Stress Rescue Routine: E.A.S.E.

Stress doesn’t have to kill us. But sometimes we need a rescue from the chaos that has swallowed us. Learning how to respond well to stress allows us to stay energized enough to care for others, rather than being burnt out and irritable. It also allows us to work smarter and be more engaged and productive, and accomplish our meaningful goals. 

Today we’re going to let E.A.S.E. be an acronym for a Stress Rescue Routine we can use anytime we find ourselves feeling overwhelmed by what seems like negative changes, or anxiety-inducing circumstances.

The Paradox of Positive Disruption

Using the EASE Stress Rescue Routine becomes easier when we accept the paradox of positive disruption. That is: positive change often comes through negative disruption. If we believe this, we anticipate change as necessary, rather than wasting energy resisting change. 

We don’t become doormats toward life, mindlessly receiving and being ground into the dust by the pain or injustice of our circumstances. Instead, we open ourselves to the unknown good that may result, and look for positive meaning inside of our experience. (Read more about Positive Disruption in last week’s blog if you want to dig into this Wild Idea a bit more.)

The EASE Stress Rescue Routine is 4 Steps:

E - Exhale to Exit the Toxic Thought Train

A - Attend to the Good with Specific Gratitude

S - Settle into the Present Moment

E - Engage One Action at a Time

Step 1: EXHALE to EXIT:

In moments of stress our inner voice can become toxic, a runaway train of negativity, criticism, and despair. Like a train going nowhere fast, instead of arguing with the conductor or bracing for impact, sometimes you have to just exit the train.

Have you ever noticed when your “train of thought” turns toxic? 

We keep thinking things like:

This never should have happened. 

Things like this always happen to me.

I can never win. 

It’s always something. 

I don’t even care anymore. 

I knew this would happen. 

I can’t believe this.

Our inner voice is so powerful that this defeated chatter can tangle us up, keeping us tied to the front of a runaway train. We may ruminate silently, or explode on others. But as long as we remain on board, relief doesn’t come. Get off the train with a mindful breath. 

Try it Now

If your chatter train is still chugging saying “I’ve tried breathing before, nothing works for me” that’s okay. It’s what the chatter train does. Respect that it is biased, and jump off the train anyway.

One thing you know for sure: you can always get back on the train again later if you miss being stressed. For now, close your eyes and take a relaxed breath through your nose. 

I’ll wait.

When you come back to read this, get ready to do it again, this time turning your mental attention to the sound of your breath and the way it feels coming in through your nose, climbing into your lungs to fill your belly.

Let’s breathe again. 

No matter how severe your circumstances, how exhausted you are, or how nervous you are that it won’t work; spending 2-3 minutes focusing on your breathing will shift your internal resources.

Since our minds can only focus on one thought at a time, bringing our attention to our breath steals our attention from our worries.

Step 2: ATTEND to the Good in Gratitude:

Our attitudes and emotions are products of our attention. Just like “attending” to your breath ejects you from the negative thought train, turning your attention to the good with gratitude can put you on a completely new train of thought. As our thoughts change our emotions begin to follow.

It may seem like the circumstances themselves, or the actions of others cause our emotional reactions, but the cause-and-effect is hidden behind our attention.

We use our attention to sift and select what information is important; and once attended to, our attitude and emotional response flows from “what we see.” Step 2 in our Stress Rescue Routine has us turning our attention to something specific we appreciate, feel fortunate about, or which brings us joy. 

Finding some specific thing to be grateful for initiates powerful gratitude effects and shifts mental and emotional energy away from anxious stress and toward calm resourcefulness. 

Stop Should-ing on Yourself

This is not an opportunity for you to say “I should be grateful that this is making me stronger” or even “I should be grateful because I know other people have it worse than me.” Whenever we do this, it’s not only unkind to ourselves, it’s also cheating. Repeating should-be-gratefuls triggers resentment in us, not gratitude and joy.

Gratitude has profound effects to open us up, strengthen our hearts and clear our minds. Research has shown powerful connections between gratitude and creative problem solving, endurance and resilience, even health effects. But you don’t get any of those if you don’t allow yourself to feel the gratitude in your gut. It may take discipline to start the exercise, but once you begin don’t settle for “shoulds.” Keep looking until you find something you can connect with authentically.

Try it Now

Even if you’re reading this blog for fun, not feeling stressed at all, do this with me. Gratitude yields dividends every time you engage in it.

It can be something mundane like your morning coffee, something momentary like a lovely sunrise, or meaningful like an opportunity at work. You could bring to mind a person in your life whose support you know has made a difference for you, or even something difficult that you feel grateful to have overcome. If you have a pet who brings you comfort, or a treat to look forward to this weekend, bring it to mind.

Supercharge your gratitude moment with a deep breath and a physical smile. Let yourself enjoy the thing you’re grateful for. Attend to it so it becomes more a part of your reality. 

We can talk about the science of gratitude* sometime, but for now just know that practicing it changes the game of what is possible for us.

Step 3: SETTLE into the PRESENT MOMENT

For the most part, “good stress” is the kind that helps us dig in to make the most of the moment. Even emotions of anxiety can help kick us into action to prevent disasters or come through on something important. But when it feels like the stress is killing us it’s usually a sign that we’re trapped in past regrets, or future fears. 

Our brain’s highlight reel can become a circular replay of negative things from the past, or a preview-of-likely-catastrophes on repeat. 

Instead of reviewing all the previous thinking, look around you in the present. What opportunity for positive action does today hold? What’s happening right now that you value? If you were able to set the past aside, and notice the present, what do you see?

It can take practice and support to stop taking all forward progress on a detour through the past. But we all get better with practice. 

Love Today 

If disappointments, failures, or losses have been piling up in your past, it can feel risky to let yourself try again. Allowing yourself to hope that today could be different from past disappointments can feel risky. What if today doesn’t go as planned?

With all the things in life we cannot control, it’s important to find some way to appreciate the unexpectedness, opportunity for change, and the possibilities of each new “today.” Becoming fully present includes allowing tomorrow to take care of itself. For now, all any of us can do is face into the present with integrity and willingness to try.

Try it Now

Setting the “should haves,” “wish I’ds,” and “it’ll nevers” aside for a moment, what is possible from where we currently are?

Sometimes settling into the present** means releasing ego. It can be hard to stop harping on the past when we see the present as having problems in it that “could have been avoided.” But to stay attached to our anger (or regret) is a type of ego maintenance. It takes humility to let the past go and begin with today. 

At time embracing the present means allowing the grief of a loss to be “in progress.” In some seasons of grief we are keep fighting against the loss. We don’t want it to be true, so we delay acceptance. Moving into the present means choosing to see grief as something meaningful we are navigating. We can sometimes accept the grief process before we accept losing what we have lost. Acceptance of the process is one way to move into the present.

For many of us though, settling into the present is a matter of focus. Modern life is highly distractible, our focus shredded by the demands of life and tools we use to manage them. Curiosity can help us defragment and focus on the now. 

Use one of these curious questions to get into the present. Pick the one that is easiest for you to answer, and move through it into the now:

• What is today for?
• How is today beautiful?
• What is important to me right now?
• Who is in my life at this moment?
• What am I learning today?
• Where is my energy?

Once you’re in the moment, thinking about now instead of staying trapped in the past or future, we can take the fourth and final step of the Stress Rescue Routine: Engage life one step at a time.

Step 4: Engage Life One Step at a Time

There’s a reason the classic Nike slogan “Just Do It” appeals to us; sometimes just doing something brings more relief than any amount of thinking. Often, the biggest casualty of stress is that we become too overwhelmed to know where to start. So we don’t. Then lack of action snowballs until we feel defeated.

With many of the high performers I have coached, often it’s not laziness that prevents action, but excessive expectations. Past seasons of high performance skew our judgement of what is sustainable. We remember “doing so much” or “handling things” better in the past, and now in the face of a gaggle of demands we tell ourselves we should “just do it.”

But you can’t “just do” more than one thing. It’s remarkable what happens when we give ourselves permission to care about one thing at a time.

We can start to have stress attached to taking action when we forget that work only gets done one thing at a time. If everything has a “right now!!” energy attached to it, that’s not an action list -- it’s a catastrophe. It’s failure waiting to happen, disguised as a productivity plan. 

Don’t do this to yourself. 

I won’t go deep into task and time management hacks right now, but remember when it’s time to act, one thing at a time is fastest, even when the list is long.

Try it Now

Return to your answer to one of the questions in Step 3. Whether you figured out “what today is for” or noticed “who is in my life at this moment,” being attached to the now is the place to be when you begin to engage life. 

Resist the urge to assume you have to keep working on the thing you feel most behind about. Instead, ask yourself what engaging life today would look like? 

Where would you start if this moment was really fresh?

Make this tangible by writing down a few actions you could take to engage the potential of the present. This may be one thing, great. Start there. If you have multiple actions to take, write them down in the order you want to do them, top down. That way you visually have a starting place and sequence to guide you.

Whatever you do, don’t jump around, don’t distract yourself with other things. Give yourself permission to care about the top thing on the list, and only the top thing until you’ve completed it. Then celebrate with a smile and acknowledgement of your victory before moving to the next.

Small actions have snowball effect. Find your way to the present where you can “just do” one thing at a time and see how your energy responds.

Before we end, there’s one last thing to mention. We won’t go deep, but it’s important to acknowledge that sometimes our stress is actually about our stress.

Stress About Being Stressed

Learning to engage in an effective Stress Rescue Routine not only helps us through whatever chaos is going on in the moment, but also can reduce one of the least-useful forms of stress: the stress we feel when we anticipate being stressed. 

With what early stress researchers did to define stress as purely destructive, many of us have started to have stress about feeling stressed. “This is killing me” we think, and instead of the stress making us stronger and more responsive, it erodes our confidence. 

The science of stress has come a long way in the past decade, and if you’re not clear on the ways that stress can really help you and make you stronger, healthier, and more successful, you might want to learn more about what health psychologist Kelly McGonigal PhD calls “the upside of stress.”*** 

For today though, I hope you give the EASE Stress Rescue Technique a shot and let us know how it worked for you. Being able to respond to stress with E.A.S.E. can reduce your fear of stress’s negative effects, and make room for better energy now.