Detach and de-stress

The meeting ran late and you missed an important appointment. An unexpected problem disrupted a vital project and you must now re-negotiate the completion date, with someone you can't find. A client has complained about a member of your team. Your manager wants to see you before you leave today to discuss "concerns about your lack of progress". More than a third of the tasks you planned this morning for completion today are overdue. Once again you won't be home until well after dark. Plans for a family occasion, already twice postponed, are in tatters.

You and I are completely free to take whatever attitude we wish towards combinations of events like these. Why then do we so often choose a negative view and become stressed-out? How can we deal with overwhelming busyness and other reasons for stress, more positively?

We have all faced many similar situations in the past. We've always "got through it" and sometimes found humour in reflecting that we believed we would not. At the time, it seemed that our choices lay between stressful, panic-based activity or the end of life-as-we-know-it. We felt trapped, frightened, put-upon, resentful, victimised even. Yet we survived; equilibrium was eventually restored, as it usually is. Why do we forget this? How do we create such stress for ourselves?

We make it up

The short answer is, we make (it) up (in) our minds. At some level we decide to experience what we get, unaware of the mental and emotional processes this involves and of our capacity for altering them. Changing these processes requires first, that we understand them.

Whether we view circumstances as negative, positive, frightening, dejecting, interesting, excitingly challenging or neutral are matters of choice. Whether or not so-called negative events become A Big Deal or A Drama is entirely within our own hands. Much of the difficulty and strong feelings about the everyday events we find stressful result from our either imagining that we are not free to make these choices or from our choosing not to experience this freedom.

Our reactions to events are generated by projecting the learning and conditioning of our upbringing on to situations that are emotionally neutral. We charge these neutral events with significance for ourselves by consciously or unawarely recalling and acting on the learning of our upbringing that Certain Significant Things are true: "In order for me to be happy, everything must work out pretty much as I'd hoped it would", for example. Without our doing this, our experiences would remain colourless and significant only to those others people who choose to give them significance.

Stages in the process

There are four distinct stages to the mental processes involved:

1. Consciousness: The act of undifferentiated awareness or cognition. Raw data of experience is registered without assigning labels or making value judgements.
2. Perception: This stage, the act of recognition, distinguishes and categorises the incoming data and makes positive or negative evaluations based on stored memories and patterns.
3. Sensation: Once a value is attached to the incoming data, a pleasant or unpleasant sensation arises depending on the evaluation given.
4. Reaction: If the sensation is pleasant, a desire forms to prolong and intensify the experience. If it is an unpleasant sensation, the wish is to stop it, to push it away. The mind reacts with liking or disliking.

For instance, many people have learned to associate wintry or unseasonable weather with "bad", "dreadful" or "awful", something to judge negatively and to feel miserable about. Equating bad weather with bad day has become an unquestioned automatic reaction. As soon as they become conscious of weather that fits their definition of undesirable, they categorise it negatively and label it bad. Their sensation is then of dislike, they try to avoid it or protect themselves from it. They become angry or despondent about it. This, in simple terms, is how we create and perpetuate our own reality. We get what we think.

These processes occur so rapidly that we are usually not aware of them. It is only when a particular reaction has been repeated over a long period of time and has taken a pronounced, intensified form (or we eventually hear what others notice about us) that awareness of it develops at the conscious level. When we notice, for example, that some of our behaviours are remarkably similar to those of our parents, we have become conscious of a pattern and may begin to examine its causes.

Change your mind

We could choose a completely undifferentiated perception about almost anything we've learned to judge negatively, and see them as neutral or positive events instead. We could for example, learn to make a positive differentiation about cold, wet weather and be free to enjoy it. We could learn to accept that weather is neutral: there is always and always will be a lot of it. If we did this, we'd have no conflict with so-called unseasonable weather. Likewise, if we stopped equating "a good day" with "achieving all I set out to achieve, preferably perfectly and without pressure", we'd be less disconcerted, less put out when we achieved less.

Fears and memories from the past are a constant inhibition to free action in the present, while projections on to an imaginary future prevent us from truly experiencing the realities of the day.
John Krishnamurti

Start here: acknowledge the feeling and detach from it

Our emotions provide essential data for interpreting events, our reactions to them and the need to initiate change. We can learn to identify the thoughts that give rise to strong feelings and eventually, the belief systems on which our thoughts are based. With practice, we can change unhealthy belief systems to others that are more helpful Thus we should never repress our feelings (fail to acknowledge them), seldom suppress them (avoid them) and should always find some way to acknowledge and appropriately express them. However, we should avoid identifying with the feeling: believing or acting as though we are the feeling.

Yet most people immediately identify with their emotion, whatever it is. They believe it is their right and duty to do so, having done it all their lives and taken it for granted that this is normal and healthy. The habit seriously inhibits development and is partly why we so often react to situations and others in unhelpfully stressful, knee-jerk ways.

Study the process and take charge of it

The topic has intrigued me ever since I first understood how much my enjoyment of or tolerance for external events is determined by what I project on to them from my beliefs, thoughts and feelings, and what I have to gain by learning to change my habits. Over the years I've worked with hundreds of clients with similar interests, who've learned to strengthen new habits of perception and response, to become more self-empowered, more interpersonally competent, increasingly self-initiating, and less inclined to destructive stress, despondency or burn-out.

You can begin change by learning to detach from your tendencies to identify with those feelings that cause you difficulty. Learn to look at your feelings instead, and not indulge them. This can prevent panic or stress, and usefully alter those times when you're on the verge of losing the plot through overwhelming demands or busyness. The trick is to create a space between your emotions and yourself. In the gap, however small, you introduce a considered choice about responding to the situation, rather than a directly-connected (knee-jerk) reaction to it. It takes just a little space to create a bigger space.

Start here

This is a list of separate ideas, from which you may choose whichever appeal to you. They are not presented as a sequence for you to follow.

1. Learn to identify the onset of stress by noticing when your temperature has risen, your palms are perspiring, your heart-rate has increased and your breathing has become rapid, shallow or both. (These may, of course, indicate other things.)
   
   
2. Look at your feeling before you act on it. This alone is a major step, especially for people who've learned to suppress their emotions. Acknowledge the feeling but do not indulge it: do not fight it or try to get rid of it. Simply look at the feeling and say, "That is not me. It's temporary. It is not me." Let go of the feeling or say, "I let go of this." Every time you do this you weaken tendencies to identify with feelings. If instead you remain focused on the feeling, your energy will flow to it and strengthen it. Reverse the process by withdrawing nourishment from it. It will die a natural death.
   
   
3. Stop or interrupt what you are doing if you can, or close your eyes momentarily. Take 15 seconds, more or less, to breathe deeply and ask yourself, "What am I doing? How am I feeling? What do I need, in the next moment?" If you immediately return to panic-driven or stress-generating activity, force yourself to repeat the process.
   
   
4. Learn how much you are or can be in control of your thoughts. Meditate for a few minutes at a time (though 20 minutes, once or twice a day is better) by applying 70% of your attention to your out-breath: its rate, pace, temperature, sound, capacity, distribution, etc. Each time you become aware of other thoughts gently tell yourself, "Thinking . . " and re-focus on your out-breath. Practice this until you learn that you can alter your thinking and clear your mind, whenever you need to.
   
   
5. Introduce this meditative technique at times when you become aware of negative thoughts and feelings you want to change. Let go of them by emptying your mind in this way. Withdraw nourishment from what you wish not to focus on. Create a gap into which you can decide to think, feel and behave differently.
   
   
6. Memorise a few "antidotes" to negative emotional chain reactions: short phrases such as -
   
   "When I hold a grudge, I hurt myself"
   "This is what I have today. I may as well enjoy it"
   "I am responsible for my own happiness"
   "I can be hurt only by my own thoughts"
   
   - can help shift energy towards more helpful sequences, when introduced into the "gaps" you create.
   
   
7. Place a gap between one task and the next. No time for this? How about 10 - 15 seconds? After a phone call, when you close out of a file or programme, when you complete a letter, a presentation or a meeting, pause long enough to close your eyes, take a deep breath or two, check-out your feelings and detach from negativity. If you've time, change your physical activity too, before the next task.
   

Breathing Our breathing patterns may be a powerful mediator of our feelings of anxiety. Researchers at San Francisco State University reported that unease decreased dramatically in anxiety-prone subjects who were instructed to exhale just 70 percent of the oxygen they inhaled during one phase of a deep-breathing exercise. A return to breathing deeply but evenly brought anxiety back to low original levels. By manipulating anxiety through this relatively simple technique, the researchers hoped to show subjects that it can result from basic somatic processes rather than deep-seated emotions. (Erik Pepper and Merrie MacHose, Bio-feedback and Self-Regulation 128: 133-139. Institute for Holistic Healing Studies, San Francisco State U., San Francisco.) When we become aroused by demands that are too intense or sustained, or are bombarded by too many demands simultaneously, one of the first things that happens is that our breathing patterns change. When this becomes extreme we experience panic attacks. However, over-breathing is on a continuum, and many people continuously over-breathe without realising it. In normal circumstances we only need to breathe about 12 times a minute, and this is best achieved from the diaphragm, not from the intercostals muscles of the chest. When you over-breathe the composition of you blood gases is changed. The depletion of carbon dioxide (from breathing out more frequently) makes the blood more alkaline, which in turn triggers the sympathetic nervous system. Your body is then in alarm mode. A whole cascade of physiological changes then occur, readying your body for an emergency - activating it for fight-or-flight. This is helpful in an emergency but not so helpful when it is related to over-doing things, and the nature of our lives is that we do constantly over-do it. (Stress Less, by Averil Overton, Random House, 2005.)

 

Accelerate your progress
I've devoted most of a complete chapter to this topic within Hear and Be Heard, our Guidebook devoted to the foundational practices of effective people-management. I take the view that in order to manage others successfully we must first manage ourselves: managing the processes of our beliefs, thoughts and feelings is an essential part of that.

In Hear and Be Heard I provide numerous illustrations of the processes to help you first identify them within yourself, then initiate small-step controls over your attitudes and the decisions that flow from them. I encourage you to study Hear and Be Heard, in one of the convenient options we offer.

Study of Hear and Be Heard is particularly suited to those who recognise that much of their negative stress is derived from "people-management issues" or "people-problems".

Copyright 2002 - 2007 Tom Watkins Group. All rights reserved.

Select and contact a Mentor if you'd like to discuss these ideas or want support to make progress with your own issues.

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