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Key points
- When all deserve a sense of peace, but unexpected events can rob us of that.
Stressful events happen, often out of the blue. When this occurs, it can throw us for a loop. For example, it can disrupt our sleep and infect all our waking hours with worry or a feeling of being distracted and on-edge.
Here's what you can do to protect your peace while you're dealing with a stressor.
1. Give yourself compassion if the source of your stress can't be resolved straight away.
Often when stress occurs, it's initially somewhat ambiguous. For example:
- Something in your home breaks and you don't know if it's an easy or expensive fix.
- You notice a physical health symptom and don't know if it's a sign of something that's nothing, minor, moderate, or sinister.
- Your boss or coworker sends you an ambiguous but foreboding email at 4.30pm on a Friday.
When you can't resolve a problem straight away, give yourself compassion for how stressful that ambiguity is. The reality of life is that we have to learn to tolerate it, but it's burdensome to do so.
2. Curb catastrophizing.
Remember that most problems aren't catastrophes. Minor annoyances or stressful, but fixable, problems are more common.
3. Do you think you caused your problem by not worrying enough?
Here's the problem with excessive worry. You can worry about 100 or 1000 things, and the bad thing that actually happens isn't any of them. It's something entirely different.
If you're prone to worry, you may think you failed to prevent your problem because you didn't worry enough. That's unlikely to be true.
4. Be open to the experience.
Being intolerant to having an experience, such as thinking "This shouldn't be happening to ME" or "This shouldn't be happening now with everything else I have to deal with," doesn't help. It adds suffering, can impede taking responsibility for what we're responsible for, and can make our thinking less flexible regarding how to solve the problem.
Your experience of stress may involve vulnerability, realizing a mistake you've made, embarrassment, a big financial hit, lost sleep, physical pain, or any of a host of other challenging experiences. Our experiences are what they are. In a way, they're not inherently good or bad, even though we categorize them as such. Sometimes, through a "bad" experience, we learn something about ourselves, strengthen relationships, or learn a key skill or lesson that serves our goals.
I was reminded of this principle in reading a review copy of my PT colleague Seth Gillihan's upcoming book, Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. This suggestion really transformed how I viewed a situation that had landed on my plate and was immensely helpful.
5. Commit to small valued actions.
I titled this article "how to protect your peace." Your peace belongs to you. Don't give up your peace for an object (like a malfunctioning car) or a person (like an unreasonable boss or gossipy coworker).
In practical terms, you can protect your peace by committing to small valued actions: Hug or read to your children. Support a coworker. Call your senator about something that matters to you. Contact the friend you've been meaning to get back to. Eat a nutritious meal. Go for a walk. Take a nap. Take your vitamin. Look at a tree fluttering in the wind for a few minutes.
Protecting your peace isn't about making yourself an island immune to what's happening in the wider world. Nor is it about believing you're flawless and always in the right. It's more about a belief that we're always searching for peace, and short of you having done something truly awful, you deserve it as much anyone else.
6. Pay attention to superstitious thinking.
When something stressful happens, we can start to speculate on what we've done to create bad luck. For example, if you recently complained about how you'd been treated you might think, "Standing up for myself must've been the wrong thing to do. I created stress for someone else and now the universe is creating stress for me." Correct this thought distortion if you catch it.
Superstitious thinking can be hard to recognize because it comes in many forms. Another common manifestation is if you had a mean thought about someone and now you think that "karma" has brought stress into your life.
7. Use your supports.
You don't need to wait to use your supports. Grab a "bite" of support. Your supports can help you see the problem a different way, and help you catch thought distortions you're not recognizing as such.
8. Be very wary about conclusions you immediately jump to.
I've mentioned a few specific types of thought distortions here (superstitious thinking, catastrophizing, and thinking you didn't worry enough to prevent the problem). Those are common responses to stress, especially among people prone to worrying or depression. However, there are lots of other distorted thinking patterns that are common when we're under stress. Since there are too many to specifically outline, you can cover this gap by being generally distrustful of your automatic conclusions. Always consider alternative explanations (why it happened), predictions (what will happen next), and interpretations (anything extra you layer on).
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Which of these points feels most helpful to you? I'm currently dealing with a stressor that falls into this category and points #3-5 have been most helpful to me thus far. When you next need to cope with a stressful event, test the strategies mentioned here, without pre-judging them, and see what works for you.
