Stress management tips

These stress management tips can help you and your kids cope with chronic, everyday stress.

Analyze your stressors

A stressor is a situation, thought, or stimulus that triggers your stress response. We all need a little stress in our lives. Good stress makes us feel alert and stimulated.

But bad stress causes distress--anger, anxiety, and a host of physiological symptoms. Different people may respond differently to the same stressor. It's important to identify what stressors cause you distress. The more you learn about your stressors, the more likely you are to diminish, control, or eliminate them. For advice on how to take inventory of personal stressors, see these stress management tips for analyzing stress.

Take action

Helplessness, or feeling out of control, intensifies stress. There are plenty of bad things we can’t control-—like being caught in a natural disaster or suffering from terminal cancer.

But some bad situations can be changed. And some aspects of our stress response can be improved. To a great degree, just recognizing what you can change—and committing yourself to make changes—can reduce your distress. In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers (2004), neurologist Robert Sapolsky argues that taking action is more than half the battle. The specific stress management tips you follow may be less important than your commitment to follow through.

Get more oxytocin

Oxytocin is a natural sedative that promotes emotional attachment, maternal behavior, sexual arousal, intimacy, and trust. Known as the “cuddle” hormone, it is also a neurotransmitter that reduces blood pressure and cortisol (stress hormone) levels (Uvnäs-Moberg 1998). When people are given oxytocin, they recover from stressful situations more quickly and heal faster (Uvnäs-Moberg 2003).

If you are under stress, you might benefit from more oxytocin. Here are some stress management for boosting oxytocin levels (Uvnäs-Moberg 2003):

• Breastfeed. Breastfeeding triggers an oxytocin surge in mothers. It may also boost the oxytocin of nursing infants--but more research is needed to confirm this.

• Engage in pleasant, social touching. Hugs and massage can increase oxytocin levels. And don't forget one of the oldest forms of social touch--grooming. See the monkeys above for a demonstration...

• Seek out pleasant social interactions. You don't have to touch another person to increase your oxytocin levels. Research suggests that a friendly conversation can boost oxytocin.

Get more sleep

When you’re stressed, you lose sleep. When you lose sleep, you feel more stressed.

Sleep deprivation doesn’t just make you tired. It interferes with the natural pattern of stress hormone production. Stress hormones typically peak in the morning and diminish throughout the day. In people suffering from sleep restriction, stress hormones rise in the afternoon and evening (Spiegel et al 2003). Sleep restriction also reduces the body's production of melatonin (Spiegel et al 2003), impairs memory (Yoo et al 2007), and hampers the immune system (Rogers et al 2001).

Parents of newborns and young babies often suffer from sleep restriction. For tips on surviving the newborn phase, see this article on newborn sleep patterns.

For coping with sleep problems in babies, see my article on infant sleep problems.

For sleep problems in older kids, see my family sleep tips.

Get a massage

As noted above, massage therapy increases oxytocin levels. It also descreases levels of cortisol (a stress hormone) and boosts levels of the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine (Field et al 2005). Massage has therapeutic effects on infants and children, as well as adults.

Address and treat your child's nighttime fears

Many children suffer from nighttime fears and separation anxiety. Obviously, such fears are distressing to kids. They trigger the release of stress hormones at night, and interfere with sleep. If your child suffers from nocturnal fears, teach him how to cope with them. For more information, see my article on nighttime fears in children.

Find a pleasant form of exercise

Exercise protects the body against the effects of physical and psychological stress (Spalding et al 2004). It also reduces anxiety (Altchilder and Motta 1994). And it strengthens the connections between neurons and improves memory.

But there are some caveats. First, to reap anti-stress benefits, exercise should be aerobic. Weight training has important health benefits, but it’s not a great stress-buster. Second, you will get more benefits if you exercise in bouts of at least 30 minutes. This is how long it takes for the brain to produce endophins—those natural opiates that give you the “jogger’s high.”

Third, you won’t benefit if you don’t want to exercise. When animals are forced to exercise, they become more—-not less--stressed (Greenwood et al 2003).

Take a deep breath

This is one of the oldest stress management tips around. Take a deep breath and exhale--slowly. When you inhale, you speed up your sympathetic nervous system. When you exhale, you slow it down--a mini-stress reducer.

Reduce interruptions

Frequent interruptions can be an important source of stress, especially if you are a task-oriented person. To reduce the toll of frequent interruptions, try:

Smart scheduling. Save your high-concentration tasks for times when you are energetic and less likely to be interrupted. When your home with the kids, don’t squander quiet time on household chores. It’s relatively easy to do your housekeeping amid interruptions.

Turning off the phone. Whenever it is convenient and safe, turn off the phone.

Avoid noise

People who live in cities become accustomed to “tuning out” noise. But noise can trigger elevated stress hormones, even if you are not consciously aware of it. If you can reduce your exposure to noise, you may find yourself becoming less tense and irritable.

Reduce housework

Most people can reduce domestic stress by make some changes to their housekeeping routine. Read these stress managment tips for reducing the workload at home.

Reduce household paperwork

If you have trouble finding the time to pay your monthly bills, consider an automatic bill paying service. Or try the do-it-yourself version of automatic bill paying: Have as many services as possible billed automatically to your credit card. You will still need to review your billing statements for errors. And you will still have to remember to pay that credit card bill. But you will reduce the number of payment deadlines throughout the month, and you can schedule the paperwork at times that are maximally convenient for you.

Other stress management tips for dealing with paperwork include:

• Deal with receipts immediately. File receipts you must keep. Shred those you don’t.

• Don’t pick up the mail unless you are ready to sort it. Put all bills in a temporary file. Process junk mail immediately. Put it directly in the shredder or recycle bin.

• Cancel subscriptions to any periodicals you don’t read.

Eliminate unnecessary deadlines

If you think those high-pressure deadlines are killing you, you might be right. An analysis of heart attack patients in Sweden revealed that “having a high-pressure deadline at work” is associated with a six-fold increase in the risk of a myocardial infarction over the next 24 hours (Moller et al 2005).

You probably can’t eliminate all deadlines. Nor should you. Some deadlines have positive effects—they challenge us, stimulate enthusiasm, and inspire problem-solving. But you shouldn’t accept a high-pressure, deadline-oriented lifestyle if that lifestyle is making you sick. If you are stressed out at work and your job imposes frequent, high-pressure deadlines on you, it might be time to consider a change of employment.

You can also change the deadlines that are self-imposed. Before you commit yourself to a deadline, ask yourself what makes that date special. In some cases, people create rushed deadlines for themselves as a way to cope with feelings of guilt. For example, if you feel you’ve let someone down in the past, you may be tempted to make very generous promises now. It’s a natural reaction, but it will backfire if you commit yourself to deadlines that are unrealistic, or attainable only at the cost of a high-stress meltdown.

In other cases, people set themselves tight deadlines to avoid procrastination. There is nothing wrong with this strategy if you thrive under the resulting stress. But if your self-imposed deadlines create bad stress, you need to find alternative ways to motivate yourself.

References: Stress management tips

Altchiler L, Motta R.1994. Effects of aerobic and nonaerobic exercise on anxiety, absenteeism, and job satisfaction. J Clin Psychol. 50(6):829-40.

Field T, Hernandez-Reif M, Diego M, Schanberg S, Kuhn C. 2005. Cortisol decreases and serotonin and dopamine increase following massage therapy. Int J Neurosci. 115(10):1397-413.

Greenwood BN, Fleshner M. 2008. Exercise, Learned Helplessness, and the Stress-Resistant Brain. Neuromolecular Med. 2008 Feb 26; [Epub ahead of print]

Greenwood BN, Kennedy S, Smith TP, Campeau S, Day HE, Fleshner M. 2003. Voluntary freewheel running selectively modulates catecholamine content in peripheral tissue and c-Fos expression in the central sympathetic circuit following exposure to uncontrollable stress in rats. Neuroscience. 2003;120(1):269-81.

Möller J, Theorell T, de Faire U, Ahlbom A, Hallqvist J. 2005 Work related stressful life events and the risk of myocardial infarction. Case-control and case-crossover analyses within the Stockholm heart epidemiology programme (SHEEP).J Epidemiol Community Health. 59(1):23-30.

Rogers NL, Szuba MP, Staab JP, Evans DL, Dinges DF. 2001. Neuroimmunologic aspects of sleep and sleep loss. Semin Clin Neuropsychiatry. 6(4):295-307.

Sapolsky RM. 2006. Why zebras don’t get ulcers. Third edition. NY: Henry Holt and company.Spalding TW, Lyon LA, Steel DH, Hatfield BD. 2004 Aerobic exercise training and cardiovascular reactivity to psychological stress in sedentary young normotensive men and women. Psychophysiology. 41(4):552-62.

Spiegel K, Leproult R, Van Cauter E. 2003. [Impact of sleep debt on physiological rhythms] Rev Neurol (Paris). 159(11 Suppl):6S11-20. French.

Uvnäs-Moberg K. 1998.Antistress Pattern Induced by Oxytocin. News Physiol Sci. 13:22-25.

Uvnäs-Moberg K. 2003. The Oxytocin Factor: Tapping the Hormone of Calm, Love and Healing; Boston: Da Capo Press.

Yoo SS, Hu PT, Gujar N, Jolesz FA, Walker MP. 2007. A deficit in the ability to form new human memories without sleep. Nat Neurosci. 10(3):385-92.

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