MASTERING A GOOD RESPONSE TO STRESS

WITH practice, you will get better at using the braintraining techniques I am sharing here. Soon, switching off stress and triggering a relaxation response will become your default mode. Remember, your nervous system cannot tell the difference between a real and imagined experience. So, each time you pictured a stressful situation, you felt that stress almost as if it were happening now. By imagining those situations, but this time responding with calm, you reprogramme yourself to feel more able to handle them. Before doing this technique, read through all that follows. Write down the five most significant stresses in your life. Now, we are going to lower the stress level of each one. Choose one of the five situations. Using the calm anchor you created in the exercise above, think about this normally stressful situation and squeeze the thumb and middle finger of your right hand together. Feel that calm feeling spreading through your body and imagine taking it into that stressful situation. Imagine everything going well. See what you’ll see, hear what you’ll hear and how good it feels. Now, still squeezing your thumb and finger, again imagine being in that stressful situation. This time, imagine a few challenges and notice yourself handling them perfectly thanks to now feeling calm. See what you’ll see, hear what you’ll hear and feel how good it feels to be so much calmer and in control. Stop and think about that situation now. Do you feel less stressed? If not, repeat until you do. Follow this process with each of the five situations until you feel much more in control.