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“Every day brings a choice: to practice stress or to practice peace.” - Joan Borysenko

Easier said than done, right?

We all know that stress is a major problem in our modern lifestyles and it’s almost universally recognised, that stress in some form or another is at the bottom of almost everything that goes wrong with our health and happiness.  One study even showed that 60-80% of patients go to their doctor with problems that are stress-related problems!

But saying “reduce your stress” is FAR, FAR easier than actually reducing your stress.

The good news is that it is very possible to slowly, but surely, start reducing and even removing stress in your life, even when you’re too stressed out for major changes.

The problem that arises is that most of us don’t readily recognize many of the silent sources of stress impacting our lives.  We have a tendency to focus on the BIG problems, like traumatic events or demanding jobs, yet dismiss the little stuff. And in fact, it’s very likely that these big stressors are a result of several underlying hidden stressors, which luckily often turn out to be MUCH EASIER to address.

And today we’re looking at that key first step - recognising and understanding the hidden sources of stress in your life that often underlie the more apparent stressors.

Because if you can't SEE the stressors and understand how they are impacting you, then it's almost impossible to remove them.

But, by shedding light on these hidden stressors, you can take proactive steps to minimise their impact.

Before we start, let’s bear in mind that stress isn’t completely bad.  Stress is in fact a normal part of life and acute stress responses can be a useful enhancement for performance, for example in an emergency or when you exercise.

However, chronic stress - too much over too long a period of time - can have significantly damaging consequences for your physical and mental well-being.

Let’s look at the obvious contenders that we all know about already…

1. Traumatic Experiences

The big one we all think about is a major life-changing experience, particularly with longer term impact on your life, such as the death of a loved one, relationship break-downs, job loss or a physical accident, but there are many smaller, less obvious traumas that can hugely affect our state of mind and self-esteem.  Even positive events that have a big life-changing impact, such as having a baby, can create significant stress while you adjust to the new situation.

People often fail to recognise that trauma from a long-time ago, perhaps even forgotten, can still be impacting you and the way you think and act, today, especially if it wasn’t talked about or worked through at the time. Sometimes it can be as simple as talking about it, but often it is safer to do this with a trained professional (to avoid causing more stress)!  

2. Ongoing Stress

It’s not just the big stuff that can sabotage your healthy, happy life – lower impact stress on an ongoing basis can also have a huge impact on your health and mental wellbeing, for example challenging relationships, caring for family, financial difficulties, academic pressures, job insecurity or a highly pressured work environment.

3. Social Stresses

Discrimination, harassment, bullying, lack of support or even feeling like you struggle to express yourself or make social connections can all cause significant stress.  Connection to others is a huge hard-wired primal need, which goes some way to explaining why the opinions of others matters to us, even when we know it doesn’t.

These emotional-based stresses are all very typical stresses that come to mind when you think about reducing stress.  This is the ‘big stuff’ and to reduce their impact, you need to focus on internal changes, shifting your perspective and challenging the limiting beliefs that keep you trapped within these perspectives, something that often requires you to have external support, like working with a coach, our own programs or finding a therapist that is a good fit for you.

However, there are plenty of other lot of other 'smaller' stresses that can more easily be changed, sometimes through a simple change in lifestyle or environment.

4. Environmental Stresses

We often ignore the stress impact of toxins in our environments, which can be very damaging to the body and brain, including, for example toxic household and garden chemicals, air pollution, noise pollution smoking or passive smoking and even spending many hours under artificial lighting and using screen technology, which can all put a huge strain on your health.hen climbing a mountain, you also need to know what to pack, but without making your pack to heavy, right?

5. Lack of Sleep

Lack of sleep is probably one of the biggest stressors on health and happiness that I see and there are so many ways that sleep deprivation can cause stress and damage on the body.  It’s crucial to address sleep issues BEFORE you try creating other healthy habits.

6. The food you eat (or don't eat)

The food you eat (or don’t eat as the case may be) can also create substantial damage to your body and brain in the form of dietary stresses, increasing your overall stress load and sabotaging all your best efforts to get healthy.  For example, eating too much sugar and processed foods can cause physical stress in the form of blood sugar spikes, under-nourishment, inflammation, digestive problems, leading to fatigue, irritability, and mood swings or, in the longer term to obesity and chronic diseases such as heart disease and cancer, all which in turn create even more stress on the body, mind and soul..

7. Dieting

The act of dieting itself can create stress and I think we’re all familiar with the mental stress that dieting can cause, but making big changes to your food can also create physical stress on the body, even when but moving to healthier way of eating, as the body initially struggles to adapt it’s with different chemical pathways and responses to the new foods.

This is a HUGE reason that diets so often don’t work.

8. Drugs

Other (non-food) things we consume, such medications, alcohol and other drugs can also put a lot of strain on the body..

9. Chronic Pain

Ongoing pain is a another HUGEly debilitating stress, as anyone who has lived with ongoing pain will know.  As well as emotional stress, inflammation around the painful area is also creating a cascade of hormones that over time lead to imbalances and potentially other health issues.  This is important

to address BEFORE you jump into increasing your exercise and cause more damage..

10. Exercise

Exercise is an interesting stressor, because we purposely put stress the body with exercise to help the body adapt to become fitter and stronger and, ironically, to reduce stress.  While that’s good stress, it’s important to be aware that you are creating additional stress when you’re trying to reduce stress. 

The typical more-is-better mindset also results in a lot of people over-exercising, without enough rest and recovery, resulting in too much damaging stress on the body, not only in the form of injuries and joint damage, but to hormonal and metabolic processes. 

Of course, a sedentary lifestyle is also super stressful on the body as you become stiffer and less mobile, gain weight and lose muscle, making it harder for the body to cope, so it is all about creating a balance..

11. Incorrect Breathing

Breathing incorrectly is another hidden source of stress, because shallow chest breathing can put your body in a state of stress and cause anxiety.

12. Pressure to Perform

Pressure to perform or achieve, usually self-driven, is a HUGE underlying and very hidden stress for a lot of people.  This often shows up as being an A-type, or can be seen in how you approach sport, work or social media, but it can be present for anybody who never feels ‘good enough’ and in some way feels inadequate and they have to ‘do better’.

13. Negative Emotions

Negative emotions, including anxiety, anger, worry, depression, fear, jealousy and even boredom, all trigger the stress response - your fight or flight, because these emotions are actually signals to the brain that there is something to worry about – a potential danger.

14. Negative Thoughts

Even your thoughts can create stress on your body in the same manner and you might be getting stressed just reading this! This is why it is so important to move away from judgement, especially self-judgement, and towards Presence, where you accept what is, without judging..

15. Effects of Stress

The effects of stress can themselves create stress! For example, putting on weight, negative feelings when you can’t cope and physical damage to your body will all create MORE stress. This sets up a vicious self-perpetuating stress cycle, where you feel completely trapped and unable to know where to start.

As you can see, stress comes from all sorts of sources - not just trauma and busy stressful lifestyles, but also the food you eat (or don’t eat), your environment, not enough sleep, chronic pain, your exercise patterns, medications and even negative emotions and thoughts.  And the stresses themselves create even more stresses.

These wide-ranging stresses interact and layer together to create a heavy load on your body, mind and soul,  but you can start to lighten that load by recognising the hidden stressors in YOUR life and choosing just two or three that can easily be changed and start there, for example the way you breathe (see Bitesize Hack #1) or replacing toxic chemicals in the home with non-toxic alternatives, instead of worrying about things that you can’t influence or the things that present too great a challenge for you to tackle right now.

Remember, this is your journey – and the gradual path is the one that works for most of us.

So, when we say “Every day brings a choice: to practice stress or to practice peace”, just know that it’s perfectly OK to choose to practice peace with the small stuff (and we’ve looked at plenty of those today).

And you might just find that the big stuff will start to take care of itself.

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