Energy-Free Stress Management Strategies

26 evidence-based tools to effectively respond to stress.

Intentional Stress vs Stress Management

If you've followed my account for more than a day, you know I advocate for intentional stress as a tool to build resilience. Deliberate discomfort serves as training for life's inevitable challenges. However, intentional stress training fundamentally differs from stress management.

When you're already emotionally overwhelmed, adding more stress isn't the answer. Instead, your priority should be returning to a rational state.

Stress management strategies help reverse emotional reasoning in the moment.

Resilience training prevents emotional reasoning from taking over in the first place.

The Reality of Stress

Life is going to hit you hard.

Stressors will pile up.

There will inevitably be hard times.

What tools do you have at your disposal to manage stress?

The question isn't whether you'll face challenges, but how prepared you'll be when they arrive.

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

-Archilochus

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The Foundation: Self-Awareness

You can't improve what you can't identify.

Self-awareness serves as the cornerstone of effective stress management. This awareness helps you differentiate between:

• Stressors: The external circumstances potentially triggering the stress response

• Stress: Internal thoughts and feelings about stressors.

This distinction reveals where you have control. With stressors involving other people, communication might be possible. Otherwise, you're left with two options: acceptance or avoidance.

Your stress response, however, offers numerous opportunities for intervention.

I explained a basic system for managing stress in my first Substack post:

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Perspective is Key

Reframing situations and adopting new mindsets prove crucial in stress management.

Your interpretation of thoughts or events often impacts your stress response more than circumstances themselves.

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Taking Action: Both Active and Passive

Stress management isn't one-size-fits-all. Individual variability necessitates that we all determine what uniquely works best for ourselves.

There are countless ways to respond to stress.

Exertion-Based Approaches:

• Exercise

• Deliberate heat or cold exposure

• Fasting from various urges

• Fear exposure

• Learning a new skill

These activities transform our physiology by temporarily causing a heightened stress response followed by recovery. The emotional brain cannot differentiate between causes of stressors or reasons for recovery. Therefore, effective response to an intentional stressor encourages recovery from other uncontrollable circumstances in your life. I love writing about challenges for consideration in this realm.

Energy-Conserving Techniques:

• Conscious breathing

• Pleasurable activities

• Sensory activation

• Strategic recovery

Recovery differs from rest. While rest is passive, recovery can be active without depleting your resources. The key is finding activities that benefit you.

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Energy-Free Strategies for Stress Management

The following offers a collection of practical, accessible strategies for managing stress without requiring significant energy expenditure or resources.

None of the recommendations I suggest today will cause you to sweat. Activity doesn’t have to imply discomfort or high exertion. Behaviors can be beneficial without zapping energy.

Each strategy is designed to interrupt the stress response and promote recovery through simple, intentional practices. Whether you have just a moment or several minutes, these techniques can help shift your mental and physiological state to increase executive functioning and resilience.

I break down the following 26 techniques into two sections:

• Sensory Approaches

• Cognitive Interventions

Sensory approaches like breathing, resting, temperature, and vibration are all extremely low energy but incredibly effective at reversing emotional reactions and returning you to a grounded state.

Cognitive interventions like asking questions, mantras, offering yourself advice, and temporal distancing are low energy but require some amount of executive functioning.

Sensory approaches are useful in encouraging rationality. Cognitive interventions are then effective in managing and fully recovering from the stress response.

Not every strategy will work for everyone or every situation.

The goal is to build a personalized toolkit that works for you.

Give one or two strategies a try. If they work, great! Tool added.

If not, pivot to another.

"Absorb what is useful. Discard what is not. Add what is uniquely your own."

-Bruce Lee

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26 Energy-Free Stress Management Strategies

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Sensory Approaches

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Conscious Breathing

I’m not a fan of using the word “should”, but intentional breathing SHOULD be the first action one takes following awareness of stress. If anything, you MUST do this strategy if wanting or needing to efficiently ground yourself.

Respiration is an autonomic function. It also automatically changes in response to stress.

Making a subconscious function become conscious is a great way to slow down emotional reasoning.

Nasal breathing with extended exhales and/or the physiologic sigh (one large inhale followed by another inhale to get to full capacity and then an extended exhale) are always my initial response to noticing I’m experiencing the stress response. I often honestly joke that I physiologic sigh as much as I breathe normally these days.

Overriding your subconscious breathing encourages rationality when you’re experiencing stress.

Intentional breathing can be a response that initially combats emotional reactivity.

Train this skill both in known stressful environments and with intentional stress.

Bring attention to disordered ventilation.

Override your physiology with the power of conscious breathing.

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Music