How are you breathing right now? Are you taking short, shallow breaths or are you breathing more slowly and deeply? Do your shoulders feel relaxed or are they tensed and pulled up toward your ears? If you’re not using your hands, are they clenched in tight fists or opened and at rest? These are some ways to hold tension and manifest anxiety through the body, as well as some remedies for countering and relieving those signs of stress.
I see a lot of people display signs of stress on a regular basis. They may perform one or more of the actions in the previous paragraph or do something else along the same lines: continuously moving one leg while seated, tapping a finger, playing with their hair, and so on. If I’m not careful, I can slip into one of several nervous habits. My most common ones are pacing, playing with a pen, chewing my lips, and messing with my hands or my beard. I mostly catch myself doing those when I’m struggling to explain something to another person or when I’m having a difficult conversation with them. I don’t know what other people experience while they perform a nervous habit, but I think I’m made worse off because of them and tend to interact more smoothly with others when I avoid doing them.
As suggested by the phrase “nervous habit”, these behaviors are simply habits, which means that they can be changed if you so desire. Of course, before you can change a habit, you have to be aware of it, and that’s where self-awareness comes in. Self-awareness allows you to notice how you’re breathing, what you’re doing with your hands, how you’re holding yourself, and so on. Bringing conscious attention to your body makes it easier to control your actions and less likely that you’ll slip into a nervous habit. That’s why I’ve found relaxation and presence to be the most useful life hacks for dealing with nervous habits. I can do them both fairly easily while stretching (which I’ve also found aids in the release of tension and helps me relax), so I try to practice them during that time. Lastly, I try to work through whatever may be stressing me out. Once I’ve done that, the stress is either a fraction of what it was before or it’s completely gone. It’s difficult to have nervous habits without stress, so working through stress is a great way to secure long-term relief.
I think my recent lack of sufficient sleep is a sign that I’m stressing out about something and need to deal with it. As I try to figure out what’s getting to me, I’ll make use of the above life hacks. They’ve consistently worked for me in the past and they’re available to me whenever I want to use them, so I’m sure they’ll help me through this ordeal. If you’re dealing with stress and you want to manage or eliminate it, I hope you find this post useful. Please let me know if you do, and I will see you next time.