Ask any techie and they will tell you they are no stranger to the topic of stress. As rewarding as tech careers are, they can also come with new challenges and obstacles that you have to navigate and overcome every day. To help combat these stressors, our Data Program Manager, Ryan O’Connell spoke to a group of Seekers at NSS to help them not only understand stress, but also ways to manage it!
Ryan O’Connell has spent the past 13 years learning different techniques to manage his own stress and now helps others understand stress and use mindfulness and meditation to help combat it. “I had meditated in the past and found it useful. And so I thought, ‘I'll try to make a habit out of this’,” he shares. “As that habit formed, I found it to be very useful for me and started attending meditation retreats.” Since then, Ryan has trained in and taught meditation from Port au Prince, Haiti, to the Nashville Public Library and other meditation centers.
Everyone experiences stress to some degree, however, the way we respond to stress makes a big difference to our overall well-being. Stress affects both the mind and the body. While a little bit of stress is good and can help us perform daily activities, too much stress can cause physical and mental health problems. Let’s start by breaking down what stress actually is so that we can begin to understand how to combat it in our daily lives.
According to the World Health Organization’s definition, “stress is a state of worry or mental tension caused by a difficult situation. It's a natural human response that prompts us to address challenges and threats in our lives.” But Ryan presents some different perspectives derived from ancient teachings about stress to give us a better, holistic understanding of stress.
Similar to the more modern perspective, everybody experiences stress.
It is helpful to understand that stress is often caused by wanting circumstances in our life to be different than they are in the present moment. For example, being caught in traffic is often stressful, but much of the distress of being caught in traffic comes from the subtle but persistent notion that one should not be caught in traffic.
Ryan suggests that when you begin to see stress in your field of experience, try asking yourself “is there some kind of wanting in my mind?” Is the idea “if your experience was somehow different, it would somehow be better,” present right now?
Then examine if that thought or “want” is true. If you find there's no value in the tension you’re experiencing from this “want”, and yet its presence persists, you can begin to ask the question “is there something I can do to start to let go of that idea of wanting?”
Stress is subdued through ethical actions, wise perspectives, and meditation. Actions such as lying, cheating and stealing, are probably going to be creating conditions that are stress inducing. Whereas wise perspectives that allow us to recognize what can be controlled and what needs to be let go of can help to subdue stressful situations, especially through meditation and other mindful practices.
Ryan believes what separates general advice on coping with stress from ideas that promote well-being and human flourishing, are our abilities to build habits around these ideas and practices. Here are some ways to cope with stress that you can build habits around.
Physical Antidotes
Mental Antidotes
Relational Antidotes
While there’s no way to do everything perfectly across all three of the lists above, find something that resonates with you and begin to cultivate a habit.
“In my experience, well-being is akin to a bank account,” Ryan describes. “If I'm making regular deposits in the bank, then I've got some resources available to me when stressful situations arise. And if I'm not making those regular deposits, then I'm not going to have as much of a bank of well-being to pull from when something comes up that's difficult.”
"All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time." -James Clear, Atomic Habits
Knowing what habit to start that builds up your reservoir of well-being, coupled with knowing the best approach to cultivating habits has helped Ryan enhance his own human flourishing over a longer period of time. Here’s some tips to forming healthy habits:
Identify the habit you want to form
The first step is to identify the habit you want to form. Be specific and clear about what the habit is and how it will benefit you.
Start small
Start with a small habit that you can easily achieve. This will help you build momentum and create a sense of accomplishment, which will motivate you to continue with other healthy habits!
Be patient and persistent
Remember that forming a habit takes time and effort. Be patient with yourself while you stay committed to building the habit and celebrate small milestones and accomplishments.
Get support
Surround yourself with people who support your habit-forming goals. This could be a friend, family member, or a community of like-minded individuals!
Want to build a habit of mindfulness?
Throughout the session, Ryan led the group in various meditation exercises connecting movement, breathing, and sound in order to calm nerves.
“These are practices that are useful when we're more overwhelmed with stress,” he explains. “Connecting breath and movement activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which sort of allows us to calm down and rest. We're going to daisy chain all these exercises together as we go along so that at the end of this, we will have a full practice.”
General Instructions:
Please only raise your arms as high as is comfortable.
Refinements:
Now sit here for a moment and see if anything has changed in your experience. Take this moment to examine if that breathing, movement and sound exercise caused any shift in your state of being. Do you feel a little more calm? (Hopefully it feels less cluttered, especially in your head and chest.)
“Connecting breath and movement gives us the opportunity to focus not just the mind but the body and activity in it. It sort of brings us down to a more steady state.” Ryan O’Connell
Ryan then led the group in a body scan exercise. Below is an a Meditation guide for a quick Body Scan exercise by Tara Brach
The point of this meditation is not to fully concentrate on the breath, but to use your breath as a “device” to notice when we become distracted. This is an opportunity to look directly at what we are thinking about, and sort of the nature of thought itself.
“In my experience of the collective experience of folks who do this, that in witnessing the nature of thought, it transforms our relationship to it and it breaks the enchantment with the kind of habitual thinking that tends to drive stress and difficulty,” Ryan shares.
General Instructions:
We hope that building healthy habits and practicing mindfulness can help you the next time your code returns the same error for the 50th time! And remember to lean on your team and NSS community. We’re all in this together!