Last year, I posted a little tidbit about managing stress during the holidays, recommending to you, my dear readers, that you treat
yourselves gently in stressful times. Holiday events with friends and family
can be joyous occasions, but for many of us, they can also be laden with
stress. The advice to ‘treat yourself gently’ is an aphorism for healthy living
I learned from a psychologist who was one of my teachers. The basic meaning is
to give yourself space for self care in times of stress, when others are making
demands of you and your time. Treat yourself gently – don’t be hard on
yourself, give yourself time and space, and above all, pay attention to what
you need to feel well.
This year, I return to the topic, with some more
recommendations based on what I’ve learned from working with my patients. A
large proportion of my patients are stressed out for a variety of reasons. In
working with chronic stress, I’ve learned two important lessons from my
patients.
1. Stress is not stress is not stress. We all respond to stress in our own unique ways.
Some of us become sad, others angry, others fatigued, and others eat when
stressed. The variability of own unique responses to stress makes it hard to
make general recommendations about stress. There are a whole host of
supplements out there that purport to treat stress, including herbs, vitamins,
and even minerals, but because stress is so individual, it takes a trained
professional to recommend one treatment over another. I’ve found a number of
herbs and supplements that help people find relief from stress, but it takes an
office visit to determine what’s helpful. For example, l-theanine would help
someone who become nervous with stress, but would aggravate someone who responded
to stress by becoming fatigued. Similarly, rhodiola might help someone who
became fatigued with stress, but worsen symptoms for someone who was irritable
or nervous.
Before I move on to the second point, let me interject here
to say that supplements don't fully answer the problem of stress. Supplements and
medications help people cope with stress, but it’s the changes to their diet
and lifestyle that will help keep them healthy in the long run. After all,
supplements don’t get rid of stress, they only help us deal with it better.
Which brings me to my next point…
2. When treating stress, you can either reduce the
external stress or improve your response to the stress. We all know what causes us stress – our jobs, our
family, our partner, our parents, schoolwork, the economy, Christmas shopping,
our budget, the government… the list goes on and on. Some of these things we
have power over and can change, thus reducing our stress. Other things, we have
less power over, and so it falls to us to improve our response to the stresses
we face. Used properly, herbs and supplements can help us achieve an improved
response to stress, but as I said earlier, these are a means to an end, not an
end unto themselves. They may relieve symptoms, but in the long run, cannot
achieve the resilient mental attitude that comes from exercise, yoga,
meditation, tai chi, or other lifestyle practices.
In managing stress, herbs and supplementation require
individualized attention, but the lifestyle factors that can help improve our
response to stress are applicable to nearly everyone. These sorts of things
include regular exercise (and I’m not talking about triathalons), adequate
sleep, a healthy diet, meditation, yoga or tai chi. These practices feed our
core so that we are able to deal with stresses from a place of strength, not
weakness. Encountering stress from a place of strength allows us to deal with
it without allowing it to affect us.
A healthy response to stress also takes some mental work –
to deal with stress effectively, I find that a person often has to cultivate a
resilient mental attitude. We often hear about a positive mental attitude, and
while positive thinking is by all means excellent, I find that people who are
very stressed are more helped by adopting a resilient mental attitude – one
that allows them to deal with the stress, not let it touch them too strongly
and then bounce back. There are a wide variety of books for people to read on
the topic of dealing with stress, and people have been writing books on the
topic of stress management for millennia, though these books did not always
deal explicitly with ‘stress management’. The Tao Te Ching and Bhagavad Gita,
for example, deal with the topic of how to act wisely and live happily. Within
the context that I am writing, I might say that they teach us how to act
effectively to deal with stress, and without letting stresses affect us to
strongly. Even The Bible (parts of the Old Testament and especially the New
Testament) deals with the eternal conflict of how to deal with the stresses we
encounter in life. A spiritual practice of whatever tradition speaks to you can
be helpful in developing the resilient mental attitude that serves us in time
of stress.
I hope this blog finds you some peace during the holiday
stresses. As I said last year, be gentle with yourself. Give yourself the space
and time you need, despite the demands that others make on you. Additionally,
the lifestyle recommendations I made this year can help keep you healthy and
stress-free, not only through the holiday season, but throughout the year. And
as always, working with a professional, be it an MD, ND, counselor,
psychotherapist, acupuncturist, or psychiatrist can be an important step.
Building a therapeutic alliance with another person helps to build core strength
and resilience.
