Stress Management Lecture

There is no universal stress management formula. The essence of all effective methods is to "find the adaptive threshold between you and stress, rather than pursuing the complete elimination of stress." This is the most unadulterated summary after I have been doing corporate EAP consulting for 6 years and handled nearly 300 cases.

When I was checking in just now, I scanned around and there was a young man in a plaid shirt who was still clutching the disconnected work group interface in his hand. His brows were so furrowed that he could kill mosquitoes. He must have just rushed over after being scolded by his boss. Last week I just received a case similar to his. A 28-year-old Internet operator carries Suxiao Jiuxin Pills in his bag all year round. The nodules on the physical examination report range from the thyroid gland to the breast glands. He has signed up for 5 mindfulness meditation classes and set an alarm clock for 7 o'clock every morning to get up and meditate. As a result, when the alarm clock goes off at that time, he gets flustered. After half an hour of meditation, his mind is filled with unwritten plans, which makes him even more anxious.

There are actually many schools on stress management on the market now. The cognitive-behavioral school says that you are stressed because you have irrational beliefs, and you should change "I must be perfect" to "I can make mistakes." The mindfulness-based acceptance school says that you should not fight stress, but learn to be aware of it, accept it, and treat it as a friend; These statements are both correct and incorrect - I met a big brother who has been in sales for ten years. If you ask him to sit there and meditate for 10 minutes, he will be more restless than when meeting tens of millions of customers. Later, I asked him to go to the community basketball court after get off work for half an hour and a half every day. When he was sweating, he would go home, take a shower, and sleep on the pillow. After three consecutive months of reexamination, he found that the thyroid nodules were smaller. There is also a little girl who is doing basic scientific research in a university. Even dinner parties usually feel like a waste of time. If you ask her to go hiking once a week to relieve stress, she will have to stay up for two long nights to make up for the experimental progress, which doubles the stress. Finally, I gave her a small method: spend 5 minutes before going to bed every day to write a "today's completion list", and mark the first step to be done tomorrow after the unfinished things. With this small action, her insomnia problem has been cured by half in half a month.

I specially reviewed the workplace stress survey published by the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences last year. 89.2% of people have tried at least three stress management methods, but only 17% can persist for more than one month. The core reason is that everyone is looking for "standard answers" and always feel that others have used useful methods, and whether they use them or not is their own problem. Oh, by the way, don’t believe the nonsense on the Internet that “excellent people have given up their emotions long ago.” Last month, I interviewed a CTO of a company with a market value of tens of billions. He said that he had to hide in the fire escape and smoke three cigarettes before launching a major version every time, and secretly sucked an orange candy to calm down. This is not called vulnerability, this is the normal state of ordinary people coping with stress. If you have to force yourself to live by the so-called "elite standards" and the pressure doesn't go away, you need to hold yourself back from the internal injuries first.

To be honest, pressure is like the sand in your shoes. People tell you to just take off your shoes and pour them out. But some people wear canvas shoes and it only takes two seconds to take off their shoes; some people wear hiking boots that are tied eight times, and it takes three minutes to untie their shoelaces; some people simply walk barefoot on the road, and you ask them to pour out the sand, but they don’t even have shoes. There is no high or low method, only whether it is suitable or not. For example, your current pressure is "There is a mountain of things at hand and I can't finish them." Don't do anything to accept the present. It is no different from messing up. Instead, spend 10 minutes sorting everything in order of urgency and importance. Pick the easiest thing first and do it for 15 minutes. Positive feedback will come, and your anxiety will naturally be eliminated by half; if your pressure is "uncertain about the future" "I don't know if what I'm doing now is of any use." Don't make plans every day and break down your goals. The more you break down the goals, the more panic you get. Instead, find a fixed "small anchor point" for yourself. For example, you must drink a glass of iced Americano every morning and listen to two episodes of non-nutritional funny podcasts on the way home from get off work. These small and completely certain things can offset most of the uncertain anxiety.

Today I didn’t give you a list of 10 things you must do, nor did I ask you to go back and clock in to complete the tasks. Just listen to the lecture. It’s enough if you can take away a small method that can be used. When you feel so stressed that you can't breathe after you go back, don't subconsciously search for "how to relieve stress". First, stop and ask yourself: What do I want to do most now? Do you want to go out for a couple of runs, do you want to sit there and cry for 10 minutes, or do you want to find a friend and call you an idiot for half an hour? Just follow your instinct and choose, which is more useful than reading 10 useful articles. Oh, by the way, if it doesn’t work after trying it, it’s normal, just change it. After all, we are all students for the first time when it comes to living with pressure, so there is no perfect answer.