Mindful Practice Stress-Reacting vs. Responding Reflect notice stress reaction patterns experienced body/breath/feelings/thoughts Mindful Practice supports a person move reactive mode responsive mode

Stress-reacting vs. responding:

The advantages of mindful practice in everyday life

Every day, for every person, contains a certain amount of stress, both positive and negative. When I am in a stressful situation, such as when I am in a rush and am trapped behind someone driving very slowly or I feel that someone is not listening to me (such as when I am coaching a student during a critical moment of a game), I immediately feel myself tense up. As a way of displacing the tension, I often find myself gritting and grinding my teeth, clenching my toes and gripping my palm with my fingernails. My face looks tense and I furrow my brow. My breathing becomes quick and shallow. If I am in a nerve-wracking situation such as if I am late to a meeting, I may feel my heart pounding.

My thoughts tend to be very focused and very directed on the moment. On one hand, this can be a relatively useful aspect of stress: stress can be very motivational in getting someone out of a risky or tight situation. I find that my reflexes are sharper when I am stressed, such as when I am playing a game. On the other hand, it is much easier to become aggressive and angry when under duress, which is why entering 'flight or fight' mode is not necessarily the best...

Stress is all about reacting to something in the moment, often reflexively and without thought. Stress is what enables us to hit a ball quickly, but when we are under too much stress we can strike out at other people.
Another problem with stress is that our feelings tend to be amplified. For example, when we are stressed and someone asks us a question, it is easy to feel defensive. When I am running and inevitably people yell insults at me from their cars, I feel a greater surge of anger than I would if I were sitting by the side of the road having a picnic. My stress level is high because I am engaged in an intense physical activity.

Mindful practice encourages us to take a breath and to have more rational and measured responses to our environment. Mindful practice can be formal meditation or it can simply be taking a deep breath. Above all, it demands that we pause and think about the thought patterns flitting through our heads rather than accept them as objective reality. When I am engaged in mindful practice, I am able to consciously relax the tension in my body, take deeper breaths, and bring my heart rate and blood pressure down. I am less tense and sometimes that can also make me more effective in realizing my objective, even when I am engaged in physical activity, as I am not wasting precious energy.

Mindful practice also makes me more objective about my…