How to stop your stress before it begins with this simple mind hack

Even at 13 and 14 years old, kids are already talking about the “S” word in school.

Yep, you guessed it.

I’m talking about stress.

In one of my weekly mindfulness sessions at The American School of Bangkok, one of my students asked me a question: “Mr. Jeremy”, she said, “how do you deal with stress?” I answered her as honestly as I could, telling her how I approach stress in my own life. I know many of you out there deal with stress too, and are looking for ways to reduce it.

In this article I’ll describe a useful way of looking at and dealing with stress in your life. I’ll share with you a surprisingly simple technique that I have been using for the past 6 years, one that has helped me stay relatively stress-free, despite being in some fairly stressful situations in my life (including going through qualifying exams at Duke University, making the decision to leave my PhD program after 4.5 years, and starting and running my own company).

First, why is stress such a huge problem for us? Because of our past evolutionary history, our brains have evolved to be on constant lookout for danger. Tigers, snakes, sharp pointy things, angry faces. We are hardwired to always be looking for the dangerous thing just around the corner. And when something bad does happen, our brain tries to make us remember it so that we don’t make the same mistake again. As one neuroscientist recently quipped,“Our brains are like velcro for bad experiences, and teflon for good ones.”

I remember when I was in graduate school, I might be having a perfectly fine day — sun shinning, my experiments going as planned, social life going well — and then ONE not-so-flattering comment from a professor would send my mind into a stress spiral for hours.

“I can’t believe they said that! Do they think I’m not smart? Do they think I don’t belong in graduate school? Maybe every one else thinks I’m a failure too.” At that point it wouldn’t matter how good my life actually was. That one comment would be all I could focus on. When hat “velcro” is oriented towards the future, it results in stressful thinking. We often end up thinking of all the things that might go wrong in our life.

If you actually stop and look at your stress, you’ll see that it’s mostly your mind spinning out of control with fear about the future: “I have no idea how to do this task. If I don’t do a good job on this, my boss will never trust me again, and I’ll probably get fired. My career will probably be over, and my life will be ruined.”

Fortunately, these are just THOUGHTS in your mind. Dreamed up scenarios out of an infinite number of possibilities for what the day might actually bring.

They are not true. They never happened. And yet you live out these scenarios in your head, you feel the consequences as if they were real, and that is scary.

It’s no wonder stress makes us feel awful. We’re constantly getting ignored, disrespected, and insulted in our head over and over again each day.

Take a moment and realize that whatever stress you’re feeling is a product of your mind. I’ll admit, things happen in the real world, but the stress itself comes from your mind spinning out of control and thinking about bad potential outcomes. Shakespeare once said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Events are happening all around. Whether we call them good or bad depends on our perspective, and how we relate to what just happened.

Now that we have a slightly more refined view of our stress, let’s talk about how we can deal with it.

I call this the Snowball technique for stress management.

Do you know in cartoons, when a small snowball at the top of a hill starts rolling down the slope? As it rolls down, it picks up snow as it goes, getting larger and more massive. By the time this snowball has reached the bottom of the hill, it is a gigantic, beastly snow boulder that crushes everything in its path.

Stressful thinking is just like this. Thoughts start as small little bubbles in the mind. When we simply let the mind run wild, unchecked, the thoughts get larger. They build momentum in the mind.

Eventually, these small thoughts become a gigantic 5-ton ball of snow rolling down the hill coming right at you. At this point you can’t stop it, you can only duck and cover, and hope it doesn’t do too much damage.

How can we use this analogy to reduce stress? Just ask yourself, what would happen if you picked up that snowball at the very top of the hill, before it started to roll down? It would never get the chance to become big and scary.

The way to pick up these “snowballs” in the mind is through practicing mindful awareness: being aware of what you’re experiencing in the present moment, without judgement and with kindness towards whatever arises. (If you need some help getting started with mindfulness, click here for my beginner’s guide to mindfulness). Simply by being mindful of a thought, you will stop the thought from proliferating and growing bigger.

This is what the Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls “the miracle of mindfulness.” You do not need to do anything extra, simply bring mindfulness to your experience (even to difficult experiences) and a sense of peace and ease will come. If it helps, you can imagine your mindfulness like a laser beam coming from your eyes and melting the snowballs at the top of the hill. Just seeing them has the power to stop them in their tracks.

How to practice the Snowball Technique:

• Try to notice when you are feeling stressed as often as you can.
• The more frequently you notice stressful thoughts, the less they will be able to build up.
• Each time you notice a stressful thought, simply label it in your mind as “stress.” (This is called the mental noting technique).
• Once you have labeled the thought as “stress”, take one deep breath and bring your attention to the feeling of your breath in your belly.
• Repeat these steps as often as you notice stress.

Over time, as you continue to practice this in your life, you will see that stress is merely a proliferation of fearful thoughts in your mind, and that you can choose to end the proliferation through mindful awareness. You may also discover that a moment when your mind is free of stress is a moment that can be filled with joy and contentment.

If you’re just getting started with mindfulness practice, click here to download my free 6-step guide to mindful breathing.