How Do I Recover From Stress | Dubai.Psychology.Remo

How Do I Overcome Stress:

1.1 Why is Stress Important to Talk About?

This is often a question that we ask ourselves when it is too late.

The goal of this blogpost is to help you identify when you’re approaching the edge of a cliff and enable you to pull the ‘emergency break’ before it is too late. As a psychologist, I have unfortunately seen a number of cases where the emergency brake was pulled too late, causing significant emotional distress, physical complications and an unnecessarily long recovery time. High pressure work environments are common in rapidly developing cities like Dubai, and many employees here are experiencing a high level of work related stress. Specific global statistics related to stress are challenging to obtain as they depend on a variety of factors, and specific data related to prevalence of stress is not available from the GCC region. However, WHO states that work-related stress is a global concern that can lead to a number of detrimental health complications, and it has been measured to affect as much as 27% of population in countries such as the United States. It is therefore a topic that we all can benefit from educating ourselves on, as there is a high probability that we at one point or another will experience symptoms related to stress to varying degrees.

1.2. What is the Definition of Stress

Before we can answer the question of “Do I Have Stress”, we need to define what ‘Stress’ is:

"... A normal human reaction, which most of us experience on a frequent basis in order to adapt to challenging situations. Stress allows our energy to surge, productivity to increase, enables us to hyperfocus, and ignore physical pain. As such, stress is a massively important survival mechanism, and also goes under the name ‘Fight or Flight Response".

Looking at the above, it appears evident that stress is a rather positive and useful response. So, would it not be beneficial for this response to be chronic? I would say no (unfortunately), and the reason that we do not want a stress response to be chronic, is because stress is a deviation from our ‘emotional baseline’, meaning that when we are in a state of stress, we are pushing our system beyond its boundaries. You can equate it to running to the point of experiencing a side stitch. Once you feel the side stitch, you automatically reduce the tempo of your workout. A Stress Response is a "mental side stitch"! Our bodies are designed for this response, but just as with a regular side stitch, if we try to maintain such a pace despite the warning signals of the body, it will result in serious discomfort. Due to this discomfort, once experiencing a stress for a prolonged period of time, most people will stop engaging in the activity that is causing stress. However, when a certain level of pressure is put upon us, either by ourselves or by employers, we tend to push ourselves beyond this point, which can lead to a Chronic Stress Response. In this state, the level of cortisol is chronically heightened in the body, which can result in a number of symptoms including, but not limited to: reduced immune system functioning, increased cell death in the brain, altered hormonal balance, poor sleep, and gastrointestinal disturbances*. As such, a stress response causes discomfort, whereas a chronic stress response causes serious risk factors to both the physical and mental health of the individual. Before delving further into the recovery aspect of chronic stress, it is valuable to talk about how to prevent developing such a response.

*An extensive list of symptoms related to stress can be seen on: https://www.webmd.com/balance/stress-management/stress-symptoms-effects_of-stress-on-the-body

1.3 How to Prevent a Chronic Stress Response (Respect the Road Signs)

Preventing a chronic stress response in some ways is similar to the process of avoiding running your car over a cliff. If you are observant of the road signs along the road, you will slow down at the right times, which will allow you to turn at the appropriate speed when the turns come. People who avoid developing a chronic stress response are usually adept at looking out for these signs and adhering to these warnings. The people who do develop chronic stress responses tends to either ignore the signs, or simply have not learned to look out for them.

When trying to avoid developing a chronic stress response, you are looking for warning signs that your body is not coping with the stress that it is being put through, either because the demands in the moment are so grand, or because the stress has been present for too long. Learning to identify the early warning signs that you are going too fast for too long will help you avoid serious symptoms of stress. The warning signs of each person is individual, and there are different categories of these. The more severe ones would include the following list of severe symptoms of stress:

Poor quality of sleep and appetite.
Chronic rumination.
Inability to recover calm in body after a day’s work before the next day begins.
Tachycardia.
Chronic fatigue.

While it is important to be aware of these, if you start to feel these symptoms, chances are that you are most likely too close to the edge already. What you can do is sit down now and write a list of more subtle traits that are indicating that you are moving at a pace that is not sustainable. Examples of mild symptoms of stress are given in the below:

Reduced desire to socialize.
Not having energy to do things that you used to enjoy, for example going to the gym or other hobbies.
Increased tendency to forget day to day things or deadlines that you normally would be on top of.
Lack of desire to explore new things.
Feeling less creative and spontaneous.

Most people will only start to take their symptoms seriously when they experience the severe symptoms, but it ought to be taken seriously already when the mild indications of stress occur, if they are long lasting. Once you experience these symptoms, there are three pillars of treatment that you ought to pursue. The first one is to reduce your workload, the second is to reduce expectations, and the third is to work with the thoughts that are causing you stress. Reducing your workload is in essence simple, but can rarely be done without reducing expectations. Working with your thoughts is a bit more complex, but it will also help greatly in the work of reducing expectations. Therefore, all three pillars would usually be targeted in stress related treatment modalities. The following will take you through these Three Pillars.

2.1 Reducing Workload and Setting Clear Boundaries for Time When Engaging in Work

For the majority of people experiencing chronic stress responses, a reduction of workload is necessary**. This would usually be the case for stressed professionals consistently working 50+ hours a week. What is sometimes more important than the amount of hours worked though, is the boundaries for working time. As such, if the professional never feel that they can take time off, and constantly can be called in for work, or always checks and responds to their emails, this can severely diminish the de-stressing effect that the person would otherwise have from taking time off.

To give a metaphor of the importance of detaching completely from work; think about yourself as being an athlete. All athletes need to recover in order to be ready for the next workout/match the following day/weekend. As a matter of fact, most athletes schedule in ‘recovery time’ in order for them to be able to perform optimally when needed. Similarly, when working, you will activate your stress system (sympathetic nervous system), and that is typically fine, because once you’re off work, you will be able to relax and ‘de-stress’/recover from a hard days work (activate your parasympathetic nervous system).

Your body typically take a certain amount of time before it goes into ‘rest mode’ depending on how busy the days have been. Sometimes going into ‘rest-mode’ can take 10 min., other times it can take a lot more, if you have had a particularly rough day. However, once you’re in recovery mode, you will be able to enjoy your time, socialize, recover, eat and sleep, and be ready for the following day. But if you are checking your phone or email throughout the evening, when you were supposed to be destressing, you will never fully enter recovery mode. This will usually cause a slow, but steady burnout, and that is why boundaries around when you are ‘on the clock’ and when you’re ‘off the clock is so important.

** For some individuals, the stress response is purely caused by the work not aligning with personal values. Extreme examples of this could be a pacifist working for an arms manufacturer, or a vegan working for a slaughterhouse. Usually though, it would often be more like a person who cares deeply about human values and have high standards for being truthful and having integrity, working for a company whose sole focus is on monetary gain and disregarding the wellbeing of their clients. In these cases, a reduction in workload will not be a sustainable solution, and a job/career change will be unavoidable.

2.2 How do I set Boundaries when Everyone is Used to me Responding Right Away

The answer to this is simple. By responding to messages and calls at every hour of the day, you have essentially conditioned your co-workers to reach out to you at all times of the day. What is usually helpful here is to put an automatic email response saying “To Whom it May Concern. I work between 09:00-17:00, and if you are receiving this message, I will not be available for an immediate response. I will get back to you tomorrow at my earliest convenience. Thanks for reaching out to me. Sincerely yours (insert name)”.

Having separate phones for private and work related matters are also valuable, as this will give you the option of simply shutting off your work phone once the day is over. Similarly to the automatic email response, it is a good idea to have an automatic response on your phone outlining your working hours, when you do not pick up.

With regards to vacation…

This is such a tough topic for high-performers and ambitious people, as most seem to find it tremendously difficult to leave their work phone and laptop at home. However, going on vacation is where you truly gear down, go into ‘rest and digest’ mode, recharge your batteries, and gain new perspectives on life. This precious time should preferably be kept ‘pure’, as even small work-related interactions can put you back into ‘work mode’.

3.1 Have Realistic Expectations for Yourself

When talking about expectations, we cannot avoid the subject of “Should Statements”. Should statements are essentially internalized rules that we have set for ourselves which drive us towards certain goals or ways of living. Such should statements can be tremendously helpful and motivating if they are realistic and in tune with our situation. However, they can also become detrimental if they exert unrealistic pressure on a person. For example, if a person has internalized the should statement “I need to be the top performer every month, and I will lose my job, or people will look down on me if I am not”, “everybody should love me, and I am failure if they do not”, or “I need to sacrifice my own well-being for others’, otherwise I am a bad person”. These should statements may seem overexaggerated, but unfortunately these, or similar ones, are what I frequently see in my sessions. They cause a tremendous amount of pressure on the individual, which often make it even harder for the individual to live up to such expectations. More realistic expectations would be:

1. “I would love to be the top-performer at my job every month, and I’ll do my best to achieve that, but I am in an office full of talented people who work incredibly hard, so it is unlikely that I’ll achieve that goal consistently. Furthermore, even if I am not the top-performer every month, I will likely not get fired, as I’ve been with this company for a while, generally am well-liked, and nobody with my level of performance has ever gotten fired as far as I know”.

2. “It would be nice if everybody around me loved me, but by the very nature of the feeling of ‘love’, it’s something that human beings generally only feel for a limited amount of people in their lives, and so, it would be highly unlikely that everyone in my life would love me. Matter of fact, it’s unlikely 100% of the people that I meet will even like me, as we are all different, and we can’t like everyone that we meet. I don’t even like everyone I meet! Therefore, I’ll do my best to be friendly and close with as many as I can while still being myself“.

3. “If I continue to sacrifice my own well-being for that of others, I’m going to break mentally, which is going to cause people to be concerned about me. Actually, the times where I see that people are the happiest around me are when I am genuinely the happiest with myself. Therefore, while I’m happy to help others whenever I can, I need to prioritise myself, so that I can be a genuine positive influence on others. Furthermore, I would never ask anyone of those that I love or care about to sacrifice themselves as much as I have myself in recent years, and if they had, I would tell them to focus on themselves before helping others. So I should probably do the same”.

Changing your should statements (expectation to yourself) to more realistic ones changes what level of pressure you put on yourself, and subsequently, how you react to your own achievements. If you consistently internalize unrealistically ambitious should statements, then you will likely be in a more or less chronic state of disappointment in yourself. On the other hand, if you consistently set realistic expectations for yourself, you will equally consistently feel accomplished and accepting of yourself, and will likely feel more motivated to work towards your goals without becoming burned out.

4.1 How Thoughts Affect Our Responses to Situations

There is a good chance that you have tried the following, or something similar to it: You’re sitting for an exam, you feel confident, you feel that you are going to do well as you have prepared well, or simply because you have a knack for this particular subject. You’re smiling to the people around you, you’re getting ready for the examination, and in a couple of hours, you know that you will be enjoying yourself having a couple of laughs with your friends about the exam, and otherwise go about your day and enjoy life. Suddenly, negative thoughts starts to creep into your mind. Thoughts like: “What if the questions are going to be primarily about that one chapter that I did not read”, “What if I missed something while preparing”, “What if I don’t have enough time to answer all the questions”, “What if the teacher decided to throw us a curve ball and gives us all kinds of tricky questions”…. Once these thoughts starts to creep into our minds, suddenly our mood changes as well. We may start to get clammy hands, our heart starts to beat a bit faster, we no longer smile as enthusiastically to our friends, and we become rather uncomfortable. Not only that, but once these negative thoughts creep into our minds, it generally does not stop there. These thoughts can start to take a life of their own, and we can end up in a ‘negative cognitive spiral’. As such, once the initial negative thoughts creep in, consecutive thoughts such as: “I am going to fail the exam”, “all of my friends are going to do so well, and I’m going to be the only one who fails, and it’s going to be so embarrassing”, “I’ll have to re-sit this exam, and everyone is going to know that I have failed and think less of me”, “I might not get the job that I want, because people are going to know that I failed, and will consider me dumb”, etc… Just 10 minutes ago, you were on top of the world, thinking that you would do well in the exam, but now you are on the verge of panic attack. In these 10 minutes, nothing about the situation that you are in has changed, but your thoughts about the situation has, and that made you interpret the situation differently. These thoughts are called ‘Negative Automatic Thoughts’ (NATs), and they are always present when people experience high levels of stress. NATs are almost always distorted, meaning that they give an inaccurate representation of the situation, which is why they can be so inhumanely distressing to experience. I am now going to show the very basics of how these thoughts mentioned in the above are distorted, and how you can ‘untwist’ them. Consider the below examples:

1. NAT: “What if the questions are going to be primarily about that one chapter that I did not read”.
Reflection: This thought is distorted, because it is highly unlikely that all of the questions for an exam is going to be about ONE chapter in the curriculum. In this situation, the person is having an overly strong focus on WHAT THEY DID NOT DO, and an overly weak focus on WHAT THEY DID DO, as the person read all the other chapters. Therefore, a more realistic thought would be:

True Thought: “It is possible that I may not be able to answer ALL the questions in this exam, as I did miss one chapter when preparing for the exam. However, as I have read the other nine chapters, and therefore have prepared for 90% of the curriculum, I’ll probably be able to do quite alright”.

2. NAT: “I am going to fail the exam”.

Reflection: As with almost all thoughts, there is some truth to this NAT. In theory, even though you have prepared for 90% of the curriculum, you may still fail the exam if you suddenly blank out, or if the teacher has decided to throw the entire class a curve ball and give questions, which almost no one can understand. However, unless there is a history of you blanking out and/or the teacher being incredibly unfair, this thought would be distorted as the focus in on something that is highly unlikely, and a more realistic thought would therefore be:

True Thought: “I am very scared of failing this exam, because I really want to do well, but I don’t have a history of blanking out, my teacher does not have a history of throwing us curve balls for exams, and I have studied 90% of the curriculum. Therefore, while there always is the odd chance of something out of the ordinary happening, which might make me fail, if things go as they normally do, I have a very high chance of passing this exam.

3. NAT: “I might not get the job that I want, because people are going to know that I failed, and will consider me dumb”

(Before reading further, take a moment for yourself to consider how you think that this thought could be distorted, and what a more realistic thought could be. Once you’ve done so, please read on)

Reflection: This thought is distorted for a couple of reasons. First of all, very few employers will look at whether or not you have failed an exam or not as it will normally be the grade on the re-test that is displayed; secondly, failing one exam says very little about one’s intelligence unless failing is a recurrent pattern, and how people value each other’s intelligence is based on much more than exam results. However, it is not untrue that some people may jump to that conclusion because they don’t know you well enough, and therefore label you incorrectly. Therefore, there is a reality to this part of the statement, and it should be taken into consideration when creating the realistic thought. It could be phrased something like this:

True Thought: “First of all, while there always is that off-chance that I will fail, it is very unlikely to happen. However, if it does happen, I don’t think that it will affect my job prospect, as I will just re-sit the exams, and as I will then study even more for it, I will likely get a better grade the second time around, than if I pass it now, and it does not show on my grade chart how many times I took the exam. Therefore, a future employer would not know about me failing, as they will only be able to see my final grade. With regards to me being labelled a loser. Hmm. Most of my friends know me quite well, and as I am usually good at my studies and frequently win other people over in debates, it is very unlikely that they would consider me dumb because I fail this particular exam. If anyone considers me dumb because of it, it is probably because they don’t know anything else about me, or because they’re highly prejudiced people, in which case I don’t really care about their friendship or opinion anyways.

4.2 The Truth Shall Set You Free

In the above I have given three examples of Negative Automatic Thoughts (NAT), and a correction of these NAT’s under the header: “True Thoughts”. Now the question is, which of the above thoughts would you personally consider the most scary, and which of the above thoughts would you consider the most true? My guess is, that the true thoughts likely are the least scary. Correct? At least, that is what all of my clients say, and based on the above, you can probably see that working with your thoughts can make a tremendous difference in how you react to different situations, which in turn affect your overall mental health. First of all, it is a much nicer feeling to think thoughts that are not overly negative; and secondly, it makes you spend less time ruminating, which gives you more time to get stuff done, which in the long run will make you feel more accomplished and less stressed. Therefore, we can say that our thoughts affect our emotions, which affects how and what we do, which in turn affects how we think about ourselves and the world, as summarised in the below:

Thoughts = Emotions = Behaviour = Thoughts (etc.)

Conclusion

In conclusion, there are three pillars of overcoming an exacerbated stress response.

1. Reduce workload.

2. Have realistic expectations to yourself

3. Learn to manage Negative Automatic Thoughts, and regain your mental health.

If you are interested in learning more about how to manage stress, the best recommendation that I can give is to seek out a psychologist to guide you in the process of achieving the three pillars of overcoming a chronic stress response as mentioned in the above. If this is not feasible for you, I’d recommend reading the book “Feeling Great, The Revolutionary New Treatment for Depression and Anxiety” written by Dr. Burns, as that gives a great insight with regards to pillar two and three, that are related to should statements and negative thinking patterns.