Stay calm

Here are mummo’s top ten tips to help you stay calm even when life isn’t ...

1. Know your triggers
2. Learn to manage your time more effectively (Put first things first)
3. Look after yourself
4. Relax and recharge
5. Just say ‘no’!
6. Spend time with friends
7. Take control of your responses
8. Think positively
9. Avoid unnecessary conflict
10. Fix it or forget it!

1. Know your triggers

Keep a list - for at least a fortnight - of events, times, places and people that seem to make you feel more stressed. You will probably be surprised to find that a pattern soon emerges. This may be linked to time pressure, personality clashes, inappropriate demands or simply trying to do too many things at once. Once you have identified your pressure points you can begin to put appropriate solutions into place in a much more targeted way. So if, for example, getting yourself and your children out of the house in the morning is a trigger for you, you can put into place specific strategies to reduce the stress - perhaps doing more to get ready the night before, allowing more time, asking your partner to help, and so on. Or, if you find that meeting a particular friend always makes you feel uptight, ask yourself why that might be and, if necessary, review your friendship. The first step towards a calmer life is to know what’s stressing you in the first place.

2. Learn to manage your time more effectively

Too much to do, too little time?! Most mums would agree that this is a major source of stress and, of course, most of us would also say that we’re pretty damn good at managing our time, multi-tasking and just generally getting a million things done in a day! However, if you’re feeling under pressure it’s important to take another look at exactly how you’re using your time. Do you get hooked into spending hours on relatively unimportant tasks, whilst putting off something more important but perhaps less pleasant? Or do you sometimes let your perfectionist or ‘control freak’ tendencies get the better of you? Try using the following technique in your head to quickly establish which jobs need doing first, and which might not need doing at all!

Ask yourself:

• Is it important (bearing in mind your overall priorities in life)?
• Is it urgent? Really?

(taken from Stephen Covey’s ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’)

The key is to get clear on what really matters to you, and then to put first things first. The more time you can spend in quadrant 2, the better, as this is the secret to being in control of your life and planning for your future, rather than just reacting to what happens.

And remember, if you put off the jobs you hate, you only stress yourself out even more every time you think about them. A top business person once offered this tip: "Start the day with an easy, pleasant task to get you going and give you a sense of achievement, then do the thing you’ve been putting off or dreading. Once that’s out of the way, you’ll be on a roll …"

3. Look after yourself

As a mum, it’s easy to always end up last on the list. You manage to look after everyone else but never seem to find the time to look after yourself. And yet life is so much easier if you’re fighting fit and firing on all cylinders. So do what you can to adopt a healthy lifestyle and you’ll boost your immune system, increase your energy levels and give yourself the best possible chance of taking stress in your stride. And just to remind you, here’s how:

• eat a nutritious diet with plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, wholegrains and high quality protein - see Eat well
• drink lots of water
• take regular exercise, even if it’s just a quick blast of brisk walking - see Feel fit
• get enough sleep
• learn how to relax - see tip 4.
• plan in some ‘me time’ when you something enjoyable just for you
• avoid using alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, chocolate or any other unhealthy stimulants to help you cope (they won’t in the long run!)

4. Relax and recharge

Relaxation is an important part of looking after yourself. It may feel like you’re doing nothing, but it’ll make you all the more effective the rest of the time!

Deep breathing

• Practise deep-breathing techniques. For example, slowly inhale while counting to five; hold your breath for five seconds then breathe out as slowly as possible. Repeat this 10 times when feeling stressed, concentrating on nothing but your breathing.

Stretching

• Stretch the muscles of your neck and shoulders by keeping your shoulders level and trying to touch each shoulder with your ear. Look right up at the ceiling, then down at the floor. Rotate each shoulder in a wide circle. Repeat five times forwards, and five times backwards. Open your jaws wide several times, as stress often causes tension in the jaw area.
• Sitting upright on a chair, and keeping your back straight, extend your arms out in front of you as far as possible. Hold for ten seconds. Repeat, with your arms behind you. Then hold on to the sides of your chair and push your body upwards. Feel your spine stretch. Hold for ten. Now stretch arms to the ceiling, to release tension in back and shoulders. Relax and shake your arms.

Time out

• Take time out for yourself, away from other people. For five minutes every hour, try to 'shut down' and think of nothing but your perfect situation. This could be a dream holiday, ideal partner or simply thinking about doing nothing at all. You’ll be surprised at how effectively this can lower stress levels.

Yoga

• Practise yoga, especially the Child’s Pose. Kneel on your shins, buttocks resting on your heels, knees together. With your arms at your sides, palms up, bend from the hips and extend your upper body over your knees. Resting on your thighs, bring your forehead to the floor. Breathe deeply, hold for as long as is comfortable. Then slowly sit up. If you have trouble kneeling, placing a pillow between your thighs and calves will help. This simple position floods every cell of the body with oxygen, helping eliminate physical and emotional toxins. The constriction on your legs increases blood supply to the upper body, making respiration more efficient, and helping the blood to remove waste gases more efficiently. The pressure from the diaphragm in this posture creates a deep, slow, rhythmic massage of the vital organs, energising them and improving the quality and quantity of the blood circulating to them. If you hold the pose more than 5 minutes, deeper benefits occur. The position gets more blood to the head and to the pituitary gland, the master gland that regulates hormonal balance. This makes the Child's Pose extremely relaxing.

Meditation

• Research has proven the benefits of meditation for helping people to maintain a healthy state of mind. There are numerous different techniques but if you can find a way that works for you and, ideally, fit in at least 20 minutes a day, you’ll be amazed at how much calmer and more in control you feel.

5. Just say ‘no’!

Easier said than done, perhaps, but learning to say ‘no’ can often be the key to taking control of your time ... and your life. There’s a way to do it, though, that will ensure you keep your friends and behave assertively rather than passively or aggressively.

• first of all, be clear about what’s being asked of you, so that you know exactly what you would be letting yourself in for if you said ‘yes’
• decide what you are prepared to do, if anything (bearing in mind your own priorities)
• if you can’t or don’t want to do whatever it is that’s being asked, just say ‘no’ - eg. “No, I’m sorry, I’m not available on that day”
• only give reasons / justifications if you want to
• consider offering a suggestion or alternative that’s acceptable to you - eg. “I could meet you for lunch next week though, if you’d like to do that instead.”
• if the other person doesn’t accept your initial ‘no’, keep repeating the same statement over and over until they get the message (this is called the ‘broken record’ technique!)
• be polite and friendly but stay firm

It’s a typically female thing to want to make other people happy if we possibly can, and that’s a lovely quality in many ways. The danger is that we may end up being taken for granted and, if we’re not careful, running ourselves into the ground and then being no use to anyone! Bear in mind that you’ll get more respect if you stand up for yourself.

6. Spend time with friends

Your social life is often the first thing to go when you feel under pressure and weighed down by demands on you. And yet, actually, getting together with friends can be one of the best ways to de-stress and regain some energy and enthusiasm for life. Always assuming, of course, that your friends make you feel good! (If they don’t, you need to ask yourself what’s going on and whether the friendship is worth pursuing.) So, rather than cancel that girls’ night out, force yourself to go even if it feels like a bit of an effort. A change of clothes, a touch of lipstick, a large glass of wine, a lot of laughs and you’ll soon feel like your old self again!

7. Take control of your responses

You may not be able to control everything that happens to you, but you CAN control the way you respond to it. For example, one person may see a redundancy as the end of the world, whilst another may see it as an amazing opportunity. One day you may manage your child’s tantrum beautifully without it upsetting you, the next you may find yourself screaming and having a tantrum along with them! Victor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who survived the concentration camps but lost almost all his family in the holocaust, wrote a book called ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’. In it, he said: "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing - the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." The key point here is that we have a choice. And the choices we make about how we respond to events in our lives can have a huge influence over how stressed - or calm - we feel.

So, next time you feel yourself reacting instinctively to something in a less than positive way, do the following:

STOP - THINK - CHOOSE YOUR RESPONSE

And use this technique to slow you down and calm your nerves so that you can actually think straight. It’s simple - just start breathing slowly and deeply. This brings down the heart rate, blood pressure and muscle tension, sending a relaxation response throughout your body and mind. Inhale so that you can feel the air reach right into your abdomen. Keep the pace of your breathing easy and the rhythm steady. Do this whenever you feel your emotions running away with you and, if possible, twice a day for 10 minutes a time, as a preventative measure. You’ll be surprised what a difference it makes.

8. Think positively

Positive thinking has received a lot of negative ‘flack’ in some circles and, it’s true, if taken to extremes it can seem unrealistic and more than a bit nauseating! However, as discussed in tip 6, we can choose to see things positively or negatively - the old “glass half full, glass half empty” question! Whilst our tendency to optimism or pessimism is almost certainly influenced by both nature and nurture, as adults we have the capacity to change the way we look at the world. We can choose to focus on the good bits of life rather than the bad bits, and we can also reframe unpleasant experiences to find something positive about them. Here are two quick tricks that can help you to re-training your brain:

At the end of every day, ask yourself:

• What’s made me happy?
• What have I enjoyed or appreciated?
• What am I looking forward to tomorrow?

Whenever something negative happens, ask yourself:

• What could be good about this experience?

In both cases, force yourself to find something, however small! And keep doing it - you’ll find that it soon becomes second nature and you feel a whole lot better about your life as a result.

9. Avoid unnecessary conflict

There’s a fine line between avoiding conflict and being a pushover. It comes back to being clear on your priorities. What do you feel really strongly about, and what is a relatively minor ‘niggle’ in the grand scheme of things? As a mum, it would be easy to spend your whole time nagging and telling your children (and your partner!) what not to do. And yet that’s a surefire recipe for stress. So, wherever possible, choose your battles. Don't be too argumentative. Is it really worth it? Look for win-win situations where both people can achieve a positive outcome.

10. Fix it or forget it!

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Reinhold Niebuhr

It may sound simplistic, but there’s a lot to be gained from learning to just “fix it or forget it”. It means you either get on and do something about a situation, if there’s something you can realistically do, or you get over it! Of course there are some scenarios - bereavement, for example - to which this just doesn’t apply, but as a general rule it can be helpful. It prompts us into taking action where we can , rather than just moaning perhaps?! It stops us dwelling on things that we can’t change and encourages us instead to accept them and move on.

According to Stephen Covey, author of ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’, some people waste a great deal of time operating in what he calls their ‘circle of concern’. In other words, they worry about and get preoccupied with things that are beyond their control. In contrast, the most effective people spend the majority of their time operating within their ‘circle of influence’. This means they concentrate on those aspects of their lives where they do have some control and can change things. And, guess what, the more time you spend in your circle of influence, the bigger it gets! It's got to be worth a try …