Stress Awareness Month: Stress Relief and Resilience
So far the blog posts for Stress Awareness Month have focused on learning more about stress. Now, it is time to focus on what we can do to build resilience for stress relief. Let’s remind ourselves what resilience means. Resilience is our ability to bounce back from stressful situations, which helps buffer the impacts of stress (Bajaj et al., 2022; Chen et al., 2022). The other key feature of resilience is that resilience is not about avoidance, but rather our ability to adapt to, manage, and recover from stress. Avoiding stress is something altogether different. And, resilience is something that we can develop through things like social connections, building our self-awareness, etc. Believe it or not, positive affect can be a resilience resource as higher levels of positive affect can help protect people from impacts of stress (Egan et al., 2024). The focus for today is diving into what helps us build resilience so that we can flip challenges on their head and turn them into growth opportunities.
Strategies
Build Social Connections
Cultivating and building strong, positive relationships with friends and family and being able to ask for help when needed is a great way to build one’s resilience (Acoba, 2024).
Reframing
Practice reframing challenging situations to instead understand them as manageable or as learning opportunities rather than a situation that can’t be overcome. That does not mean that one can’t ask for help or take the time to learn something new that will help in that situation. Reframing is a mental skill.
Cultivate Self-Care Routines
Remember self-care is not selfish! Self-care is a way of being that is proactive and even an evidence-based practice of ensuring that one is taking care of one’s physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional health to help with well-being. Notice the different domains that are mentioned. This means that we are not just focusing on our physical health, but also remembering to take care of spiritual, mental, and emotional health. Self-care can include daily habits like nutritious eating, physical activity, adequate sleep, and even boundary-setting.
Goal Setting
Reaching goals and finding ways to celebrate are good for the brain. So consider setting realistic, small, and achievable goals to help manage stress. This strategy gives you the opportunity to celebrate your victories and maybe even build a sense of accomplishment.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is used so frequently, but with good reason. Mindfulness is foundational for so many things. At the core of mindfulness is the practice of consciously bringing awareness to the present moment, noticing thoughts, feelings, sensations, and the environment, minus judgement. To practice mindfulness, it can be as simple as bringing your awareness to the present moment all the way to practicing breathing techniques, meditation, or quiet reflection.
Trigger Identification
This strategy goes back to what has been alluded to in earlier posts in this series. Cultivate the ability to recognize what causes stress in your life. This means looking at internal and external triggers. Sometimes the external are easier to identify, while the internal are harder because it means we need to acknowledge thoughts, feelings, and emotions that we may not want to look at. When we are able to better understand our triggers we can better prepare ourselves and make more conscious choices.
Where is the Control?
There is a phrase, “Control the controlables.” Oftentimes we spend so much time and energy trying to control the factors that are not in our control that we end up wasting our time and energy on that when we could have put towards the factors in our control. For example, we can control our actions, but we cannot control the weather. Don’t waste valuable time and energy.
Invite Self-Compassion
“Self-compassion refers to being supportive toward oneself when experiencing suffering or pain—be it caused by personal mistakes and inadequacies or external life challenges” (Neff, 2023, 193). This strategy cannot be overstated. We must practice self-compassion. It does not do us any good to be hard on ourselves or continuously judge ourselves. Rather, it makes things harder for us. Remembering that everyone makes mistakes because we are human will serve us all well in so many ways.
Boundary Setting
Boundaries can be physical, mental, or emotional. We all need boundaries to keep us safe.One boundary that we can all practice in the context of stress reduction, is our ability to say no. It can be hard to say no, and, yet, so worth it to protect ourselves. One way to help the mental battle that can rage in our heads stay a minimum is that by saying no you are giving someone else the opportunity to say yes.
Engage in Action
There might be days that we think that if we avoid stress and problems, that they will go away. Unfortunately, that is generally not the case. It can often make situations worse. Consider making plans, taking small and manageable steps to address problems. And, remember it is okay to also ask for help!
We all have the ability to strengthen our resilience! We are not stuck where we are at the current moment. It does, however, take some practice. We have the potential to not allow stress to run our lives and, instead, grow from our challenging experiences.
A river and tropical forest in the background. In the foreground there is a hammock between two posts and potted plants to the right of the hammock. It looks like it is raining.
take action today moment:
Today’s take action moment is simple! Practice! Give some of these strategies and try!
Learn More About Stress, Resilience, and Stress Relief:
How to Make Stress Your Friend | Kelly McGonigal | TED
How to stay calm when you know you'll be stressed | Daniel Levitin | TED
Tools for Managing Stress & Anxiety
References
Acoba, E. F. (2024). Social support and mental health: The mediating role of perceived stress. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1330720. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1330720
Bajaj, B., Khoury, B., & Sengupta, S. (2022). Resilience and stress as mediators in the relationship of mindfulness and happiness. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 771263. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.771263
Chen, S. Y., Yan, S. R., Zhao, W. W., Gao, Y., Zong, W., Bian, C., Cheng, Y., & Zhang, Y. H. (2022). The mediating and moderating role of psychological resilience between occupational stress and mental health of psychiatric nurses: A multicenter cross-sectional study. BMC Psychiatry, 22(1), 823. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-022-04485-y
Egan, L. A., Park, H. R. P., Lam, J., & Gatt, J. M. (2024). Resilience to stress and adversity: A Narrative Review of the role of positive affect. Psychology Research and Behavior Management, 17, 2011–2038. https://doi.org/10.2147/PRBM.S391403
Neff, K. D. (2023). Self-compassion: Theory, method, research, and intervention. Annual Review of Psychology, 74(1), 193-218. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-032420-031047