Stress Reduction: Tips for a Calmer Mind

Who isn’t stressed these days? There’s a lot to worry about, from political turmoil in Russia and Ukraine to the upcoming presidential election in the States and the effects of climate change on our weather patterns. And those are just big-picture worries. Most likely, you are also dealing with a host of “micro” stressors borne out of your personal circumstances. Residual supply shortages and inflation caused by the pandemic have only increased the pressure.

Perhaps no one is more stressed than busy entrepreneurs. Three-quarters of business owners are concerned about their mental health, and 56% have been diagnosed with stress-related ailments such as anxiety and depression. Not only are entrepreneurs concerned about things like valuing their small business and finding investors; but they also worry about the impact of their long work hours on relationships with family and loved ones. 

As most people know, stress is the life-saving biological reaction that allowed your distant ancestors to escape the jaws of a saber-toothed tiger. The stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol prepare the body to fight off an attack, enhancing strength and inhibiting pain. 

Human beings have not evolved fast enough to finetune this primitive stress response; our bodies cannot differentiate between a truly life-threatening event and the annoyance of waiting in a traffic jam. Thus, we are constantly bathed with stress hormones, and over time, this can negatively impact health, causing depression, anxiety, headaches, weight gain, heart disease, and impaired cognition.

You can’t change the world around you. But you can minimize the impact of stress on your body by adapting your behavior in response to it. The good news is that many of the following tips will improve your health in a variety of other ways as well. 

Walk It Out

Walking has a number of health benefits. It is an essential weight-bearing exercise that helps to strengthen bones and improve balance. Taken in the middle of the workday or during a challenging project, a walk can boost creativity. It lowers your risk of getting metabolic disorders and some forms of cancer. What’s more, it is a natural antidepressant.   

It stands to reason that if walking can calm your mood, it can also relieve stress. In fact, most forms of exercise will reduce stress because physical activity causes the release of endorphins into your bloodstream, which promotes relaxation and improves your mood. 

Walking can be done anywhere, and the only equipment you need is a good pair of walking shoes. Aim for 30 minutes a day. To experience stress relief, you don’t need to go fast; you just need to make it a regular practice. 

Be Mindful 

Mindfulness is the act of being present in the moment and observing the things around you without judgment. Think back to when you were a child and didn’t understand how things were interconnected or the ways they might affect you in the future. This naive way of looking at the world is close to mindfulness.

For instance, suppose you see a line of carpenter ants streaming from a rotten column on your porch. Your habituated response is probably to view this as a problem to be solved – thinking about the destruction the ants may have already caused and the time and expense it will take to eradicate them is stressful.

A mindful approach is simply to observe the ants in the present moment, taking notice of their movements without automatically analyzing why they are there or what it will take to get rid of them. 

Mindfulness is a form of meditation that asks you to empty your mind of the thoughts, judgments, and associations you normally bring to everyday experiences, focusing on a meditative object – in my example, ants. It sounds simple, but it is a learned behavior that takes a lot of practice. 

How does it instill calm? Over time, it accustoms you to sit with thoughts and feelings that usually trigger a stress response. If you put space between the thought and the impulse to act on that thought, you can avoid the stress response in the first place. 

Stay Connected

Human beings are not meant to live in isolation, yet technology has allowed us to communicate with others and work without direct human contact. Although the pandemic exacerbated this trend, the way Americans live was already contributing to a loneliness epidemic even before the Covid lockdowns. 

Loneliness and isolation eat away at our resilience, making even minor events more stressful than they would otherwise be. In fact, people who live in isolation lead shorter lives than their more connected peers.

When you are busy, it can be tempting to send a text or cancel plans instead of spending quality time with the people you care about. You know what you have to do, though. Reach out to old friends and spend time with new ones. Talk to the store cashier when you purchase something. Find out if the elderly couple down the street needs your help. When all else fails, call your mother. 

Eat Your Veggies

Certain foods are associated with helping you to establish a calmer frame of mind. Unsurprisingly, these are the same foods we associate with better health: Omega-3 fatty acids, green leafy vegetables, and fiber dense grains like oatmeal. 

Just as important as the foods you eat is how you consume them. Try to eat regularly throughout the day to keep your brain’s glucose levels stable. This will also help you to concentrate on tasks more effectively. 

Finally, you might consider cutting back on caffeinated beverages. Numerous studies have shown that caffeine causes an increase in cortisol production. When you compound coffee with a stressful event, you’ll feel more jittery and tense than if you had abstained.  

Get More Sleep

You probably already realize that you don’t sleep well when you are stressed. The relationship between poor sleep and stress is even more pernicious than that, though. When you don’t get enough sleep, it triggers your body’s stress response system, pushing more cortisol into your system. This, in turn, disrupts sleep even further. 

In other words, when you don’t sleep well due to stress, your body produces even more stress hormones, creating a vicious cycle.

In order to get the seven to nine recommended hours a night, you’ll need to practice good sleep hygiene:

• Power off screens at least an hour before bedtime. The blue light emanating from screens can interfere with melatonin production. And while you can install a blue light filter, the best practice is to avoid screens altogether right before bed. 
• Turn down the temperature in your bedroom – 65 degrees Fahrenheit is perfect.
• Don’t multitask in bed! Experts advise people to reserve their bedrooms for sleep. Ideally, you shouldn’t even have a television in the room.
• Aim to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. 

Just Breathe

If you’ve read this far, you might be thinking, I don’t have time to implement these stress reducers in my daily life! In fact, you may have already tried to meditate, taken a yoga class, or used a smartwatch to monitor your sleep patterns. As an entrepreneur, you are savvy enough to research what you have to do, and you’ve been proactive.

But while you meditate, quarterly figures keep intruding on your mental space. Meetings get scheduled during your yoga class. You know you’re supposed to turn off screens an hour before bedtime, but yeah – right.  

For those of you who have tried it all and found that nothing sticks, breathing exercises might be just what you need! You can do them anywhere, and they are guaranteed to work because they affect your system automatically and involuntarily, making it impossible for you to get in your head and mess it up.

Learning to take regular deep breaths when you are stressed is simple, it takes just a few minutes each day, and you can do it anywhere.

My favorite breathing exercise, developed by Dr. Andrew Weil, is the 4-7-8 breathing technique. As the name implies, the technique has three stages. First, you inhale silently through your nose to the count of four. Next, you hold that breath to the count of seven. Finally, you exhale audibly and forcefully through your mouth to the count of eight. 

Weil says that four repetitions are sufficient for relaxation and stress reduction. He also cautions people against attempting too many repetitions as they learn the practice. 

Although you can do this breathing exercise anywhere, I find it is particularly beneficial when stalled in traffic. Not only do you have ample time to practice, it will help to focus your energy away from the source of aggravation. 

Some Final Thoughts

Once reserved for life-or-death situations, stress is now a common and inevitable part of life. Because stressors aren’t going away, you have to adjust your reaction to them.

A long-term plan for reducing stress looks a lot like any healthy living plan – eat nutritious foods, get enough sleep, engage in face-to-face social activities, and get enough exercise. In addition, mindfulness meditation and breathing techniques are active practices you can engage in to calm your body down.