In a sense, during this mental rehearsal you are giving yourself "meta-instructions": "If I feel tense or think a stressful thought, then I will actively relax myself." The response is fast. In a tense situation you don't always have the wherewithal to stop, observe, and decide to relax. With mental rehearsal you can speed up the relaxation response time.
What to Practice
Looking back at the sample instructions for managing stress, you see there are four types of antecedents: tension in the muscles, stress thoughts, times you did not manage stress as successfully as you wanted to, and those in which you anticipate experiencing stress. Mentally practice managing stress in the presence of each of these antecedents.
There are two general types of mental rehearsals: mastery practice and coping practice. Mastery practice is essentially what comes to mind when you think of positive thinking: "I am a good salesperson" and "I am getting better and better" are examples of mastery practice. Coping practice, however, is more effective in managing stress, Whenever you learn a new skill, you invariably experience frustration and setbacks in the beginning. Prepare yourself for this by mentally rehearsing what you will say to yourself and what you will do when this happens.
When you first begin to practice, you may find it helpful to write down your instructions. Pick a specific situation in which you frequently experience stress. (For example, if you often experience tension in your forehead, the antecedent would be "tense forehead.") Now write down exactly how you will tell yourself to relax. This instruction is the behavior you'll deliberately enact when you notice the tense forehead (antecedent); the pleasure of relaxation will be the positive consequence.
By deliberately practicing this sequence, you will learn that a tense forehead is an antecedent or a signal to relax. Imagine that you are a thermostat. When your early detection system senses tension in your forehead, your stress management system responds by instructing you to relax your forehead muscles, thereby lowering the tension level. To learn to do this, follow the small-step procedure. First, make sure you learn the instructions themselves. If you skip this step, you may end up ad-libbing and become even more tense. Then deliberately tense your forehead and use the instructions so that you can learn the behavioral sequence. Finally, practice in real life.
To practice coping with stress that has gotten out of control, select a past situation in which this has happened. Write down the instruction you would have liked to have given yourself at the time, then begin to relive the situation in your mind's eye and practice managing stress. Go easy on yourself. Begin with mildly stressful scenarios, and shape your ability to manage stress in small steps. As you develop skill, increase the stressfulness of the rehearsal scenarios.
When to Practice
The end of your relaxation exercise session is the best time to do your mental practice. Don't rush yourself-begin your fantasy work only after you have learned to achieve a deep level of relaxation. When you're relaxed, it is easier to focus your attention, and you become more suggestible. Practicing while completely relaxed becomes a mildly hypnotic suggestion.
Follow the same tensing and relaxing process you used when you learned to relax muscles. Allow yourself to experience a mild stress-producing scenario. Then mentally practice coping with it. For example, deliberately tense your neck muscles while picturing yourself having trouble closing a sale, then mentally hear your self-instructions while you relax your neck muscles. Or think of one of your habitual stress-producing thoughts while picturing yourself trapped in a traffic jam, then hear your self-instructions and see yourself relaxing in your car. When you can do this easily during your home sessions, slowly extend your mental rehearsals into your daily life. Mentally rehearse while commuting, when you're waiting on "hold" or riding the elevator, or during a solitary lunch. Consider taking relaxation breaks and skipping the coffee: Close your office door, turn off the lights, close your eyes, relax all your muscles, and enjoy the relaxation at the same time that you make stress management a natural part of your daily life.
The final step is actually confronting the stress trigger. Don't overdo it; set yourself up to succeed. Begin practicing stress management in situations that are mildly stressful. And remember, not all tension is bad: In a real-life situation, tension alerts us to dangers and prepares us to deal with the situation. The goal is to control tension, not to eliminate it entirely. You are learning to manage your stress. When it threatens to get out of control, actively reduce it to a manage able level. Controlled tension can be used to help you. It can be used as a motivator that prods you through projects you don't like. Debilitating tension interferes with your performance.
To get results, you need to master the skills at each step. So, when thinking of the parable of the tortoise and the hare, become the tortoise. It takes consistent and systematic effort: Don't race through the training, but master each step before going on to the next. Slow down and relax!
Controlling Mental Torture and Other Stress-Producing Fantasies
At one time or another, all of us inflict mental anguish upon ourselves. We punish ourselves with nagging admonitions to improve, berate ourselves with guilty thoughts, and endlessly replay scenarios in which we come out the loser. These are, of course, our own thoughts and images, yet they seem to perform independently and to take on an existence of their own. Just as you can learn to control the tension in your muscles, you can control mental tension by learning to shut out stress-producing thought processes. The procedure is relatively simple, but learning to use it once again requires consistent effort.
The basic principle is obvious. Think of something relaxing. Despite the sophistication and complexity of our brains, few of us can think of more than one thing during a particular moment. This means that while we are mentally abusing ourselves, we cannot focus our attention on important decisions or on more creative and productive thinking. It also means that if we deliberately engage in relaxing and pleasurable fantasies, we close out our destructive, nagging thoughts. Learning to control what you think begins with identifying what you enjoy thinking about, practicing these thoughts, and then using them when you want to relax your mind.
Learning to Use Your Fantasies
Until recently, fantasizing has been dismissed as useless day dreaming. With the discovery of the right-left brain dichotomy, however, interest in right-brain activities such as fantasizing became legitimate. There is an impressive body of research into the functions of mental imagery. One consistent finding shows that mental practice can often substitute for actual physical practice of a skill! In other words, scientific experiments have revealed that if you imagine yourself skiing well your performance on the slopes is likely to improve. By the same token, when you replay failure experiences in your mind, you are actually practicing and learning behavior you probably prefer to forget. The important point is that mental rehearsal has a direct impact on your performance.
Like analytic thinking, mental imagery can be developed through specific exercises. But more often than not, this form of cognitive development has been ignored or downgraded. If this has happened to you, then you will need to teach yourself. Not only will this ability prove helpful for stress management, but it will increase creativity and problem solving as well as your enjoyment of many aspects of life. The first step in imagery training is to be an active participant in your mental scenarios. A simple experiment will help you understand what to do. Close your eyes and imagine the following scene for 15 seconds: You are on a blanket at the beach on a beautiful summer day. What did you see? Probably the ocean in front of you. But did you add details to make the scene as vivid and as real as possible? What color was your towel? Who else was on the beach? Were there clouds in the sky? Did you hear the waves hitting the beach or the seagulls screeching? Did you feel the heat of the sun and the hot sand on your skin or smell the salt in the air?
Being an active participant means adding enough details to en gage all your senses. Close your eyes and imagine the beach scene again, but this time experience the scene with all your senses. You may notice that one sense is more real than the others. This merely means that you have developed that mode of imagery more than the others. Did you notice the difference the second time? Details bring the scene to life and make it easier to focus all your attention. Here are some examples of practice scenes you can use to develop each imagery mode.
- You are sitting in a meadow on a beautiful day. See the trees, grass, flowers, bugs, and sky.
- You are making lemonade. Smell and taste a cut lemon.
- You are playing catch with a friend. Feel the movement in your muscles as you catch the ball and throw it back.
- You are skating at a public rink. Hear the sound of the skaters and of the children laughing. Feel yourself glide around the rink and brush against the other skaters. See the other skaters.
Managing Anxiety and Fear
Unmanaged fear can interfere with performance and career advancement. Most of us retreat rather than confront fear, and in so doing give it more power. Yet it is difficult to do otherwise: Just thinking about a fearful confrontation is frightening, but unmanaged fear is constricting. It can interfere with and at times even prevent performance and career advancement.
Bill, for example, turned down a unique and attractive promotion. Why? Because as Western Regional Director, he would have to fly regularly to Hawaii, Japan, and the Philippines. Bill was afraid of flying-he experienced anxiety at the mere thought of a flight. Bill’s unmanaged fear took precedence in his decision. Avoidance of flying was more important than the substantial salary increase, the opportunities for travel, and the increase in responsibility and prestige he would have gotten with the promotion.
Anxiety and fear are learned respondent behaviors that occur in direct response to some stimulus. Through a process of pairing or classical conditioning, the person learns to react anxiously to a formerly neutral stimulus. It is important to realize that anxiety is learned, because that means it can be unlearned as well.
Consider this representation of the genesis of the fear of flying:
Anxiety is learned through a process of association in which a neutral stimulus is paired with an aversive one. The aversive stimulus can be anything. With flying it might be an actual frightening experience in the air, or reading or hearing about air disasters, or taking a trip to an unpleasant place, or having to sit in flight next to someone whom you wish you could have avoided. The aversive stimulus can be anything that causes you to worry or to feel anxious. When you fly through a storm, for example, any stimulus present can become associated with the anxiety evoked by the rough flight. Merely being in a plane, thinking about the plane, and seeing the interior of the plane can later create anxiety during routine flights.
This process is insidious because of higher-order conditioning: Once a person, a thought, a place, an activity, or any stimulus that is not inherently frightening assumes stimulus control or the power to evoke anxiety, it also becomes capable of infecting other neutral stimuli that are present when you become anxious.
This model illustrates the way in which fear becomes contagious. A person who is afraid of flying will experience anxiety on routine flights, and any stimulus present during the flight can then become associated with flying and will assume the power to evoke anxiety.
For instance, Bill, who turned down the promotion, still had to fly occasionally. One time he and the sales manager. Murphy, flew to Los Angeles to participate in critical planning for overseas marketing of a filtration system. Before the trip Bill had had good rapport with Murphy, and except for Bill’s intense anxiety, the flight was uneventful. After that, however. Bill noticed he felt mildly apprehensive around Murphy. It didn't occur to him that it was a hangover from the flight across the country. Rather, he began scrutinizing Murphy, looking for something to explain his anxiety. Of course, he discovered lots of things about Murphy that he found irritating: the way Murphy dressed, the way he interrupted, the way he laughed. Bill noticed something else, too-he lost interest in marketing the filtration system. Working on anything related to it became an effort, and as an explanation for his negative reaction, he began to look for flaws and shortcomings in the project itself. It never occurred to Bill that this negative reaction began with the anxiety from the flight that became associated with Murphy and the project.
Fear is insidious in another respect-it promotes avoidance behavior. Turning off? Anxiety is negatively reinforcing. Whatever we do to avoid or turn off anxiety, we are likely to do again. So you can see that anxiety becomes a trap; If you grit your teeth and confront it, the anxiety you experience may intensify your fear as well as infect any neutral stimulus that may be present. And if you try to avoid it, you insulate the fear and teach yourself a lot of counterproductive avoidance behaviors.
