How I stay calm
The company I work for recently started an education programme for our corporate clients and my boss posed this question to me as a potential idea for something we could help our clients with during this unprecedented time. We never actually created a course for it or ran it with our clients, but it got me thinking about what it is I actually do for this.
I scream 😐 (but only in my head 🙊)
Jokes aside, I think there are a few things that all come together to help me achieve this and I hope to break them down in this post.
I should note that I’m one of the lucky ones — I still have my job and can comfortably work remotely as well. These ideas are really meant to provide a framework (in this case, the framework that I myself use) for those of us that want (or need) to introduce more calm into our lives. Everyone’s situation is different and it’s up to you to decide if you have the space to implement these ideas.
PERSPECTIVE
I would say this is the big one. There are some concepts around perspective that I’ve chosen to internalize which really help ground me and set a good foundation for some of the other practices that I have.
I’m a fairly religious person, so much of the concepts I use come from that. For example, in Islam, we have a concept that states “With every hardship comes ease” [Qur’an, 94:5]. This really helps me with re-framing my situations (more on that later).
There is another saying I make use of as well — “This too shall pass” (not quite sure of the origins of it, but here’s a wikipedia page 💁🏽♂️). This speaks towards the impermanence of things and that, over a long enough timeline, everything fades.
For the less-religiously inclined, concepts such as Simon Sinek’s Infinite mindset may help as well — where he advocates taking, you guessed it, an infinite mindset. This asks people not to be concerned with winning or losing (because infinite games have no end), but rather to think about how to progress. I like this one because it advocates for action, regardless of the situation.
All-in-all, I’d say step 1 is to work on your mindset and perspective.
TOOLS TO STAY CALM
Take action
An idle mind is the devil’s workshop
This one is important, because as the last podcast I listened to noted:
Self-esteem is the one thing that is most responsible in driving human happiness
[…]
Self-esteem comes from diligent progress towards an important goal
Self-esteem comes from progress and progress is achieved through action.
If we allow ourselves to wallow in the bleakness of it all, we blind ourselves to the opportunities available to better our situation. In other words, the more we dwell on how bad things are, the less energy we will have left to do something about it.
However, once we start taking action (and, as usual, it’s the starting that is the hardest part), it becomes easier to see a light at the end of the tunnel — some way for us to come out of this better off (or at least not worse off) than where we started.
So, what actions should you take? That really depends on you and your goals. What have you been putting off because you didn’t have the time? What do you want more of in your life? Think about these things and come up with a list of concrete actions you can do to achieve them — when you’re just starting out, making these actions as achievable as possible is also a good idea.
A few things that all of us can do to stay calm are the other tools below 👇🏽
Meditation
This is something I started a few months ago, but it’s had a profound impact on my ability to deal with stress. Now, meditation isn’t the practice of getting rid of stress. Meditation is simply a way to practice being at ease with your thoughts and emotions — a way to see them for what they are (thoughts and emotions) and what they are not (you). You’re not getting rid of stress, you’re coming to terms with it and finding ease despite it being there.
It helps to free up all that space in your mind that worrying takes, so that you can fill it with more productive, less stressful thoughts.
However, like it says, it is a practice. It’s a skill that needs to be trained and it can be difficult at first. I personally use the Headspace app to guide me through the process. Like any skill, there are different types of meditation techniques (like visualization etc.) which can help to be at ease with different kinds of stressors and having a guide can be invaluable when you’re just starting out.
Ideally, try to build a consistent practice of meditation — everyday, around the same time each day.
Re-framing
This is another practice that I find really helps with dealing with stressful situations, but it can help to have your perspective in shape first.
For example, the concept I shared with you earlier (“With every hardship comes ease”), indicates that hardships and ease come hand-in-hand — it’s not sequential, it’s together. This helps me realize that despite the bad situation, there is probably some good as well — I just need to look for it. This simple act of changing what I see in any situation (a.k.a. re-framing that situation) helps reduce how stressful or bleak it seems.
Another question you can ask yourself to help this process is something I learnt from Impact Theory, “How is the worst thing that happened to me actually the best thing that happened to me?”. This question is genius, because it forces you to look at something you’ve felt is nothing but bad and re-frame it into something empowering!
Remember, it’s not the situation itself, but how we see the situation that dictates how bad it seems to us.
Become a student
Finally, it’s difficult to see things as bleak and terrible, if you see them as working for you rather than happening to you. What this advocates is looking for what you can learn from each situation in your life. What is it trying to teach you? What can you learn from this to improve your life going forward?
But don’t stop there! Actually internalize these teachings and take action to implement them in your life — mindset alone will not help make things better.
That about wraps up this post. I hope some of the ideas here help you deal with things if you’re feeling stressed 🙂. If you have other techniques you use, I’d love to hear them!
This post first appeared on my blog. Check it out for the key to that one cupboard in your house! (jk, it’s just more posts 😛).
