Why You Need Five Levels of Defense Against Stress

Most efforts to cope with stress fail because they are too limited and only address one aspect of stress. Remember: stress is the combination of three things: (1) a potential stressor, (2) what your mind tells you about your ability to cope with it, and (3) a stress response that kicks in if you feel unable to cope with it. To conquer your stress, you need to address all three parts.

In the late 1990s, I developed a program that does just that and called it The Five R's of Coping©. Since then, I've used the five R's to teach thousands of students and clients around the world how to conquer their stress.

The Five R's are: Rethink, Relax, Release, Reduce, and Reorganize. Each R represents a different level of coping skills that can be used independently to cope with stressors or combined in a comprehensive stress management plan.

A key to effective stress management is realizing that there is no single stress management technique that will work with all stressors under all circumstances. Not only is there no single magic bullet for stress, sometimes a coping strategy that worked for you under different circumstances in the past won't work for you in the present moment with the same stressor.

This can happen because while the stressor is the same, the context (place, time, etc.) and you are different (physical health, energy level, etc.) this time around.

Let me give you a quick explanation of the Five R's and then show you how they attack the three components of stress.

The Five R's

Rethink works by using Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) techniques to help you change the way you think about potential stressors and your ability to cope with them. It also teaches you how to slow down your runaway mind so you can think more clearly.

Relax works by putting your mind and body into a relaxed state that cancels out the stress response. Relax uses techniques such as diaphragmatic breathing, meditation, visualization, and autogenic training to relax your tense, achy muscles and slow down your runaway mind.

Release works by getting rid of stress-related muscle tension and nervous energy in healthy ways. Release techniques use mild, moderate, vigorous, and cathartic forms of physical activity to quickly get rid of pent-up stress-related energy and tension before they can harm you.

Reduce works by helping you cut back on the overall number of stressors in your life and turn the remaining ones into challenges. This will help you simplify your life and operate at peak performance.

Reorganize works by helping you develop a hardier, more stress-resistant lifestyle by increasing your level of wellness across all seven dimensions (physical, social, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, occupational, and environmental) of health.

How the Five R's Attack the Three Components of Stress

What makes the Five R's so effective is that they target the three components of stress. They don't waste your time focusing on things that are not directly related to your stress.

Potential Stressors

• Reduce – reduces your overall number of potential stressors, freeing you to turn the remaining ones into challenges.
• Reorganize – prevents potential stressors from becoming actual stressors by creating a hardier, stress-resistant lifestyle, filled with coping resources.

What Your Mind Tells You About Potential Stressors

• Rethink – unleashes the power of your mind to help you think more clearly about potential stressors and the threat, harm, and loss associated with them. This defuses their ability to become actual stressors and trigger stress responses.
• Relax – slows down your runaway mind so you can think more clearly.

The Stress Response

• Relax – leads with your mind to relax your body and break the stress response as quickly as possible.
• Release – leads with your body to get rid of stress-related tension and nervous energy and break the stress response.

The five Rs can work independently or together to help you deal with stress. A synergistic effect occurs when you use all five levels of coping simultaneously. In other words, the combined result of using all five levels every day is much greater than merely adding the five together.

Over the next several articles, I will go over the Five R's and share easy-to-use techniques from each that will help you conquer your stress.

Thanks for reading and remember to Stress Less and Live More.