What to do when too stressed or too tired to steer your thoughts (1 minute read)
What to do when too stressed or too tired to steer your thoughts (1 minute read)
In “What to do when too stressed or too tired to steer your thoughts” continues a summary of my posts on how to recover as quickly as possible from more serious stress and exhaustion symptoms.
As mentioned earlier, in my daily work with people who have sought help for stress and exhaustion problems, I have been able to distinguish 3 building blocks of stress management:
1. Adjust your stress level
2. Manage your stress sources
3. Use healthy routines
This post continues with the second building block, 2 Manage your stress sources, here in relation to stressful thoughts, such as anxiety and rumination, as it is crucial to learn to steer one’s thoughts to reduce the stress level and create conditions for recovery.
Last weeks’ posts have contained the main principles of how to make a worry-hour work with the aim to steering one’s thinking.
A common situation when the worry / problem solving hour is not working is when the stress level is high for various reasons, such as when experiencing strong emotions.
This can be explained by an overactive sympathetic nervous system that creates a locked position in the brain that causes the thoughts to spin without the use of the anterior part of the brain where problem solving occurs, since this part has been disconnected by stress hormones.
But this can also happen in the opposite state – when we are so tired that we can no longer think clearly.
Then you can experience a relief by instead accepting the thoughts while avoiding listening to their content.
Repeat instead to yourself:
“These thoughts are just symptoms of being tired. I am not able to find a solution right now, but I will do so later when I am calmer.”
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Also, see these user-friendly medical research databases:
The world’s largest government funded medical library: www.nlm.nih.gov
Johns Hopkins University: www.hopkinsmedicine.org
Harvard University: www.health.harvard.edu
Oxford university: http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/