4 Psychological Habits for Greater Peace of Mind
When times are tough, it’s easy to get lost in spirals of stress and anxiety — endlessly worrying about the future, obsessively ruminating on the past, and procrastinating on the goals that matter most.
Unfortunately, many of the habits we fall into during difficult times only make our stress worse in the long-run:
Worry leads to panic and chronic anxiety.
Rumination leads to self-doubt and depression.
Procrastination leads to shame and low self-esteem.
And guess what happens to stress when you multiply it by anxiety, depression, and shame? That’s right: it gets worse — a lot worse.
But here’s the silver lining:
While bad habits intensify stress, good habits shield you from it.
Which means if you want to deal with stress in a healthy way, you need to build better habits—habits that buffer you from stress before it takes hold, keeping your mind calm, your mood balanced, and your focus sharp.
What follows are 4 psychological habits that will help you keep your head when it feels like the world is going to pieces around you.
- Manage Your Stressors, not Your Stress
Because I’m a psychologist, people are especially shocked when they hear me say that stress management is usually a waste of time.
Of course, I phrase it that way for maximal surprise value, but I really do believe it. But before we dive into why, we need to get clear about a critical distinction:
Stress is your reaction to a stressor. And a stressor is anything that causes a stress reaction.
See the difference? Stressors are the cause and stress is the result.
Think about it like this:
You would never treat a gunshot wound with a Band-Aid because the bleeding is not the real problem.
Bleeding is just a symptom of the underlying issue — organ damage from a bullet in your chest.
If you take a Band-Aid approach to treating a gunshot wound, you’re going to run into two big problems:
It won’t actually work. It might temporarily stop some bleeding, but there’s still a bullet in your chest and the bleeding will likely continue internally.
It distracts you from the real problem. The real solution to a gunshot wound is surgery. You need to get in there, remove the bullet, and repair any damage it did internally. Now, that’s a much more complicated, painful, and time-consuming solution to your problem. But at least you’re addressing the right problem.
Managing your stress is like treating a gunshot wound with a Band-Aid: You’re managing the symptom but avoiding the cause.
Here’s a specific example:
Let’s say you’re chronically stressed most days after work. You get home, walk through the door, and are committed to spending quality time with your family and relaxing. But you just can’t seem to let go of work — your mind obsessively alternating between worry about that deadline coming up anyhow idiot your manager is being.
So you decide to get serious about stress management: you schedule a weekly massage; you download a mindfulness app on your phone; and you start reading a couple self-help books about how to cultivate a more positive attitude at work.
Now, I’ve got nothing against massages, mindfulness, or self-help books, per se. But it’s insane to think that these things are going to fix your chronic stress. And the reason…
Your problem isn’t stress. Your problem is stressors.
You’re in a job you hate, with people you don’t respect, doing work that doesn’t matter. Of course you’re stressed!
Stress management techniques like 5 minutes a day of mindfulness or a weekly massage are appealing because they’re relatively easy and low risk. But often they’re just a distraction — a way to procrastinate on addressing the real issues in your life that are causing stress in the first place.
If you really want to feel less stressed in your life, stop getting distracted by your stress and learn to look carefully for the stressors in your life. Then work like hell to eliminate them. Or at least set better boundaries on them.
Nobody likes surgery. But it’s better than living in denial with a box of Band-Aids.
Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.
— Deb Hope
- Work on Something Important
Human beings have a well-documented negativity bias. Which means, all other things being equal, our minds tend to go toward the negative.
For example: you’re laying in bed at night, exhausted but not sleepy. It’s dark, you’ve got nothing external to focus on, so where does your mind go?
Worries about a big project or deadline coming up in the future.
Ruminating and stewing on past mistakes or regrets.
Imagining the worst-case scenario for how little sleep you’ll get tonight and how bad you’ll feel tomorrow as a result.
But why is this? Why does our brain gravitate toward the negative?
Well, a big part of the reason is that it was likely evolutionarily adaptive. For your ancestors, being borderline paranoid about dangerous animals invading your cave at night probably led to taking more and better precautions, living longer, and having a better chance of passing on your genes.