3 Steps to Calm: How to Cope with Stress

AVAlexander Volchek

Hi, everyone! My name is Alexander Volchek, and on my YouTube channel I talk about genuine human development and growth. Today I'm going to talk about types of stress. Most importantly, throughout this video I'll give you specific techniques and solutions for dealing with stress and its different forms. I'll pay particular attention to what you actually need to do so that there is never any stress in your life. When we talk about stress, the most important thing to do right at the start is recognize that there are different types—or at least make that distinction for yourself. Obviously, you can come up with many different classifications, but at a basic level there is stress that has just appeared, that has arisen here and now. For example, your child's temperature suddenly goes up to 40 degrees Celsius, someone steals a large amount of money from you on the street, someone calls to tell you that a loved one has died, or you break something—a glass in the kitchen. Stress that has appeared right here and now, today. Of course, you can stretch that time frame a little. Something extraordinary doesn't have to have happened; it's a state of stress that wasn't there ten minutes ago. Then there's another situation: stress that is there all the time.

When stress is there all the time, that means you wake up in the morning and you're stressed. You wake up in the middle of the night and you're stressed. You wake up during the day and you're stressed. There's an extreme here too, because a lot of descriptions of stress treat waking up stressed in the night as something like the absolute limit. But I want to show that there can be major differences even here. For example, I consistently experience stress whenever I see my wife. Or whenever I'm home alone with the children. Or whenever I need to talk to my boss at the office. This ongoing stress covers a range of situations. For myself—and I suggest you do this for yourself—I would distinguish it by the situations in which it arises. We're not talking yet about whether you know the situation or why this stress is happening. That's a crucial subject, and we'll discuss it a little later. Right now I'm talking about these two kinds of stress in general, because you need to work with each of them differently. There's also a fundamental question that comes up when I talk to someone about stress: can you reach a state in which stress doesn't exist at all?

There's the kind of work on yourself that lets you relieve the stress you're currently experiencing: regain your composure when you see that your child has broken an arm, or react calmly and try to view a situation neutrally—at least try to remain an observer rather than fall into a complete psychophysical coma when someone calls to tell you that a person has died. Or gradually bring yourself back into balance when you notice stress in the evening or the morning, when you're with friends, with a particular female friend or a particular male friend. Or when you go on a date. Or when you're discussing your salary with your manager. And then there's this other area: how to shape your days and your life so that even if a state of stress does arise somewhere, you always remain able to observe it. So that stress isn't something that envelops your whole being and leaves you not knowing what to do. This is where the main mistake happens: very often, people hear about a technique for working with stress and start using it without understanding where their stress comes from. If we want to get to grips with this whole question of stress, we need to understand what we're working with.

If we want to address the very way stress arises in our system—to approach it by saying that over the next year we'll experience fewer and fewer stressful situations—some techniques will have almost no effect. For example, if something difficult has happened right here and now and you need to recover quickly, you can simply sit on the couch for ten minutes like this, with your eyes closed and your back straight. Just sit for ten minutes. Always, absolutely always, no matter what, those ten minutes will bring balance into your system. Always, regardless of anything else, they will add balance. But if you sit for ten minutes and do this practice every day, it will have very little overall effect on your recovery in terms of your tendency to fall into stress at all. Imagine that every day you shout at people for hours—four hours of shouting at people. Now a difficult, stressful situation has come up, and you need to recover quickly. Or another difficult situation: your child has a temperature of 40 degrees Celsius at home, and you need to recover quickly. You sit down, spend a little time like this, feel better, and start making the right decisions.

Do I give my child medicine myself, call an ambulance, take them to the emergency room myself, or call a doctor I know? I start communicating normally with my husband or wife. You start interacting properly and taking the whole situation into account. You pull yourself together to make the best possible decision. Why you need to recover from stress is a separate question altogether. But if the next day you go back to cursing at someone for four hours, you won't have removed the causes of the stress itself. So the techniques you use depend on how well you understand what causes your stress. That's a very important part of it. Another important part is this: why are you fighting stress at all? What is it for? Are you fighting stress because you want to win, because you don't want to look like an idiot in a particular situation? For example, you don't want to feel completely unaware of what you're doing when a conflict arises at work. You don't want people to speak badly of you afterward, saying you can't handle stress and start crying. Suppose your stress comes with tears, and you want to get rid of those tears—not so that you can resolve the workplace conflict properly. For example, there's been a conflict at work, and because of it you didn't get a bonus, or your reputation in your role suffered, or you lost certain responsibilities, or you lost clients.

But you want to resolve this stressful situation only so that people don't think you cry at all. Then there are situations where people want to work through stress because they understand that under stress a person becomes aggressive, very often starts behaving inappropriately, and can hurt other people. The difference between those motives is fundamental. I'm not necessarily saying that you have to deal with stress in order to avoid hurting people. But at least don't lie to yourself about it. For me, for example, one of the fundamental considerations, one of the reasons I want to deal with stress when it arises, is that I don't want to hurt people while I'm stressed. That's very important to me. So I use particular tools for that. If I want to regain my composure right here and now so that people won't think badly of me—for example, so I don't cry under stress... I don't cry, by the way, but suppose that were my situation. I see so many people trying to deal with their tears under stress when, really, they'd be better off crying. By focusing on their tears, they stop addressing their main task: working through an overall situation in their life.

Instead, they start working on saving face. Those are completely different things. So that brings us to what comes first when we talk about stress. We may be stressed and ask, “How do I deal with stress in my life? I'm tired of living with stress”—or say, “I'm not stressed.” Plenty of people say, “I'm never stressed.” Or someone says, “I'm stressed, but my wife—that's stress. Mine isn't stress.” Or, “I'm stressed, but look at how stressed they are.” Or, “I'm stressed, but the whole country is stressed.” When you try to choose a technique, it's important to understand what stress you're actually talking about, how well you can identify whether you're in one kind of stress or another, and how capable you are of feeling it at all. On the other side, what is your reason for working on stress? Only after understanding that should you apply a particular technique appropriately. Otherwise, very often it may not only fail to solve the problem but put you into a state of even greater stress and negativity in the future.

Because you trusted someone, tried something on the understanding that it works, and didn't get the result you needed. For example, someone feels they're not quite functioning normally, and they're given advice. Especially in our society, where everyone endlessly gives everyone else advice. There are so many techniques and books; someone watched something on YouTube or heard something somewhere, and they offer advice: “Go see a psychotherapist.”

So the person goes to a psychotherapist, attends a session, and says, “This is bullshit. It's nonsense. None of it works. I'm not staying here.” That's a typical problem. First, someone recommended a psychotherapist, but the person doesn't even understand what a psychotherapist is, or that different psychotherapists can be as different as an ant and an apple—completely different, suited to different kinds of tasks. They don't understand whom they've chosen, whom they've ended up seeing, or exactly why they've come. People often come in and say, “I don't have a problem. I was just asked to come.” Or, “I want to resolve this particular situation.” But the problem lies somewhere else entirely. They don't stay and resolve their issue; they make things worse. For example, they become disappointed in the friend who gave them the advice. They become disillusioned with their understanding of psychotherapy itself. They may become even more entrenched in their selfishness, in the belief that they're doing great, they're fine, and everyone else is an asshole. Or the opposite: they become entrenched in the idea that they felt bad before and will have to feel bad for the rest of their lives, that no one will ever help them. There are a lot of these extremes. The key to working with stress is understanding its causes and your goals.

I'm not urging you in any way to work on something sweeping or comprehensive. But understanding that it works, and making it more effective, is very important. Take a toothbrush. People are often told, “Brush your teeth twice a day.” There's a big difference between brushing twice a day with an electric toothbrush and a manual one, what toothpaste you use, whether you spend a minute casually moving it around or actually brush for four minutes. There's a big difference between brushing for four minutes with a Philips Ultrasonic toothbrush and spending a minute and a half moving an ordinary manual brush around a little. The difference in effect could be something like fiftyfold. I always say there's nothing difficult about brushing with an Ultrasonic. The difficulty is that someone didn't want to look into it a little and make it more effective. Very often, all people lack is a few tiny actions, small steps, and a little effort to understand. Then they'll get a completely different effect. A completely different effect—dramatically different. They simply didn't understand what was actually happening, or didn't notice it. With stress, one of the solutions I mentioned was sitting like this with your back straight for ten minutes.

I had an interesting experience. In 2012, I was at home with two friends, and late that night one of them and I got into a very deep conversation about esotericism and various spiritual practices. The third person there, a very close friend of mine, Lyosha, was completely unfamiliar with all those terms and knew nothing about any of it. At one point I called over to him in the kitchen: “Listen, if you sat down right now and spent thirty minutes like this, with your eyes closed and your back straight, you'd understand at least something about what's going on.” He got up, went over, and sat on the couch. An hour and a half later he came back. An hour and a half had passed, and he said, “Holy shit, what was that? All I did was sit on the couch for an hour and a half. What was that?” He had entered a particular state that he'd never experienced in his life. But the important thing is that he didn't retain any memory of it. At the time it made an incredible impression on him. The next morning, of course, that whole impression had automatically been erased. That's the fundamental point: he had found a tool, for example, for entering a particular state.

Like the example I gave you: a quick way to deal with stress. You put on a particular type of music for twenty minutes—a quick way to deal with stress. At a certain moment you call a particular kind of person—a quick way to address stress. For example, if I suddenly experience very difficult stress, I'll call my wife and tell her about it. In nine out of ten situations, I guarantee... provided the situation doesn't stress my wife out too. There are situations that would stress her out. In those cases, I shouldn't call her. But in nine out of ten situations, she'll bring me back out of stress. There are certain actions you can take. Or you can stand up and jump four hundred times, simply jump in place. Stand up like this and jump. A person is guaranteed to come out of a particular state of stress. Or sit down with a piece of paper and tell yourself, “I'm going to write down thirty reasons why I've become stressed right now.” The very act of focusing on it, observing it from the outside: I'll write down thirty situations from an outside perspective, explaining why I'm stressed. Not how to resolve the stress. Why I'm in it. Notice that people start by thinking they need to get out of stress, to know how to get out. The starting point—the most important rule—is that you need to know not how to get out of stress, but why you got into it.

That is fundamentally important. It's the same with earning money, relationships with a husband or wife, having children, starting a business, being hired or fired at work. Not what comes next, but why. The first question here is “Why?” Why did this happen? Why did it turn out this way? When you know the answer to “Why?”, you can then apply solutions in a completely different, considered way—apply solutions completely differently, act completely differently. If you don't know why, you'll very often start using solutions that won't work for you specifically, or that will make things even worse. A huge number of techniques and practices will make things worse, not better. That's fundamental. But when we're talking about resolving stress here and now, we need to know: if I'm dealing with it here and now, there are actions I can take. They may make things worse for me in the future, but I need to take them now. I need to protect myself from this now. I need to act now. For example, if certain people suddenly attack you on the street, sometimes you need to act aggressively under stress, and that aggression will save your life. Not being aggressive won't save you. But that doesn't mean you should start acting aggressively in every situation in life, because that will make your life worse.

At a particular moment, though, it can make things better. If you see that you're stressed and want to deal with a specific situation so that you feel better in the morning, you approach it very precisely and in a targeted way, specifically to feel better in the morning or to sleep at night. You start using certain techniques. The room needs to be right, the air needs to be right, the windows closed. Who's sleeping beside you? Was I looking at my phone beforehand? What happened during my day? You focus on resolving that issue. Then there are other circumstances that can affect you more broadly. Why does the stress itself arise? For some people, what bothers them at night may be the husband lying beside them. They go to bed and get stressed every time their husband is lying there. I'm not talking about a snoring husband. I'm talking about a husband who is simply lying beside them. His presence bothers them. They sleep alone at night and everything is fine; their husband sleeps beside them and things aren't fine. Their wife sleeps beside them and things aren't fine. A certain state, a certain stress, simply arises. You can address that specifically. It's another matter to address stress entering your life at all.

That works completely differently. For example, we may know that to sleep better at night we need to sleep alone. But looking at my life as a whole, I understand that I have a wife and can't sleep alone. With my wife specifically, if I started sleeping alone, we wouldn't stay together. Some people sleep in different rooms. We aren't going to sleep in different rooms; our life together would be over. So I can't—I couldn't, for example, use that approach. I don't have a problem sleeping beside her, but if one suddenly arose, I couldn't use that solution. My life doesn't allow it. I would then approach it this way: locally, I could reach an agreement with her. I could say, “Could we handle this situation this way for the next three months? I want to neutralize this trigger.” But as a general solution, it doesn't work. That's why you always need to look at it through these three areas: relieving short-term stress, relieving ongoing stress, and, more broadly, neutralizing the emergence of stress in your life.

Why does neutralizing stress across your whole life matter? Why is it so important? Enormously important. Because you never know what kind of stress might appear, or when. People assume that they're here now and that their entire life ahead will be exactly like their life today. If they're stressed, for example, they think they'll get rid of this stress and everything will be wonderful and happy. Their salary will go from a thousand dollars a month to five thousand, and everything will be resolved. That's it. That's the whole issue, as they see it. They don't understand that being at a different point in time, in a different country, in a different family, with a different husband or wife, a different number of children, different friends, a different job, at a different time and age brings different circumstances and feelings. The stress you're experiencing now may be nothing compared with what you'll experience in the future. That's fundamentally important, because it lets you rethink everything that's happening in a completely different way. It lets you relate differently to your life and to what's happening, and truly notice the causes that are there.

Otherwise, you'll keep dealing with things locally, as most people in the world do. They say, “I'm not stressed,” or, “I worked through all that long ago.” Ask nine out of ten people around you whether they're stressed. Even with those who say they are, if you start telling them, “Well, that's it—you're screwed,” they'll say, “No, it's temporary. I'll sort it out now, and it'll be gone.” Maybe you won't sort it out. Maybe it'll only get worse, and you'll have to live in that state for the rest of your life. It's like going up to a blind person and saying, “You're blind.” They say, “No, I'm only temporarily blind. Any moment now I won't be blind anymore.” Your life is different depending on whether you understand that you're blind temporarily, for a week, or for the rest of your life. Your life is different depending on whether you understand that you have no legs for the rest of your life, or temporarily, or for a week. Life differs according to those circumstances; it's a little different, and you assess it differently. Understanding that frees a person—frees them in a very profound way, gives them freedom.

It frees a person, gives them the freedom to make the right decisions about stress and take the right actions in relation to it. To be able to see it at all—to see the stress itself. So one of the fundamental tasks you need to work on separately is to start identifying the kinds of stress present in you. What is this stress? Do I have stress that comes with physical sensations? Do I have stress accompanied by a particular thought process? Do I have stress that isn't accompanied by anything, that I simply identify as a kind of panic attack? What different kinds of stress do I have? They are different. Do I have stress that looks like anxiety? How would I describe it? What are these different stresses? People generally approach it by saying, “I'm stressed.” They think stress is like an apple you can eat: one thing, simply stress. But it's an abstraction, a kind of abstraction. And this brings us to the most important rule about stress. The very most important rule: everyone experiences different states of stress—completely different states of stress. Not only does it differ in how it feels and how it unfolds, it also differs in people's ability to be in various stressful situations, in their resilience in different stressful situations—completely different stressful situations.

Some people are virtually incapable of getting through any difficulty. Any difficulty makes them give up, and immediately everything becomes completely unmanageable. It's not just anxiety; it's panic, absolute panic. The person loses control and is ready to abandon their children. They see a tiger and throw their child to the tiger. It becomes completely automatic panic. Other people can withstand an incredible amount of stress—an enormous amount, from all sorts of factors and in all sorts of forms, including physical stress. Even while their physical body is being destroyed, they'll retain as much awareness as possible and remain capable of thinking, being aware, and making decisions. This is incredibly important! Why do you need to know it? Because every person, absolutely everyone, is constantly comparing, every minute of their life. They compare themselves all the time, compare themselves with everyone. They compare what I'm describing with themselves: “It's the same for me.” So many of you watching this video will often think, “Yes, that's exactly what I have. Exactly that. What he just said—it's exactly the same for me.” Hearing the phrase “That's exactly how it is for me” is typical of people today. That comparison is a mistake. One of the first things you need to do is stop comparing your stress with anyone else's.

Stop comparing altogether. Don't compare your stress with stress described in a video or on television, or by a friend, a neighbor, a brother, your wife, or acquaintances. Stop comparing it with other people's stress, because any comparison in this case will lead to a mistaken decision. You're a unique person with a unique combination of different solutions and parameters. That doesn't mean there aren't common actions that might work for you. Like the example I gave with a straight back, or putting on a particular type of music for ten minutes to deal with stress, or spending two hours a day on a particular practice. Notice that for different people this will produce different results—completely different consequences. What does that mean, different consequences? It's like going to the gym. I often tell this story: in 2013, my partner at Business Molodost and I took boxing classes. For him, for his system, boxing was relaxing. For me, boxing intensified aggression. He relaxed through boxing, while I became aggressive. It's incredible, but it's a fact. Two completely opposite outcomes. Some outcomes are very hard to compare. What will happen to someone who sits in meditation for two hours every day?

A person tries to deal with a state of stress, for example, but ends up addressing another layer of issues as well, and consequently their life changes in a different area. Often they may then experience a problem not with stress but with a whole host of other things. That's another topic. You'll always be able to learn about it on my channel. Write in the comments—it'll be very interesting to see—what stress means to you, what kind you have now, what you're feeling, and what makes you feel stressed. Write it in the comments; I'll be sure to look into all of it. See you next time!