1. Focus on what you can control.
“Engaging in present-focused awareness and what is happening right now is effective for managing strong emotions,” Chapman says.
He recommends using a meditation app like Headspace to get you in that self-focused mindset—then move forward with your day with the awareness that you can only control what you do (think: waking up 30 minutes earlier to write, wearing a mask when you go outside, or going for a slow run after work).
2. Label your stress.
Yes, labeling your stress can change the way you respond to it. Specifically, “labeling helps us externalize the stressor,” says WH advisor Chloe Carmichael, PhD, a clinical psychologist in New York. Furthermore, locating the burden of stress on a situation helps make sure that you’re not “merging the stress with the self,” she explains. Or else, the stressor “can actually start to become us, or the fabric of ourselves.”
Plus, when you label an issue—such as I’m stressed about my workload this week—you are putting it into a system and Carmichael points out that language is a system. By describing our stress with words, “we’re automatically starting to put stress under control, to classify it, and, on a certain level, take charge of it by talking about it instead of just letting them sit within us,” Carmichael explains. In short, the first step in tackling any stressful issue is identifying it, separating it from yourself, then considering how to move forward.