How to Handle Stress? 12 life hacks

What is stress?

75 to 95 percent of visits to the doctor are for stress-related conditions

Allostatic load: a physiological and neurological state caused by your body being on constant alert. It damages your health and cognitive performance

• Prolonged levels of high cortisol (stress hormone) in the bloodstream lead to shrinkage of the hippocampus, which is important for long-term memory and the intake of new information
• Stress causes a reduction in serotonin in the brain, which can lead to depression and burnout
• The more stress we perceive, the more overactivated our amygdala becomes. As a result, chronically stressed people become hypersensitive to any potential stressor

Key to emotional regulation: strengthening your ability to handle stress and training the conscious mind to control our primitive/automatic responses.

12 life hacks to Handle Stress - Based on neuroscience

Life hack 1 to handle stress: Sleep

• Sleeping a sufficient amount helps us withstand stresses and aggravations

• Sleep loss:
  • makes us more short-tempered, impatient, and moody
  • diminishes our ability to judge the emotions in other people’s faces
  • interferes with decision making, productivity
  • increases our risk of cardiovascular and gastrointestinal problems

Life hack 2 to handle stress: Exercise

• Engaging in regular exercise:
  • Improves our cognitive test scores
  • Enhances our long-term memory, reasoning and attention
  • Makes us better at problem-solving and fluid intelligence tasks
  • Regulates the release of serotonin, dopamine, and noradrenaline
  • Eases depression and anxiety
  • Makes us less tense and more refreshed

Life hack 3 to handle stress: Nature

• Time spent in nature can improve emotional regulation and diminish stress
• Even sitting by the window, or looking at pictures of nature can make us feel more at ease

Life hack 4 to handle stress: Food

• Change in nutrition changes our mental fitness
• There are certain foods that enhance our emotional well-being:
  • Nutrient-rich vegetables and fruits
  • Healthy fatty acids, such as olive and canola oils
  • Protein in moderate quantities
  • Whole-grain complex carbohydrates, such as oatmeal

Life hack 5 to handle stress: “Acting as if”

• According to the facial feedback hypothesis, our physical expressions send signals to our brains to produce the appropriate emotional response
• Studies have found that by simply putting a pencil in our mouth and thus being forced to smile actually makes us happier
• Expansive posture makes us feel more confident:
  • Crossing legs instead of keeping them together
  • Draping an arm over the back of a chair instead of placing hands under legs etc.

Life hack 6 to handle stress: Physical contact

• Physical contact in general has been shown to reduce stress more than soothing words
• Giving or receiving a hug can trigger a huge release of oxytocin
• Even shaking hands can release a bit of oxytocin and make us have a greater sense of connection

Life hack 7 to handle stress: Deep breathing

• Deep breathing makes us more relaxed
• How to do it:
  • Inhale through your nose
  • Use each new breath to expand your abdomen instead of your chest
  • When you exhale do it through your mouth, slowly

Life hack 8 to handle stress: Progressive muscle relaxation

• This method strengthens our ability to recognize and remedy feelings of stress
• How to do it:
  • Tense a muscle group in your body
  • Relax that muscle group
  • Move onto the next muscle group and repeat until you feel you have moved through all parts of your body

Life hack 9 to handle stress: Autogenic training

• This practice increases our awareness and control of our autonomic nervous system, enabling us to switch from our sympathetic nervous system to the more soothing parasympathetic system
• Ways to do it:
  • By sitting quietly and comfortably and focus on a sound, word, phrase or object
  • By consciously focusing on relaxing your body
  • By shifting your posture and moving around frequently

Life hack 10 to handle stress: Gratitude

• A change in attitude follows a change in self-image and stress levels
• Gratitude is about redirecting your attention, instead of suppressing something
• 3 weeks of gratitude training has been shown to improve personal well-being, psychological health and to increase energy levels
• Gratitude should be directed on people or things around us that make life better
• A simple way to practice gratitude is by writing down 3 to 5 things each morning you are grateful for

Life hack 11 to handle stress: Building on Success

• Approaching difficult tasks as challenges rather than threats has a positive effect on our emotions
• How to do it:
  • Whenever you make a mistake, dismiss it as temporary
  • Gain support from someone you respect
  • Compare yourself favorably to your peers (“If they can do it, so can I”)
  • Celebrate your small victories

Life hack 12 to handle stress: Labeling and reframing

• Acknowledging our feelings in words helps us regain control
• Finding a way to interpret setbacks in a more positive way helps our emotional well-being

Source

• Based on the book: The Leading Brain: Neuroscience Hacks to Work Smarter, Better, Happier by Hans W. Hagemann and Friederike Fabritius