A simple stress-management practice

You can begin exploring this at home.

When you notice yourself becoming overwhelmed:

1. Pause

If possible, stop what you are doing for a moment.

2. Feel your body

Notice your feet, your hands, your breathing, and the weight of your body.

3. Name what is present

Instead of immediately identifying with the experience, try:

“Anxiety is present.”

“Anger is present.”

“I notice tension in my chest.”

“I feel overwhelmed right now.”

4. Let the intensity have a number

You might ask yourself, “If this feeling were on a scale from 0 to 100, where is it right now?”

Perhaps it is an 80.

You don’t have to force it to become a 20.

Simply notice.

5. Imagine turning down the volume

Rather than suppressing the feeling or telling yourself that everything is fine, imagine gently turning down the volume on the body’s alarm system.

Take a slow breath.

Feel the support beneath you.

Give yourself permission to be here.

—

Sometimes the goal isn’t to make the stress disappear. It is simply to create enough space that you are no longer completely inside it. Stress relief isn’t always about changing everything around you. Sometimes we genuinely need to change the circumstances creating our stress.

We may need to have a difficult conversation, establish a boundary, change our workload, seek financial advice, ask for help, or make a significant life change. But sometimes we cannot change the circumstances immediately and this is where learning to work with our own response becomes so important.

The purpose of stress management is not to make you indifferent to life, it is not about suppressing difficult emotions or pretending that problems don’t matter. It is about developing enough inner stability that you can experience what is happening without being completely overwhelmed by it.

You can feel anger without becoming anger and you can experience fear without being ruled by fear. You can experience uncertainty without needing to immediately resolve it. You can recognize that something is difficult without allowing it to consume your entire inner world. This is a movement toward greater freedom. Not freedom from having feelings, but freedom to have feelings without being completely controlled by them.

Be well,

John