The 3 Pillars of Stress Reduction

Clients can be successful by focusing on these practices.

Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer

Key points

• Attending to our biological needs makes us mentally and physically prepared for stress reduction.
• The stories we tell ourselves affect our biological processes.
• Stress is reduced when we direct the brain's activity away from the intellect and towards our senses.

Over the last 20 years, my clients who have been most successful in reducing stress have three things in common. I'd like to share them here:

1. Self-care: Setting Yourself Up for Successes

Stress is a product of biological processes. Addressing those processes is what we call self-care and it can take many forms. Here are some big ones:

Healthcare: The importance of getting regular care from your providers and following medical advice can’t be overstated. In many cases, it may be difficult to impossible to reduce stress until this medical piece is properly in place. Following doctor’s recommendations, including diligently taking medication if prescribed, can mean the difference between success and failure in the battle with stress. If appropriate, regularly attending therapy, including ongoing periodic therapy for mental health maintenance, might be an integral component as well. Just as a person can’t stop going to the gym once they are fit and expect to remain that way, we often have to build mental health maintenance into our lifestyle.

Eating/Diet: Eating three balanced meals per day in the modern context can be extremely difficult. Many working people on their way to fight rush hour traffic or families scrambling to be on time for school may not feel they even have the time for the luxury of breakfast, for example. But getting as close as we can to a balanced, healthy diet and regular eating habits can make a big difference. While everyone should consult their healthcare provider to see what is right for them, for many people something as simple as keeping a bag of almonds in their car can help them reach their recommended dietary levels.

Exercise: One commonality that fight or flight situations have in nature is that they involve vigorous physical activity. Whether wresting or running, the organism’s muscular and cardiovascular systems get a workout. This is one of the ways our bodies metabolize and expel the stress inducing hormones that were introduced. Following a provider approved plan for exercise can significantly contribute to stress reduction. For many people, helpful physical activities can be as simple as taking a 10 minute walk around the block a couple of times a day, giving those stress hormones an outlet for release.

Socialization: First and foremost, humans are social creatures. Aristotle even said that anyone who can tolerate isolation is either a beast or a god. We can see evidence of this for example with brain scans of people who are experiencing rejection. We see activation in the same areas of the brain that are responsible for physical pain. Solitary confinement can quickly lead a person to lose touch with reality and suffer severe distress. In our modern world of isolation and alienation, we often have to actively work to get healthy amounts of human contact into our schedules (and no, social media doesn’t count).

Sleep: In my experience, this is the one people often have the most trouble with. It’s difficult for anything in our lives to work well if we are not getting good sleep. There is a whole field of sleep hygiene with tips to help us fall asleep and sleep soundly through the night. One big area where I see people struggle is our brains often need a wind-down activity at the end of the day or they will remain overactive, leading to racing thoughts and light sleep. I personally use an audio exercise available on a streaming service in which a physician who specializes in sleep leads the listener through first a physical relaxation routine, and then a mental one, followed by relaxing ambient sounds. In any case, if someone is having sleep difficulty, it’s important they promptly discuss it with their providers to see what’s right for them or their stress mitigation efforts may be over before they even began.

2) Re-messaging: Changing the Stories We Tell Ourselves

People often have trouble believing me when I tell them they can change their thoughts. It seems unrealistic that we can believe something new, until I point out that it’s actually the foundation of our economy. Marketing is an example of a thought changing practice that we’re all familiar with. It’s important to remember that a company like McDonalds, for example, doesn’t have a billboard to inform us that McDonalds exists. Everyone already knows that. The billboard is there to tell us that McDonalds is good. If we hear this message enough it becomes our new reality. This is because again, we evolved in tight-knit social communities in which absorbing and complying with the messaging around us were essential for survival. Every dictator that has ever existed has taken advantage of this human trait. But we can also use it as a tool for good. We can launch a “marketing” campaign targeting ourselves and the messages we want to replace. To use the earlier example, this is the equivalent of catching ourselves automatically thinking, “There is a tiger behind that bush!” and changing it to “I have no reason to believe there is a tiger behind that bush. But even if there is, I am prepared to battle it.”

3) Mindfulness: Turning Away From Overthinking and Towards Sensing

Tools for coping with anxiety may have different variations, but many of them come down to redirecting the brain’s activity away from the prefrontal cortex and back to its earlier centers of information processing. This is actually a very ancient technique that humans discovered through trial and error: mindfulness. People have been practicing it for centuries and now we know neurologically why it works. It returns us to that primordial animal state of sensory awareness

Depending on how elaborate someone wants to be, one way to practice this is a sensory box. You can take a shoebox or delivery box and put something in it to practice focusing with for each one of your senses. Something that we like and feel connected to can often work well. For example, someone who loves New York may shake up a snow globe of the city’s skyline to watch the glitter as it falls. Other ideas could be bubble wrap or sandpaper for touch. For smell, maybe lavender oil. For taste, a chocolate or strong mint. For sound, maybe a tuning fork. Some people even decorate the box. They pull it out and use it regularly for practice but it can often also be effective to help with acute stress.

It’s not uncommon for a client to come back the next week after we discuss mindfulness and say something like, “Well, I tried it and it didn’t work. What else do you got?”. But it’s important to remember that this is a skill that takes time, but can be built with sustained practice. It’s very similar to learning a musical instrument. It’s not rational for someone to say, “Well, I tried learning the piano this week and I still can’t play a tune so I might as well quit.” It will feel phony, awkward, foreign, and ineffective. Until it doesn’t. Slowly the skill will grow more fluid, and with enough practice it can even become automatic.

Pulling Ideas Together

We've reviewed here how self-care, re-messaging, and mindfulness are some of the ways we can mitigate stress in light of understanding its biological basis. Today, being a mental health consumer can be confusing and overwhelming. It’s important we work to simplify things. I hope it’s helpful that the above information has been collected and reiterated succinctly here so my clients and others can access it in one convenient place.