How do you not feel stress anymore? I started taking on less and expecting less in order to manage my stress levels and it worked. I also started listening to my own rhythm but that translates sometimes to brain dead days and other times with very productive days. I accepted that and am no longer pushing. But I still take on things but at a slower pace. Id still avoid taking on as much as I was doing in my early 20s, that would not end up well for me. How do you manage it?
I'm not tluyben2 and really interested in his secret, but here's what helped me most:
– not taking what my inner critic says too literal. I imagine someone else saying such critical things to me – it would be ridiculous and I'd tell them to go to hell. So I just accept that something fuels my inner critic and take care of it in a different way.
– enjoying the little things in front of me instead of obsessing about processes which outcomes I can't control.
This has a purely hedonistical side too: I can focus on the pure pleasure on squashing this software bug. My food tastes so much better if I actively taste it.
When I look outside the window, I see trees moving in the wind or some other tiny movement. It would be laughable to even try to imagine a world where I control the wind in the trees, so why obsess about other complex things outside my control?
– do some imagination/self hypnosis exercise. Write them for myself. Some (lizard) parts of our brains can't distinguish between imagination and reality, so it's exactly these parts that get anxious/stressed. I find it helpful to just dictate some calming exercise (a story how everything goes right) and listen to it in a relaxed state. It works really well since it's my own voice.
I wrote an exercise for a friend and just yesterday did a recording of it:
https://rybakov.com/blog/being_an_octopus/
one thing for me, was to realize that whatever is happening, its not about "me"
i think sometimes we internalize situations and make it about "us", and while we do indeed cause our own stressful situations sometimes, usually things are in motion (work, poliics, environment) that have really nothing to do with us and internalizing it, as if we are "100% responsible for it" can make one more stressed than it should be
another bad situation to be in is, being responsible but not "in charge", meaning one gets blamed but is powerless to fix the situation (work), then in those cases again, its better to not internalize because in a lot of those cases its politics or bad general management etc... better to see the big picture and put things into perspective...
then even if something was "100% our fault" then just take it as a learning experience "debugging reality", we can do everything right and still completely fail, and that is normal... better to learn and move on (easier said than done, i know)
at least for me, this kind of thinking helped alot with overcoming stress
