coping strategies for stress: 5 ways to stress better

Is stress taking a toll on your mental or physical well-being? I’ve got good and bad news.

The bad news is that stress is unavoidable (more on that later). In fact, 46% of Canadians reported “feeling an increased sensitivity to stress” in 2022 compared to before the pandemic, according to a TELUS Health study.  

The good news is that you can learn effective coping strategies for stress to help you stress better. These strategies are all about nurturing resilience so that the next time a stressful event occurs in your life, you’ll be able to navigate it with less disruption to your health and happiness. 

Here’s a sneak peek at the five ways to cope with stress:

• Remember that stress is unavoidable

• Learn to calm your nervous system

• Stop multitasking in the workplace and at home

• Don’t crank the volume on mental stress

• Learn to respond instead of react

Let’s dive into how to put these healthy coping mechanisms for stress to work. 

5 coping strategies for stress that you can try today

1. Remember that stress is unavoidable

Life is full of constant change — sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. This means that stress is inevitable and no one in the world is able to escape it, regardless of their circumstances.

You might think that someone who is retired, independently wealthy, or who has a different job or family situation than you (basically someone without your same set of problems) isn’t stressed. This is simply not true. Everyone experiences stress in their lives.

One of the best ways to cope with stress is to try to accept the stressful circumstances as well as you can. Fighting reality will only create more stress. Remember that nothing in life is permanent, including the negative situation you’re facing right now.

2. Learn to calm your nervous system

Tapping into mindfulness based stress reduction techniques is a quick and easy way to start feeling better in the moment. It’s as simple as learning a one-minute breathing exercise.

Why this approach? Breath is the back door to affecting your nervous system. And, your nervous system impacts your state of mind. If you’re stressed, you’re more likely to be reactive, irritable, frustrated, and overwhelmed. In contrast, when your nervous system is relaxed, your mind will be relaxed, too. Your thoughts will be more hopeful and problems will feel solvable as opposed to insurmountable.

You can try a one-minute breathing exercise by downloading an app like Insight Timer. This can provide a much-needed reset when you’re feeling stressed and can change your physiological state. (PS: search “Trish Tutton” on the Insight Timer app to find some free guided meditations from yours truly).

3. Stop multitasking in the workplace and at home

Multitasking might make you feel like you’re operating with high efficiency (read: getting sh*t done), but one of the foremost studies on the topic shows that it actually makes you 40% less productive than if you focused on a single task at a time.

Even worse than lost productivity? Multitasking can majorly stress you out, according to David Meyer, PhD, a professor of psychology, cognition and perception at the University of Michigan.

“Multitasking is especially stressful when the tasks are important, as they often are on the job,” says Meyer. “The brain responds to impossible demands by pumping out adrenaline and other stress hormones that put a person on edge.”

My advice? Ditch multitasking for one of the more underrated but powerful coping strategies for stress: time boxing. This simply means setting an amount of time that you’ll focus solely on one task. It can increase productivity and decrease stress, which is a win-win in my books.

4. Don’t crank the volume on mental stress

You now know that stress is unavoidable. Just like when you turn on the radio and your least favourite song blasts from the speaker, sometimes in life things won’t go your way. The problem is that as humans, we have a habit of cranking the volume on stressful situations.

We dwell on the parts of life that are unsatisfying, we worry about the future, and we ruminate on our stress. This is like turning up the volume on pain. Instead, we can use mindfulness based stress reduction techniques to tune into the present moment so that we don’t exacerbate the inevitably painful parts of life.

Here’s how this looks in action. Let’s say you have to lead a team meeting tomorrow and you hate speaking in front of others. While the situation is not ideal, you have a choice in how you handle the circumstances. 

You can lay in bed the night before and let your mind repeat a scene where you mess up, get embarrassed, disappoint your boss, and get fired. Or, you can lay in bed and intentionally take note of the warmth of the bed, the soft pillows, your breath, and turn down the volume on the catastrophe. (Hint: a one-minute breathing exercise can be especially useful here).

5. Learn to respond instead of react

This last point is the result of stressing better, and it’s all about nurturing resilience. Eventually, when you master the four coping strategies for stress that we’ve just walked through, you’ll be able to respond to stressors vs. react to them.

A client of mine used to think about stress like pre-heating an oven — except she used the term “pre-irritated.” When you’re pre-irritated, any little benign thing can happen, like spilling your coffee, and you’ll react as if it’s the worst case scenario. In contrast, when you stress better, you respond to things happening in your life more appropriately and less reactively. 

Experience more calm and clarity

While these healthy coping mechanisms for stress can’t fix all of your problems, they will help you experience more calm and clarity as you manage the ups and downs of life.

Looking for more coping strategies for stress?

Download my free guide, One Minute to Calm, where I share five methods that can help you create a feeling of calm in one minute or less, even when you’re at work...