Nearly everyone I know is back from their holiday now. There’s a big sign up in our street warning drivers that schools are open again and children will be crossing the road. Autumn is already nibbling around the edges, with a definite chill in the air. It’s certainly getting dark earlier.
It seems only a few weeks ago that people were talking about where they were going on holiday, or where they had just come back from. Now today, our local supermarket has started selling Speculaas, a cookie traditionally eaten on St. Nicholas’s Dayon 5 December. The summer holidays are definitely over.
Personally, I love autumn but many people I know are suffering from post-holiday blues. They feel back in the normal round and the next holiday feels too far away.
What makes the holidays special?
1. We try new things
Don’t you love the feeling of exploration and adventure during the holidays?
My brother-in-law was recently photographed entering a 5,500-year-old long barrow in the Cotswoldson a weekend away. Not everyone’s cup of tea but he is a history enthusiast and sites like this are his passion. My partner and I were recently in Drenthe,a northern province in Holland where there are ancient Hunebedden sites.No-one is sure what these sites were used for but they could have been used for burials. We were enchanted by the ancient majesty of these places and spent ages looking at as many different sites as we could.
Different food, new customs, trying out summer sports are all wonderfully freeing and engaging. Trying new things opens up new possibilities and helps us to break out of our shell.
2. A holiday can mean time with friends and family
Unless you’ve chosen to go on a solo holiday, time away usually means that we have a chance to interact with friends, partners, family members with more freedom. So much of our everyday life we are juggling too many things– family, work, leisure. It can be hard to feel any of it is proper quality time.
The holidays are times when you can play, chat and catch up with your family without always looking at the clock. Many of us have fond childhood memories of getting to hang out more with our parents because we were all on holiday together.
3. There is freedom from routine
On our holidays we suddenly find ourselves transported away from our usual routine. We can get up when we want, go to bed when we want – the day is ours’ to spend as we wish. The stress of keeping up and managing it all can start to fade away.
There is a wonderful feeling of freedom in this. We can be spontaneous because there is no schedule to keep to. If we are having an important conversation or reading a great book, we can just stay with it. Everything feels possible.
4. It’s possible to relax on your holidays
Freedom like this helps us to finally unwind. It seems that for most people we need at least 8 daysbefore we can feel that we have actually arrived on holiday. We’re stressed from work and the rush to get things ready for our holiday. There’s the journey to recover from. We need to get used to our new surroundings and find our way around.
Once this has all settled, we can truly begin to let ourselves relax.
5. The space during the holidays feels endless
Then there is really a sense of space opening up. Space for ourselves, space to rest, space to play. This is the real reason why holidays are so important. We need this connection to a different part of ourselves, with different possibilities.
So, how do we overcome our after-the-holidays blues?
The main there here is to look at what our holiday is telling us about the rest of our life. Many of us are experiencing so much stress that we don’t know how life can be without it. Too much of the time we are so caught up in everyday life that we don’t take proper care of ourselves. Let’s look again and what really makes a holiday special.
Ask yourself these questions—then try out the suggestions:
When did you last try something new?
New experiences help to inspire us and keep us fresh. They expose us to new ideas and give us the opportunity to learn more about ourselves. If you have not tried anything new for more than a month maybe this is something for you to look at. It can be small – trying a new café or restaurant, changing your hair style, wearing that scarf your sister-in-law bought you and you’ve never worn.
It helps us not to feel that we are caught in a repeating loop that just goes from day to day.
Do you prioritise spending time with friends and family?
During a nine year study, researchers found that people who lack social ties were about three times more likely to die during those nine years than those who have strong relationships with their friends and family.Research also indicates that even people with unhealthy lifestyles that are able to maintain strong relationships are more likely to live longer than those without social connections. Spending time with your family and friends can help lead you to a longer life.
Yet somehow, we too often push our time with friends and family to the bottom of our to do list. There is always this idea that we’ll get to it later, or when things are less busy. Before we know where we are 6 months have gone by and we have not had an evening with our best friend.
Take a look at your agenda and make a date with a friend or family member right away.
Are you trapped in your routine?
Perhaps you never really saw yourself as a person who would set up and follow strict routines? For many of us, part of growing up is finding the capacity to organise our time in the most creative way. The trouble is we are juggling so many different parts of ourselves – worker, parent, friend, lover, … and yes, yourself! It’s easy to become stressed and let our routine begin to squeeze us, instead of being something useful.
Something that I find helpful is at least once a week change something in your routine. Again, it does not need to be a big thing. You can do something in a different order. Try cycling instead of taking a bus. Drink tea instead of coffee. Decide to have lunch out in a café. See if you can do without some of your normal activities – are they necessary, or just a habit.
Changing your routine helps you to feel in control, and less like a victim of your daily round. It’s refreshing!
What is your average stress level?
If it takes us up to eight days to unwind on your holidays what is that telling us about our stress level day to day? When was the last time you took a long hard look at how much stress you are dealing with?
In my experience, meditation is the best way I know of to work with stress and to understand something about how my mind works. Have you ever given it a try?
How much space do you have?
A helpful trick is to learn how to find and use small moments of space that open up even in the busiest days. Bringing ourselves into the present moment and dropping whatever is on our mind just for a while can have a powerful effect in opening up space. It cuts through worry and busyness and allows a moment to refresh. So, don’t cover up the small free moments in your day but enjoy them to the full.
Holidays are very special time with lots of opportunities to enhance our wellbeing. We can also use them as a mirror to check out and see how we handle the ordinary day-to-day events of our lives. If we take seriously what we discover then we can bring a holiday spirit into every day.
We hear a lot about increasing levels of stress in the workplace. It seems that now almost 20% of workers in Europe say they experience stress in their job. I recently witnessed an incident with a flight attendant and a difficult passenger. It struck me how keeping your cool can come at a high price. Looking for ways to ease a stressful situation could work well with less cost.
The incident that caused stress
It was on a return flight to Amsterdam from the UK that I overheard a fellow-passenger giving a flight attendant a really bad time. It was hard to catch the full story from where I was sitting but it involved the passenger asking for hot water in a plastic, see-through cup. Apparently cups of this sort are not safe to hold hot water and the only alternative was the purchase—for three euros—of a polystyrene cup. Not surprisingly the passenger found this rather excessive. What was more surprising was his response—he proceeded to cross-examine the flight attendant in increasingly aggressive tones, applying the kind of ruthless logic that would not have been out of place in a courtroom.
The reaction to the stress
The flight attendant did his utmost best. He remained polite, consistent and managed not to react to the escalating tone of complaint and anger that he was subjected to. He had a kind of party line that he could fall back on, ‘Sorry sir, this is company policy, I am not allowed to give you this cup…’ and so on. After some time, he managed to get away and push his trolley on to the next customer. As he came past me our eyes met and I murmured, ‘breathe’.He looked at my rather desperately but did not respond.
The passenger’s final attempt to get his own way was daring—he simply marched up to the refreshment trolley and started all over again. He returned to his seat carrying a bottle of cold water.
The cost of that reaction
I happened to be one of the last off the ‘plane and exchanged a few words with the male flight attendant. Remembering my attitude of sympathy—but not my advice to focus on his breath—he asked me what I thought of the sort of thing they had to put up with. During our short conversation my earlier hunch was confirmed—when dealing with a stressful situation he relied on his determination to stay professional, rather than adopting any strategy tomanage his stress. Instead of looking for ways to ease the stressful situation, he gritted his teeth in the face of trouble. He took up the burden as a way of demonstrating to himself how efficient he was at enduring one of the downsides of his job. It would probably have been how he was trained.
3 ways to ease a stressful situation
Here are a few things that the flight attendant could have tried:
1. Humour helps to bring ease to the stressful situation
When he saw that the passenger was not impressed by the company policy, the flight attendant could have used humour. There is something farcical about two grown men arguing about a cup of hot water. With a bit of skill, he could have tried to get the passenger to see things from his point of view and to laugh with him.
2. Putting himself in the passenger’s shoes would have brought ease to the stressful situation
I found myself having some sympathy with the passenger, although I did not care for his aggression. It is galling to be told that a seemingly simple request cannot be granted. No-one likes to be managed and the passenger could probably feel that that was what was happening to him.
Because the flight attendant was focusing on containing the situation, he did not appear to take the time to see it from the passenger’s point of view. Nor did he really take the time to address the needs of the passenger.
Both men adopted opposing sides of the situation, without trying to find common ground. One of the most direct ways to disarm a situation is to realise that all the participants are just trying to manage their day. They would like their day to go well but could be dealing with all kinds of hassles along the way. We all have this in common.
3. Working with his emotions to bring ease to the stressful situation
The flight attendant had his emotions firmly under control but that was part of the problem. He was obviously challenged by the passenger and yet maintained the same party line throughout. Being able to notice when your emotions are triggered and then working with what you noticeis a more sustainable way of being with emotions.
When we are in the grip of emotions it can be hard to remember that they will pass, that they are not solid and real. Mindfulnesshelps us to be able to identify an emotion, to acknowledge it and to gently let it go. It helps us to respect it but not to take it too seriously. When we start to identify with the emotion and use it to bolster our position then we are creating a possible trigger for stress.
The kind of stress I witnessed on this occasion was not major, but it was nasty. The man I spoke to looked very tired by the end of the flight and I doubt if it was his last of the day. The tension he was holding looked like it was heading towards a stiff drink and a good moan—not so bad in small doses but not a good long-term strategy for stress-management.
If you have found the ideas in this post interesting you might like to look at my new online course, How to Make Kindness Matter at Work. You can find out more here.
My niece is stressed at the moment because she has an end-of-year presentation for her PhD. My neighbour has been stressed for some time because she has a mysterious leak in her shower, which the plumber has so far been unable to fix. A colleague of mine is on extended sick leave due to high blood pressure and has been told to avoid anything likely to cause her stress. My friend had a headache for three days because he was stressed with over-work.
Divorce, bereavement, moving to a new house and even going on holiday all rate high in the stress scale. Troubles at work, economic instability and unemployment are also possible sources. We can even feel stress if caught in traffic or standing in a slow-moving queue at the airport. When we worry about our families, our health, our job, our weight, we are creating scenarios in the mind that can create stress. A short-term physical crisis, such as falling over or scalding an arm can be termed stressful, as can longer-term physical challenges like facing chronic illness or disability.
What is stress?
We use the word ‘stress’ to cover a multitude of experiences—things we are afraid of, things we don’t like, feelings we have, worries that plague us—we refer to all of them as stress. So, we find ourselves using stress to describe moods we have, sensations in our bodies, our reactions to events around us, things happening to us, or things we are worried will happen to us.
In fact, our stress response evolved to help us avoid threat and survive as a species. Our bodies respond to stress in much the same way as any other mammal. However, the way this works in modern life it is not so simple. We subject ourselves to low grade stress for long periods of time. This means that our bodies are continuously being subjected to all the effects of the stress response even when we do not need it.
We get stressed by the very things we created in order to make our lives easier. When my internet goes down it drives me crazy. If I have computer trouble it feels, it can cause stress.
Having a flat tyre is not usually a life-threatening situation and yet it can cause our stress to erupt. Once we have got upset, it is hard to find our off switch and reset. The stress tends to rumble on. Any other mammal experiencing a stressor being removed simply returns to its normal activity. If a zebra escapes from the lion who is trying to eat it, it just goes back to grazing.
On top of that, as humans we have the capacity to think, imagine, and project. No zebra would understand how anyone could lie awake at night worrying about a presentation that they have to make at work the next day. When we worry, we are causing ourselves stress about stuff that might not ever happen.
How we react
We can also help ourselves by looking more closely at what is going on for us when we talk about being stressed. Often we say we are stressed when things are simply not going the way we want them to—we just miss the bus we were running for, the person before us in the supermarket picks up the last loaf of our favourite bread, a colleague at work does not perform how we think they should.
Of course, all these things can be annoying, but we can tip them over into stressful situations by how we react. If we shrug and look for the next bus coming along instead of cursing the driver for not waiting for us; if we mentally offer the bread to the person who got there first instead of resenting them and if we take the time to talk to our colleague to find out why their performance is under-par we can things on a manageable level and avoid a full-stress impact.
There is a Buddhist teaching about two arrows. It describes how when something difficult happens we suffer and feel pain, as if being shot by an arrow. That in itself is intense enough but then we often react to what is happening by complaining, blaming, or hitting out. The pain that this causes us is like being shot by a second arrow. Maybe we cannot avoid the first one, but we do have some choice about the second one.
Stress is inevitable
Hans Seyle, the father of stress research, once said that if you do not experience stress, you must be dead! We know that life is full of challenges. Some are huge and seem overwhelming. Many are small and relatively unimportant in themselves but can add up to a lot of hassle. Training ourselves to accept this, rather than fight it is can be a big help in working with stress.
Meditation can help with this. It helps us become more present, which cuts our habit of ruminating over our worries. Our perspective opens up and we are less likely to take things so personally. Through meditation we can build resilience and learn to how to come back more quickly from a difficult experience.
We can also learn to be more kind to ourselves and stop beating ourselves up about things that go wrong. Telling ourselves off for finding things hard is certainly being hit with two arrows, instead of just one.
Understanding the stress of other people
When we can take a look at how we react, as well as beginning to accept the inevitability of stress it opens up some space. Then we can look around us and see how stress affects other people.
Maybe we find ourselves having to drop into our local super-market on the way home from work. If we take the time to look around us as we push our trolleys through the laden shelves, it is not hard to find opportunities to observe many of the ways we human beings experience stress.
Consider the middle-aged man in a smart suit buying an easy-to prepare meal for one. Perhaps he is recently divorced, living alone for the first time in years and dealing with the stress of change and upheaval. Spare a thought for the young mother with a baby in a buggy and a toddler clinging round her legs. She looks as if she has not had a propernight’s sleep for two or three years. The lounging teenage boy sulking around the soft drinks has an air of aimlessness and boredom about him. Maybe because he left school with such high hopes and now does not seem to be able to find any kind of job that lives up to his dreams. Take care as you pass the older woman, walking carefully, who underwent major surgery two months ago and is feeling low and vulnerable as she tries to get her strength back.
Recognising our shared humanity
As we select the items, we need to cook our evening meal, perhaps we are rubbing shoulders with people suffering from exam nerves, having relationship problems, shouldering the care of elderly relatives–the list is endless.
If we can create space around our own stress, it enables us to see more clearly what is going on for other people. Recognising stress in other people brings home how we are all in the same boat. Whatever our differences, we all just want to be happy and avoid suffering and pain. Yet we know that life brings challenges that we all need to face from time to time.
When we allow ourselves to take account of the difficulties other people face, it opens our hearts. Instead of being focused on our own problems we find room for concern for those of other people. We feel more connected with others and less likely to isolate ourselves with our own worries.
Awareness in Action is dedicated to building a community of people interested in living a life of meaning and purpose based on sustainable wellbeing. If you would like to join with us, you could make a start by sharing and commenting on the ideas you find in the blogs on these pages. Your story is part of our journey.
There is a traditional Buddhist teachingabout the power of not reacting. It’s based on the image of being hit by an arrow. The first arrow is the difficult circumstance, disappointment or stress that we face. This arrow is unavoidable—challenging things are just part of life. The second arrow is how we react to whatever is happening—and here we have a choice. If we react by blaming ourselves, getting angry or complaining we are shooting ourselves all over again with a second arrow. That way we have the original pain to deal with plus the suffering of our reaction.
Recently I witnessed an incident that brought this home to me.
People gazing in the airport
Living in Amsterdam means that my local airport is Schiphol airport. It’s a great airport—spacious, light and airy. There are plenty of good cafes and places to sit. I always enjoy people gazingwhile sipping a hot chocolate. Recently I was waiting at the gate for my flight and had the opportunity to observe an interesting case of not reacting.
Cleaning the floor
It occurred to me that he must have swept this same expanse of floor many times. It’s most likely that he has never actually been thanked for the quality of his work. His pay was probably low, but he did the job thoroughly from a sense of self-respect. He was not looking for any outside acknowledgement. I found it restful to watch him but a bit sad also. He seemed to expect so little.
Me first
The next people to take part were a couple running towards a neighbouring gate where a flight to the States had just been called. There was no great rush, but they were obviously concerned to arrive well in time. All their attention was focused on getting to their gate. They were not mindfulof anything else.
Maybe you can guess what happened? They ran right through the pile of rubbish the cleaner had so painstakingly gathered, scattering it all over a wide expanse of floor. The woman checked her steps for a fraction of a second. I thought she would see the cleaner and apologize but instead she picked up her pace and quickly followed her companion towards their destination. There was an opportunity there for a moment of kindnessbut as so often happens, it passed by without being taken up.
Habitual patterns
I understood then the man’s attitude of not expecting to be seen—this must happen to him over and over again. It is so easy isn’t it, when you’re pressured to simply put your own agenda centre-stage and not even see that others may have an agenda of their own that needs your attention. There was a power imbalance in this incident too—the customer’s needs taking precedence over a mere cleaner getting on with his job. That kind of thing can happen so often in our working life. Maybe we have dealings with a manager, or team leader who may, or may not choose to see our contribution clearly, or as important as their own.
Choosing not to react
Perhaps it will not surprise you at all that the cleaner simply gathered up the scattered dirt and debris and continued with his work almost as if there had been no interruption. He did not reactin any way. He could have called out, or cursed under his breath. It would have been understandable if he had looked around for a sympathetic eye—I admit, I was ready to provide one—but he did none of those things. The cleaner simply continued with his job.
Managing our stress levels
It occurred to me that he considered dealing with that kind of lack of awareness from the people using the airport around him as part of his job. Rather than seeing it as an annoying incident to be stored up to take home and tell the wife about, he just got on with things. By having that attitude, he was keeping his own stresslevels under control. Imagine if he had reacted every time someone failed to see him working how tired and exhausted, he would be at the end of every day.
It brought home to me strongly the power of not reacting when irritating things happen. When we don’t shoot the second arrow it has a big benefit for yourself and everyone around you. Hans Seyle,was one of the first people to research the effects of stress on humans. In fact, he is sometimes called the grandfather of stress research. One of his most quoted opinions is,
It’s not stress that kills us; it is our reaction to it
Isn’t that worth a thought next time we have something happen to us that we didn’t want to happen?
How To Make Your Stress Benefit You
If you enjoyed this post you might like to take a look at this online course. It’s full of simple, practical steps to work better with stress.
Recently I was doing a piece of work in a rural area in the south of France. You might think that’s very pleasant and, in some ways, it can be but not when you need to get things done. When you are in the middle of nowhere the internet can be really unreliable.
After two frustrating days of not even being able to use a dial-up system to retrieve email I turned, in some desperation, to an acquaintance who runs a small IT unit in the area. We had worked together before and he had helped me out.
As I explained my situation over the phone and asked for advice on how to get on even a slow-line, I could sense his reluctance. Slowly but surely this reluctance began to merge into impatience at my request for help. He was extremely busy; he said and was squeezed in between several conflicting demands already. The more I asked for his help, the worse he felt and the more irritable he became.
I was desperate, so I did not give up. I pointed out that it was an indication of the seriousness of my situation that I was bothering him in the first place. All he needed to do was to set me in the direction of who to talk to. I reminded him that is hard to sort out how to get online without beingon line. We had two or three rather tense phone calls before he used the excuse of taking an hour to check out something and did not call me back.
In spite of this setback, the story ended happily. Eventually, through some miracle, I got on to a local provider with a line for non-French speakers and they confirmed that yes, it is still possible to go on dial-up in that part of France but I would have to travel to the nearest office to register—the nearest office being in a town two hours away. At my gasp of dismay, the agent on the phone offered to look further and within five minutes had provided me with all the coordinates to get me online. There should be a way of ringing back people who provide help at such times and telling them how they have changed your day!
What the story shows
No-one sets out to be anxious. It usually happens as a response to a situation we find ourselves in that is harder to manage than we expected. It can come up when we can’t get what we need at any given time, but it can also come up when we can’t give someone else what they want from us. My IT acquaintance spent more time on the phone with me telling me how he could not help me than the person who eventually solved the problem. Although it did not seem like it, he felt bad about not helping and it made him more cross.
It can be hard to see the effect that our anxiety is having on our own behaviour. It can be even harder to see the effect it is having on other people.
I thought about this story and what it tells us about anxiety for quite a while afterwards. I realised that when we are caught up in anxious state, we can be quite difficult. Maybe we don’t mean to be but that is how it comes across.
3 ways anxiety led to unhelpful behaviour
My anxiety made me too desperate
For my part, my anxiety at being out of touch with the people I was working with, as well as the world at large made me more brittle than I would normally be. My own need felt more important than what was going on with anyone else. It made me push, where I should have been more skilful.
Anxiety can close you down
My colleague’s experience of being over-worked and under pressure made him resent my asking him anything in the first place. This sense of grievance deepened in the face of my refusal to give up, so that his ability to solve my relatively small problem became limited and constrained by emotional resentment. The person who solved the problem was relatively relaxed and able to look at the situation from a bigger perspective.
When you are experiencing anxiety it’s hard to see clearly
I realised later that I was not able to read the signs my acquaintance was sending me. Just as his stress closed him down, my anxiety undermined my ability to see the situation clearly. I did not appreciate how stressed he was and thought if I just kept asking, he would give in. My anxiety clouded my judgment. For me, how I was experiencing the situation was how it was. There was little or no room for other people’s feelings.
So often, the frustrations and limitations we experience at work can be traced back to our mood at the time. When we are under pressure, we need to know that we will be operating much less skilfully than normal.
We can waste a lot of time this way, as well as disappointing people and limiting our capacity to contribute creatively to what is going on around us.
Looking back, I felt badly for the IT guy. My own anxiety swamped any feeling of kindness for what was going on for him. OK, he had not tried very hard to be helpful, but I had not given him much space either.
Do you have any examples of this sort of thing happening to you recently at work? How did you resolve it?
If work issues are important to you right now, you might be interested in this online course:
9 Ways to Cope Better With Your Work Frustration – you can find out more here
Awareness in Action is dedicated to building a community of people interested in living a life of meaning and purpose based on sustainable wellbeing. If you would like to join with us, you could make a start by sharing and commenting on the ideas you find in the blogs on these pages. Your story is part of our journey.
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