Completing a Stress Cycle
“It’s not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.” -Hans Selye
We all get the lovely opportunity to experience different levels of stress throughout our days and weeks, and I am always fascinated by times in my life when stress seems to stick around and build up. I don’t feel like I’m doing anything different, but I am not adapting well, or things are sticking to me when they normally would not. I recently went through a couple of weeks where I was just really stuck, and I could feel my responses and my attitude getting narrow and too restrictive for what the situation needed. In my daily reflection, I started to notice that my reflections were getting more deflective, and I was cycling over the same things.
There are a lot of things that you can do to help yourself overcome times like these, and most of these things involve completing a stress cycle. When we experience something stressful, even if that thing only lasts a few seconds, we get an influx of cortisol, the stress hormone. Cortisol is one of the more difficult hormones to metabolize. Think about when you are in a meeting and something really gets under your skin or stresses you out. For the rest of the meeting, you know intellectually that you should let it go or it was not something to harp on, but it just sticks to you. When we don’t have the opportunity to metabolize that cortisol, we are stuck in a stress cycle – and we can remain there for longer than necessary. Physical movement is what helps us break down this cortisol, and it doesn’t have to be a lot of physical movement.
Due to the long duration of the stress cycle that I was stuck in, I knew that I needed to do something that allowed me to fully reset. Athlete and thought leader David Goggins proposed a challenge on his social media – a 4x4x48. This challenge was running 4 miles, every 4 hours, for 48 consecutive hours. I thought this would be challenging enough and exhausting enough that it would force me out of the stress cycle.
The 4x4x48 challenge was exactly what I needed. I found that the opportunities to reflect during each run, and even in the spaces between, was everything that I needed to get back on track. What I really loved about it was the challenge to my mindset, which occurred after the first 24 hours. It takes a lot to stay in a challenge for that long, but I was able to move into a new headspace that was productive, actionable, and assumed responsibility for how I was showing up.
In the book Looks Good on Paper?, Leslie Pratch identifies the four ways a person responds when dealing with stress:
They identify the stress and remove it, while maintaining and improving physical and emotional health.
They identify and tolerate the stress, maintaining the status quo without making any changes and not growing.
They deny stress as a method to defend against it, distort their perception of it, or react to it unrealistically.
They suffer a complete breakdown in functioning.
Everyone’s response to stress looks different. Hesitation. Reframing. Procrastination. Mindfulness. Frustration. Adapting. Burnout. Growth. Poor performance. Action. Reaction. Dealing with more stress doesn’t make you better at it, but it does give you the opportunity to learn ways to effectively deal with it.
“Today I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions, not outside.” Marcus Aurelius
How can we metabolize this cortisol and complete the stress cycle when we are at work, fully engaged in meetings and other important connection points? We can’t just stop everything and do a 4x4x48 – and some people may not even want to! Sometimes, we can’t even stop for 5 minutes. There are many times when we need to continue to press on, compartmentalize something for a while, and deal with it at a later time (or at the end of the meeting).
John Maxwell talks about the concept of “refueling stations”, which are small, actions and behaviors that you can practice and do throughout your day to continue to keep yourself engaged and refueled. These are things that only take one to ten minutes. When we do them throughout the day, they become regular behaviors and habits that help metabolize our day. Then, when we do experience a stress point, we know that we have tools we can use at the end of the meeting to complete that stress cycle.
Since the physical movement that helps break the stress cycle doesn’t have to be running a whole marathon, these refueling opportunities will support you. You can take two to five minutes to run in place, walk around your building, or do some jumping jacks. You don’t have to break an intense sweat, but you need to get moving so the cortisol can break up so the stress doesn’t ruin the rest of your day.
Growing up, my Mom would ask “Did you have a bad day? Or did you have a bad five minutes that you have been milking all day?” I still think about this to this day because when something is sticking to me, I always like to reflect on why. Why does this thing matter enough to overtake so many hours and so many thoughts and so much intellectual capital? I have found that this happens less frequently when I engage with my fueling stations and take the time to do physical movement multiple times throughout the day. Your refueling stations and stress cycle completion actions will be unique to you, and the most important thing is to make sure you use them.