Master Your Calm: 3 Essential Skills for Managing Distress

If you had to pick one goal to focus on and achieve in the next 90 days, what would you set your sights on?

With ambitious goals comes immense pressure to achieve them, and with immense pressure.. comes stress. Not all stress is bad. Good stress, also called eustress, is the kind that helps motivate you to achieve your goals. 

However, if stress moves from eustress to become painful, where you feel you can no longer cope, you are experiencing distress. Distress is the unhealthy type of stress, and the longer you experience it, the more you are putting your physical and mental health at risk. 

Our mental health is shaped by how well we can cope. Coping skills are trainable skills that can help you better manage distress. 

This micro-skill focuses on coping skills. Coping skills are tools you can develop. There are both positive coping skills (such as good distractions) and negative ones (such as snacking at night) that can have an impact on your long-term health. Below are a few actions you can take to improve how you cope at work and at home every day. Like any skill, developing coping skills requires focus, practice and patience.

The Power of Pause 

When you feel you are being challenged, pause before responding. When you get a troublesome e-mail or someone challenges you in person, give yourself permission to slow down. The goal is to avoid thinking errors. A rapid response without facts often adds more stress and complexity to a situation. 

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman reported that rapid decision making increases the risk of personal bias that often is not accurate. To reduce bias, slow down and get the facts, get your emotions under control and write out your thoughts. Then, in an hour or so, read what you wrote. This self-editing step will often help change the tone and message of your communication so you can get to a solution based on facts and a desirable outcome. 

It helps ensure that the decision is based on your beliefs and that you are comfortable with it. This can help you maintain control and reduce the urgency that some e-mails often create when they are perceived as being undesirable. 

Keep Score

Most of us experience moments of distress in the workplace. It happens. But consider the following example: In one eight-hour shift, a person reports they experienced 30 minutes of distress and 7.5 hours of positivity. How would the average person report this day? 

Too many people put more value on negative events than positive ones. In an eight-hour day, there are 480 minutes. Thirty minutes divided by 480 suggests that about 6 per cent of the day was negative, but 94 per cent of the day was just fine. If, at the end of every day, you completed this simple equation, it would help give you perspective. 

There's no such a thing as perfection. The purpose of this exercise is to keep the perspective that if more than 90 per cent of a day is good, that's excellent. One coping skill, called resiliency, helps you develop the ability to look for the positive path in situations when it may feel hard to do so, and believe through your actions that you will be okay. 

Take up Journaling

Keep a daily journal with you for 90 days. One way to support and develop your coping skills is to measure where you are at the beginning of the period and remeasure after 30 days. Also, monitor your daily perceptions for 90 days, using a personal daily journal template. 

Keeping a journal helps provide you with the opportunity to write out your thoughts each day, and to put your thoughts and feelings onto paper for examination. We often aren't aware of how we are truly feeling until we stop and examine our emotions.

Consider the example of someone putting on 20 extra pounds over six months. In this case, the person's waist expands from 36 inches to 44. This expansion doesn't just happen overnight. It's caused by daily micro-decisions that result in the person ending up wearing pants that are eight inches larger. 

It takes time to change your habits, micro-decisions, and coping skills. Keeping a journal can help you stay on track with your goals, and build mental awareness as well.

Distress can negatively impact your mental health when it's rationalized and not dealt with. 

Awareness and taking actions to curb your distress can reduce your mental-health risk. If you don't address distress and its effects, it can evolve into a chronic mental illness. The process of keeping a journal can help determine whether you are having trouble improving your day-to-day stress. In that case, you may benefit from getting professional help.

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