The Way You’re Coping With Stress Is Making It Worse: What You Should Do Instead to Build Your Resiliency

On a typical day, you’re most likely squeezing in three days worth of work. You have your scheduled work time consisting of meetings, servicing clients and customers, managing communications, and connecting with colleagues scattered around the globe. Your second workday consists of the one before, after and in-between. You get up early to get a jump on emails, you stay late to get work done, and you multitask during the day in an attempt to be as productive as possible. Your third workday begins when you leave the office. You have to pick up food for dinner on the way home, perhaps get the kids to practice, run a load of laundry and make sure the house hasn’t fallen apart. Before you go to bed you see the opportunity to get on your computer to get more work done. No wonder you’re completely stressed and exhausted by the end of the day!

You just need to find better ways to reduce or manage your stress, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, there’s no way to reduce your stress. Your job is never going to ask less of you, nor are your loved ones. The demands in your life will only continue to increase as you move up in your career and your personal life becomes more complex. In addition, stress is not just something that happens in your head. It’s a chemical, hormonal event that radically changes your chemistry and physiology.

The hormones released in response to stress can have many negative effects on your body and brain. As just one example, the stress hormone cortisol kills cells in the brain relating to memory, learning and goal setting. It’s responsible for insomnia. It makes you crave high-fat, high-sugar foods in large amounts, and to store a majority of it as fat, specifically around the midsection.

But the good news is, when we understand the physiology of the stress response, we can build our resiliency to stress. We can train our bodies to recover from stress more quickly and efficiently, as well as raise our threshold for stress. And if that’s not enough, resiliency training can also improve our health and help us lose body fat.

Up until now, many of the things you’re doing to cope with the stresses you’re facing are actually making things worse. You may skip meals and workouts, sacrifice sleep to get more work done, grab sweets or salty snacks, rev yourself up with caffeine and bring yourself down with alcohol. Here are four things you may be doing that are exacerbating your stress, along with tips to build your resiliency:

1. You sacrifice sleep to get things done.

It’s tempting to trade sleep for extra hours of productivity, but lack of sleep ramps up our sympathetic nervous system, pushing us in the direction of the stress response. Simultaneously, it makes the parasympathetic nervous system – which is related to restoring balance and calm — less effective. Sleep deprivation also increases body fat levels, specifically around the midsection. This abdominal fat is not only frustrating, it also increases our risk of diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and even premature death. Keep to a regular sleep and wake cycle, and aim to get between 7-9 hours each night. Sleep is one of the best tools we have for the body to recover from stress.

2. You drink caffeine to get energy and make up for lack of sleep.

In addition to increasing blood pressure, caffeine stimulates the release of the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol. To make matters worse, caffeine has been shown to work synergistically with mental stress to further increase cortisol levels. From a stress perspective, cutting out caffeine is ideal. Why voluntarily pump more stress hormones into your body? If you choose to consume caffeine, do so in small amounts.

3. You skip meals because you’re too busy to eat.

When we skip meals or go too long without eating, blood glucose (a form of sugar the body uses for energy from many of the foods we eat) drops. When there’s not enough glucose, the body thinks a famine is occurring, the stress response is stimulated and the body secretes cortisol. This puts us into food seeking mode to get much needed energy into the body. Cortisol makes us eat large amounts of food containing fat and sugar, and to store much of this extra energy away in our fat cells for the next glucose emergency. Maintain blood glucose levels and minimize stress by eating about every 3 hours, alternating between moderate sized meals and small snacks.

4. You skip your workout because you don’t have time.

Stress hormones are specifically designed to fuel a short burst of intense physical activity – fighting or fleeing. When we do this, it burns them off and releases another class of hormones that restore balance and counteract the negative consequences of stress. The good news is just 30-60 seconds of intense exercise produces these feel good hormones. Sprint up a flight of stairs, or do a few jumping jacks or burpees. Worst-case scenario, do a few of these shorts bursts to hit the reset button on stress, or squeeze in a few minutes here and there. Exercise can be accumulated throughout the day in 10-minute bouts, which can be just as effective for improving fitness and decreasing body fat as exercising for 30 minutes straight.

For more strategies on how to build your resiliency to stress, read Jenny’s book The Resiliency rEvolution: Your Stress Solution for Life, 60 Seconds at a Time.

Jenny C. Evans is the author of THE RESILIENCY rEVOLUTION: Your Stress Solution For Life 60 Seconds at a Time (Wise Ink Creative Publishing; 2014). She is also founder and CEO of PowerHouse Performance, where she works with thousands of C-suite executives, leaders, and employees worldwide to help them improve their resilience, performance and productivity, while enhancing their health.

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