How to Handle Stress as a Musician

Handling Stress
Handling Stress

In this article I cover:

1. My Story On Stress
2. What Is Stress?
3. Stress Takes Time To Handle
4. How Our Brain Works
5. How do you WANT to handle Stress?
6. Systemizing Stress

I’d like to start this article by saying I am not a licensed therapist and everything I write about here is from my own experience over the past few years.

1. My Story On Stress:

I remember a turning point in my life about three or four years ago when I first felt the dark side of stress. I was about 19-20 years old and had just received a letter from HMRC (The taxman here in the U.K). They’d slapped me with a bill for £5k+ in unpaid taxes and overdue payments, and It was then that I realized how chaotic the world can be. All sorts of things ran through my mind from thinking of myself as a failure to thinking, “how do I tell people about this?”, and “Why didn’t I know about taxes sooner?!”. Only two years before I got the bill, I had started my first company and was doing great (or so I thought). I was earning more than I could ever imagine and everything seemed as though it would never go wrong, but if there’s one thing that rings true, it’s that the taxman is always right behind you.

Soon after receiving this tax bill I couldn’t afford to pay, my relationship with my ex-partner began to spiral out of control, I would wake up late in the day and have no interest in running my business; I’d also eat any and everything in sight to curb the feeling of anxiety. A £5k tax bill may not seem like the largest amount, but it was my ego that was hurt most. I worked so hard to impress people that looked down on me, and here I was, in trouble with the Tax system itself and my business going bust in front of my eyes.

Thankfully, I was able to start the long road of repaying my debt to the government. It was a long road, but It humbled me and helped me become the person I am today. I’m grateful to say that I am now debt-free and took it upon myself to study taxes instead of demonizing them. The stresses of that experience were so powerful that it sent me down a journey of self-betterment that has changed my views on stress, and I hope this article can shed light on how to manage your own stress, too.

2. What is Stress?

Google’s definition of stress is: “The body’s reaction to any change that requires an adjustment or response. The body reacts to these changes with physical, mental, and emotional responses.” – It’s only once I started digging into stress that I came across “coping mechanisms” and how they’re formed long before we encounter adult life.

What this means is, from childhood, we’re literally recording our parents, siblings, and our community’s responses to stress. Think about that for a moment. Before the age of ten, you’ve already been programmed by your peers to understand thousands of rules to be a part of society. You walk across the road when you see a green man, you open the door for someone when you can, you don’t kill people, and you close a fridge after you’ve gotten your snacks. That’s just a few of the many you’ll learn in life. So then, if you grew up with parents that reacted with violence or shut down and ran away when they were stressed, the chances are you’ll pick up a lot of these coping mechanisms.

My primary coping mechanisms were eating a bunch of food, not answering phone calls (even to close friends and family), and pushing away important work so it would just build up later on.

3. Stress Takes Time To Handle

Since coping mechanisms have been “hard-wired” into our brains since childhood, they’re incredibly hard to undo, but not impossible. The important part here is that you remain observant of your coping mechanisms instead of being judgemental of them. Being judgemental only leads to worse mechanisms forming. If you get mad when stressed, or do something you regret, try to speak positively to yourself so that you learn to change your bad coping mechanisms over time. This sounds simple, but it works. One simple sentence that clicks cognitively each time you’re mad has a great impact on your long-term ability to identify and help handle stress.

For example, if you tend to drink, take drugs, or engage in casual relationships as a form of managing your stress, don’t make yourself feel bad after you’ve calmed down. Instead, become aware of your bad mechanisms, and from time-to-time, work on switching them out for something else and speaking to yourself as if you were a child changing bad habits, like, “Next time I can work on changing this” - You wouldn’t shout at a child for a small mistake, so why shout at yourself internally? The reason you need to do this over time is because your brain hates change.

4. How Our Brain Works

Since I began my self-betterment journey, I became fascinated by the power of our brains and the way it works. One fact I learned, is that our brain processes 64,000+ thoughts & actions every single day. Most of which are subconscious functions (around 95% according to Dr. Bruce Lipton).

To break down your bad mechanisms for handling stress, you need to know that through repetition, your brain has created what’s known called ”Neural pathways”. Think of these as “bridges”. As you repeat a behavior, you strengthen them. A simple way to remember this: If you’ve ever played Zombies in Call Of Duty, your aim is to reinforce windows with planks of wood or metal to keep the zombies out. So, as you repeat a behavior, you’re making it stronger and stronger and reinforcing that habit/behavior with time, too. And, the only way to break this down, is to repeat the positive ways to handle your stress… Over time.

Here’s how neural pathways look like in your brain:

Pathways
Pathways

As you build good behaviors, your brain starts breaking down the negative behaviors. But remember, whatever habit you create, gets built or broken down. You decide. If you repeat bad habits, they become harder to break down again.

Now that you know how neural pathways are built, it can help you become more aware of your reactions to stress in the future. When you feel stressed, you can remember, “Oh crap, this is how my brain WANTS me to react, but I want to change this”. And you will! :)

Labeling Stress

As humans, we’re also wired to tell the world or those around how we feel, which goes onto further reinforce our emotions in the moment. However, when we constantly identify with our emotions (from my experience, and from Neuroscientist John Yates Ph.D.) we push away our curiosity to understand them. This is why it’s vital that whenever you feel stressed, try saying, “Stress is arising” instead of “I am so stressed!”. By doing so, you distance yourself from the emotion, and begin to “see” it instead of “becoming it”.

Over time, your awareness of emotions builds greatly. It’s almost like an out-of-body experience since the emotion no longer controls your entire mood and actions, but merely presents itself so you can make the better judgment.

You can use this labeling for other emotions too, for example, “Sadness is arising”, or “anger is arising”. Say these in your head, not out loud haha!

Remember - We are NOT our emotions, we simply have them. The same way an overweight person isn’t “Fat” itself, but simply has fat stores. Think of emotions as so: Emotions = Energy in motion. Observe the dance it does and make the better judgment :)

5. How do you WANT to handle stress?

When you read that title, what answer immediately came to mind? - If I were to answer, I’d like to be calm, focussed, and break my problems down into a simple-to-follow process. The same way a puzzle gets moved around and then slotted into a visual representation of something that makes sense: the issue we were solving.

Now that you know the way you’d like to handle stress, it takes a combination of guiding behaviors to get you over the edge, once again, with time.

Meditation & Deep-Breathing

Your breath plays a huge part in stress management, and I know what you’re thinking… How on earth does breathing help anything?

To answer this, think back to a time when you got into an argument with someone. Let’s say a younger sibling, and right before you wanted to punch them into high heavens, you took a step back and took a big deep breath to save you from a lifetime prison sentence. We’ve all been there it’s okay. 😂😂

Meditation and mindful deep breathing help calm what’s known as the ”sympathetic nervous system”, and actives the parasympathetic nervous system. Here’s an image to give you an idea of the difference between the two:

Differences
Differences

As you can see, the sympathetic nervous system is getting you ready to fight or run (or argue), and the parasympathetic nervous system is calming us down and keeping us functional.

I don’t know about you, but I’d like to be calmer in the face of stress.

Meditation and deep-breathing help because it brings our focus to a meditation object, our breath. By building concentration and focus on something as simple as our breath, it keeps us in the present moment, and neither in the future or the past. Meditation has also been shown to increase the areas of our brain responsible for empathy and the ability to see another perspective.

6. Systemizing Stress

When we’re stressed, our body goes into fight or flight mode (FoF). FoF is an ancient mechanism our brain still runs on for protection. It would’ve been helpful hundreds of years ago if a bear came into our homes, but as we’ve evolved, it’s just making us more stressed. Your siblings can be pains, but they’re not bears, so why give a survival-based reaction?

I learn to systemize my stress only recently. You see, humans have an amazing tendency to make things seem BIGGER than they actually are. We can take a simple issue like, “Ahh man, why didn’t ask that girl out”, to thinking, “Oh my God I ruined my only chance and I’m so damn stupid, I’ll never try this again”. But guess what buddy? That girl you missed the chance to ask out is still single, and there’s always tomorrow….

The way to systemize your stress is simple, and like I’ve mentioned many times in this article, it takes time. Start analyzing the core issue. If it were the above issue, it would be, “Not asking Maddie out on a date”. Great, you’ve done 50% of the task by outline the core issue.

Next, you need to write down (in order of priority how to solve the issue”. E.g: Get Maddies attention after school and ask her out. Or, Text Maddie and ask her if she’d like to go out with me.

And that’s it. Resolutions to your problem. Before you go on, I know it seems simple, but issues generally are. Our brain just doesn’t like to organize the issue and solve it systematically. It prefers to make a reality T.V show out of it.

Remember this, NASA uses a simple checklist to record data, collect samples, and keep its teams safe in outer space. If they use simple checklists for some of the most complex missions ever, how much time, effort, and stress could it save you to systemize your stress?

Why Managing Stress Is Important

I could go on about the benefits of creating healthy coping mechanisms all day long, but some of the key reasons it’s so important are because:

  • You don’t say things that can hurt someone for a lifetime, because you learn to calm yourself before you react.
  • You’re able to think logically instead of emotionally, which, in business is highly important. You NEVER want to make a business decision based on anger or revenge.
  • Pain and suffering teach you lessons if you’re able to reflect on it. Are you trying to mask stress or are you asking, “damn, what is this situation trying to teach me?” - Aware people mask the stress, but people who are growing question stressful situations, then create a way to handle the stress.

We hope you enjoyed this article. As always, please be sure to share this with a friend or someone who could benefit from this knowledge. We wish you all the best with your success on your journies!