you hear it from your spouse, friend, or colleague, being told to “just relax” or “just let it go” doesn’t work and isn’t healthy. While it might be true that you need to relax or let go, it’s not that easy. You need to address your main issue—you are stressed, and you want help.
Yes, you can learn to relax, let it go, and get over it. But the keyword is “learn.” As a psychotherapist in New York City, I regularly help my clients learn powerful tools that don’t just “manage” stress but can actually help to reduce it. We can work together to calm your nervous system, get you through stressful situations, and manage future stress successfully.
First steps
Evaluate what causes you to feel stressed or anxious. What are your triggers? Do they involve specific situations? Individuals? Levels of busyness? Do they come on when you are low on sleep or haven’t exercised in a while?
Sometimes the answer is fairly obvious: “Whenever I don’t get enough sleep or miss my workout, I get really stressed.” This is easy to fix. But if it were that obvious, you probably would have fixed it. So it likely goes deeper.
If you get overwhelmed and stressed when you have too many things going on at once, and you’re just too busy, the answer may be to learn how to politely say no.
But if you evaluate yourself and can’t find an obvious solution, or if the solution is obvious but you can’t really change it (for instance, an extremely stressful work environment or trouble balancing work and family life), then you need to develop strategies to ease your stress and anxiety.
Helpful strategies
We should always look first to lifestyle fixes: nutritious food, healthy sleep, and regular exercise. Involving your family in these steps deepens the family bond and helps everyone be less stressed and healthier together! Walking the dog with your spouse or going to the park to jog with the kids can be a wonderful bonding time and an emotional lift.
Beyond basic self-care, there are many very helpful strategies for de-stressing, but different methods work better for different people. We can work together to see which works for you. Some possible strategies include:
- Mindfulness: There are many techniques, and I work with my patients to determine which mindfulness techniques work best for them.
- Movement that calms: Again, there are many techniques. We can find something you enjoy that helps you relax.
- 60-second reset: There is strong science behind a breathing technique that calms the brain and slows the nervous system reaction to anxiety in just 60 seconds. Here are the steps: Relax your shoulders and get comfortable; breathe in through the nose for four seconds; hold it for four seconds; release the air slowly through your mouth for six seconds; repeat four times.
- Laughing and smiling: You literally trigger “happy hormones” when you smile and laugh. Get a joke book, tell someone your favorite joke, or watch a funny movie.
- Doing a hobby you love: Pick something soothing, not something that you will criticize yourself over. For instance, if you try to draw or paint a portrait and it doesn’t look like the person, and that would bother you, don’t pick that hobby.
In our discussions, we will also explore the possibility of a deeper cause for your anxious response to these stimuli. Sometimes, a past event keeps rehearsing subconsciously in your head. For instance, if traffic makes you very anxious, was there a traffic accident in your past that involved you or a loved one, that may still be affecting you? If you are fearful of losing your job if you don’t perform to perfection, is there an event in your past that is creating this fear?
The stress management techniques may be all you need to balance your emotions and overcome anxious moments. But if there is an underlying issue that causes your anxiety, we can explore that together. With deeper underlying causes, there are no quick fixes, since they’ve been there for a while. But together we can create a safe space for you to explore what causes the stress and how to deal with it long before you are in a prolonged state of anxiety. If you’re in the NYC area, contact me to see how I can help you.