Stress Reduction Techniques: Why Mindfulness is the Star of the Show

Sometimes, stress can be overwhelming.

It becomes hard to concentrate, to stay calm, to manage your everyday life.

Stress reduction techniques like exercise, taking short breaks, talking to a friend, listening to music and remembering good times in the past can be very helpful to change your frame of mind.

Yet, when it comes to kick-starting the human relaxation response, mindfulness really is the star of the show.

The human stress/relaxation system

When you experience an overload of stress, your brain triggers the human stress response. This is a very old evolutionary mechanism, located in the least sophisticated parts of our brain, the ‘flight or fight’ response.

Your breath becomes shallow, your heart rate goes up, your digestion stalls and you may feel dizzy. These are all responses from your autonomous nervous system, sent to prepare you for fighting a tiger or running away from it.

Hormones and other chemicals trigger further changes in your system.

In modern life, where there are very few tigers, most of this extra energy finds no outlet. Your fear doesn’t get a chance to convert into fuel for action, and you may feel anxious for a long time.

Mindfulness is the most effective stress reduction technique, because it works directly on the main causes of your stress response.

What is mindfulness

Mindfulness was not originally designed as a stress reduction technique. It is a modern, Westernized version of Asian meditation practices that seek to free the mind from over-involvement with everyday matters and from overwhelming emotions, including fear.

But mindfulness is a very powerful tool for dealing with your stress response. Its basic principles are simple, and it can be applied everywhere and any time.

Connect with the present

If you experience a constant elevated stress response, your mind will often be occupied with the future. A future that you fear.

But life can really only happen in the present moment.

The past is memory, the future is fantasy.

Mindfulness begins and ends with connecting to the moment you are living in. Right now. (Try it!)

This can be really difficult when you are very stressed. Your system is trying to keep you hyper-alert for potential tigers in the vicinity and looking for potential escape routes.

Mindfulness suggests these tools:

• Connect with your senses

If you can, close your eyes so that you have to focus on your less dominant senses.

What can you hear? What can you smell? What can you feel inside your body?

Mindfulness is not about prettifying your environment. It’s about connecting with it, without letting it control you.

The everyday sounds of office equipment, the sounds floating in through an open window – chirping birds or stalling traffic, the power of gravity holding you in your chair – just listen to them as they really are, not as triggers for your stress.

Even the sound of a ringing phone – something that may trigger your stress response every time you hear it – can become part of the living background of sound in your life.

• Connect with the world

Through the senses, you connect with the world around.

You are part of that world, and you are real. Right now.

When you practice mindfulness, you just experience the world and yourself, you don’t comment on it, judge it, or try to shape it to your will…

• Connect with your breath

The most fundamental connection we have both to ourselves and the world around us is through our breath.

Mindfulness breathing practice is not a superficial exercise. Just as you pay attention to the input of your senses, you pay attention to the breath that flows in and out of you, every moment of your life.

Don’t try to force it into a slower rhythm immediately, just observe.

Breath is important. Breath is life.

When you feel connected to your natural rhythm, you can try, gently, to lengthen your exhalations a little bit, then a little bit more.

A good ratio is the 5/5/7 system, where you breathe in for 5 counts, hold your breath for another 5, and then breathe out for 7 counts. Try to do this for a few minutes and your relaxation response system, the natural balance to the stress response, will switch on. But don’t obsess about counting or length of breath! Just breathe.

Meditate

If you have followed the mindfulness steps outlined above, you are already entering a state of meditation.

Buddhist monks meditate for hours on end, and there are many places where you can learn from them.

But in your busy life, mindfulness may be the one effective stress reduction technique you need.