Parse: Break the situation down into its smallest controllable parts.
Prioritize: Decide which of the parts is easier to control and which is harder to change.
Act: Pick the one that’s easiest to control—preferably something you like and are good at doing. Then take action. It can be as simple as cooking dinner for your family, bringing groceries to a home-bound person, or volunteering at a local shelter. That will help you gain a tiny bit of control, reducing your stress in the process.
And that brings me to a bonus way to take control of your stress response: Do good. Research has shown that altruistic behaviors—lovingkindness and helping others, reduce stress and trigger the brain’s dopamine reward and endorphin anti-pain regions that enhance positive emotions. This hearkens back to the Dalai Lama and Buddhist monks' compassion meditation, and indeed to the core of virtually every one of the world’s religions, captured in the adage “love thy neighbor.” On top of that, doing so gives you a sense of purpose—another important way to reduce stress, and turn bad stress into good.
All this points to another way to get through tough times that are out of your control: find meaning. Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who survived a Nazi concentration camp during WWII, attributed his resilience and strength to finding meaning. Millions of copies of his book Man’s Search for Meaning have been sold worldwide since he first published it in 1946.
Perhaps, then, if each of us finds meaning in our own lives and does good through it by helping others in our own small world, together we will make the larger world a better place and balance out the negative with the positive, the bad with the good.
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