Cool It

In 2017 the APA (American Psychological Association) reported that 45% of Americans report lying awake due to stress, 36% reported having stress or anxiety, 35% reported heightened irritability or anger, and 34% reported fatigue due to stress. In the full report, they state that Gen Z (born in the late 1900’s early 2000s) is the most likely generation to have poor mental health. Writing that introduction pains me. I love all my peers as humans, each and every one of them has something beautiful about them that I appreciate. When I see them and in my head I know that they not only might, but are likely, fighting a war, one taking place in their own head; I become poignant, and try to help the people I can. However, I as one person can only directly talk to so many, so today I write this in hopes to help show practical strategies you can use not only to reduce feelings of stress and anxiety, but also increase your feelings of serenity and happiness.

Before I dive into it I will say that there are many different things I have found that can help achieve serenity and happiness so this post will be longer than most as I have a lot of things to fit in, and many of these things could be expanded upon, but I didn’t have the space to do so. Besides that, the things I’m going to detail in this post are practical and/or proven things. I will not offer solutions that will interrupt your life or your lifestyle, but things that you can easily assimilate into your life.

Stress is a response from the body usually caused by being overwhelmed or fearing your ability to accomplish something. Most people feel stress, however, stress can become severe enough to affect your life, such as causing CAPS (chronic abdominal pain syndrome), something that will make your stomach hurt greatly when you’re stressed. Anxiety can be placed into two categories: everyday anxiety and anxiety disorder. In everyday anxiety, you’d feel normal worries or simple embarrassment or insecurities, but things that often won’t affect your way of life, most people deal with this as we all have worries. Anxiety disorder is a mental health ailment that will cause people to worry about many things, often inane, constantly. It affects people’s life, causes people to completely avoid social events, and panic attacks can occur. If you think you have the latter of stress and/or anxiety, talk to a professional, I’m a sixteen-year-old with books, and while these things I will talk about will help you, every person is different and there may be things the doctor will tell you that I either haven’t included or don’t know.

With definitions out of the way, let’s start with the start. Before anything, you have to first, understand you have stress or anxiety issues admit it to yourself, most people say it, but just in your own head say it to yourself, face it, this isn’t usually hard. Second, you must be willing and ready to evolve yourself, to make changes, to do things that will help you. You need to be open-minded when doing all these things, understanding that everything may not work, but being willing to try, because in your mind if you already think it won’t work, it won’t. Reality is a perception of your mind, what you believe is what you will experience. Before everything, you must tell yourself that you want to change and that you want to improve. This can be a lot more terrifying than admitting you’re stressed, but it is the first step.

The first thing we have to figure out is what stresses you, what makes you anxious? Tests? The future? Bills? Responsibilities? All of these? Know what is making you stressed, once you do this you’ll have more clarity in your situation. Sometimes the things that are stressing you out can simply be avoided. If you have a person in your life causing you stress, you can, and should, cut them off. However, it’s something like the things I mentioned above, those are things that can’t really be avoided. Now, let’s get into our first trick, the Zorro Circle. The Zorro Circle is a concept explained in Shawn Achor’s The Happiness Advantage (a lot of these come from that book). It states that when you have a huge task, or many huge tasks, this will cause you to be enervated, and, in the end, the stress and/or anxiety will make it so you get nothing done. To solve this, break down big tasks into small manageable ones. Going along with the Zorro Circle is knowing your limits. Know what you can and cannot handle, this will help you know how small to break your subtasks into, and don’t push your limits unless you’re practicing to increase your limits, but you shouldn’t be doing this with things that can negatively affect you like a project at your job because it wouldn’t end well if you got fired for not finishing with the excuse, “I was trying to improve my stress limit.” Overall, plan, take time and know what you’re going to do, don’t just dive into it, while there are times for that, if you can’t dive without stressing yourself and you end up belly flopping into the water, you’re gonna get hurt. Probably a lot.

Along with that, if you’re doing a project, preparing for a presentation, a competition. Take breaks. You won’t fail your test if you take a 30-minute break from your five hours of studying. Power naps have been shown to be really powerful—who would’ve thought—and breaks will not only help reduce your stress/anxiety, but also help you retain, and likely improve, what you’re doing when you come back, especially if you enjoy what you’re doing but are hyperextending. And if you mix taking breaks with the Zorro Circle, you could mess around with the pomodoro technique—a time management technique for doing tasks efficiently with breaks. Don’t hate something you used to love because you burned yourself out. Next to that, do things that you enjoy, or love. Unrelated to breaks, just make time to do those things which make you happy for the simple reason of they make you happy. Doing something you love and/or are good at, as it’ll help provide a boost of dopamine. It’s not a waste of time, and it’s doesn’t have to be “free time,” just do it.

You could also go outside. One study in 2005 showed that 30 minutes outside in nice weather not only boosted positive mood, but broadened thinking and working memory. Another strategy is to have something to look forward to. After you finish something stressful tell yourself that afterward you’ll do or get something nice for yourself. If you have a test on Friday, buy a movie ticket for Saturday. This will lessen stress by helping increase positive anticipation.

Next, don’t try. Stop trying. Specifically, stop trying to be perfect, sorry to tell you this, but you’re not gonna get there, a human can’t be perfect, it’s just not possible. Understand that you’re not perfect, and understand that you cannot be perfect. If you do something, put everything you have into it, and that’s all you can do, that’s perfect enough. And don’t be down if someone judges it, if you’re proud of your work, understand that you have improvement left because we always do, but don’t worry about the teacher who gave you a B instead of an A, the person who rejected your book proposal. Those are single people, and there are 7 billion other people who may love your work. J. K Rowling got rejected by 12 publishers before Harry Potter actually got through, and recently she just fell off the Forbes Billionaire list because she gave away so much money to charity.

Which segways into the next strategy: do conscious acts of kindness for people. Help someone with something, take a family member or a friend out to eat, or buy someone a present. Write someone a nice letter or text, go tell someone how much they mean to you. Just spread positivity, it will come back to you, that’s a karmic law, and it’s been shown to do so in many studies throughout the years.

Speaking of loved ones. It’s been tested and shown multiple times that humans are social creatures. Often, when we get stressed or anxious, we close ourselves off. In college when midterms are coming up we’ll hole ourselves up in the library, turn our phones off, and basically disappear off the face of, not the planet, but the universe. That, however, isn’t a positive way to do things. Shawn Achor (who worked at Harvard as a psychologist) spoke about how social support was a far greater predictor in happiness than anything else: SAT score, GPA, family income, no, it was simply social support. So when you’re stressed, talk to friends, talk to loved ones. Talk to them about anything, but it’s best if you can talk about your stress/anxiety as it will help the most—and it’s what this post is about. This was also supported in a study by Martin Seligman in 2002 trying to find the happiest ten percent of people. Those ten percent all had one thing in common, the strength of their social relationships.

Sometimes, however, we aren’t ready to tell people about your worries and mental ailments. When this happens there’s also a solution: write it down. Get a notebook, and a pen/pencil and write down how you feel. This doesn’t need to be some cliche diary, just a notebook. Whenever you’re stressed or anxious, write it down. If you’re in a place where you don’t have paper or a writing utensil, then jot it in the notes on your phone—paper is more effective, though. I can personally say that this helps, and everyone I’ve told to do it, that has, none of them have come back and told me that they didn’t benefit from it. Now, if writing down everything is too time-consuming, and you’re that busy, then there’s another exercise you can do. Another study by Martin Seligman in 2005 had participants write down three positive things that happened to them each day three times a week, versus people who wrote down three neutral things. Of course, the difference in happiness levels at the end of the experiment were astounding. It wasn’t by a little, but the people who wrote down positive things were significantly happier; 47/50 people went from the depression range of 34 (close to extreme depression) to 17.2 within one month. In the end, the exercise was found to be more effective than anti-depressants. The exercise is simple: write down three things at the end of the day, at the same time every day, on paper. Doesn’t have to be specific, it could be that really tasty sandwich you had for lunch, just write it and why it was positive. This will put you into a positive tetris effect, and increases optimism, which innately reduces stress and anxiety. It also has lasting effects on increased levels of happiness.

Speaking of optimism, surround yourself with positivity. The people around you should be positive. If you have a group of friends and everyone’s stressed, that’s not helping you. You’ve likely heard, “you are what you eat.” That’s false, vegans don’t turn into carrots. What is true is, you are who you hang out with. The people you surround yourself with, the energy you surround yourself with, that truly does make who you are. Find a group, a circle, that exudes positivity, and our psychological tendencies will force us to be just as positive (this can be expanded in another post, so I’ll leave it there).

The next strategy is for those who are or can be optimistic and are a logical and/or disciplined person and you have anxiety, and your mind is racing. Something that you can do is ask yourself, the things your thinking and worrying about… Are these thoughts objectively helping you? Are the things you’re thinking about going to matter in a few years? Ask yourself questions, and if you’re not a visceral person, then with discipline you can slowly begin purging those thoughts once you realize that they won’t have a long term impact, but if you are visceral, there’s nothing wrong with that, there are more things we can do.

This is really long, but we’re at the home stretch, and that’s another thing we can do. Stretch. Stretching is really good for you, and I have a post talking all about it (read it here). The point, though, is that stretching will help get blood circulation flowing, and more blood in your body, you’ll feel looser, and when you’re stressed and feel like a mime stuck in a box the size of a marble, stretching will help. After you stretch you can also do exercise. Exercise is extremely impactful when it comes to decreasing stress or anxiety. It releases endorphins, the natural ‘feel-good’ chemicals in the body. Along with boosting your mood, it’ll also help enhance work performance. A study in 2000 also showed that exercise was just as, if not more, effective for treating depression as antidepressants. With that said, I think stress and anxiety would also be decreased when exercising has those results under its belt.

Along with exercising, naturally, comes eating healthy and having healthy habits. A healthy diet will help keep better serotonin levels which are the bodies main happiness chemicals. Another thing that helps keep serotonin in check is sleeping. Get the correct amount of sleep at night, sleeping also helps your memory, so after you studied for six hours for your math test, sleeping for at least seven hours won’t make you forget, it’ll actually help you retain the information better, sleep.

Getting into the things that seem really cliché, though. Breathe. If you’re stressed or anxious and have seen a doctor, you’ve probably been advised to do breathing exercises. Honestly, when you first hear this it sounds like complete malarky. If you’re a logical person and you basically hear, “you’re breathing wrong, here’s how you should do it and you’ll feel better,” you probably won’t respond well. While you’re not exactly breathing wrong, there are ways to breathe that will help if you’re stressed or anxious, the one I share comes from Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry. Your lungs are made to very precisely deliver the exact amount of oxygen to your body. We normally breathe in shallow breaths that let us function and live, however, the brain demands 20 percent of your body’s oxygen. Since your body is first priority, you just need to breathe a little more to get more to your brain. Breathe through your nose, keep breathing until your stomach starts to feel a little tight, then exhale, still through your nose, completely emptying your lungs. This helps deliver your brain more oxygen and allows you to think in a clearer more logical way. Anxiety and stress are often things that are proliferated by the thoughts in your head, and with this breathing, it’ll help you rationally think instead of letting your worries run rampant, and will help calm you. Maybe it’ll help you figure out how to use a Zorro Circle to divide your tasks.

Next is meditation. I do this one often, and as I read about successful people something almost all of them do is mediate, notably, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Mike Posner, and many more. There are many types of meditation, but the one I believe will help most in reducing stress and anxiety is mindfulness meditation. Studies have shown that monks who spend years of their life meditating grow their left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for happiness. Studies also show that the minutes right after meditation causes us to feel feelings of calm and contentment along with a heightened awareness and empathy. One more study—if you want to google these, go ahead, I understand your skepticism—conducted by psychologists in 2005 on meditation and happiness detailed how regular meditation can permanently increase happiness, improve immune function, and decrease stress. Study after study has been conducted and they all show the positive effects of meditation, I think that five minutes a day is a minimal amount of time, especially considering how much it will help not only reduce stress and anxiety, but increase happiness. To actually do this, sit down, doesn't matter where, try your best to straighten your back, lightly close your eyes, put your hands where you want to, preferably together, then breath. Clear your mind and focus on your breathing, the in and out, the rise and fall of your body. When your mind strays somewhere else (which it will, and that's normal and fine), gently pull it back to your breath. As you continue to do this you'll get better at keeping focus on your breath, and the more clear you can keep your mind the better you'll feel at the end.

Something I think may help some—but not all—is music. Listen to music, specifically music you can relate to. Music is a beautiful form of art that helps convey the artist’s feelings and emotion to you. If their emotions and feelings match yours you’ll feel less alone, and as shown in my post Alone, loneliness is grievous to humans. However, be aware that sometimes you’ll listen to music that exudes stronger emotions than the ones you feel, and that can be harmful, be careful with this strategy. The only basis I have for this is my own experiences and other people’s opinions—yeah, no studies on this one.

The last strategy I want to provide here is… don’t be afraid to cry. When we get stressed or anxious our body releases a chemical called cortisol. The best way to get this chemical out of your system is by crying. Crying also cleans the eyes, releases endorphins, and purges 80-90% of the bacteria in your body at that moment. Crying is a positive thing. If you feel like crying, if you’re stressed, your anxious, and you just wanna cry, do it. Don’t be ashamed, just cry, and you’ll be left feeling better.

Finally, on to the peroration. This post took me almost three hours to write non-stop, and with everything I said in this post, remember, everything may not work for you, but if you don’t give them a shot, and don’t go into them open-minded, they will not work for you. The most prominent strategies you leave with should be that you need to be willing to evolve, write things down, keep strong social relationships, and meditate. This post will hopefully help you reduce your stress and anxiety and increase your serenity and happiness. Also,something that’s important is self-awareness, make sure you know yourself, do this by asking yourself questions and being honest with your answers, you can calm yourself down better if you know yourself better. Also, a lot of these things help happiness because happiness is a force in itself that will reduce stress and anxiety, be happy. With all of that said, if you need someone to talk to and know me, message me, I’d love to talk to you, or leave it in the comments, if you don’t wanna talk, write it down. Also, do your own research, there may be things you find that I didn’t write here, or don’t know—however, all the studies mentioned were taken out of sources from books I’ve read from actual psychologists—take charge of your own mental health, I know you’re smart enough to do it, and it’s definitely worth the time. This was a hefty post, I loved writing it, I hoped you loved reading it, I’ll probably take a break next week, though. Have a serene and ecstatic week, I’ll see you soon, remember to cool it, peace.