The REACT Method: Instant Stress Relief

As a leader you don't stop being human, but you do gain a certain spotlight on you for how you handle stress. You have a slightly greater need to show that you handle it with grace; this provides a cue to your team that makes all the difference in their own responses and to their focus on the task(s) at hand.

It is important to understand that you should not dismiss stress as irrelevant, because this will only make it worse, or it will start affecting your health in other ways (heart, weight, and so on). You can learn some ways to dispel stress when it is heavily upon you and your team. 

You don’t get to choose when emotions happen or how strong they are. You often have to weather the strongest ones. Allow them to do their thing without panicking.

We over-react to everything. Stress is a part of our natural design. Imagine your mind is a farm, planted with crops and seeds in various locations. These are your thoughts and plans, your character as you grow. You tend to them as a farmer would. All plants need sunshine and rain to properly grow. Your emotions are a bit like sunshine and rain: they are useful, in measured amounts. Too much of one or the other can be damaging, but just like sunshine and rain, you don't get much of a choice as to how much you get. When you fight your emotions, it's like trying to fight the weather: it makes no sense.

So imagine stressful emotions to be a storm cloud that is heading for your farm. The cloud is approaching your farm at great speed. It might destroy all your plants! How do you prepare for such an amount of rain all at once? 

Do the cloud a great favour: don’t go outside trying to fight it off. You will achieve nothing except muddying the fields. Accept that it’s stormy for a while even if you don’t like it. Every farm needs rain: sometimes rain comes in a storm. Just hold fast and it passes.

• Reduce your breathing rate. Slow, steady breaths, at least 5 seconds, ideally 10, deep in and out. Directly calms the nerves after a minute or so.
• Elaborate on the emotion: just name it. Emotions are of different types, just like clouds Name it. Say to yourself: ‘this is anger’, or ‘this is anxiety’. 
• Accept the presence of the emotion. You don’t need to fight it, and you don’t have to agree with it either. It will pass. Just accept that it is there for a while. 
• Center It. Go to your Center. Detach from the emotion and seek guidance on how to behave from your finest self- to your Codes of Conduct (Truths and Principles)
• Thank. Be thankful that you have used the method, regardless of it it works or not. You are learning to make peace with yourself. Reflect later on how all emotions have some kind of useful message in their origin.

R-E-A-C-T. The storm passes. All the rain is about to fall and drain away. Move on. Get on with what you were doing before the emotion came to disturb you. 

Storm-clouds can have good or bad effects, just like your Ego: it depends how you are prepared to just let the waves pass. The more you welcome it, the better you will be at letting it diffuse away. Be patient with yourself.

Be a good host to your emotions; they are like neighbours coming in to warn you about something. Be polite and accepting of them. Allow them to stay even if they are unwelcome or irritating. They won’t leave until they feel heard, so hear them. If you keep arguing with them, they will only just stay longer. 

So much unnecessary human mental suffering comes from a sense of being oppressed by our own emotions. 

When you simply accept the emotions, you’re showing meta-cognition- thinking about your own mind- which in turn makes you far more powerful over yourself. You get to see the Ego for what it is: just a signalling system that you could respond to in any way that you like. You recognise that you have a choice.

Mental illness

All negative emotions are temporary, and in 99% of cases they get bored, tired and drained, and leave you if you let them just be. 

Occasionally they don’t go. If they linger and seem unappeasable, or if your thoughts become detached from reality, and this is constant, uninterrupted, for longer than 4 weeks, you must consider if you are becoming mentally ill. Seek advice and consultation from a doctor. If you spot this in someone else, help them. It is a simple twist of fortune, a change in health. You would do the same if you had heart or skin trouble. Get external help when you are ill, in body or in mind. 

Clinical depression is when the Ego is totally beaten, consuming the rest of the mind. The person is convinced of hopelessness; nothing convinces them otherwise, and it is impossible to cheer up beyond a few minutes. The person seems to have lost all perspective on their problems, for weeks on end.

Paranoid illness happens when a person believes their life is being sabotaged in some sinister way. It typically happens after some negative event, and can be accompanied by hearing voices or other strange phenomena. The Ego is scrabbling around trying to make sense of feelings and thoughts that seem totally outlandish. People with this problem are tormented and in pain; they need you to recognise it and get them professional medical help.

Anxiety disorder is when the Ego takes over, thoroughly convincing a person that something terrible is going to happen in the imminent future. Again, it sets in slowly, over a period of weeks. It tends to change as time passes, sometimes into fears of poor health, to fears of death or embarrassment, social decline and so on. 

All mental illnesses merit the same attention and care as any other illness, perhaps even more. Without the mind behaving functionally, we find it difficult to deal with so many other things. That doesn’t mean that mental illness is incompatible with happiness or fulfilment though. Just like other illnesses, long term or intermittent mental illness can be dealt with judiciously and proactively, with every reason to pursue and develop other strengths in parallel to or in between phases of illness, as much as possible. We have one life, and our greatest achievements are sometimes born out of our understanding and victory over difficulty.