By contrast, make your life like a long, lingering love affair with dark chocolate truffles, rather than the mindless stuffing of handfuls of cheap, corn syrup “chocolates.” You want your life to be a peach so pungent, so full of flavor running down your chin that it makes your mouth water to think of it, not a biggie-size bucket of dyed food products. And when you look back at your life, it will have been rich and full only if you happened to notice it. At that point, you will be satisfied.
Now here’s the caveat. There are people who find joy in their type A behavior. For those of you who could do nothing else but busily plow through your lists of things to do, and this truly gives you happiness, bless you.
The point is that you don’t have to unplug or slow down, because loving your life is not quantitative—it doesn’t matter whether you fill your day with two things or a hundred. It only matters whether you can be at peace with living the life you choose. For example, most of us cannot juggle fifty of life’s batons at once (work, boss, coworkers, home, cleaning, spouse, kids, parent duties, events, pets, night school, and on and on) without getting frazzled around the edges. There are those rare few, however, who genuinely love such an environment and thrive in it. They aren’t stressed by this kind of life, they’re thrilled by it. But for most of us—if you don’t love it, don’t do it.
Be sensual. Get out of your head and pay attention to the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures around you. Let your eyes drift from the computer screen and really notice your world for a moment. The screen will still be there when you come back.
Be honest. Be realistic with yourself about the number of items you have to do in a day. If your life feels like a blur at the end of the day, you’ve got to cut back. Are you really enjoying your life every day? If not, be prepared to trade in your high quantity for a little more quality.
Be physical. Nothing can be such a good “reboot” as getting outside and moving around. For me, a good solid bout of physical exertion is a fantastic way to disengage my mind from the hurly-burly of the day. But even if you don’t exercise, you can take a quick jaunt outside and move around for a minute on your break.
Stress-Relief Routines
The French culture makes it very easy to live a pleasant life. But we live in a society that not only doesn’t offer two-hour lunch breaks and five weeks of paid vacation, it seems to pride itself on anxiety. Our unfortunately frequent response to that is to eat. Thus, we need practical strategies to cope with and even reduce the stress of everyday life.
The first and easiest way to relieve stress in your life is to simply leave time open during your day. Don’t fill every minute with tasks and chores. Of course you have a normal life to lead, but you can set aside a little time—if only a few minutes—for yourself. How?
Delegate. You don’t have to do everything yourself. Enroll those around you in your tasks as well. Then you’re a team!
Schedule. Set aside time for yourself in advance, like an appointment, and stick to it.
Control the list. Don’t give in to extra errands sneaking into your schedule, as your to-do list expands to fit your time. Determine what you want to get done for the day, and if you accomplish it, your free time is your reward!
With these basics, you can lift yourself out of the bottomless to-do abyss and you’ll do your body a favor as well. But more important is the link between your body and mind, which needs relaxing every day. Just as you clear time in your schedule, practice clearing your mind whenever you can. This gets you out of the constant mental whir of activities and worries that spin through your head and gives you a break from the stress hormones that can damage your health.
Deep Breathing—Instant Stress Relief
When we’re anxious, we breathe from the chest in shorter, quicker bursts of air. When calm, we tend to breathe deeply from the stomach. But does that mean that stress causes chest breathing? Or is increased stress an effect of rapid breathing? Actually, there’s no clear difference between the cause of your breathing patterns and the effect of them. Chest breathing encourages your body to have a stress response, while belly breathing encourages your body to release stress. It’s another circle.
Just as your emotions influence behaviors (being stressed causes chest breathing, being calm causes belly breathing), your behaviors can also influence your emotions. Make use of this knowledge every day and control your body’s stress response by practicing the healthy breathing techniques that can help lower cortisol. Once you practice them for a few weeks and make them a habit, you’re in control for life.
The following breathing routine can help calm your mind and reduce your daily stress. Whenever you feel anxious, this technique will help you think more clearly and concentrate better.
Sit in a chair and put your left hand on your belly. Now put your right hand on the center of your chest. Inhale slowly and deeply, and focus on the movement of your hands. You want the hand on your stomach to rise and fall with your breaths, and the hand on your chest to move only slightly.
When you’ve inhaled fully, hold your breath there and slowly count to three.
Exhale slowly and completely to empty your lungs.
Repeat this 3 to 5 times, but be careful not to hyperventilate. If you feel dizzy, you’ve just gotten too much oxygen and you can pause.
This technique can be used absolutely anywhere: when the traffic is terrible, when you’re trying to get to sleep, or when something is upsetting you.
Good Morning Meditation
This simple method can help center your mind before the maelstrom of the day. It can lower the stress hormones in your blood, train you to become less responsive to stressful events, and counteract their accumulated effects.
Meditation helps you temporarily transfer your thinking away from the whirring, worrying thoughts that permeate our minds. With this technique, you’ll instead focus on a single message, rather than on your normal nagging thoughts. This makes meditation basically a neural trick (respectful apologies to meditation teachers), but a healthy one that may be perhaps the single most overlooked aspect of wellness.
Find a quiet place where you can sit comfortably.
Select a word, phrase, sound, or repetitive movement (as in tai chi, for example) to focus your attention on. Whatever you choose should have a positive meaning to you. You might try peace, easy, or rest. Focus your mind on your breath as you inhale (through your mouth or nose, it doesn’t matter), and then say your word to yourself or out loud during the exhale.
When you begin, keep your eyes closed so you won’t be distracted by the visual environment around you. (However, you might place a clock in easy view so you can peek at it if necessary to see how long you’ve been at it.)
Breathe and focus for about fifteen minutes in the morning. If, while meditating, a thought comes into your mind, don’t panic and stop. Just consciously ease your attention back to your breathing and your word.
Breathe and focus using this technique at least three times per week, preferably in the morning. The more you practice relaxing your mind, the easier it will be to slip into that relaxed state. First it becomes easier to relax through the meditation period, but then you’ll notice increased relaxation and peace through your day. Expect it to take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks of practice before you begin to realize how much the technique helps calm your mind. It just depends on the individual person.
Remember, letting go of stress is just like every other new habit. There’s no switch that you can flip from on to off. Even though the techniques are simple, you do have to practice them to make them a steady part of your life. This is how “finding your peace” becomes easier as you go.
Yoga
Is yoga an exercise or a stress management technique? Actually, it’s both. If you need a little of both and don’t have the time to sign up for full contact karate and transcendental meditation, yoga gives you a bit of both, all at the same time. It’s good for your heart, for your body, and for
your mind.
In fact, it’s so healthy that it is now being studied by rigorous medical scientists. In a 2004 paper, Dr. Parshad investigated the various ways yoga improves overall health. These include muscle strength, flexibility, improved circulation and oxygen uptake, as well as hormone function. And the relaxation clearly helps yoga practitioners be more resilient to stressful situations. This, in turn, helps them reduce risk factors for cardiorespiratory diseases. These wonderful benefits have been known in Eastern cultures for centuries, and are just now receiving their proper medical explanations in the West.
Laughter Lightens the Heart
Humor really does heal. In fact, decades of research has shown that humor—and the physical act of laughing—is an incredibly effective intervention for cancer patients, decreasing anxiety, boosting the immune system, and reducing stress hormones. After all, laughter has a trove of positive physiological effects such as lowering blood pressure, increasing relaxation, and perhaps even helping prevent heart disease.
So find something that makes you laugh every day. Especially when your situation provokes worry and anxiety, try to find the humor that will lighten your emotional load. Call it your cancer-prevention medicine, your heart medicine, or your immunity-boosting medicine, because that’s what it is. Laugh, doctor’s orders.
One day Janet, a woman in our PATH to Healthy Weight Loss course, worried to me that she had to serve on a voter registration panel, but wasn’t looking forward to it. The panel was made up of people who just seemed to be perpetually grumpy. Even though it wasn’t until the next week, she was already working up a good solid case of dread about it. One of her coworkers in particular was so negative about absolutely everything she said, she was sure it would make the day unbearable. And, of course, the poor poll workers are easy targets for rude people who come by and blame them for any perceived slight.
This issue was bearing down on Janet, but it’s something almost everyone faces in some form or another all the time. How can you stay positive in your life in the face of boring work and the company of negative people? It’s not easy, but here’s what I advised for her.
Negate the negative. I coached Janet to sit as far away from the negative coworker as possible. Grumpy people are unfortunately plentiful and stuck in their ways. Always position yourself around people who are upbeat; they’ll elevate your mood and naturally support your happiness and health. You can do the same thing at home by choosing comedy TV shows and radio programs. You don’t have to do this all the time, just make sure to include the infectiousness of humor somewhere in your entertainment lineup.
See it your way. If her colleagues insisted on sharing their black clouds, she could mentally distance herself from them by viewing their ridiculous comments as she would a cartoon: Eeyore, Yosemite Sam, Grumpy the dwarf. These guys are all funny because they’re just playing the role of the disgruntled person for the scene. For the real people in front of you, when you choose to see them as caricatures of their ugly emotions, you’re more detached and less likely to take personally whatever problems they’re working themselves through. In this light, their bark loses its bite.
Clock out. For those times when no voters are drifting by, Janet could take an enjoyable book to fill her time with. It wouldn’t have to be funny per se, but something that would make her smile. Look for the funny, quirky, offbeat elements that are around you all the time. Do this as a commitment to a lightened spirit that helps ward off even chronically gloomy people of the world. Don’t let them drag you down.
Take a Muscle Inventory
Check in with your body and you’ll be able to release tension in just seconds. It takes no more than a couple minutes to make a mental survey of your muscles. It’s a body scan you can do on yourself. In fact, go ahead and try this now. It helps to do this with your eyes closed.
Think about your shoulder muscles. If they’re tight, let them go slack. Roll your shoulders back. They may tense up later on, but that’s okay because by doing this you’ve broken the chronic contractions with a brief period of relaxation. See how easy that was? And it only took a few seconds!
Focus on your face. Now take a brief muscular inventory from the neck up. Start at your neck muscles, especially at the base of your skull and then slowly move around to beneath your chin. Think about whether they are tightened up, one at a time, and consciously relax them. Now move to the biggest cause of tension headaches, the muscles of your face. Think about the tightness you experience around your eyes, then in your forehead and finally down to your jaw muscles. Let them go slack, one at a time.
Down to your toes. With the same procedure, move to the muscles along your neck and upper back, arms, and legs. At each stage, check for tightness and relax the muscles for a few seconds, long enough to release the tension before continuing. You’ll find the most productive area you have to work on will be around your upper back, which is the region that gets scrunched up when you hunch your shoulders.
Take your muscle inventory daily and two important things happen. First, relaxation becomes a more natural part of your day as you begin to sense the strain that builds up in your shoulders and around your eyes before it turns into a tension headache. And once you begin to notice muscle tension within your normal day, you’ll be more likely to relax your muscles—it becomes automatic. At that point you have a lifetime solution that heads off stress before it can affect you physically.
The second thing that happens when you practice relaxing your muscles daily is that you tap into the relationship between your body and mind. While it’s true that mental stress causes physical stress, chronic physical stress also causes mental stress. It goes both ways. That’s why, when you relax the muscles of (especially) your face and neck, your overall level of anxiety is reduced as well.
You’ve probably heard the old saying that it’s the little things that matter most. Taking care of your muscle tension periodically through the day is perhaps the easiest, quickest thing you can do to handle chronic stress in your life.
Writing
Venting can be an important stress-relieving outlet for many people. But the problem with venting is that you’re usually doing it at someone—not a good idea. However, the technique I want to show you really helps you vent, but in a productive way … by writing.
Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a good writer. And don’t worry about getting the words, spelling, or grammar perfect (your scribblings won’t be seen by anyone but you). But by consistently venting your thoughts on the page, you’ll find that the effects can be dramatic. To do this, follow these simple rules:
With a notebook and pen, find a quiet spot where you’ll have about fifteen minutes of time to yourself.
The only rule is that you need to write continuously. You don’t have to write fast, just keep the words flowing. And it doesn’t matter what you choose to write about either, because you’re simply venting onto the page and the subjects will come out on their own. If you run out of topics to write about, restate what you’ve already written down. Just keep writing something for the entire fifteen minutes.
When you’re done, tear up the page and throw it away, so your journal can never be seen. You can tell it anything.
You will find that, as with everything, this process gets easier as you continue. At first you may have to repeat what you’ve already written a few times, but by the second and third attempt you’ll be able to spill all the pent-up thoughts right out on the page.
Keep in mind that your venting doesn’t have to be negative. Positive venting can be very liberating when you write your gratitude, hopes, and excitements. This moves them from your stewing subconscious onto the objective page in a way that lets them go completely.
Vent to your journal as often as you like, but start by practicing a few times per week. Even when you don’t think you have anything to say, write on your set schedule anyway. The items below the surface will come out as you write, and you never would have said them if you hadn’t s
tarted in the first place.
Sleep Controls Weight
Here’s some radical weight control advice—get a good night’s sleep.
This is a habit no one really thinks about in regard to their weight and health, but it’s a critical part of any lifestyle approach to weight loss. Quality sleep is essential for sustaining the body’s normal ability to process and control weight-related functions such as blood sugar levels, cortisol, and thyroid hormones.
The Columbia University Obesity Research Center recently showed that those who got less than four hours of sleep were a full 50 percent more likely to be obese than those getting a normal night of sleep. Dr. Stephen Heymsfield worked on the study and pointed out that “there’s growing scientific evidence that there’s a link between sleep and the various neural pathways that regulate food intake.”
For example, sleep deprivation can manifest itself as hunger cravings, possibly because the hunger hormone grehlin is elevated in the sleep-deprived. For whatever reason, it tends to lead to bingeing and snacking throughout the day. But here’s the good news—you don’t have to lose sleep over losing sleep. The effects of deprivation can be reversed by just three consecutive full nights of sleep.
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