Tag Archives: stress

Are you the Queen of “What if?”

Have you ever noticed that when you become anxious about something your internal voice that asks “what if?” goes into overdrive?

Questions that start with these two words actual do not improve your ability to assess a situation and make sound decisions.  No, these two words just add fuel to your stress and worry. According to Travis Bradberry, coauthor of Emotional Intelligence 2.0:

The more time you spend worrying about the possibilities, the less time you’ll spend focusing on taking action.

So rather than fret and worry about what might happen here are some tips to get you into a mindset that will support your success in the next stressful circumstance (let’s face it, another one will come sooner or later).

  • Breathe!

    • This is always my first and formost recommendation when anxiety mounts. Take at least two minutes (excuse yourself to the bathroom if needed) to just breathe deeply. Oxygenating your brain will improve your thought process.  Slowing down to breath will calm your nervous system.  And lastly, deep breathing for two minutes will allow you to respond, not react, to whatever troubles you.

  • Think outside the box!

    • When faced with a crisis of sorts you might tend to resort to restrictive thinking. “This is how it always is.” “This will never work.” Sometimes you need to imagine how another person would see and handle this situation, rather than yourself, to start to expand your possible solutions.

  • Imagine the outcome you desire in detail.

    • Unfortunately, if you are like most people you problem are great at imagining the details of what can go wrong but spend little time imagining things going exactly how you would want them.  Put time into creatively imagining how you want things to go and put your focus on the postitive possibilities.

  • Create a plan of action for achieving what you want.

    • Sometimes a list of what I need to do, broken down into small steps is extremely soothing to me.  It helps take me out of crisis mode and into planning mode. It also helps me see things from the smaller details that look managable rather than the overwhelming problem where I started.
    • You can even add in contingency plans to settle your “What if” queen, as long as they focus on how you can overcome possible obstacles and do not start a list of reasons it won’t work.

  • Ask will this matter next month, next year, in five years, or when I am old.

    • This is one of my favorite exercises and one that has saved me from spiraling into uncontrolled anguish that my first boss gave me. It will help you put things in perspective quickly when your fight or flight system has been triggered.

Are you stressed and unhappy?

Why are so many women under stress and unhappy?  And what can we do about it?

The American Psychological Association reports that 49% of women say their stress has increased in the past 5 years.  Has yours?  I know you have heard the detrimental effect of stress on your health, but you may have pushed on feeling you need to in order to achieve a certain goal.  If you are like most people, you attribute your future happiness to the achievement of that goal; and so you ignore your stress levels for this future reward.

However, your success and happiness are more directly tied to your enjoyment of your current life than the achievement of some future goal.  In fact, your ability to succeed is dependent on your ability to think clearly, solve problems, be creative and visualize yourself happy–all of which are hindered, if not completely halted, by stress.

Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor at the University of California, has shown that fully 40% of your happiness is available for you to control.  You and I often consider our outer circumstances as holding the keys to our happiness.  Because of this you probably focus much of your efforts on trying to change people and circumstances to increase your happiness. Sonja’s brain studies show that by influencing the 40% that is an internal job, we can greatly change our happiness quotient!  This is great news for me because it’s frustrating to have important aspects of my life out of my own control. How about you?

Have you noticed you cannot be happy and stressed at the same time?  They do not go hand in hand.  So the effort you place on increasing your happiness will also reduce your stress levels–a double win!

There are actually happiness exercises you can do to increase your happiness, today!  Nancy Clark writes about these in her article in Forbes.  Two of my favorites are paying attention to things you do well and congratulating yourself on your successes rather than rushing past them; and exercising gratitude.

I often coach women to make a list of their accomplishments.  Try it.  You can activate your confidence and improve your ongoing success by noticing and celebrating everything you do well and have achieved.  It is a list you should add to regularly; reading it daily if necessary during times of great uncertainty.  Another list that helps immensely is listing what you are grateful for about yourself.  See my challenge on this here.

The other tool I use is a gratitude log.  I learned this exercise from Christie Marie Sheldon and then later read about it in Wallace Wattles work, The Science of Getting Rich.  Christie calls it “Great Fuel.”  Don’t you love that?

Wallace says the key to attracting what you want can be summed up in one word, gratitude. That is a powerful statement and I think he is right.  Each night I write in my gratitude journal, kept by my bedside, all the things I am grateful for that day.  Some days things haven’t gone well and it is hard to find something to be grateful for so I resort to being grateful for my children and my health and my home and find I still have a lot to be grateful for.  Somedays the list is long and on others I am so profoundly moved by one thing I write about it in detail. Regardless of how my gratitude list looks, it always puts me in an improved state of mind before I go to sleep.

These are both powerful tools you can add to your life today and increase your happiness and decrease your stress, now!