Not all stress is bad. But, if left unmanaged and unchecked, stress can become quite unhealthy for us. We all know many causes of stress, but we don’t always slow down enough to think about the specifics that are causing stress in our own lives.

Money, health, family, friends, work, safety and security – are all prevalent triggers, and the sheer volume makes it difficult to intentionally focus on what’s causing us stress. One of the coping mechanisms that we can use is visualisation, a powerful technique that can help relieve the symptoms of stress and anxiety.

The technique involves using mental imagery to achieve a more relaxed mind. Similar to daydreaming, visualisation is accomplished through the use of your imagination. It is common practice for athletes to use imagery while they prepare for an event, practice a movement, or train while injured.

Swimmers mentally rehearse a perfect dolphin kick, and endurance runners imagine pulling extra miles from the depths of their mental and physical resources (Meijen, 2019; McCormick, Meijen, & Marcora, 2015). The mind offers a safe and flexible environment for practising a stressful task. Mentally rehearsing a daunting performance prepares the individual by asserting control over a (sometimes harmful) inner voice (Strycharczyk & Clough, 2015).

Focusing on positive mental images can favourably impact our mind and body and increase self-belief in our ability to cope with change. One study from 1995 took a group of sixty subjects and tested their levels of anxiety and depression before and after using visualisation techniques. After several sessions, all subjects showed vast improvement in stress reduction, lower anxiety, and decreased depression symptoms.

Visualisation can provide temporary relief from pain, tension, or problems. It requires creating images in your mind that are so captivating, so rich in detail, and so all-consuming that you get lost in the images your mind creates.

A recent article on betterhelp.com highlighted several types of visualisation that could help you explore this stress management technique a little further.

1. Creative visualisation of a favourable outcome
2. Visualisation as a diversion from stress
3. Visualisation with deep breathing
4. Guided imagery
5. Happy memory visualisation
6. Visualisation with the senses
7. Visualisation for self-motivation

If you’re a fan of apps for your mobile, here are some great ideas too:

1. Balance
2. Breathe+
3. Calm
4. Headspace
5. Waking Up

Coaches, therapists, psychologists and even early-childhood practitioners use visualisation to help calm overwhelming emotions and create a safe and happy healing space. This makes it a helpful tool to be used as a form of mindfulness and to manage stress.

There are many reasons for our increased stress levels – the use of technology and how it has changed our communication with each other and the world around us is complex and deeply integrated with our wellbeing. But where we used to follow seasons and the flow of the natural world around us, we have now created new rhythms and patterns and this has disrupted our Circadian Rhythm.

The term Circadian Rhythm refers to our body’s biological clock. This clock is observed across bird, reptile, and mammal species and is key for directing daily and seasonal behaviour patterns such as hibernation, eating and breeding. The light/dark cycle of the sun has a powerful effect on the circadian clock, sleep, and alertness. Our circadian clock responds to light, as a signal to be awake, and dark, as a signal to fall asleep. Increased light equals increased alertness, which equals increased stress.

Incandescent light bulbs were introduced in the late 19th century and since then our world has become awash in bright lights. Not only have artificial lights become a staple of our evening and early morning activities – we stare into backlit screens for several hours during the day too. From lamps that light up every street and city skyline all the way to constant mobile device use.

Our Circadian Rhythm is responsible for biological processes like brain wave patterns, hormone production and cell regulation. Studies show that the circadian cycle controls 10-15% of our genes.

Exposure to artificial light disrupts our internal clock regulation and has been linked to:

– Depression

– Insomnia

– Cardiovascular disease

– Cancer

– Immunity/Stress Response

All these conditions are quite clearly linked to our overall wellbeing. Your pineal gland releases the highest levels of melatonin when there’s darkness and decreases melatonin production when you’re exposed to light.

Melatonin triggers a host of biological activities, possibly including a nocturnal reduction in the body’s production of oestrogen. Sleep pattern disruption is thought to interfere with cancer suppression genes, leading to an increased risk of breast, prostate, gastric, and lung cancers.

Whilst things like financial stress, relationship tension, loss of a loved one and dealing with a global pandemic are all obvious causes of stress, a simple imbalance of our waking and sleeping lives can be equally harmful to our wellbeing. If you want to improve your quality of life, it’s not just about earning more money, or eating healthily, it’s about finding the right integration and balance of everything in your life.

“We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.” – Sheryl Sandberg

The foundation of most of our ongoing frustrations can be traced back to our habits, and the challenge with habits is we often aren’t even aware of them. When the world went into COVID lockdown, there was an increased awareness of face-touching, hand-washing and social distancing.

All of a sudden, we became aware that we could be touching our faces as much as three times every minute. We became aware of how close we would stand to people and how long we would wash our hands. This awareness, and knowledge of the implications, caused us to interrupt our regular routines and habits and change our behaviour.

Imagine how powerfully we could impact other areas in our lives where we feel stuck and frustrated with limited thinking and unhealthy habits!

When we constantly feel guilty for the money we have or regularly feel the stress of not having enough, we can start to recognise the habits accompanying those feelings. We might habitually be grumpy with loved ones because of finances or spend everything we have the minute it arrives in our account.

Recognising these patterns is the first step to connecting the habit to a desired or undesirable outcome – and we can interrupt that pattern. Even if we simply pause and take a mental note of what we’re doing, we’re already starting to alter our behaviour. Think about the first weeks of the global pandemic; there was so much happening that we would often forget our masks at home and would have to figure out how to work around it. Some of us kept spares in the car, our handbags and desk drawers.

We didn’t change overnight, but our habits and thinking patterns were interrupted enough to slowly spark the change.

If you’re sitting with some blindspots and can’t see the roots of some of your habits, perhaps we could connect and chat through your frustrations. We can’t see our own blindspots, and when we’re unaware of them, we cannot change them. Having a financial adviser or coach work with you can help you recognise, interrupt and change the habits that keep you in an unhealthy space.

Everything we know, believe, and feel is based on our internal thoughts. Positive thinking gives us extraordinary power over our thinking and ourselves (Strycharczyk & Clough, 2015).

Some people are exceptional; they always seem to remain positive regardless of what lemons are tossed their way. You know the type, the every-cloud-has-a-silver-lining, glass-half-full, things-will-get-better type of people. We love to have them around when we need their support, but we can also envy their seemingly relentless positive energy.

But – if our positivity is superficial and never permeates deep into our psyche, it can become unhealthy for us. It’s essential to make space in our lives for all the emotions we need to feel to avoid suppressing emotions and potentially becoming ill (dis-eased). This kind of surface happiness can be a little too nonchalant and detach us from what’s really going on in our lives.

It’s less about having positive feelings and more about choosing a positive attitude to whatever we feel. We cannot control our emotions; we can decide how to behave with those emotions – this is when we start to tap into that extraordinary power. Smiling is a proven way to physically start changing our attitude to uncomfortable emotions.

Smiling offers a mood boost and helps our bodies release cortisol and endorphins that provide numerous health benefits, including reduced blood pressure, stress and pain, and increased endurance and a strengthened immune system.

There is also growing evidence that the use of positive self-talk (following on from our smile and going a little deeper) can significantly improve how we tackle a challenge or approach a situation. Talk to yourself as though a friend, coach, or supportive colleague is offering you positive advice. This means that we don’t push out the emotions that we’d rather avoid, but instead, we approach them with a healthier attitude.

We must avoid feeling bad for feeling unfocused, bored, tired, overwhelmed, inadequate, excluded, exposed, anxious (and tons of other feelings!). Instead, we can internally acknowledge them and say to ourselves: “I know you’re feeling overwhelmed and tired, but you can do this. Rest if you need to, and start again a little later.” This creates space for discomfort whilst holding a healthy, positive attitude.

At the end of each day, we can reflect on our successes and achievements rather than dwelling on disappointments or perceived failures. Whether it’s in how we spoke with our family, landed a project at work, or even managed to achieve a finance, fitness or food goal – this practice helps us find the healthy positive.

It’s hard not to become fixated on getting things perfect. It may not be in all areas of our lives, but for almost all of us, we have skills, relationships and responsibilities where we want to show up as perfect. As Dave and Hester Vaughan (yourjourneyforlife.com) often say, “Messy, not perfect!”

This is a great reminder that we mustn’t fall into the perfectionism trap. If we do, we will find piles and piles of frustration. As the Economist wrote in a recent article (by Josh Cohen), society bombards us with instructions to be happier, fitter and richer. Why have we become so dissatisfied with being ordinary?

As a result, we’ve become fixated with ‘never enough’. We never seem to have enough money, time or material possessions, and we feel like we can’t start big projects because we’re not ready.

From Emerson’s provocative defence of “self-reliance” in 1841 to the rise of the self-help industry in the 1930s and the emergence of our own selfie culture, selfhood was regarded as our highest value and the object of our striving. Educational, aesthetic and financial betterment and the need for validation from others are the elements that form the perfectionist air we all now breathe.

Cohen writes that perfectionism “makes for a thin life, lived for what it isn’t rather than what it is”.

The imperative toward perfection remains as potent and pervasive as ever. In an article in 2017, two British psychologists, Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill, ascribed an exponential rise in perfectionism among the younger generation to the “increasingly demanding social and economic parameters” within which they struggled to make their lives. They also blamed “increasingly anxious and controlling parental practices”.

Social media creates additional pressure to construct a perfect public image, exacerbating our feelings of inadequacy.

This impacts how we make and communicate financial decisions. If we don’t look to understand the emotions and meaning behind our money, we will never be able to uncover the truth of messy, not perfect. Instead of embracing our true values and passions (called “ordinary” by the world), we perpetuate a culture where we are likely to grow dissatisfied with what we have and who we are. 

Managing our money and integrating it with a happy life requires us to recognise and accept that a happy life is messy, not perfect. Remember, the kid with the muddy clothes is the one who had the most fun.

[Find the original Economist article here.]