How to Handle Stressful Situations: A Guide to Staying Calm

AVAlexander Volchek

Hello, everyone. My name is Alexander Volchek. Here on my YouTube channel, I talk about genuine personal development and scaling up as a person. Stress is any state in which you don't feel good—don't feel good overall. It isn't easy to recognize it and ask yourself, “What is stress, anyway?” If you've asked that question and are watching this video, for example, that's also a good way to address stress and how it arises. For many people, some of the situations I'm describing really don't count as stress. They're something else, just an everyday occurrence. It doesn't seem to describe stress or being under stress. There really is a big difference between stress that takes the form of pain in the physical body and stress that takes the form of an endless stream of thoughts you can't stop. At the same time, a large stream of thoughts can arise without generating stress, and the person won't be in a state of stress. Let's look at specific examples of what a person can do when they're stressed in three different situations. One is being onstage, giving a public talk, for example. That probably doesn't happen to you, but it's a way to understand the example itself. The second is being at work with your boss or colleagues when a stressful situation suddenly arises.

What can the person do? How can they make a decision here? The third situation is in a relationship: something has happened with a boyfriend or girlfriend, a husband or wife, some problem has just arisen, and the people suddenly find themselves in a conflict. What do you do? What's the question here? If I'm onstage giving a public talk, I can't just sit down with my back straight for thirty minutes, can I? Or say, “Hold on a second, I need to jump around for ten minutes. Or I need to listen to music.” You can't. Or, “I need to call my mom. I'll talk to my mom, and then my stress will change.” By the way, one interesting solution is to call someone you feel good with, someone you trust. Another solution is to call someone while you're stressed with whom you have very particular feelings, a very particular relationship. Making that kind of countermove can help resolve stress at a fundamental level. Suppose you're stressed at work, and your relationship with your dad isn't very good. Pick up the phone and call your dad. Your work, that stress at work, will look completely different.

That's a very good combination. Now for a specific example. Someone is onstage and becomes stressed. It has just happened, and they can't—well, it's hard to speak. What can they do at that moment? There are a huge number of practices dealing specifically with being onstage, so I won't go into them as a professional stage performer, because I'm not a professional stage performer. I'll talk about this from the perspective of the way stress itself arises, the way stress itself arises. The first thing you can do is be quiet for a little while and recover, give yourself a certain amount of time. I know this from being onstage or speaking somewhere: slow down a little. You can take thirty seconds to think. Nobody is forbidding you to think. The second, and probably simplest, solution is to tell people you're feeling stressed. There are situations where you can't do that. But generally, when you're giving a talk, it's very easy to say, “You know, I never speak in public. It's very hard for me to do this, and it's really hard for me to be here today.” Most of the time, the audience will support you. That can be a solution in itself. The problem is that you can't anticipate all these situations and their solutions.

It comes down to how capable you are of generating solutions at any given moment. If there's a problem at work, you can be prepared for it in advance. When problems arise at work, you know, for example, that meeting with certain colleagues at a weekly or daily meeting stresses you out when a colleague says the work they did was theirs, when it was actually yours. Or says they're better than you, for example. Whenever you know you're entering a state of stress and can't take the next right step, you need to tell yourself, “At this moment, I'll stay with myself, keep quiet, and not speak.” One of the greatest things you can do is simply keep quiet. Just keep quiet and take a pause. Let someone finish speaking, for example, without saying anything, without starting to justify yourself or offer your own solutions, without saying you're better or that they took your work. Say, “You know, I need a moment. I've heard a lot of different things today. Could you give me a little time? I'll provide that information in an hour. Or could you give me some time, and I'll answer that tomorrow?”

Always give yourself time. Most of the time, there is time. Most of the time. When there's a conflict in a relationship with a boyfriend or girlfriend, a husband or wife, very often you don't need to find a solution right here and now. This is a fundamental rule for working with stress: don't try to resolve it right here and now. When we say that with stress, the first task is to find its cause rather than simply relieve the stress itself, tell yourself, “I'll give myself time and go work on the causes.” When you're speaking onstage, you can't do that anymore, because the talk has already happened. That's it; it was a one-time event. So try to prepare in advance for what might happen, what stressful or conflict situations could arise. Think it through a little. Try to work out what you'll do if you go onstage and start shaking. What will you do? Work that out. Or what will you do if someone in the audience says, “Boo, asshole!” Or if the audience starts shouting? Just work out for yourself what you'll do. Here's an interesting situation. In the summer, during the election campaign in the United States, someone shot at the future president, Trump.

They shot at Donald Trump. We all know about that incident. After he was shot at, he stood up a minute later and raised his hand. Everyone says, “Look what a great thing he did.” I'm certainly not saying here whether it was good or bad. Let's look at the situation. A person experiences stress. All the people, all the discussions I've ever seen or described, converge on what he did, on his raising his hand. They all focus deeply on that. Absolutely all the discussion converges on his raising his hand. But we could ask: why did he raise his hand? Did he raise it because the idea came to him during the thirty seconds he was lying on the ground? Or did he raise it because he'd prepared in advance to raise his hand in that stressful situation? Imagine I walk onstage without knowing people will throw tomatoes at me. They start throwing tomatoes. I start coming up with a solution right then, while I'm stressed. When someone is shot at, they're guaranteed to experience stress. Guaranteed to experience stress, especially at a certain age. He's not a Marine; he isn't used to being shot at every day.

He isn't someone who has gone off somewhere and gets shot at every day. He isn't a Marine; he doesn't know what that kind of stress is like. He was shot at and went into a state of stress. I walk onstage, ten people throw tomatoes at me, and they hit me. I experience stress, a surge of stress and aggression. Do I make up a solution right now, on the spot? Or, while I'm under stress, am I capable of entering a neutral state and remembering that there's a solution: if people throw tomatoes at me in this room, I should say, “Stop!” Or I should run offstage. Or I should keep saying what I'm saying. These will be different solutions depending on the audience and where I'm speaking. There are rooms where I absolutely must leave. There are rooms where I must keep talking no matter what, knowing that security, for example, will now remove the people who threw tomatoes. There are rooms where I should stop them. My mom told me another example of stress a few days ago. I started discussing causes and effects with her. She really didn't like it. I think she left feeling very negative toward me.

For example, she told me that when she was younger, in the nineties, she was riding a trolleybus. There were literally five or ten people on it. Two young women got on, sat down, and started talking to each other. At the next stop, another group got on—young men and women. The young women in that group, she said, were chewing gum, chatting, laughing loudly, and started picking on the other two girls, really picking on them. They started acting aggressively toward them. My mom said, “I was so irritated by this that I stood up and told those people off. I said, ‘You have no right to do that.’” But she said, “I was terribly stressed because I was afraid. It was getting late, it was dusk, and I had to get off at the next stop. I was afraid they'd get off after me. I was afraid they'd do something to me, and so on. They were young people. I understood that, yes, I was an adult.” Although at the time, she was probably about my age. I'm not that young anymore either, of course. She was my age, but she was afraid. And she said, “I still took that action.”

She was explaining that she did it because she couldn't stand watching other people being harmed. I brought up some other circumstances. I agree with her about that. I really don't know the right way to act in that situation. I wouldn't presume to say. I told her she'd done a good thing. Then we went on to examine causes and effects. I said, “If we look at causes and effects, we don't know what happened. For one thing, maybe those people later did those girls terrible harm on the bus. Or maybe the girls you defended never managed to stand up for themselves. Maybe the people who were attacking them became even more aggressive afterward. Or maybe, on the contrary, they became less aggressive because they saw that you really mustn't behave that way.” We never know. What's more, by acting as she did, she was risking her own life. She could have been harmed. She had two children at home, and her children would have had problems, or the family would have had problems, and so on. So the situation has different aspects: different events, different causes and effects.

Different events, different causes and effects. Just like that president, who gets up with his hand raised like that—or doesn't. There can be different consequences. One consequence that could have happened that summer was a second bullet hitting him. Of course a second bullet could have hit him, because nobody can say everything is under control. That's impossible. There is no such thing as control. Anything could come flying at you. There are always consequences. When someone is stressed, their ability to make a decision they haven't prepared in advance and also understand all the consequences is fundamentally important. So the simplest thing you can do when you're stressed, as your first action, is take a pause. Don't make any decisions, especially when there's a conflict. Relationships with other people bring an enormous amount of stress. Take a pause. Don't respond immediately to your husband, wife, child, parents, your boss at work, or your employee. Don't respond immediately. If you're stressed, you must remember one simple thing. There's just one thing you must remember: when you're stressed, your perception is narrowed. You will always make the wrong decision. Always. To make the right decision, you need to come out of the state of stress—even if you do it in thirty seconds—and then make the decision.

Being stressed always guarantees that you'll make the wrong decisions. If I'm stressed and even start generating solutions, but I can see that the stress is still there, I know it's better to take—better to keep remembering, “Can I take a pause? Can I take a pause?” In this situation, it's better to take a pause. I take a pause. Can I not say it right now? Can I not say it? I've seen every time that it's better not to say it to my wife. But my mind is screaming, “Tell her right now that she's wrong. It's very important. It's so damn important that the sun won't rise tomorrow morning if you don't tell her she's wrong right now. She needs to hear it right now. Tell your boss right now that he's wrong, right?” No, a pause matters. So you take a pause, take a pause, take a pause, take a pause, take a pause. And you think, “I'm so glad I didn't say it. I'm so glad I didn't do it. I'm so glad I didn't look.” A pause is a solution, an incredibly powerful solution in relationships, in communication, discussions, the details, and everything else.

A pause is better. The best thing there is is a pause. Even if you're in a conflict where you seem to need to react immediately, go to the bathroom. Say, “I need to use the bathroom. I'll go now, and then we'll resolve this. Excuse me, I'll just go to the bathroom.” I hold a lot of individual meetings and groups; people come to me often. I often tell them, “When you need to resolve something right here and now, go to the bathroom. Just go to the bathroom.” Even if there's a meeting at work and something is happening, say, “Excuse me, I urgently need to use the bathroom.” Everyone says, “Go ahead!” Going to the bathroom doesn't provoke objections; it's an absolutely automatic response in anyone. But if your boss says, “No, answer first, then you can go,” you say, “I can't. I'd better go.” “Oh. You'd better go?” “Yes.” “All right, go.” Always go to the bathroom, because it will give you time to think. And it's better to extend that bathroom break further, further, make it longer. Very often, when you come back, there's no conflict happening anymore. There's no conflict as such. When we're talking about your stress as a constant or something that keeps recurring, the main situations that cause it involve stress that's worked through over a long period of time, through repeated events.

So when stress arises, you need to remember that you won't resolve that stress right now. You shouldn't even try to do that. The very presence of stress tells you this, because it's more important to work on why you keep falling into different kinds of stress. Work on that, work on why stress arises in your life. If someone is a cashier, a store clerk, and a certain type of person stresses them out, it's very hard to work when a certain type of person causes them stress endlessly. But if you're at home all day and never see that type of person, it might seem that you don't have to work on it because you never encounter them. It isn't that critical or that important. A paradox arises here: a person doesn't want to notice that they're stressed at home with their husband every day, stressed at home with their child every day, stressed every day when they leave work to go home, stressed every day when they arrive at work. Some people can't stand being at work and run home. Others can't stand being at home and run to work.

Some people can't stand being at home because they're alone there. Others can't stand being at home because their husband or wife is there. That's a very big difference. Or the children are there, or their wife's mother or their husband's mother lives with them. Those are different things.