Day 5: Manage Stress

Managing stress doesn't mean getting rid of it or avoiding it. It doesn't mean: just breathe. Managing stress means understanding that human beings do not do things over and over and over again if there is no benefit to doing those things. And so if we are making ourselves stressed, which is literally what we are doing, our brains are producing chemical signals that go throughout our body that manifest as what we think of as stress. If we're doing that, it's not just some sort of malfunction that has somehow endured over years and over generations, but those signals are meant to produce states that are useful to us and that in fact produce benefits.

So as we start our day on managing stress, we want to identify the states associated with some of the major stress responses. Not so that we can find out what's wrong with them, but so we can find out what's right with them. What positive things is stress bringing into your life? And we start with calibration game because that's one of our quick ways to access a state by going into a memory of a time we've experienced it and noticing what changes in our body and in our senses while we're there. As we calibrate different states, we can find where they overlap and where they are different. And this becomes an important part of our discernment. As we develop emotional intelligence and better choices about what we're noticing and how to interpret it when our body is sending us messages.

So, we start off with the two most basic, most well-known stress responses, fight and flight. But instead of thinking of a time you were fighting, start with thinking of a time you wanted something. The point of fighting is always that there is something you want and you are trying to move towards it or clear away obstacles. And this is true if we are talking about competing with other people, but it's also true if we're talking about fighting obstacles or situations. We know what we want.

So instead of thinking of a time you were fighting, we begin by thinking of a time you really wanted something. And as you go back into that memory, you're going to notice that wanting is not entirely a comfortable sensation. And you'll notice this externally if you watch, say, kids before a birthday or Christmas that they are quivering with wanting. That wanting has a lot in common with those stress responses that amp up our awareness and amp up our readiness to get engaged.

So wanting flight, running away, is also a way of saying notice how much energy you have because when you feel that real energy again think of kids in a grade one classroom and you will think of some little boy or some little girl who is so full of energy that sitting still is just so hard. So flight related to our response, gather energy and be ready to move. And the calibration game is to go into one or the other of those. Have your partner guess. Notice that you can move between them. Notice whether they overlap for you or whether they're very different. Fight and flight, wanting and energy.

And then a second game, there are two slightly less known, less talked about stress responses. One of them is freeze. And freeze is like fight or flight. You'll hear fight, flight, freeze. Freeze is that moment when everything stops. The other day I was out in my yard and I thought I don't remember buying a bunny statuette and then I realized it wasn't a figure. It was a bunny.

And that bunny was so frozen, so stopped, but also so alive, so aware. You could feel its focus. You could feel its situational awareness. Now, there are many, many times when having that awareness of where you are and what's going on around you is powerful and important. Find one of those times and go into that awareness. Notice that when you are aware of a situation, you're not reading about it. It's not just in your eyes and in that cerebral part of your brain.

But it's all through you. It is as though you are pulling all the information into your body. And the last stress response is less known but well documented, supported by evidence and scientists call it tend and befriend. And it means that under stress, one response that human beings have is to reach out and help somebody else to be in supportive connections, actively supportive.

So we've got all that energy associated with stress and we can use it to do some good. So, you're going to access that in yourself and notice how being in a supportive connection, reaching out to do good for somebody else actually changes your physical experience, changes what you are paying attention to with your eyes and your ears. And become really aware that these four states aren't problems. They're kind of superpowers.

Now, if you've watched very much superhero kind of TV, you'll know that superpowers often pose problems for the people who possess them. That they don't slide easily through the world just because they have superpowers. But also those superpowers, while uncomfortable, are important and valuable and allow people to do things they wouldn't otherwise be able to do. Scientists who study emotional intelligence, like Lisa Feldman Barrett, talk about how our brain produces changes through us and our mind has to label it. And they say if we only have a small vocabulary to talk about emotion, then we only have a few choices.

And so if all you have is angry, sad, stressed, then you're going to be those things a lot. We use NLP to give ourselves better choices of labels to apply to the changes we notice in our body and in our senses as we move through situations where things might be risky or things might be important. And we use that general label stress. It doesn't really tell us what we need.

So, you're going to calibrate first of all some states to see for you how close are they to this idea of stress. When you think of a time you were excited, you're going to produce a lot of the same chemical reactions in your body as you have thinking about stress. Excitement, that super alert, energized state, lots of focus, but it might be dashing around. It might not be just staying in one place. That's true in stress. It's true in excitement. And it's one of the most basic, most researched reframes is that if people tell themselves instead of I am stressed, I am excited, it changes what they perceive in their situation, changes what they do and how well they perform.

So, we're going to do some work on mapping out excitement so that you know for you how does your body know you are excited. Then we're going to think about being detail-oriented. Now, some people are naturally very focused on specifics and for other people it takes a lot of energy. But one of the manifestations of stress is that we get very alert to specifics to details.

Our antennae go up. We say we become alert and on alert. We're not just generally kind of feeling emotional. What we're feeling is we are paying attention to the details and we are moving our attention around.

So, I want you to think of a time you were focused on details and notice how does that shift your hearing. What do you do with your eyes? What do you let in and what do you filter out? What's going on in your body so that you can be this detailoriented person? And finally, let's go back to figuring out what happens in you when you want something.

Now that very word want in English means two things. It means to desire something, to imagine something good that you don't have but could have. But it also means pay attention to what you lack. It has this kind of edginess about it. And that edginess is where we start finding the overlap with stress responses.

So go back, find a time you really wanted something. And as you go into the memory as if it's happening now, becoming used to recreating in your body, in your senses, what it's like to be back in that remembered time and place doing the things you were doing. And that's a lot of excitement for one morning. So we'll take a break and when we come back we think about well what does this mean if we have to connect with people by matching and mirroring by aligning our states and they are stressed. Does that mean we have to be stressed too? And there are many many workplaces, there are many, many families where you're almost seen as not engaged or not part of the team if you don't pick up on this general level of arousal of stress. Hurry up.

It's important panic kind of vibe. And so we need a way to deal with that. And the first way to deal with it is to really learn a state that for you overlaps with what you think of as a stress response. So any of the things we have talked about today, excitement, wanting, details, energetic, any of those states are going to produce in your body some of the elements of stress. And you're going to pick one of those. We're going to call it an overlapping state. And the idea here is not just that when you personally are stressed, you're going to be able to go, I notice these changes in me and I'm going to give them a different label.

But when you are connected with other people, you're going to avoid mirroring stress because that just amplifies it. Now we've got two stressed people and everybody's like, "Oh my gosh, there really is something to be stressed about." But instead you are going to and this is the most subtle way of reframing. You're going to take their stress, notice it in your body and reframe it or give it a different label. And the label will be the state you choose that for you is close to stress, excitement, wanting, focus, energized.

So you pick one of those and you learn it really well. And when we say learn it really well in NLP, we mean map it out. Start from the top of your head. Notice all the sensations that change in your head, in your face, in your neck, in your shoulders, down through your core, your breath, your breathing, your balance, your legs, the big muscles in your legs, the small muscles in your feet, and then into your ears. How are you aware of sound in this state? And how are you aware of sight? What are you noticing through your vision?

Not what details of the scene, but are you aware of color or faces, shapes, light and dark, what's happening? How does your vision change in this state? And remember that creating this detailed map is helping you learn consciously all the little changes you can make when you want to enter that state. But also all the little changes that will tell you, oh yeah, this is the state I am in. This state I have chosen.

So we learn that really well and then we practice. We practice states where we're stressed and then we read the map. We make tiny alterations in this stress to move us to the state you have chosen. And this is the pattern that you will enact with other people. Need to learn the basics before we can apply them.

But this is the route to being the person who helps others find their best self when they are stressed. It is not being calm while they are stressed. That's too different. It doesn't offer enough of a connection. Instead, it is taking elements of their stress, using it to build a resourceful state in you, a state that would also be useful to them, and then holding that state so that as they then mirror you, they're making subtle shifts that help them be better prepared to manage not the stress, but the actual situation that is producing the stress. For them to be able to go back into the world wanting or energized or excited or whatever they've chosen and apply those filters to the situation they're in. Sometimes though, enough is enough.

And if you've ever said to anybody, "Okay, just breathe." You'll know how hard it is to get people to just breathe when they are feeling all of that adrenaline pulsing through them. Slowing their breath and being really like a Zen master is just not available to most people. You can't get there from here. But NLP has an extremely effective way of using the energy in the state to create calm. Sounds paradoxical and a lot of NLP sounds like paradox. It sounds like what you were saying is the opposite of what people expect. And the reason for that is that our conscious minds are limited to one word at a time, to one thought at a time.

But our brains are processing multiple streams of information all the time. So this paradox is actually just the difference between processing abilities and speeds consciously and in your brain and body system. Some people call that the unconscious mind. And so what we do when we want to interrupt this kind of frenzied stress is we use the energy in that state to manage our senses. And there's some techniques for pulling your vision out to the periphery.

Now, instead of telling you just calm down and relax your gaze, which is hard to do if you're not relaxed, we say, "No, no, no. Really focus on your peripheral vision." And I'm using my hands as a guide right now. And as all of your attention is forcibly, you have to use energy to do this. As you move all of your attention out to the periphery, it suddenly will become very quiet in here. And it's not quiet because somebody told you to quiet down or to calm down. It's quiet because you're really intent on your visual awareness of what's out there. And it doesn't leave any conscious attention for what's in here.

Now, in NLP, we don't deal with all five sensory systems. That's partly because NLP was developed in English, and English doesn't have a lot of language. We're not taught to distinguish different kinds of smells or tastes. We're not even really good with different kinds of touch kind of experiences.

So, we stick to the visual, which we just did, using your eyes to guide your attention. The auditory using your ears. And you can push your hearing by focusing first on things that are close to you and then on sounds that are a little farther away and then on sounds that are so far away you aren't sure you're hearing them, but you know they're there. And the space just keeps getting bigger. And as your attention is so engaged in these sounds that are way out there, it becomes quiet and calm in here. And the third way we can do it is we can do that same thing but using our whole body by imagining our breath. First focus just on in and out.

And that can be a little tricky when you're actually stressed, right? Because you know, take a deep breath becomes it's hard. Instead, we say, okay, just imagine the breath in a column in and out. And then let's make that column bigger. Let's imagine breath coming in through your skin. Let's imagine your breath moving air out to create a bubble, a space just for you. That feels pretty good when you're stressed.

Clearing space with your breath. And then you can imagine your breath actually coming in from the corners of your room and pushing out to the corners. And it's this pushing that aligns with the feelings you have in stress. Instead of your body, your mind perceiving you're trying to do something different. It feels like, oh, you're working with me and everything settles.

And so a really effective way to clear space in a stressful time is to use these three different techniques to achieve what is often called in NLP stop the world, but really is more about stopping the world inside. This widening is good for all kinds of stress in all different kinds of ways of applying it. So when we talk about widening a frame, widening the limits around a situation, we mean pushing our attention out conceptually as well as in terms of our physical senses to see. We say a bigger playing field. We might talk about a mountaintop view. And sometimes we talk about perspective that goes through a lot more time.

Now you have to work gently to widen frames. If you say to somebody, "Will this matter 10 years from now?" They are likely to turn around and snap back at you. It matters now. They're not going to release stress. If you tell yourself this won't matter five years from now, you say, well, I I still have to live through this moment.

So, how does that help? Like, I know I'll get there, but that's not where I am right now. So, questioning patterns we practice for opening up frames requires all of that attention to our state and the other person's state that we've been working on throughout the course, maintaining rapport and marrying our physical sense of how do we open up perspective which comes from those stop the world exercises to gently use questions to open up bigger categories, bigger spaces, some real some metaphorical mostly metaphorical so that a situation that has us really focused on a stress point becomes part of a much wider field of vision and experience. Now, one of the most useful words for reframing is not some clever language pattern. It's the word else. Sure, that's true.

But what else is true? What else is possible? What else could you think? How else could you be feeling if you couldn't use that word? What other word would you use? How else could you describe it? And we practice using that word else because it's the word that gets left out in stress-driven conversations.

In stressdriven conversations, the focus narrows in and we forget that outside this very narrow focus, there is a world of possibility, a world of differences and a world that goes back not just out but through time, through time behind us and also through time ahead of us. And that if we are in that bigger expanse, we are not just less stressed, but we have connection to much more information. And more information means more possible ways to move forward. The day ends thinking about two different things that when we bring them together give us a really powerful intention. An intention strong enough to kind of absorb all that energy and stress. And the first is a sense of purpose.

Now I say sense of purpose because there's no way there is no objective truth that says each human being has a purpose. There are faith systems that believe that and that teach that belief. There are people who outside of a faith-based system believe in their purpose, but we can't prove it. However, the whole concept of proof really comes from mathematics. And in mathematics, sometimes they say, "We think this is true. We can't prove it. We're going to start working with the idea." And we'll have a contest and we'll give a prize to somebody when they figure out how to prove it.

And so using that kind of logic, we're going to say you may not know what your grand purpose is, but you do know the difference between something you do accidentally or unconsciously and something you do on purpose. And you also understand that the way language works in the brain, when you hear that word purpose, it doesn't get routed one way or the other. It gets routed to all of the associations with purpose. So on purpose you may say well that just means deliberate and purpose that means well it also kind of means deliberate doesn't it? It means maybe unconsciously deliberate means some bigger part of you is tracking. And this goes with research on our ability to predict what is satisfying to us, what makes us happy or sad. And Dan Gilbert's book, Stumbling Upon Happiness, is really about research that says human beings are bad at predicting their responses.

They say, "If this happened, I'd feel terrible and they would for a while, but then they'd come back." or if this happened, I would be so happy and they would for a while, but then they'd come back. But research also tells us that your brain is a more complex processor of data than most, if not all, computers. And so it makes sense that somewhere in the back of your mind, somewhere in your brain, some part of you is keeping track of goals that have been satisfying and of goals that you got and went, "Hm, shouldn't have done that." Some part of you knows the difference. And maybe the problem is us raising our calibration, our intention, our ability to notice things within ourselves and then categorize them to study them in science. And one day maybe we will be able to calibrate scientifically the difference between the goals that will satisfy us, the goals that are part of our purpose, and the goals that don't matter much when we achieve them. For this day, we just say, "Think of something you did on purpose and notice what comes to mind." And because your brain is picking up this pattern of intention of the importance of the end of the day for setting intentions, it's going to send you something pretty good. You may not consciously have any understanding of why this pops into your head, and that's okay.

Part of what you do through the practices of neuro-linguistic programming is to start accepting this interaction between your conscious mind and your unconscious processing and honoring both halves of the equation. You say, "Well, how do I know what I did on purpose?" Is whatever comes to mind. If you were three years old and you broke something and your mom said, "Did you do that on purpose? You would pretty much have figured out that if you did it on purpose, you're accountable for it. If you did it by accident, you can cry a little and probably it all goes away. And still that three-year-old child will tell the truth. They will say, "No, I did do that on purpose." And we're just going to explore this memory of doing something on purpose from your point of view, from the point of view of your lived experience of doing the thing, the skills, the thoughts, the strengths that came into doing this thing.

But we're also going to put the wider world around it because purpose tends to be our connection to the world around us. And so we're going to look at that through some other people's eyes using second position shifts and third position. What would somebody objective see about us doing this thing on purpose in this situation? And then we're going to follow the rest of the logical levels up to just letting some sort of symbol come into our awareness that represents on purpose. And just have that experience. And then in the final exercise, we're going to combine on purpose with this other really big idea. It's out there all the time.

People talk about it, but it's hard to define. It's the idea of presence. And we've been working with this idea of presence throughout the course. We've called it often congruence. It's the idea that you can be in one place and one time without your mind jumping restlessly back and forth to other times to other places. When you are present, when all of your attention is focused where you actually are, you are bringing your undistracted focus, your undistracted processing power into a situation, which is powerful. It's so powerful it communicates to other people.

And just as when you push all of your attention out to the periphery, something in here goes. When we are with someone who is fully present and we start matching and mirroring their state, we have another experience and it's mesmerizing. So being present sounds like something that takes you away from other people, but having presence is something that kind of defines your ability to include other people in your experience. And both things are true in the language. Your own association with the word might vary a little bit, but you have both of those definitions of present available to you.

So, we're going to combine something you want to do on purpose with doing it while you are fully present, while taking action. You focus on one thing and not all the other things happening in you and around you. And you let go of the wasted effort that is represented by task switching by moving from one gear to another and instead you take everything in you and you just allow it to be in one place in one action that will make one difference. And that's the way the day wraps up. And when you have purpose and presence, I guarantee you will have all those wonderful benefits of being alert and alive and energized and none of the stress that you don't want. You will have successfully channelled all of those very positive responses your system makes to the world so that you can move through the world in a way that feels good.