The Stress Countdown Technique

You may have noticed that life can be quite stressful at times.

I can certainly get stressed, but sometimes it can be difficult to tell whether I am or not because of a life of being a bloke!

I’ve had decades of cultural conditioning to make sure that I’m not too aware of many of my feelings: being told “Don’t be a baby”, or “Man up”, etc doesn’t exactly encourage sensitive exploration of our inner world. I think I’m getting better, but I still have a few blank spots.

Unfortunately, not being fully aware of some of the things that are going on inside me can be problematic.

For example: I don’t often know how stressed I am until it is quite severe.

Sometimes, the first I know of being stressed is when Karen, my much better half, notices that I’m being snappy or grumpy.

Having someone else’s distress as a measure of my own stress is neither ideal, or fair, so I started looking for a way of assessing my own level of stress so I could do something about it before I got snappy or grumpy.

This is my solution to that problem.

The Process

The approach relies on your unconscious mind’s ability to know what’s really going on, even if your conscious mind is clueless (a common occurrence for me).

Note: In this process I am using Intention Tapping created by Steve Wells rather than EFT/tapping (which would work, but be more laborious).

Step 0: Read through the instructions before you try this because Step 1 won’t make much sense if you don’t.

Step 1: Ask your unconscious mind to let you know when you recognise your level of stress ( you will probably only need to do this once).

Step 2: Ask yourself “What is my level of stress?” then count backwards slowly from 10, 9, 8, 7,6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Step 3: When you get to the number that resonates with you, you will have an idea how strong your stress level is. (Those of you from the EFT world will recognise this as a way to access your SUDs level).

Step 4: Start tapping, using “I release all my emotional attachments to everything that is causing me stress”. Follow whatever thoughts, feelings, memories, images or fantasies show up as you tap and release all of them in the usual way.

Step 5: Ask yourself, “What is my level of stress now? And repeat the countdown (the stress level should be lowered).

Step 6: Repeat the process until the stress level is at, or close to, zero.

I’ve been using this process for a while and have found it very useful. It has several advantages:

• I don’t have to know with any clarity that I am stressed, checking my stress level is quick and easy. I use this as a daily practice just to improve my well-being.
• I can use it as part of my daily routine to ease my stress levels over time.
• I don’t have to know exactly what I am stressed about before I start. However, I usually get to find out what it is all about during the tapping.
• I don’t need to rely on aggravating someone else to know that I’m stressed. This is an advantage for them as well.

This approach has proved useful with some other feelings.

I was surprised to find how overwhelmed I was especially when I was procrastinating, and sometimes I’ve found low levels of fear underneath worry that responded to this approach (all you need to do is change the question at the start of the process)

You might like to try this process for yourself and let me know how it goes.

By the way, I suspect this approach may even be of some use to people who aren’t blokes!

UPDATE: When Karen proofread this article for me she commented that I hadn’t been snappy for quite a while, so something’s working!

Image by motionstock from Pixabay