One Minute Stress Management

A Clinically Proven Programme
for Safeguarding Your Health and
Happiness in Sixty Seconds a Day

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Random House Australia (Pty) Limited
20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney
New South Wales 2061, Australia

Random House New Zealand Limited
18 Poland Road, Glenfield,
Auckland 10, New Zealand

Random House (Pty) Limited
Endulini, 5A Jubilee Road,
Parktown 2193, South Africa

Dr David Lewis is an international stress consultant and lecturer. The author of more than two dozen best-selling books on self-improvement, including The Secret Language of Success, Thinking Better and Know Your Own Mind, he obtained his doctorate at the University of Sussex, Department of Experimental Psychology. He is a Chartered Member of the British Psychological Society, a Fellow of the International Stress Management Association, a Fellow of the Institute of Directors and a visiting lecturer in postgraduate studies at the City University. He is founder of Action on Phobias, a registered charity assisting phobic sufferers, and Stresswatch, a non-profit-making company advising companies on stress management. Dr Lewis acts as an adviser to major multinational companies in both Europe and the United States. His areas of expertise include the enhancement of both personal and corporate performance, creative uses of stress and managing change. He appears frequently on British television and has presented a number of programmes in the areas of business and education.

TEST TWO Note the time. Now, without looking at your watch, estimate when sixty seconds have passed.

If you answered yes to either of these questions, stress is causing you distress.

In this book I will explain how to make stress work for rather than against you. By mastering these quick and easy-to-use procedures you will be able to transform a potentially destructive force into a powerful ally, liberating hidden reserves of creative energy and enabling you to lead a happier, healthier and more fulfilling life.

My grateful thanks to Cynthia Hemming for her valuable contributions in the production of this book; to Patricia Jowsey MFPhys ITEC for assistance with those techniques dealing with aromatherapy and massage; and to Sarah Hannigan, Victoria Hipps and Vicki Harris for their editorial work on the manuscript.

‘The biggest problem in the world could have been solved easily when it was small.’

Technique One: For a Stress-Free Stan to Your Day

Technique Two: For Giving You Greater Energy

Technique Three: Use Clary Sage to Stimulate Mind and Body

Technique Four: Take Ginseng to Increase Resistance to Stress

Technique Five: Use Music to Manage Your Moods

Technique Six: For Reducing Your Stress While Travelling

Technique Seven: For Improving Your Alertness When Travelling

Technique Eight: For Reducing Stress in Your Shoulders and Neck

Technique Nine: For Reducing Stress in Your no Legs

Technique Ten: For Reducing Your Over-all Stress

Technique Eleven: Aromatherapy for Stress Reduction When Travelling

Technique Twelve: For Combating Your Day-to-Day Stress

Technique Thirteen: Warming Away Your Stress

Technique Fourteen: Breathing Away Your Stress

Technique Fifteen: For Reducing Emotional Stress

Technique Sixteen: For Combating Stress in Your Lower Back

Technique Seventeen: For Combating Stress in Your Stomach

Technique Eighteen: For Increasing Your Mental Energy

Technique Nineteen: For Reducing Mental Stress

Technique Twenty: For Soothing Stressed Eyes

Technique Twenty-One: For Combating Concentration Stress

Technique Twenty-Two: Using Peppermint to Increase Alertness

Technique Twenty-Three: For Preventing Posture Stress

Technique Twenty-Four: For Banishing Stress When Sitting

Technique Twenty-Five: For Banishing Stress When Standing

Technique Twenty-Six: For Controlling Emotional Stress 1

Technique Twenty-Seven: For Controlling Emotional Stress 2

Technique Twenty-Eight: For Controlling Emotional Stress 3

Technique Twenty-Nine: For Controlling Emotional Stress 4

Technique Thirty: For Increasing Alertness in the Air

Technique Thirty-One: For Combating Stress After Flying 1

Technique Thirty-Two: For Combating Stress After Flying 2

Technique Thirty-Three: For Combating Stress After Flying 3

Technique Thirty-Four: Controlling Stress Using Sensualisations

Technique Thirty-Five: For Controlling Mental Stress

Technique Thirty-Six: Active Meditation

Technique Thirty-Seven: For Destressing Your Forehead

Technique Thirty-Eight: For Destressing Your Jaw

Technique Thirty-Nine: For Destressing Your Shoulders 1

Technique Forty: For Destressing Your Shoulders 2

Technique Forty-One: For Destressing Your Wrists

Technique Forty-Two: For Destressing Your Hands and Arms

Technique Forty-Three: For Destressing Your Back

Technique Forty-Four: Foot Massage for Restful Sleep 1

Technique Forty-Five: Foot Massage for Restful Sleep 2

Technique Forty-Six: Foot Massage for Restful Sleep 3

Technique Forty-Seven: Replenishing Your Stress Resistance Reserves

Part One provides a general background to stress and explains how it is possible to manage many stress-related problems using procedures which can be learned and put into practice in one minute or less.

Because this book is intended as a practical guide to stress management, I have kept the technical explanations about the nature of stress to a minimum.

Part Two describes ways of measuring your stress, and provides more than forty practical procedures for managing stress, quickly and easily, under a wide variety of circumstances.

I suggest you begin by assessing levels of workplace stress by means of the questionnaire in Chapter 8. You may also find it useful to construct the stress barometer, as explained in Chapter 9, or to start to keep a stress diary, as suggested in Chapter 10.

These objective measures make it easier to decide which of those situations that you currently find stressful should be tackled first. Start by working with the procedures of greatest relevance to your current situation.

Because they can all be learned so easily you’ll be able to put them to work for you right away. Continue with your selected procedure or procedures for a week to ten days, men review the situation.

You may also find it useful to repeat the assessment in Chapter 8 in order to see whether measurable benefits have resulted. You should also ask yourself:

Have any symptoms of anxiety, such as a rapidly beating heart, dry mouth, churning stomach, and so on, decreased?

You should be able to answer ‘yes’ to most if not all of these questions. If so, continue using the procedures until they have developed into your natural response to these particular situations.

You can then learn additional procedures to help you manage any remaining stress in other areas of your life.

WHEN I ASSURE clients that they can control stress and use it creatively, in a minute or less, their first response is usually disbelief. Their second is irritation. They accuse me of taking their difficulties a great deal too lightly.

‘I have a terrible boss, a shaky marriage, my teenage children don’t understand me, commuting to work each day leaves me exhausted, my love life is non-existent, my debts are enormous and even my dog doesn’t love me. How dare you tell me my stress problems can be solved in sixty seconds a day!’

By way of reply, I sometimes drop a lighted match on to some tissue paper placed in a metal ashtray on my desk. Because it’s been dotted with alcohol, the paper flares up, then burns steadily.

Taking a glass from my desk, I pour a small amount of water over the flames, which are quenched immediately. ‘A small fire can be brought under control quickly and easily,’ I point out. ‘But suppose those flames had been allowed to spread unchecked. In no time papers on the desk would start burning, then the desk, then the room. It would have taken hours to put out the flames. We’d have had to send for the fire brigade and tremendous damage would have been caused. The whole building might have been damaged beyond repair.’

I go on to explain that fire and stress have much in common. Uncontrolled, fire sweeps through forests or rampages through houses leaving death and devastation in its wake. Controlled, fire provides the energy to drive industry, heat our homes, power our cars, fly our jets and cook our food.

Similarly, uncontrolled stress is massively destructive to personal health and happiness; it wrecks careers, destroys relationships, undermines self-confidence and prevents you from achieving your true potential. Controlled stress, by contrast, is a potent source of creative energy which helps us live life to the full. To feel positive, creative and enthusiastic. To wake each morning inspired and energised by the prospect of fresh challenges to face and new goals to achieve.

Yet neither fire nor stress can easily be brought under control if allowed to rampage unchecked for too long.

Catch stress early enough and you can transform it into a creative force for good in your life.

THERE IS A catch–22 with many widely taught stress-management techniques. They can leave you feeling even more stressed than before!

The problem is that most take weeks to master and need to be practised for fifteen to thirty minutes a day in order to produce any lasting benefit.

For hurrying high achievers, those usually described as having a ‘Type-A personality’, setting aside this amount of time in their already hectic schedules is both difficult and demanding. Even when they find the time, the techniques themselves can, at least during early sessions, increase stress.

These barriers to managing high levels of stress were first drawn to my attention by two clients. As with all the case histories used in this book, names and some details have been changed to protect confidentiality.

When we first met, George, aged forty-five, regularly worked an eighty-hour week in his job as managing director of a software company. During a typical seven-day working week he’d be juggling tight production schedules, worrying about cash-flow, and fighting for orders in an increasingly cut-throat market. On top of all this, George travelled constantly, visiting clients and suppliers in Europe, the US and Japan.

Aggressive, competitive and ambitious, George was exactly the kind of individual that cardiologist Meyer Friedman MD, Director of the Recurrent Coronary Prevention Project in San Francisco, has identified as a Type-A. Only George was even more so. In fact, George was a world-class Type-A, for life just wasn’t fast enough. He had turned impatience into an art-form. He hated any kind of delay. In restaurants, waiters served him on the double or risked a furious tirade. Even if he really wanted something, he’d storm out of a busy shop rather than wait to be served. Once, riding with him in an express lift, I watched as George tapped irritably at his watch. It was clear that even those few seconds of enforced idleness were unbearable to him.

Yet, despite the pressure, George loved his fast-track lifestyle and refused to accept that it could ever harm him. ‘I don’t suffer from stress,’ he once boasted to me. ‘I’m a carrier!’

He was misled by a widely held belief that, if you really enjoy what you do, it can’t be stressful. That, in some way, loving your job provides an antidote to crippling stress.

Unfortunately, this is like saying that if you adore eating and drinking, gluttony will never harm your health! A month before George consulted me, a routine medical check revealed him to be severely hypertensive, with dangerously high blood-pressure.

George was worried, and rightly. He knew that this level of hypertension significantly increased his risk of heart disease and kidney failure, while reducing life expectancy by up to twelve years.

So when his doctor suggested he learn Progressive Relaxation, George agreed immediately. This technique, which involves first tensing and then relaxing each of your major muscle groups in turn, was developed some fifty years ago by University of Chicago physiologist Edmund Jacobson. Studies have shown Progressive Relaxation lowers blood-pressure, reduces unnecessary muscle tension and creates a more tranquil state of mind. The technique takes about three weeks to learn and requires regular sessions, each lasting about thirty minutes, to ensure results.

With some people Progressive Relaxation proves extremely beneficial. Unfortunately George was not one of them. In fact, it ended up making him even more stressed than before.

‘My doctor gave me a tape cassette of instructions,’ he recalls. ‘I started working with it the moment I returned home.

‘But after only a few minutes I found myself getting more and more tense and anxious. My mind started racing so fast that it was impossible to concentrate on the tape. The more I tried to unwind, the more tense I became. I called my doctor, and she said I must keep going. That it was natural to become more tense at first. But just lying there was sheer torture. After ten days, I found my blood-pressure had actually risen a couple of points. So I handed back the cassette and gave up any hope of controlling my stress through relaxation.’

Shortly afterwards, George consulted me and learned some of the one-minute stress-control techniques described in this book.

Today, without any major lifestyle changes, George’s blood-pressure is normal. He no longer suffers from poor digestion or lower-back pain, and he enjoys more restful sleep. At work, both his problem-solving and decisionmaking skills have improved significantly. He is able to deal in a calm and effective manner with challenges that once sent his stress levels soaring.

The more impatient and competitive people are, the more difficulty they will have in mastering Progressive Relaxation. Or, indeed, any technique involving lengthy training and regular practice, as is shown by my second case history.

Like many career women, Susan, a thirty-three-year-old advertising executive and mother of twin daughters, worked two shifts: the first at work, the second when she returned home in the evening. From dawn to dusk her every activity had to be tightly scheduled. ‘I used to joke that the only way I could allow myself to fall ill was if it had been timetabled in my appointment book,’ she recalls.

Like George, Susan appeared to thrive on her demanding lifestyle. ‘I kept fit, getting up at five o’clock every day, winter and summer, to go swimming. I played squash three times a week and took aerobics classes regularly,’ she told me. ‘I was so healthy, it never occurred to me I could fall victim to stress.’

Susan had been misled by a second widely held myth about stress: that being fit safeguards you against chronic stress.

Because you appear so much better able to cope with a high workload than the less-fit people around you, there’s a strong temptation on the part of bosses to dump all the most stressful challenges into your in-tray.

‘I was always given the toughest assignments,’ says Susan, ‘because my boss believed I coped with them better than anyone else in the company. If there was an angry client to pacify, it was me they sent for. If there was a rush job to complete, I was always the first in line to be asked. I became the agency’s troubleshooter, always in the middle of a commercial row.’

Because Susan was in such excellent physical health, she was able to work long and hard for years. Then, without warning, everything changed. ‘I woke up one Monday morning and immediately suffered a panic attack. I’d never experienced anything like it before and felt terrified. My heart was thumping so fast I felt certain I was having a major heart attack. My husband called out our doctor, who could find nothing wrong. Tests confirmed that my heart was in great shape. The only problem was, I wasn’t.

‘From that morning on, for more than a year, each day was a nightmare. At work I found it hard to make the simplest decisions. My creativity nose-dived. I wasn’t able to cope with tasks which, only a couple of weeks before, I’d have tackled with ease. My confidence was shot to pieces. Just getting up in the morning was a major effort.’

At her doctor’s suggestion, Susan agreed to attend classes in Autogenics. Developed during the 1930s by Dr J. W. Schultz, a German neuropsychologist, Autogenic Training (AT) teaches people to relax by repeating such phrases as ‘My hands and arms are heavy and warm. My breathing is deep and even.’ As with Progressive Relaxation, Autogenic Training can be a powerful stress-management technique.

‘My problem was finding time to attend regular classes. It was a thirty-minute drive to the clinic and each session lasted around one hour. The only way I could fit this in was by giving up my squash and cutting down on swimming. Without this regular exercise I became increasingly tense. After I’d missed a couple of sessions because one of my daughters was ill, I gave up.’

I must emphasise that both Progressive Relaxation and Autogenic Training are excellent techniques which, when mastered, can prove powerful antidotes to stress. Indeed, later in the book I shall be describing a modified form of Progressive Relaxation.

But, in my professional experience, there is a substantial number of stress victims who are not helped by them. In fact, their stress levels are increased through attempting to master these demanding and time-consuming techniques.

And, having failed to obtain benefit from these highly recommended methods, they often despair of ever being able to control their stress.

At this point they may soldier on, grinning and bearing the stress until it finally lays them low with a serious mental or physical problem. They may self-medicate by taking powerful tranquillisers in the form of alcohol or potent stimulants in the form of nicotine. They may turn to even more damaging, and illegal, drugs. They may comfort-eat, so creating weight problems and risking loss of self-esteem. They may give up a career they love but can no longer cope with. They may take their stress problems out on their family, leading to a disintegration of relationships.

What they are not likely to do is seek out alternative, health-enhancing techniques of stress control.

If, in my test at the beginning of this book, you underestimated the passing of one minute by ten seconds or more, if you loathe queuing, are irritated by even minor delays when travelling and fume when caught in rush-hour traffic, it’s likely that your response to some stress-management techniques will be the same as that of George and Susan.

Maybe you have already tried to master Progressive Relaxation, Autogenic Training, Yoga, Transcendental Meditation or some other stress-management techniques, without success.

As I have already explained, they are easy to learn and so quick to use that you can carry them out during any spare moments during the day:

During your mid-morning or afternoon breaks When you are delayed at an airport, or during the flight itself

You can use them to unwind following some stressful challenge, to avoid carrying performance-harming tension into your next activity.

By spending sixty seconds destressing yourself at the end of a hectic day, you can avoid taking work-related stresses home with you.

Controlling stress this way does more than safeguard your health. It also enables you to carry out any task with maximum success and efficiency.

As I shall explain in Chapter 5, we can only achieve our true potential when our degree of mental and physical arousal is neither too high nor too low. A point which has been termed our ‘Peak Performance Stress Level’.

But before we look at ways in which stress can be transformed into a creative force for good in our life, let’s consider some of its more destructive consequences. Effects so damaging that they have led most people to equate stress with distress.

A SURVEY AMONG financial institutions¹ revealed that sixty-four per cent of employers regard excessive stress as the principal health threat facing their company. Four times the number who cited heart disease, and six times as many as said alcoholism.

The same research suggested that around half of all absence from work in large companies can be blamed on stress-related illness.² It has been estimated to affect 1.4 per cent of the workforce at any one time, and to cause at least thirteen per cent of all sickness. In the United States, more than forty million working days are lost annually as a result of stress-related sickness. In the UK, where absenteeism on grounds of ill-health costs some £25 billion a year, forty per cent is attributed to stress.