pressure management valve

The so-called "stress management valve" is never a universal switch that can clear all stress with one click, nor is it a shackle that requires you to maintain emotional stability forever. It is a completely personalized dynamic adjustment system - the core goal is never to "eliminate stress", but to stabilize the pressure value in the "workable range" that can push you to do things without breaking through the psychological threshold.

Last week, I had dinner with a friend who was working as a content operator in a big factory. She was holding her computer while eating a salad. During the middle of the meal, three messages about Party A's change requirements were played in the background. The fork was shaking with her fingertips, and she was still muttering "I can't rush, I just did 10 minutes of mindfulness meditation in the morning." I took her computer over and said, "Righteous thoughts are to stop you from internal friction. They are not to pretend that you have not seen these three messages. If you want to curse, just curse a few words first, and then change them after you finish." ”

She was stunned for two seconds, scolded Party A in the air for three minutes, breathed a sigh of relief and said she felt much better, and handed in the revised draft in half an hour, and she actually went through it once.

You see, this is the misunderstanding that many people have about stress management: they always feel that they have to tighten the valve so that not even a bit of negative emotions can leak out. If it leaks, it means that they have failed in management. In fact, this is not the case.

Interestingly, the psychology community’s thinking on stress regulation was originally divided into two completely different directions.

One type is the more clinical "pressure relief school". The core is to add a layer of filter to the valve to first screen out the unnecessary internal friction pressure. For example, the "decatastrophizing" often mentioned in cognitive behavioral therapy is to help you interrupt the causal chain of "Party A's demand for change = my ability is very poor = I will be fired". The remaining pressure of "three items need to be modified" is actually not overwhelming at all. The current popular mindful breathing and emotional diaries essentially follow this logic: first get rid of the invalid pressure, and most people can actually handle the remaining real pressure.

The other type is the "transformation school" that has been promoted by positive psychology in recent years. The representative is Stanford psychology professor Kelly McGonigal's long-reviled and popular research: when you actively regard stress as a signal that "your body is helping you mobilize energy to deal with challenges" instead of a scourge that needs to be avoided, the negative impact of stress on the body will be directly reduced by 60%. This idea is equivalent to connecting the outlet of the valve directly to the power system - you don't need to release all the pressure, leaving it to boil water, but it can push you to run faster.

The two ideas have been arguing for almost ten years, and no one can convince the other. In fact, when it comes to specific people, there is nothing to argue about: If you have been tortured by internal friction and have insomnia every day, learn to relieve stress first, don't insist on shouting "Pressure is your friend"”； If you don't have any internal friction, but you just can't find the energy to do things, try looking at the stress from a different perspective, and you can save a lot of energy.

When I was working on my own projects to meet the deadline, I tried many Internet celebrity methods. The most useless one was forcing myself to meditate before going to bed. The more I sat there, the faster the to-do list in my mind jumped. Later, I simply saved up a simple method: when I got off work every day, I wrote down the unfinished tasks on a note one by one, pasted it on the company computer screen, took a photo and saved it in my work phone, and then locked my work phone in the desk drawer. I told myself: “These things will stay here today, and I will be the only one who comes home with me. ”

I've been using this little method with no scientific basis for three years, and it's more effective than any emotion management course worth hundreds of dollars.

I once met a friend who was in To B sales. His pressure management valve was even more outrageous: he kept a Rubik's Cube in his bag all year round. Every time he broke down with a customer, he would sit in a stairwell for 10 minutes, twist the Rubik's Cube back into shape, and then go back. He said that when he was twisting the Rubik's Cube, his mind was empty. After the anger of "Why am I so useless" was vented, he could calm down and think about how to talk next time. There is also a coffee shop owner. When he is stressed, he squats behind the bar and wipes the cups until all the cups are so bright that they can illuminate people, and his anger is relieved.

You see, there is no standard "correct valve" at all. Don't listen to others who say that you should run 5 kilometers to decompress. You already hate exercise. If you can't finish running, there will be an extra layer of pressure of "I can't even decompress well." You can't do it.

There is a popular saying recently, saying that "lying down is the best way to manage stress." Many people criticize this as a poisonous chicken soup, and many people follow it as a guideline. In fact, whether this is true or not depends entirely on your current stress level. If you have been unable to eat or sleep for a week or two in a row, are flustered when you see work news, and have reached a moderate level of anxiety when taking a psychological test, then it is not too much to just lie down and take half a month off to travel. At this time, the valve must be fully open, and let out as much as you can. But if you already feel uncomfortable lying around every day, scrolling on your phone until you don’t know what to do, and feel that life is boring and unmotivated, then you are actually under too little pressure. Instead, you need to turn the valve smaller and find something to do for yourself - sign up for a course that interests you, raise a cat that needs to be fed every day, even if you set a KPI for yourself and check in to three new coffee shops every week, your status will slowly return.

To put it bluntly, the pressure management valve is really no different from the faucet in your kitchen. You don’t need to study fluid mechanics, and you don’t have to buy the most expensive smart sensor model, just use it easily. Know when to tighten it more and when to tighten it smaller. It doesn't matter if there is some water leakage. Just wipe it. Don't wait until the water floods the whole kitchen before you think about turning it off. Don't tighten it too hard. Not even a drop of water can come out. It's not interesting to live a dry life.