Here are 6 evidence-based strategies to help you complete your stress cycle:

1. Breathing

Deep, slow breaths down-regulate the stress response, especially when the exhalation is long and slow and goes all the way to the end of the breath so your belly contracts. Breathing is most effective when your stress isn’t that high or when you just need to siphon off the very worst of the stress so you can get through a difficult situation.

A simple, practical exercise is to breathe in to a slow count of 5, hold that breath for 5, then exhale for a slow count of 10, and pause for another count of 5. Do that three times — for one minute and 15 seconds of breathing — and then see how you feel.

Casual but friendly social interaction is the first external sign that the world is a safe place.

2. Positive social interaction

Casual but friendly social interaction is an external sign that the world is a safe place. People with more acquaintances are happier. Just go buy a cup of coffee and say “Nice day” to the barista or compliment another customer’s earrings. Reassure your brain that the world is a safe, sane place, and not all people suck. It helps!

3. Laughter

Laughing together, and even just reminiscing about the times we’ve laughed together, increases relationship satisfaction. We mean belly laughs — deep, impolite, helpless laughter. When we laugh, says neuroscientist Sophie Scott, we use an “ancient evolutionary system that mammals have evolved to make and maintain social bonds and regulate emotions.”

A warm hug in a safe and trusting context can do as much to help your body feel like it has escaped a threat as jogging, and it’s a heck of a lot less sweaty.

4. Affection

Sometimes, a deeper connection with a loving presence is called for. Most often, this comes from a loving and beloved person who likes, respects and trusts you, whom you like, respect and trust. It doesn’t have to be physical affection (though physical affection is great). A warm hug in a safe and trusting context can do as much to help your body feel like it has escaped a threat as jogging a couple of miles, and it’s a heck of a lot less sweaty.

One example of affection is the “six- second kiss” advice from relationship researcher John Gottman. Every day, he suggests, kiss your partner for six seconds. There’s a reason behind the timing: Six seconds is too long to kiss someone you resent or dislike, and it’s far too long to kiss someone with whom you feel unsafe. Kissing for six seconds requires that you stop and deliberately notice you like this person, you trust them and you feel affection for them. By noticing those things, the kiss tells your body that you are safe with your tribe.

Another example: Hug someone you love and trust for 20 full seconds, while both of you are standing over your own centers of balance. Research suggests this kind of hug can change your hormones, lower your blood pressure and heart rate, and improve mood. It doesn’t have to be precisely 20 seconds. What matters is you feel the stress easing, or what therapist Suzanne Iasenza describes as “hugging until relaxed.”

Of course, affection doesn’t stop with other human beings. Just petting a cat or dog for a few minutes can help complete the cycle too.

5. A big ol’ cry

Have you had the experience of just barely making it inside your home — or bedroom — before you slam the door behind you and burst into tears for 10 minutes? Then you wipe your nose, sigh a big sigh and feel relieved from the weight of whatever made you cry? You may not have changed the situation that caused the stress, but you completed the cycle.

Have a favorite tearjerker movie that makes you cry every time? Going through that emotion with the characters allows your body to go through it, too.

You might experience completing the stress cycle as a shift in mood or mental state or physical tension, as you breathe more deeply and your thoughts relax.

6. Creative expression

Engaging in creative activities today leads to more energy, excitement, and enthusiasm tomorrow. Like sports, the arts — including painting, sculpture, music, theater and storytelling in all forms — create a context that tolerates and even encourages big emotions. Arts of all kinds give us the chance to celebrate and move through our big emotions.

P.S.: How do you know you’ve completed the cycle?

It’s like knowing when you’re full after a meal or like knowing when you’ve had an orgasm — your body tells you. You might experience it as a shift in mood or mental state or physical tension, as you breathe more deeply and your thoughts relax.

It’s easier for some people to recognize than others. For some people, it’s as obvious as knowing that they’re breathing. That’s how it is for Emily. Long before she knew about the science, she knew that when she felt stressed and tense and terrible, she could go for a runor for a bike ride and at the end of it she would feel better.  She has always been able to feel it intuitively, that shift inside her body.

Don’t worry if you’re not sure you can recognize when you’ve completed the cycle. Especially if you’ve spent a lot of years — like, your whole life, maybe — holding on to your worry or anger, you’ve probably got a whole lot of accumulated stress response cycles spinning their engines, so it’s going to take a while before you get through the backlog.

All you need to do is recognize that you feel incrementally better than you felt before you started. You can notice that something in your body has changed, shifted in the direction of peace.

“If I was at an eight on the stress scale when I started, I’m at a four now,” you can say. And that’s pretty great.

Excerpted from the book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Copyright © 2019 by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Used by permission of Ballantine, an imprint of Random House Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

References: https://ideas.ted.com/emotionally-exhausted-burnout-completing-stress-response-cycle/?fbclid=IwAR0o6TCws1QShF3dmyrrHZ2lNOZI_Zat9uB61TLtLs18uROp-vjz-NwkNKk

Technology is like oxygen— a necessary component of children’s life. Blogging is a fairly simple and helpful support for writing instruction. With technology, there is a blending of new ways of thinking about the teaching of writing, beyond the paper and pencil forms of writing instruction of the past, allowing for integration of information, communication, and technology literacy (Partnership for 21st-Century Skills, 2009). Moreover, blogs connect the literacies of the home to school. Last but not least, integrating blogging into classroom writing instruction can engage students and motivate them to participate more fully in the writing process.

Reference: Lacina, J., & Griffith, R. (2012). Blogging as a Means of Crafting Writing. The Reading Teacher, 66(4), 316–320. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.01128

1. Use your to-do list to boost your confidence 

To build confidence for the big goals, you first need to focus on the tiny ones, and that starts with the actions you take every day. After Hamden makes her daily to-do list, she looks at the list and asks herself,  “What is the one thing on here that I want to do the least?”

She says, “I think a tint bit about why, and then I make myself do it.” Quite often, she finds the task is one that — deep down — she is unsure how to do or is worried she might fail at. As she explains, “Confidence gets built when you try something new that’s a little scary, and you succeed and then you do it again and again. You have to get into a process of being brave.”  Your reluctance or fear is usually a signal that you care.

When you notice yourself avoiding something, ask yourself what you’re scared of and consider what would happen if you failed. You’d be disappointed, of course, if things go as badly, but what would the actual cost be to you?

“I used to do this all the time when I was a student and taking exams,” says Hamden. “I would be like, ‘No matter what happens, I’m still going to be alive at the end of this.’ A lot of the negative downsides are frequently in our heads.”

2. Separate your value from your work

When you fail, one knee-jerk reaction is to apply that failure to your overall worth, thinking, “If no one buys my pitch/product/idea, then it, and I, must not be very good.”

But that thinking — in addition to making you feel lousy — causes you to miss out on some valuable feedback that can help you move forward. “I think the point of doing something is being able to ask afterwards: ‘What did you learn from it?’” says Hamden. “You learn more when things don’t go correctly.”

In the disappointing weeks after FIREBall’s failed launch, Hamden took time off, and she made a point of not dwelling on any one feeling or turning her defeat into a referendum about her as a person. “You are valuable because you exist,” she says. “I think it’s really important to avoid those feelings of guilt or shame — feeling guilty about something is a way to make sure you never pick it up again.” Remind yourself: Your work is just something you do — and yes, it is an important part of your life — but it’s not a reflection of your value as a person.

3. Develop — and depend on — a mutual support group 

Developed by writers and best friends Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, who coauthored the recent book Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close, the concept of Shine Theory is, as Sow and Friedman put it, “an investment, over the long term, in helping someone be their best self — and relying on their help in return [to do the same].” Shine Theory can apply to all your relationships, not just your personal friendships.

The more you shine, the more you light up everyone around you. While it can sometimes feel strange to share your  accomplishments for fear of coming across as a braggart, Shine Theory is about leaning into the idea of mutual abundance and how someone else’s success doesn’t take away your own. In fact, you get a boost.

Building your own support group can also help you get through moments of self-doubt or failure. To find these relationships, Hamden advocates having open conversations in which you plainly state what you need.

“When you have a friendship where you can say, ‘I’m feeling really down, can I talk to you?’ or ‘I’m really thrilled and want to celebrate,’” then your failures and successes don’t have to stop and start with you,” she explains. “If you feel like you don’t have people who are capable or willing to do that,  seek them out and cultivate these relationships. You can tell yourself, ‘I’m valuable’ every day, but if the people around you don’t value you, it’s going to be hard for you to believe that.”

And if you find yourself interacting with people who leave you feeling not so good about yourself, you should avoid them — or minimize your time with them — in the future, says Hamden.

4. Remember that no one cares about your failures as much as you do

For better or worse, everyone is the hero of their own story, says Hamden. As a result, “people are not paying as close attention as you think that they are” to your personal failures. However, you might be in a professional environment where others are scrutinizing your performance, and you can learn from their responses.

For example, if you stumble and a coworker takes the opportunity to bring you down further, unfortunately you’ll know that this might not be a healthy environment for you. “The way people react tells you so much about them,” says Hamden, “and it helps to inform you about the world that you’re in.”

5. Be mindful of burnout 

As you work on your next challenging project, it’s important for you to set strict limits and boundaries on the time spent on it because the longer you’re able to put in on a project, the more you can build your confidence. “Getting time away on a regular basis is really important,” says Hamden.

Taxing projects are frequently a combination of a marathon and a sprint —  many, many intense deadlines and tasks on the way towards accomplishing a larger goal. So take the time to celebrate those sprints after they’re done, says Hamden, comparing it to the common practice of relaxing into the savasana pose after a challenging yoga session.

6. Believe in the possibility of future success  

The level of effort you put into something can correlate to how you feel about its failure — the bigger and more important it is, the more disappointed you’ll feel when it doesn’t pan out. As you get more distance between yourself and your failure, most likely you’ll be amazed at your own resilience. Reflecting on the FIREBall launch more than two years later, Hamden has a new perspective: “I got through that project and mission, and I can get through anything.”

Now she and her colleagues are preparing for their next launch in 2021. No matter what happens, she says, “the universe will still be there.”  Sometimes getting past failure is as simple as looking up and believing something new is possible.

https://hls.ted.com/project_masters/499/manifest.m3u8?intro_master_id=2346

• There are countless failures, heartbreaking failures… None of these failures are the reasons for them to give up.
• The discovery is mostly a process of finding things that don’t work and failure is inevitable when you’re pushing the limits of knowledge, so I am choosing to keep going!

References: https://ideas.ted.com/how-to-move-on-after-failure-and-rebuild-confidence-erika-hamden/?fbclid=IwAR1my0r3oDB8ie1mdHe4wkmCyJafdrBAmCa83M5beRWirBzkiNqNdmXe0io