Share Your Thoughts & Ideas About Managing Stress

Machka9

Alex wrote: »

We Want to Hear From You!
How do you handle stress? What can we do to help?

April is Stress Awareness Month. At MyFitnessPal we’re using this occasion to talk about how stress affects the body, and even changes how you eat. Personally I have done a lot less cooking and eaten a lot more takeout this past year.

When I'm stressed, I eat less.

When I'm super stressed, I almost stop eating.

I've been known to drop quite a bit of weight during final exam time at uni and times like that.


During the past 12 months, our eating out has dropped way off. But we've continued to order the same groceries regularly like we have during the past 3 years ... and I've maintained my weight.

Of course, the past 12 months has been pretty relaxed compared with the 2 years before it!

Machka9

I'm sure you've heard of mindfulness and "being fully present" as a way to relieve stress.

But why do we need to be fully present in each moment?

This is an honest question.

Why can't we let our imaginations take us away?

Your thoughts?

AnnPT77

Machka9 wrote: »

I'm sure you've heard of mindfulness and "being fully present" as a way to relieve stress.

But why do we need to be fully present in each moment?

This is an honest question.

Why can't we let our imaginations take us away?

Your thoughts?

I think "be present in the moment" is meant as a counter to patterns of negative ruminative thinking about what is past, and anxious worry about the future. Those thought patterns are pretty common, and often stressful.

To the extent there's stress-reduction value in mindfulness, I think it's about leaving those negative thought patterns behind in favor of more beneficial ones, or at least more neutral ones. However, telling people not to think about a giraffe . . . totally doesn't work - backfires.

Likewise "don't ruminate about unchangeable past, nor worry unproductively about the future". It works better to try to develop some new thought pattern that isn't those things, and "be mindful, in the present" is a pretty clear, non-mystical-sounding thing to substitute. One can remind oneself to do that, and strive to make it a habit.

Also, things like meditation or visualizations (such as guided imagery) are sometimes suggested as forms of mindfulness, or at least as equally beneficial to mindfulness in the sense of paying full sensory attention to present real-world surroundings. Some forms of meditation are very "in the present", but some are more imaginative or transcendent (not necessarily Transcendental in the official formal sense). Self-guided positive imagery is "letting our imagination take us away", isn't it?

I've known some people to be turned off by the concepts of meditation or guided imagery, considering them spiritually troublesome (in conflict with their religious beliefs, for example), or suspiciously mystical. "Be present in the moment" is a little woo-woo, maybe, but I don't think it commonly has the same degree of spiritual or mystical baggage.

Machka9

This article is interesting ...
How to Live in the Present Moment: 35 Exercises and Tools (+ Quotes)
https://positivepsychology.com/present-moment/

In it, it says, "When we are aware and present, we don’t need to worry about getting caught up in thoughts of our past or anxiety about our future" (which is what you said as well, @AnnPT77 ).

Evidently mindfulness and living in the present moment are ways to stop dwelling on the past and to stop worrying about the future.

For me ... the past is what it is. Good or bad, it is how I got here. There is no sense dwelling on it in a negative way because, after all, there is nothing I can do to change the past. I can only change what's happening now. However, like to remember good, interesting, challenging, adventurous moments of the past now and then.

For me ... I don't like to think about the future very often because we don't know what will happen in the future, and there's no point worrying about it. I do have occasional worries, and when I do, I try to change something now that might improve the situation in the future. For example, I was worried about my job situation as I get older ... so I got my Master's degree which may improve my odds in the job situation as I get older. I am also trying to get more skills. I worry a bit about my husband, but I have been developing some plans around that.

But often I would rather not focus on the present either.


I'm a long distance cyclist ... who hasn't been able to ride long distances in recent years because of my husband's situation.

One of the things that got me through my long, long bicycle rides is a tactic which I think I would like to start employing again more often. One of the reasons I miss my long, long bicycles rides is because I miss doing this.

For me, a long, long bicycle ride has a mental flow something like this:

1. Focus on getting settled and comfortable on the bicycle.
2. Mind dump - this is where I randomly think about whatever. I just let my brain go wherever it wants to go. That takes up the first hour or two on the bicycle, depending on how much I have on my mind.
3. Organise - during the mind dump process it will become evident that there are a few things that are priorities. So I'll kind of organise my thoughts into a few priority areas such as a university project (or two), work, project at home, etc..
4. Problem solve - I will think about each of the priority areas in turn and try to solve whatever is bothering me about each. It might just be a matter of breaking down the project into manageable steps and deciding what I need to get to complete it. It might be selecting a topic for a paper and deciding on a theme/focus. Or maybe figuring out how a procedure should work at work.
5. By this point, I'm usually somewhere around 3-6 hours into a ride depending on how long I take to Problem Solve. Unfortunately, most of my longer rides these days end at about 3 hours, so I don't really get into the Problem Solve step very well. I barely finish the Mind dump and start to organise things and the ride is over. However, if my ride is still going, at this point I take a deep breath and relax. I've got a plan for each of the significant problems I have identified.
6. Then I move into "story telling". This is where my imagination kicks in. I might see an old abandoned house tucked into a grove of trees and form a story around that house and area. I might design and decorate a "dream house" from top to bottom. There are all sorts of directions I could go. I might see a funny sign and I'm off with a little story about it. These stories can take me several more hours but I usually feel really mentally relaxed when I've created a few stories.
7. And I'll intersperse the stories with math (if my ride is 200 km and I'm at 140 km, I am 7/10ths of the way through the ride), prayer for family and friends and situations, and periods where I just look at the scenery.
8. Toward the end of the ride, the focus returns to being settled and comfortable on the bicycle. I'm usually starting to feel restless ("are we there yet?") ... and what I'm going to do when it does (hot shower, food).


I'm starting to think that my long rides were very beneficial to my mental well-being ... and I'm wondering how I might recapture that.

However, for me, I find that meditation, mindfulness exercises, etc. take me from Step 1 above right to the end of Step 7 without going through all the steps in between ... and that is just entirely disconcerting and very stressful and upsetting. I survived one rather long guided meditation/mindfulness exercise a few months ago by heading into Step 6 and creating my own story around it all. That wasn't too bad - at least my story amused me.

Generally, I try not to get into those situations. But I might need to see about trying to increase my cycling distance.

AnnPT77

@Machka9, it sounds like you already have a lot of self-insight about what helps you. Good show!

(Tongue in cheek, I might say that you wouldn't have discovered that that's what you do during a bike ride, had you not been present in the moment on some long bike rides, to notice yourself going through that sequence, and realizing that it was helpful to you. 😉)

I think mindfulness (the "be in the present" kind) is one possible thing people who aren't at that stage of self-insight can try, to see if it helps them with stress management or in other ways, and it's one of the easier potential methods to explain.

But it's just one tool. If I don't have a nail to drive, a hammer isn't going to be a big help, y'know?

Like you, I don't generally struggle with negative, stressful thought patterns. Still, there are times when "be in the present" mindfulness can help me, for example by bringing my attention to small, immediate pleasures, like how nice a food tastes, or birdsong sounds; or how good a deep slow breath of fresh air feels . . . when I might otherwise be distracted by non-present trivia that's less rewarding.

Machka9

AnnPT77 wrote: »

@Machka9, it sounds like you already have a lot of self-insight about what helps you. Good show!

(Tongue in cheek, I might say that you wouldn't have discovered that that's what you do during a bike ride, had you not been present in the moment on some long bike rides, to notice yourself going through that sequence, and realizing that it was helpful to you. 😉)

Thanks!

In cycling circles, a common question comes up with regard to long distance rides: "What on earth do you think about in all those hours out there ... don't you get bored?"

So I began to think about what I thought about in all those hours out there ... and why I didn't get bored. And I realised there was a pattern.

AnnPT77 wrote: »

Like you, I don't generally struggle with negative, stressful thought patterns. Still, there are times when "be in the present" mindfulness can help me, for example by bringing my attention to small, immediate pleasures, like how nice a food tastes, or birdsong sounds; or how good a deep slow breath of fresh air feels . . . when I might otherwise be distracted by non-present trivia that's less rewarding.

I think I do this when I've got my good camera in hand and I'm crawling around the yard trying to get a photo of a water drop or lying on my back on the sidewalk on a cloudy day under the rose bush to get this ...