Feeling Stressed? Here are 13 Ways to Overcome It.

12 min readJun 3, 2020

We are all familiar with stress. It’s just part of life these days, but as familiar as it is, it can be managed. Here are some scientifically based remedies to stress, along with other remedies from older traditions I know have worked for myself and clients.

1. Observe And Be Kind To Yourself

The first step to any transformative practice is observation. Figure out what your triggers are and how you react. Where does your hippocampus take you when you’re on autopilot?

Do you run to a cookie? Television, coffee, beer?

For me, once I got over the chemical dependencies of cigarettes, booze, marijuana I saw just how much my mind obsessed over my relationships when stressed.

You might find you go to the staples of self-medication or you might discover you have unique ways of coping.

Unique methods your brain has learned in order to reduce its experience of suffering.

Which brings us to our other point:

Stop torturing yourself over what you do when stressed, it’s not a reflection of you, it’s a conditioned part of your brain.

If you beat yourself up for getting stressed all you’re doing is creating more stress.

Breathe through these times, realize that the more you get yourself into a non-stressed state, the more that inner whirlpool of trigger, action, accusation, guilt, and shame starts to drain away.

2. Breathe Deeply

Our emotions are linked to our breathing because our sympathetic and parasympathetic responses are linked to our breathing.

Deeper, fuller breaths are signs that we are in a relaxed state. The short choppy breaths of a triggered state are meant to increase oxygen and get your body ready for fight or flight.

When we reverse this and calm our breath by breathing deeply, we are sending a very real message to the body that the threat has been assessed and it’s safe to calm down.

As with all things, this comes with practice and is normally easier if you establish a meditation and mindfulness routine.

3. Use Imagery

Sometimes it’s fire; I feel out the stress in my body and I burn it up.

Sometimes it’s a river washing it all away.

I know people who use rays of light. Sometimes I make it complicated, turn the worries to ash, and grow trees from them.

Use whatever comes naturally for you. Personally, for me, this changes every so often to a new image. Switch it up if you have to but a visualization can help, especially when coupled with deep breathing.

Visualization allows you to interact with the emotional state in a new way. It gets you out of the worry cycle, breaking up the thought patterns that lead to stress’s downward spiral.

4. Get Into Your Body: Sight, Sound, Smell, Touch

When the visualizations and breathing aren’t enough to keep you in your right mind, get out of your head and into your body.

Find something beautiful.

Google a picture of something you find beautiful or better yet stare at a tree, a spider web or the sky.

Focus your sight on something you find relaxing, focus your mind on your breath, and that sight.

You may feel the stress creep in and realize you are no longer seeing what you’re staring at.

This happens to me all the time when I’m walking, side thoughts enter, and I realize I’m not enjoying all the beautiful sights around me.

If you recognize this, nod your head and look again.

Congratulations, you’re meditating.

Create a tactile anchor.

If you don’t want to leave the office another great anchoring piece is touch.

Rub your index finger and thumb together, bringing your attention to the sensation, or rub your thumb around your palm in circles or figure eights.

Often stress can make us forget our bodies. Connecting with them and feeling something solid can take us out of the downward mental loop and help us realize that we’re safe in the moment.

Hum or sing a favorite line.

King of Siam it and whistle a happy tune or list your favorite things.

Music activates entire regions of the brain (1). When you engage with music you open up. On top of it, the act of humming or singing brings sensation into the body.

You feel your throat, the vibrations in your mouth and chest. If you sing you are controlling your breath. It’s a win, win all around.

I have a few go-to melodies that incorporate my spiritual and mindfulness practices. It’s an instant message to my body and mind to pay attention and open up.

Bypass the thalamus with scent.

Light some incense, smell a rose or douse yourself in essential oils.

The sense of smell is the only one to bypass the thalamus, the switchboard of the sensory systems.

The olfactory system runs its own game and it plugs into where it needs to be. What this means for you is that you can bypass the other processing systems and wake your brain out of stress through smell.

5. Splash Cold Water On Your Face (Better Yet, Dunk It)

This isn’t meant for torture. It activates the Mammalian Diving Reflex, making your body feel like you might freeze or drown.

Why is tricking your body into thinking it’s going to die a good tool for countering stress?

Because death puts things into perspective and the cold water on your face is a way of telling you to get your priorities straight. It breaks down that inner monologue of stressed-out thoughts.

The downward cycle that takes you from “well this is inconvenient” to imagining your house on fire, your car soaring over a cliff and your significant other cheating on you.

You know, the year 2020.

This is the way to break out of that cycle. It shocks your body back into the moment.

6. FIND A WAY TO FEEL IN CONTROL

This is my favorite hack because it goes hand in hand with a good spiritual practice and even magical thinking. (How often do you get to scientifically justify magical thinking?)

If you think you have control over a situation your mind avoids the stress state longer (2).

How does this relate to magical thinking and spirituality?

The positive effect of avoiding the stress state remains even if the individual’s belief about their control of the situation is illusionary. That isn’t to say that spirituality or magical thinking is illusionary, what I’m saying is real or not it works.

Why not put it to work for you?

Develop a spiritual practice, feel connected to the universe, find your silver lining and write your grimoire, whatever (within ethical reason) works to empower you.

For me, it’s prayer and ritual.

Just make sure not to reach for too much control. The belief that you can control others or master your environment is a great way to stress yourself out.

7. Get Out Into Nature And Find Your Awe

Nature heals. Simple as that.

Scientifically put, it can help us de-stress by reducing stimuli and putting the brain in a familiar environment. Familiar in the fact that nature is where the brain evolved.

This works for sound and vision (3) and a whole host of other considerations like the clean air one breaths in a forest.

The sense of awe also reduces stress by directly calming the nervous system.

It causes us to think more critically and in a new relation to time, one that doesn’t feel like the pressures of the day are crushing us. In short, it puts things in perspective.

8. Go For A Walk

Study after study shows that exercise promotes well-being and reduces stress. Walking has also been shown to increase neurogenesis, which in theory increases the speed in which neuroplasticity allows us to reshape our brains.

Tired of where the hippocampus leads you? Want to beef up that prefrontal cortex?

Get your neurogenesis on.

On top of the neurological effects, many of our states of mind, behaviors, and emotions are linked to our environment. If you don’t like where your mind is, get a change of scenery and switch it up.

For double the points, take a walk in the park and enjoy some nature. Let the cadence of your walk leave your worries behind you.

9. Meditate

It’s well known that meditation can help relieve stress and it’s really not that hard.

Most people I tell that to (who don’t have a meditation practice) roll their eyes and say that they’ve tried. “It doesn’t work for me.”

Meditation works for everyone.

It’s just a matter of managing our expectations as we truly practice.

It’s hard to pull out of the western mentality of immediate gratification. If meditating doesn’t “work” the first few times we try, we often quit.

Monks spend decades of their lives in ideal meditating conditions to become good at it. They will spend their entire lives practicing it to perfection.

Thankfully it only takes 5–10 minutes a day for us to see benefits from meditation. These benefits are subtle and build up with time, just as our brains slowly change with the practice itself.

What to do for those 5–10 minutes?

Let’s strip things down to their basics.

The brain is an organ of worry, it’s there to keep us alive and make sure we’re able to survive. It is supposed to be aware of dangers and figure out how to complete our tasks and plans. That constantly racing “monkey mind” is just doing its job.

When you sit down to meditate and your brain darts off on a rabbit trail, it isn’t because you lack self-control or your brain is too chaotic or any fault with you and your mind.

It is simply because your brain hasn’t practiced this new form of being and is doing what it is used to.

Simply observe the mind running off and, if you can, laugh. Treat the runaway thoughts like a cute puppy or baby who bolted out into a quest for fun and freedom.

Like the puppy or baby, the mind doesn’t know any better. It’s just doing what it does, what the brain has always done. With time, a relaxed attitude and consistent corrections, it’ll learn not to dart off so much.

No one gets mad at the baby while she’s learning, so don’t get mad at your mind.

Pick something to focus on, your breath or counting to 10. Some people like staring at something; a lit candle can help.

Focus on it and breathe.

If you’re alive your mind will dart somewhere. That’s fine, just recognize what it is doing when you can and bring it back to your focus.

If you get frustrated with how often your mind is running around, a good thing to remember is that every time you find your mind darting and you successfully bring it back you are taking one more step in the direction you want to go. The direction of concentration.

The running away isn’t a failure, bringing it back is the actual practice, the success.

10. Don’t Just Meditate, Practice Mindfulness

Meditation is great but on its own, it’s just a way to relax.

Bringing meditation’s mindfulness into your everyday life can help you achieve a state of self-realization.

I don’t mean this in mystical, vague cliché. I mean it in a very physical way.

When we stress out, parts of our brain like the prefrontal cortex get overwhelmed and become less functional(2).

If you want to realize the whole you, what you are when your brain’s fully functional, you want to keep your stress down.

Stress cuts you off from yourself whereas mindfulness makes you more aware of yourself in each act and moment.

A great way of doing this is using an anchoring behavior.

For instance, while you meditate, take deep breaths and add a tactile anchor such as rubbing your thumb and forefinger together or your thumb in a figure-eight around your palm like the tactile advice above.

Next time you feel triggered or are getting stressed out, not only will this tactile sensation bring you back into your body, but its association with meditation and deep breathing will bring you back into your practice.

Noting can be another way to increase mindfulness. Practicing it with the breath, “rising, falling” or “in, out,” and then expanding it into simple activities “right leg rising, foot extending, stepping, left leg. . .”

You can practice walking meditations, eating meditations, brushing your teeth and sex meditations, mindfully noting and fully experiencing each moment.

11. Take Cold Showers

Yes, I know they’re miserable until you do them and then you’re singing hallelujah and speaking in tongues.

I won’t try to sell you too much on cold showers as there are hundreds of bloggers doing that.

Just know that it works at increasing stress endurance, (4) which helps train you to keep your mind going in stressful situations.

When my mentor was growing up in Siberia, one of her shamanic teachers told her to stand naked in the ice-filled rivers of her hometown. I don’t know anyone with better focus or self-control than her.

Stories like this are not uncommon to powerful traditions.

If you want to remember yourself during all events and trials, you need to build stress resistance and this is one of the ways to do it. Plus you’ll feel like a champ.

12. Take Breaks!

My spiritual mentor is a University Professor and every 45 minutes on the dot she gives her students a break.

For her, it is good Chinese Medicine. Every activity, when concentrated, uses up Yang. You need to let the activity go into its rest phase (Yin) or else you will exhaust the student and their energy.

For behaviorists, the measured increase in productivity is enough to recommend the practice and you will find bloggers all over the web bursting with enthusiasm for the Pomodoro Technique.

Neurologically, it just makes sense.

It takes a lot to keep us focused.

Concentration is held through the constant release of neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin and/or acetylcholine.

Norepinephrine and dopamine are directly related to the stress effect

The body has to use a lot of energy, chemicals, and blood flow to keep you thinking and focused.

Taking a break gives your brain a rest and has been shown to reduce the chemical signs of stress. So set yourself a timer for 45 minutes and make sure to get up and walk around, meditate or fix yourself some tea when that timer goes off.

13. Go on vacations and make sure to enjoy yourself.

This is kind of obvious: enjoying yourself reduces stress. However, if you read this Harvard article you’ll see that most people aren’t doing that.

In fact, Glassdoor shows that 61% of people actually work while on vacation.

And if you’re anything like the people who come to me as clients — successful, determined, and hardworking — your schedule is full Monday through Sunday.

Heck, even my schedule is full. I just make sure to self-care, fun activities, and time with friends amongst everything else.

Why?

Because an enriched environment reduces stress and gets your hippocampus online and working (5), which means our memory is online and working and we’re doing better at managing our stress state.

GO HAVE FUN!

Schedule it if you have to. Just make sure there are times in your week, preferably every day, when you can enjoy yourself. (And that doesn’t mean sitting back with a bottle of wine and the television.)

The study is of an enriched environment. We’re talking good food, good company, and active participation in a great atmosphere.

Take a scented bath, throw a frisbee around the park, line up a date or hit up Disneyland, just make sure you take the time to enjoy yourself.

Conclusion:

There are plenty of ways to reduce stress. I recommend going through the list above and trying something new each week. Keep what works for you and ditch the rest.

Cultivate your resiliency to stress and the way you manage it.

You deserve it!

Call to Action:

Keep a journal as you work with the above methods of stress management.

You can create a scale 1–5 and record each day you work with a particular method, what your stress was like before using the method, after using the method, at the end of the day.

Make the techniques that work the best a part of your everyday life.