Written by Rachel Pollock
Stress is everywhere, whether it is from work, relationships, the news, adverse experiences, life changes, health problems, responsibilities, or even an unknown origin, it can be extremely challenging to avoid feeling overwhelmed. The urge to accomplish numerous tasks can be overwhelming, but heightened stress levels can trigger a ‘fight or flight’ response, making it difficult to prioritize and begin. Healthy tension and stress can be helpful with focus and achieving goals, but long durations of stress can lead to a breakdown in daily functioning (CornellHealth, 2025). Chronic, unmanageable stress can heavily impact your body’s nervous system. Frequent anxiety can cause the brain to release stress hormones on a regular basis leading to an increase in symptoms that can negatively impact your physical and mental health (Cherney, 2023). Elevated anxiety can present in the form of racing thoughts, irritability, nausea, pain, sleep disturbances, dizziness, disorganization, racing heart, sweating, and many other symptoms. Frequent stress and anxiety can feel debilitating so it is difficult to know where to begin in order to regain a sense of confidence and control over your life. Let’s start with practicing patience.
Practicing patience is one of the key starting points to successfully manage stress and anxiety. This means training our brains to slow down and focus on immediate needs. We can practice patience in a variety of ways:
Let yourself worry
As counterintuitive as this may sound, letting yourself worry can actually make stress more manageable. Patience is giving yourself scheduled time for attention to your stress. Individuals often try to push away their worries or worry about worrying. In order to desensitize stress, it is important to set aside 5-10 minutes of purposeful time to pay attention to anxious thoughts when they arise. Mindful attention to stress involves labeling thoughts and emotions and allowing thoughts to pass by without judgement (Lewis-Duarte, 2021). An example of this is to label thoughts by saying “I feel anxious. I am overwhelmed with everything I need to do today. My stress is making me feel more irritable, tired, and uncomfortable in the present moment.” Give yourself grace by validating the way you feel and letting thoughts pass without trying to change them by saying “It makes sense to feel stressed. I have experienced this feeling before. My stomach often gets upset when I feel this way, but it will pass.” The next steps in letting yourself worry is investigating where you feel worry in your body, potential triggers, and practicing self-compassion (Lewis-Duarte, 2021). You can do this by saying to yourself “My face is starting to feel hot, and my heart is pounding. I just got off of a very loud phone call, and I did not get as much sleep as I am used to last night. I have experienced this before and was able to let it pass. If I pay attention to my body and thoughts, I will pay attention to my thoughts until it passes.”
Use a Variety of Neutral Distractions
Patience is developing a variety of distractions in order to build a sense of calm. You may have a list of coping skills that are your ‘go-to’ in times of stress. Many people like to watch their favorite show, read a book, have a snack, talk to someone, listen to music, exercise, and many others. The truth is that sometimes it won’t work. Practicing patience with yourself is knowing that some days your ‘go-to’ skill that usually works is not helping in the current situation. You might get frustrated with yourself that doing something that usually makes you feel happy is not making you feel happy at the current moment. Using neutral distractions is a great way to manage stress. Your body can start to feel too much pressure trying to go from extremely stressed to feeling happy. This is a huge transition, so try to shoot for feeling neutral to take the pressure off. One example of this is doing a color scavenger hunt. You can do this in any setting where you are experiencing stress by picking one color and saying everything in your mind that you see around you with that color. Another example is using the 5-4-3-2-1 exercise by identifying 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste. These exercises will keep your mind occupied by doing simple tasks to distract from anxious thoughts. After using neutral tasks to desensitize heightened anxiety, you may find it a lot easier to use other reliable coping skills to keep building toward feeling calm.
Regulate Your Body
Patience is taking the time to find ways to slow your nervous system. Deep breathing exercises can help de-escalate heightened stress in the moment but daily deep breathing exercises can also help with training your body to regulate. Start the morning and end the night by breathing in through your nose and slowly blowing out air through your mouth. Challenge yourself to repeat this exercise three times and slow down more each consecutive time. Stress management takes practice and is a daily process. Smell is also heavily associated with memory, so it can be comforting to smell certain foods, perfumes, or other scents that are associated with positive or relaxing memories. Other regulation strategies include meditation, drinking cold water, taking a walk, exercising, and spending time outside. Moving your body can help release anxious energy and tension. It is essential to take a few minutes each day to prioritize a relaxation and body regulation strategy.
Practicing patience is a process! It can take a lot of time to build up distress tolerance and anxiety management. Therapy can help support all the work you do to manage your stress on the outside. Call Counseling Works to see how we can best support you!
References:
Lewis-Duarte, PhD., M. (2021, November 19). RAIN: A Mindful Framework for Addressing
Anxious Thoughts. Anxiety and Depression Association of America.
https://adaa.org/living-with-anxiety/personal-stories/rain-mindful-framework-addressing-
Cherney, K. (2023, November 13). Effects of Anxiety on the Body. Healthline.
https://www.healthline.com/health/anxiety/effects-on-body#how-does-it-feel
Cornell Health. (2025). Manage Stress to Flourish. Cornell Health.
https://health.cornell.edu/resources/health-topics/stress-management
