Awareness and Acknowledgement: The First Steps to Managing Stress

As leaders, entrepreneurs, and changemakers, we’re often expected to stay composed under pressure. But the reality is, stress can impact us all, whether we’re managing teams, juggling multiple projects, raising a family, or navigating life’s uncertainties. With International Stress Awareness Week around the corner, it’s the perfect time to reflect on the role stress plays in our lives and how we can take the first steps to manage it more effectively.

Stress is a natural response to challenging situations, but if left unchecked, it can start to take a toll on our mental, emotional, and physical health. It literally breaks you down at a cellular level leading to all sort of diseases that can be avoided.  In this post, we’ll explore how becoming aware of our stress triggers and acknowledging them without judgment is the essential foundation for effective stress management.

What is Stress Really?

Stress is our body’s way of responding to perceived threats or challenges. It triggers a fight-flight- freeze or fawn response. Fight is your body’s way of approaching a perceived threat with aggression. Flight is when your body chooses to run from the perceived threat. Freeze is your body’s inability to act against a threat and fawn is when we turn to people pleasing to avoid conflict. These responses are usually learned responses from our formative years, and you can experience all of them depending on the situation. The sympathetic nervous system (accelerator) drives the fight or flight response, and the parasympathetic nervous system (brake) usually drives freeze. How you react depends on which system dominates the response at that time. In general, when your autonomic nervous system is activated, it releases adrenaline and cortisol, the stress hormone. While this can be useful in short bursts, prolonged stress can have serious effects on your mental clarity, emotional well-being, and physical health.

For many of us, stress stems from juggling multiple responsibilities, uncertainty in the workplace, or even our own inner critic. It’s important to realise that stress isn’t just about external pressures—it’s often influenced by how we internally perceive and respond to situations. By understanding this, we can begin to shift how we experience stress and make conscious choices about how to manage it.

The Power of Awareness

The first step in managing stress is cultivating awareness. Without awareness, stress can creep up unnoticed, leaving us feeling overwhelmed before we’ve had a chance to respond. When we become more conscious of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours in moments of stress, we gain the ability to pause and reflect, rather than react impulsively.

Take some time to reflect on the moments when you feel most stressed. Is it during a particular time of day? When deadlines loom? Or perhaps in certain conversations or meetings? Sometimes we’re not even aware of the reason we got so triggered because we are simply running on autopilot and listening to the stories our subconscious mind has been playing back to use for years. By identifying these triggers, we can start to understand them and heal from them so that we get to a stage where we are consciously responding, rather than unconsciously reacting.

The Importance of Acknowledgement

Equally important is the act of acknowledging our stress. Far too often, we try to push through or ignore the signs, thinking it’s a sign of weakness to admit we’re stressed. We live in an extremely over stimulated world, and our internal stress response has not evolved – it’s still the same stress response that gave us the ability to run from a wild animal – except now that stress response is triggered when we miss a deadline, forget an email or are running late. Acknowledgement isn’t about giving in to stress—it’s about accepting that it’s a part of life and something we can learn to better manage.

When we acknowledge our stress, we begin to shift our mindset from resistance to acceptance. This simple shift creates space for us to respond with more clarity and compassion toward ourselves, rather than judgement. As leaders this also sets an important example for those around us, whether it’s our friends, family, or teams—normalising the fact that stress is a shared human experience and that it’s okay to talk about it. In fact, it is imperative to talk about it so that we can learn how to better manage it!

Simple Action: HeartMath Breathing Technique

A great starting point for managing stress is to incorporate simple breathing techniques, like the HeartMath Quick Coherence® technique. It’s designed to help regulate your emotions and bring your body into a more balanced state. Think of your heart like a radio station, whatever is playing on that station, will filter through to every cell in your body. We have 37 trillion cells in the body that renew, repair, and naturally function as a coherent whole. The heart sends signals to the brain, 5x more than the brain sends signal to the heart – the heart is our control centre and when we learn to regulate this, we help our entire system to become more coherent. Coherence is an optimal state in which the heart, mind and emotions are operating in-sync and in balance. Physiologically, the immune, hormonal, and nervous systems function in a state of energetic coordination (entrainment). When you are coherent you increase your mental and emotional flexibility and your capacity to be “in charge” of yourself

The choices you do and don’t make affect each and every cell in your body.

  1. Sit nice and comfortably. You may close your eyes or keep them open, whatever you prefer.
  2. Focus on your heart – First shift your attention and focus to your heart or chest area. You can place your hand on your chest to make this connection stronger.
  3. Find a balanced breath pace – Take a few deep breaths, calm and comfortable breaths, ideally breathing in and out through your nose. Now imagine the breath flowing in and out of your heart or chest area. Try and make your breath even and balanced, that is the same time for the in breath as the out breath, in for a count of 5, and out for a count of 5 is optimal for most, however finding what’s balanced for you is most important.
  4. Generate a positive feeling – As you breathe, recall someone or something for which you feel genuine care, appreciation, or gratitude. It can be a person, a place, a pet, a memory, an object, or possession – it could be something simply that brings you joy, something you’re grateful for, a memory that brings joy, or even appreciation for a small moment in the present.
  5. Continue and expand – Now that you have recalled the feeling of care, appreciation or gratitude for someone or something, breathe the feeling in and out while keeping your focus on your heart or chest area. Enjoy for a long as you want 😊

This simple exercise takes only a few minutes and can be practiced any time you’re feeling overwhelmed or depleted. It helps to calm the mind and bring your entire body into coherence, allowing you to manage stress more effectively. It increases the DHEA production in the body which counteracts the detrimental effects of cortisol on your cells. The more you do it, the more your build your coherence muscle – just like going to the gym – consistency is key!

Key Takeaway:

Stress is inevitable, but with awareness and acknowledgement, we can transform how we experience it. Over the next few days, try to identify your personal stress triggers and practice the HeartMath breathing technique whenever you feel tension rising. By doing this, you’ll begin to take control of your stress rather than letting it control you.

If you’d like to explore more about your stress triggers or build more awareness and resilience around managing it in ways that are unique to you, then get in touch. We have a variety of modalities that support how we both guide you and provide you with powerful, actionable insights.