On the other hand, small daily changes can make a significant difference in our lives, especially when they are about our mental health. One small mental change can spill over to everything and make it easier for you to keep your other resolutions. Clearly, the experience of stress and its effects are becoming more severe. Chronic stress puts us at risk for serious mental health disorders including depression1, anxiety2, and neurological disorders such as dementia3. Daily stress degrades our social connections, impairs intimacy, and lessens the subtle feelings of joy we can tap into by appreciating the ordinary miracles of the everyday. What would it feel like without all this stress bringing out our worst qualities: distraction, impatience, anger, reactivity, poor food choices, and even accelerated aging4? It’s simple. Without the threat of daily stress, there will be more of you—the real you. Here are three ways to stress less and stress better in the year ahead: Fill those tiny down moments with mind-body movement or slow breathing through the nose. Make your exhales longer than your inhales to quickly restore your nervous system, rev up parasympathetic activity, increase vagus nerve tone, and reduce stress hormones. When you have time to do these restorative activities for longer periods, by all means, do. This will help you reach a deep rest state5, where you get much-needed restoration down to the cellular level. Tough situations in our lives that don’t have a clear resolution—like caregiving, work issues, or problems with loved ones—require a robust positive stress mindset. We can spend a lot of time trying to control and solve these situations, as if we are pulling hard on a rope. But when we pull on a fixed rope, we get rug burn. It’s like playing a game of tug of war we cannot win—and expending a lot of mental and physical energy in the process. Moving forward, can you simply drop the rope? Can you accept the situation and release the need for control? You might say, “This is reality as it is, right now,” while acknowledging your pain and feeling love and kindness toward yourself. My new book, The Stress Prescription, provides many science-based ways to embrace positive stress; manage anxiety, sadness, and grief from painful and unwanted circumstances; and amplify joy starting right when you wake up. While we can’t control what happens to us, we can control how we respond. We can break up chronic stress into manageable stress and even create positive stress. Moving into 2023, hold on to this simple message from His Holiness the Dalai Lama: “The best medicine is inner peace.” Indeed, science tells a similar story: Inner peace can slow aging and allow your true loving nature to more fully manifest itself. When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, doing less truly is more.
