You can help relieve stress by cultivating hope. Stress causes us to narrow our view. When we hear a car screeching around the corner, our eyes don’t glance upward to a flock of birds in the sky. Our ears don’t pick up on a dog barking down the street. We automatically hone in on the screeching car to make sure we don’t get hit. A narrow view, tunnel vision, helps us deal with imminent danger. It’s effective in that it gets us to jump out of the way of the car.
But think about ongoing life stress: relationship conflict, financial hardship work deadlines, raising sick children, raising children in the twenty-first century, caring for elderly parents, loneliness.
If we are hit with a multitude of stressors all at once, or if these stressors are ongoing, your view of life can get increasingly narrow. Your mind fixates on the problems, on what threatens your happiness and well-being. In the case of financial hardship, you may feel trapped, convinced you’ll always live paycheck to paycheck, never be able to buy a house.
In the case of relationship conflict, you may only see the dark aspects of the other person, the problems, never widening your view to see them as more than their off-putting behavior. You may ruminate about the disagreements, fixate on how this will never work, instead of seeing what the two of you do agree on and what does work.
When you are plagued with chronic stress, you begin to think that fighting the stress, combatting the worry is your lot in life. You lose hope for a happier, more peaceful existence. This is dangerous as it can create chronic anxiety or deep depression. Cultivating hope is essential if you want to free yourself from the hold stress and worry have on you. But how do you do that when things seem so dire?
Help Relieve Stress: Widen the Lens
Because people under duress can get easily caught in these myopic views of life, I often talk about widening the lens. If you are in daily rumination about office politics, worrying you might lose your job, try to focus on the people at work who may not be involved in the conflict.
Look to the periphery. Who else might you talk to, have lunch with, both within your office environment and outside of it. In addition, the job does not define you. Think about your values, your relationships outside of work, your interests, your health. There may be other aspects of your life that are going quite well or, really, are more important to you.
Direct your mind to those parts of your life in order to unhook yourself from fixation on the problem. Or, if you can’t pull your mind off of the office problem, widen the lens to include creative or new ways of relating to it. I am not advising you to deny or avoid your problems.
I’m advising you to look at what’s beyond the issues at hand so you can feel inspired and motivated. If you only fixate on the problem, it can pull you in like quicksand, consume you to the point of depletion, which only serves to perpetuate stress. Often when we get distance from an issue, we can see more clearly what we need to do.
Employ Positive Emotions
Positive emotions are feelings such as interest, joy, gratitude, love, peace, inspiration, awe, excitement, to name a few. Researcher Barbara Frederickson developed what she calls a “Broaden and Build Theory” based on the employment of positive emotions. She found that when people are able to expand their repertoire of emotional experience beyond the narrow view of negative emotion, they develop more physical, mental and social resources that help them thrive in life.
But in order to find these emotions inside yourself, you’ll need to be intentional. As psychologist, Rick Hanson, says, “look for the good.” Because the narrow view of negativity causes us to metaphorically look down, you’ll need to look up and around.
Notice the beauty of a star-filled sky (awe), appreciate the presence of a good friend or the comfort of a warm meal (gratitude), meditate or sit in nature for a bit (peace) and so on. Notice the good things that already exist! If you’re widening the lens, you can do this. Then allow yourself to truly feel the emotion that is generated instead of batting it away. In other words, let yourself linger in awe at the star-filled sky instead of saying, “I wish I had someone to share this with.” Be present.
Help Relieve Stress: Start with Yourself
Start with yourself. A common experience these days is loneliness. If you are feeling lonely and alone, you may start to believe that you will always be lonely—that no one will be interested in your company, let alone a relationship with you.
As a result, you are probably very down on yourself. You may stay home a lot in the company of your own critical mind which only exacerbates stress. Be intentional. Pay attention to how you talk to yourself and begin to speak to yourself compassionately and with encouragement—as you would a child or a good friend. Learn to be with yourself with positive inner dialogue. It may feel foreign at first but do it anyway. Instead of, “if you haven’t found a partner by now, you never will,” say, “I’m sorry you’re suffering today, I’m here for you. Let’s go for a run.”
When you go outside, allow a smile to cross your face when you greet the grocery store clerk or the nurse at the doctor’s office or a neighbor.
Ask people about themselves, whether you feel interested or not, as you never know what may get your attention. Be intentional and present so that your interaction with the other person is not clouded with your own preoccupation with yourself, but is free from distraction, focused and open to who they are and what they have to say.
Employing positive emotions gets us to move through life with more engagement and optimism. And this can open up your world to opportunity.
Help Relieve Stress: Establish a Plan
Research shows that when we have goals and, even more, when we set a pathway to achieve those goals, we cultivate hope. You don’t have to fixate on the future or ignore all the beauty of the present to do this. Spend fifteen or twenty minutes writing out some goals for yourself—career, relationship, health, financial or leisure goals as example. It helps to write this in paragraph form in the present tense.
For example, “In one year I am living in ______, working at _____ and enjoying _____. I am exercising daily and am meeting people through _____.” Now, put that goal essay somewhere accessible and re-read it once a week. Ask yourself what you can do each day toward one or more of those goals. This kind of agency helps us realize dreams and when we bring our dreams to life in this way, we cultivate hope.
Conclusion
Curing Stress – Remember, that hopelessness is based on a narrow view, a perception of life that is eclipsed by our own blinders. Stress, especially chronic stress, can cause this tunnel vision and limit you from seeing possibility and opportunity. It can limit you from an array of things and experiences in any given day that generate positive emotion.
So, widen the lens, look for the good to employ positive emotion and make a plan. Jane Fonda said, “hope is activism” meaning when we have it we move and when we move we change things.
