What Stress Management Techniques Are Most Effective?

Our ancestors lived in a world much different from our own. A world where behind every bush a predator could be waiting for them. The slightest snap of a branch could mean trouble. To fight or to flee was instinctual and prepared us for moments like this.

It sounds stressful thinking about it but these incidences happened acutely and typically didn’t pervade every waking minute.

What happens when our ancient threat detection system gets immersed in the world we face today?

Escape versus Approach Techniques

When it comes to managing stress, we all have our own default methods that we lean into. But there are definitely some techniques that are more effective than others.

Knowing not only what types of stress affect you the most, but also how you should manage your stress is what’s going to help you to feel the best and recover better.

So let’s talk about understanding your deep health assessment and where stress is affecting you the most.

We’ll also touch on forms of escape versus approach techniques for stress management and what the best long-term solutions are for dealing with what’s bothering you.

Understand Your Deep Health and Stress Assessment

Sometimes we have a really great grasp on what’s causing the most stress in our lives but it can often come as a surprise or not be exactly what you think it is.

When you develop an awareness of the different dimensions of your health, that is your Deep Health and the stress that is intertwined with each of those dimensions, you’re better able to pinpoint your sources of stress in any given timeframe.

To do this, you want either look at the wheel with the six Deep Health components and rank or draw out how stressful each aspect of your health is right now.

Alternatively, if you need further guidance and understanding, you can fill out the Deep Health Assessment and Questionnaire which will ask you a series of questions about each dimension and give you an overall score. The areas you score lowest in correlate with which dimensions are currently most stressful to you. I will include a link down below to do the deep health assessment for yourself.

Now that you have some answers to what direction your stress is coming from mostly, you can start to strategize ways to better manage that stress.

There are lots of great ways to manage stress and recover so that you feel better but all solutions are not created equal and will depend on your sources of stress. Sometimes a hard workout at the gym is just what you need to reduce mental and emotional stress but if you‘re already dealing with a lot of physical and environmental stress, the additional strain on your body and crowded and loud gym may not help you to adequately recharge.

Should You Run, Or Stand and Fight?

When most of us face stressors in our lives, just like our cave-dwelling ancestors,  we turn to one of two solutions to cope with them. We choose to escape from them in ways that allow us to avoid what we’re dealing with, or we can approach and work on handling it directly.

Usually, avoidant techniques feel like the easy short-term solution and sometimes they can be constructive if it allows us to step back and get a better perspective or find a place of safety to start from before we deal with whatever we’re facing.

Ultimately though, the more that we practice and use approach solutions, the stronger our resilience to stress and ability to manage it will be.

Approach and Avoidance Techniques for Stress Management

So how do you practice these approach solutions to your stress? If this isn’t your default method of stress management and you do tend to avoid anything that feels threatening, it will be helpful to start slowly and with anything that’s not too intimidating for you. If mental stress is affecting you because you’ve been putting off having a conversation with your boss about something important that needs to change, this might be much harder if you’re not used to approaching and handling your stressors directly. Maybe in this case, depending on the timeline, you could start by approaching that mental stress through a meditation technique, to get control of your thoughts and even practice visualization of the crucial conversation you need to have. That way you can build up more resilience before tackling those bigger stressors.

We can do this for every type of stress that we face. There are approach and avoidance techniques in every dimension of deep health.

And if you’re trying to do a complete reboot on your system because stress seems to be coming from every direction, you should try floating.

Float therapy is one of my favourite recovery methods and is uniquely effective at reducing stress because how it can help us to recharge in all aspects of our deep health. The quiet and dark comfort of float tanks eliminates environmental and physical stress while also allowing us to go deeply within to approach and work on our mental, emotional, and existential stressors. And the solitude of the float tank is also the perfect reset for social stress. So if you haven’t tried floating before or it’s been a while since your last float and you’re feeling stress build up again, I can’t recommend floating enough.

Find Your Flow