Managing stress in times of confinement: what the military could teach us!
By Tessa Melkonian, Professor in Organizational Behavior and Management, Author of Pourquoi un leader doit être exemplaire (UGA 2019)
The measures of “reinforced” confinement announced by the President in his statement on March 16th 2020, present French people with an unprecedented situation shaking the foundations of many a habit. Such characteristics challenge our faculty to adapt. The uncertainty of not knowing if we are going to be able to address this issue adequately, does make us feel highly stressed.
Research proved that stress is nothing but a reaction to non adaptation.
In our case, our stress reaction is aggravated by the injunction to adapt in two separate areas yet simultaneously:
- The life at work, where we are requested to change our working habits radically
- The life at home, where we have to revisit the way we interact together.
Activating moderating factors
Recent research on the ripple effects of confinement in China, unsurprisingly shows highly elevated levels of stress, difficulties regulating emotions (a lot of anger) and many cases of post stress when confinement exceeded 10 days.
Research on stress show that when faced with identically stressful situations, individuals may suffer from less stress symptoms if they know how to activate a series of factors said to be moderating.
These factors reduce the effects of a clearly stressful situation on the psychophysiological reaction of individuals. Such moderators are often present in our daily way of life but, in times of confinement, people struggle to activate them, requiring a conscious effort and new habits.
As a result of research on stress as a whole, and on confinement-induced stress such as what is experienced in submarines, here is a non-exhaustive list of principles that may be useful in such challenging times.
Give pace to your daily activities
Maintaining scheduled activities (working hours, breaks etc.) in our days at home allows for two things:
- Keeping our minds focused on action rather than going around in circles
Studies clearly proved that rumination (that is constantly thinking about the negative aspects of a situation) reinforces the negative effects of a stressful situation. Maintaining simple scheduled actions (getting up at the same time, getting dressed just like for a day at work, imposing precise working time slots for yourself and your children etc.) gives us a sense of control over the organization of our working days, and leaves us with less “storage capacity” to go around in circles in our minds.
- Stay as close to our usual physiological rhythms as possible
Any change including when biological rhythms are modified, will require that we adapt to it thereby generating stress. We perform much better physically and psychologically when we can maintain quite a few habits, notably our sleeping and eating rhythms.
In other words, keep the same physiological rhythms as before and fight as much as possible the de-structuring urge to binge watch and snack.
Maintain a minimum of moves and breathing efforts during the day. The recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) are quite clear: body functioning requires a minimum of movements to solicit our respiratory and cardiac systems. Hence their recommendations for 10,000 steps a day.
Adjust to confinement characteristics
As it may be difficult to maintain a minimum of movements in times of confinement, here are a few tips for a maximum movements per day:
- Avoid elevators at all costs.
- Clean up your home more frequently.
- Exercise using muscular reinforcement, deep muscular strengthening, and/or stretching, every day for 10 minutes (many tutorials are readily available).
- Share your emotions and reinforce your social links.
Regulating emotions and social links are two key factors in managing our stress, especially when under confinement. Regulating our emotions requires that we can actually identify them in ourselves and then use them for a better relationship with others. In this context, talking about our emotions with our entourage, and on social media is a key element. It requires that we put words on what we feel, thereby allowing us to improve our ability to identify emotions. This is also a way to help us realize that we are not the only ones to have negative feelings.
When exchanging over the phone or digitally with members of our network (or rather of our now multiple networks), we can additionally identify others’ good practices to face the situation to try and emulate.
- In the end, using this slower pace in our daily routine to reinforce our links with our beloved ones is a protective factor against stress.
Set the example for our children
Amongst the stressful factors of the situation we are experimenting, there is the responsibility we have vis-à-vis our children. We owe it to them to reassure them, truthfully, and to set the example in terms of stress management. If they see us unable to control our stress, they may doubt their own ability to do so, thereby inducing even more anxiety in an already stressful situation for them.
To reduce this risk and make them more capable of managing their own stress in the future, here are a few tips:
First of all, you might want to start by explaining to your children that stress management is something we can all learn and which we can get better at, as years go by: this is what the military world taught us.
Individuals can be prepared to face up to stress by learning in their initial training a series of techniques to optimize potential (TOP for French military), that they will be able to improve then via preparation exercises and exeperiences they will carry out once in their units.
This is true also for us civilians: we could learn the basic principles of stress management at school and get better at it all throughout our professional and personal experiences.
Open the discussion on stress
Secondly, accept stress peaks and engage the discussion with your children on what effects stress may have on their body, their emotions and their thoughts. Like recent articles suggested, telling our children that this situation is objectively a stressful situation for all of us, will allow them to accept their own stress more easily, and understand its causes.
Additionally, talking openly with them about the effects this stress may cause, will help them identify their stress-induced symptoms in all their diversity (body, head and heart) and live with them more naturally. The absence of judgment on how they feel will allow them to be connected to the here and now, and to focus their minds towards potential solutions for adapting more efficiently.
In the light of such an exceptional situation, demanding a high capacity to adapt rapidly, both professionally and personally, we must keep in mind that stress can be regulated, and that we shall find the necessary resources to face such difficulties, in our discussions and co-construction with others.
This article is republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons license. Read the original article in french.
Tessa Melkonian is a Professor of Organizational Behavior and Management at emlyon business school, France. Her research interests include the role of justice and exemplarity on employees’ reactions to change, determinants of employees’ cooperation in M&As contexts, and collective performance in extreme teams.
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