How To Manage Stress in a Crisis

Well, aloha and good morning. And if you’ve been celebrating Easter, then I hope you had a very happy Easter. And if you’re in the UK and you had some warm weather,

I hope you were able to enjoy the warm weather in some way, shape or form, in these times, which are difficult, challenging.

So what I wanted to talk about today was some things that we can do to help us deal with the challenge of being isolated indoors and not able to go about our lives in the way that we normally go about our lives.

And there’s a couple of things that I thought I’d talk about. The first one is breathing.

Now I’ve talked about this before, but one of the things that’s happening with a lot of people, a lot of my clients that I’m talking to, one of the things that’s happening is that some of them are getting very, very stressed.

Maybe they’ve got kids at home, which they didn’t normally have, or they’ve got people in their houses they didn’t normally have, or they’re dealing with social isolation and they’re not used to being isolated.

Whatever the reason, whatever the way that their life has changed to cause them to feel stressed, a lot of my clients talk about the stress that they’re feeling.

So one of the things that I say is, the first thing to do when you’re stressed, when you’re anxious, is to soothe the system, because when your system is in overdrive,

when your system is in stress, when your brain’s going, “yrrr”, then it’s very hard to think, it’s very hard to deal with the emotions that are coming up.

So, how can you de-stress? And the classic one is simply to breathe. And the way that I teach breathing, and there are many other different systems so it’s not that there’s only one system.

As the Hawaiians say, “Think not there’s only one way to the light”. So there are many ways of doing these things. But the particular breathing I teach is the one that comes from the,

I’ve learnt from the Hawaiian tradition, where you breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth, and the in-breath is half as long as the out-breath, or to put it another way, the out-breath is twice as long as the in-breath.

And what this does is it engages what they call the parasympathetic nervous system. If the sympathetic nervous system is fight-or-flight, or freeze as well, but the sympathetic nervous system is about doing something about the threat.

The parasympathetic nervous system is the . So anything that engages the parasympathetic nervous system, the is going to be useful. So let’s do it together, breathing in through your nose, out through your mouth.

Out-breath twice as long. And I’m gonna use a count of two. You can use a count of two and four, three and six, four and eight. Depends how much lung capacity you’ve got.

But I’m gonna use a count of two. And make sure that you don’t do it too fast. I once did it with a group of engineers. I used to teach on an MBA course for engineers,

and we had a kind of retreat, workshop retreat thing for them, and I taught them this, I taught them too fast, and a couple of them ended up hyperventilating.

You don’t want to hyperventilate, so make sure it’s slow enough. So let’s go. In through your nose, out through your mouth. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.

And we’ll do three more. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. And just notice how you feel. Now what sometimes happens, when people first start breathing in this way, you can feel dizzy.

If you feel a little bit dizzy, just stop. Just give yourself a moment and then go back into it. The more you do it, the easier it becomes, and the less likely it is that you’re being dizzy.

The thing is that for most of us, we’re not used to doing real, proper deep breathing, and our bodies don’t quite know how to cope with it. Especially if you’re a smoker, and especially if you’re stressed, because when we’re stressed we breathe more shallowly.

So this is a way of starting to breathe deeply, and yeah, that much oxygen coming in, it can make you feel a little light-headed, but that’s normal when you’re starting to learn how to do it, and it will pass.

As I said before, you can choose your count. It can be two and four, it can be three and six. Choose, find what works for you. I will be putting out a longer meditation, where we’ll do it together for 10 minutes,

That’ll be an opportunity for you to see what happens when you do it over a longer period. And I really, really do recommend it. As I say, it’s a great way of reducing stress.

I do it before I get up in the morning, when I’m just coming awake. I just spend a couple of minutes doing that. It just prepares me for the day, opens me up for the day. If I’m feeling stressed I’ll do it.

I do before anything that’s important, because in the Hawaiian system that’s what you do, you breathe before anything that’s important, because is important.

So it’s a really, really valuable tool. So that’s haar breathing, and as I say, there are plenty other systems. The real thing is getting your breath in deeply, and making the out-breath twice as long as the in-breath.

Those are the key things to engage the parasympathetic nervous system. And unlike other systems, you don’t pause. Some systems you pause at the top or you pause at the bottom.

You pause after the in-breath or you pause after the out-breath. You don’t with that. It’s a continuous breath. So, that’s the haar breath. The next thing that you might think about doing, particularly if you’re feeling really, really, really stressed, is scream into a pillow or towel.

And all you need to do is roll up a towel or scrunch up a pillow, put your head in it and just scream into it, so that other people can’t hear. It’s a great way of releasing stress.

Very simple. I learnt it originally when I went to psychotherapy, but I relearnt it from the lovely Annie Stoker. And it’s incredibly helpful if you’ve just got something that you want to get off your chest.

So, just roll a towel, fold up a towel, or a pillow, and scream into it. Another one, and again this is from, the psychotherapists use this a lot, is getting a baseball bat, or a stick, or something, and beating a large cushion or pillow with it.

Just . Preferably don’t beat it so hard that all the feathers come out, if it’s a feather one, or all the foam comes out, if it’s a foam one. But it’s just a really good way of expressing the emotion and getting the emotion out of you.

Dance. Move. When we move we shake it off. Animals in the wild, if they’ve had a stressful experience, if they’ve been attacked by a lion or whatever, they will actually,

particularly if they go into freeze mode, once the danger has passed, they will get up and they will literally shake it all off and then walk off.

So dancing or some kind of movement, where you’re shaking it off, you’re shaking it out, can be really useful for getting rid of some of that excess stress.

Sitting still is probably the worst thing that you can do for stress. You’re feeling stressed, move. It will really help. And if you’ve got depression going along with the stress, because they often do go hand in hand, movement is so important for depression.

I’ve been through clinical depression myself, as you may know, and one of the things that was least easy to do, most difficult to do, was to get myself out from under my duvet and go, even go walking, even go down and make myself a cup of tea.

But movement’s incredibly valuable in depression, and it’s incredibly valuable in stress. And there’s plenty of clinical evidence that talks about that. So move.

That would be another recommendation. Another recommendation would be journaling. It’s a funny thing about journaling, or writing, keeping a diary, most of the most successful people on the planet actually do do this.

I wasn’t really aware of it, and then I went some years ago, I did a copywriting course. I wanted to be able to learn to write well for my audience, write well so that people would enjoy what I was writing, and also that they would want to buy what I offer.

So I did this copywriting course, and the guy who runs it, John Carlton, he’s one of the most highly paid copywriters in the world. I think the teaching’s really more for fun than anything else.

He’s very, very highly paid, and he consults for zillions and zillions of dollars to some incredibly successful individuals and organisations. And I went to this conference that he was running.

One of the things he talked about, he was talking about habits of successful people, because he consults to them so he knows a lot of them, and he said so many of them, what they do is they journal. They keep a diary.

And they may not write it every day, but they’re writing their observations, their thoughts, their feelings, their things that they want to get off their chest.

And it’s a really, really valuable way of getting things off your chest, getting perspective, starting to notice patterns, starting to understand. It’s an opportunity of exploring what’s going on and why that’s a problem, and how that’s a problem.

And if you’ve read Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way”, she talks about morning pages. She recommends that you do if first thing in the morning, every morning, when you first wake up.

Now, for many of us that’s not practical, and I’m not sure it’s even necessary to do it like that, but journaling is incredibly powerful. It stimulates creativity.

It, as I say, enables you to recognise patterns, enables you to start to understand what’s underneath the emotions that you’re feeling or the situations that you’re experiencing. So, daily or occasional journaling.

And all you have to do is, I recommend that you get a dedicated book. You can still buy stationery on Amazon, even if the stationery shops are closed. Although our news agent is selling stationery now.

He didn’t used to, but he’s selling stationery now, because all these stationers are closed. So get a book that you’re happy to write in and that you can use, dedicate for this purpose, and pick your time of day, and just write.

Write about anything. Ideally, aim to write about three sides of foolscap, or letter, if you’re in the US. But it doesn’t really matter. It’s about getting stuff out there, expressing it.

It’s much better out than in. And our creative thoughts are much better out than in, because when we have a creative thought, if we keep it in our head, very often it disappears, whereas if we have a creative thought and we put it out in the written form, it’s there.

We can go back, we can take a look. So there are some simple tools, tips for keeping you sane in the current circumstances. I hope you’re safe, I hope you’re well.

And I’ll be putting out the meditation, the haar breathing, very soon. The other thing that I’m gonna do, and this is for the ladies who are watching, I have a Facebook group,

Secret Art of Huna For Powerful Transformation, and I’m going to turn, I’m in the process of doing it right now, I’m turning my one-day Huna Live into an online version, and I’m gonna be offering it, I think, next week. Set myself a deadline.

So I’m gonna be offering it in that group. If you’re a woman, and you want to take advantage of that, sign up for the Secret Art of Huna for Powerful Transformation, sign up for the group.

Join the group. There’s a couple of questions you have to answer before you get let in, but it’s fairly straightforward, and I will be running it, and it will be free to people in that group, and we’ll see how we go.

It’s gonna be free because I’m doing it as a pilot. I want to see how it works, and then if it does work I’ll probably turn it into something a little more formal.

But for the group, it’s gonna be my gift to women in The Secret Art of, sorry, The Secret Art of Huna for Powerful Transformation. It’s a Facebook group, so just dig around on Facebook.

As I say, go well, stay safe. If you need to talk, secretartofhuna.com\diary.

You can book a call, or you can Facebook message me, and say what the issue is and what you’d like help with, and I really am available to you at this time.

Lots of love. Aloha. See you soon.

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