Lessons from the uphill: When stress lies ahead, take it easy

I hadn’t felt the flood in a while. Last week, overwhelmed at work, it hit: the heart-racing, disorienting wash of stress. My shoulders are creeping up remembering it.

It actually doesn’t matter what specifically caused it. I’m guessing you’re familiar. An email or 20 here, an unresolved question there, something that deserved/needed thought but I hadn’t given thought to yet, a project I wasn’t quite sure how to tackle, a decision needing to be made, an unpleasant thing I needed to communicate.

Queue the G-chat noise, and you have me sitting at my laptop paralyzed while also in hyperdrive.

If I work harder, this will all get done faster, my subconscious kindly informs me.

I did what many of us do when in the thick of overwhelm and stress: I attempted to start writing the email, then got distracted by another thing I had to do, which reminded me of something else, and left me with one empty blank email window open, 10 tabs that have nothing to do with one another, and zero things completed.

I set my G-chat status as away, shut my laptop and walked out the door.

When I came back I made myself focus on and complete one task.

I got up and took another quick walk and made myself some tea. I ticked off a couple of easy things on my list. That felt good. I took a breath and decided to focus on a harder thing. I got that done, too.

At the end of my day, I felt spent. But it wasn’t the work itself. It was all that effort my body had expended while being in a heightened state for so long.

When my husband suggested going for an after-work hike, I didn’t want to go. What I wanted was to sink into the couch. But I know myself well enough to know that indulging in yet more inside and screen time after a full day of inside and screen time would just leave me feeling worse. I pushed myself to go for the damn walk.

No, the hike wasn’t a panacea. But it did put some cool, fresh air on my cheeks, and reminded me that there is a world full of experiences, elements and simple sensations out there that have nothing to do with glowing screens and the bizarre worlds behind them. It helped me see, with a little distance, that much of my stress was coming from a fear of what I don’t know, and a fear that I wouldn’t be able to cope with handling whatever comes up.

Turns out it’s not actually the G-chat that’s the culprit, it’s my brain’s interpretation.

The next morning, I went for a run. Out on undulating trails, my heart rate slowly rose, then spiked, then dipped on the downhills.

I didn’t listen to music. I decided to cut the stimuli — I’d had plenty in the last 24 hours — and just run with whatever leftover fragments of tunes were jangling in my head, and my thoughts.

The nice thing about a run where I choose to focus on what I see and sense is that it helps train my thoughts to follow suit. I can be in a near-meditative headspace where I can notice what’s happening, externally and internally, and keep moving through it. If something comes up that I don’t want to dwell on, I can — literally — keep it moving. I acknowledge the thought, and then look at the sun and the sun-ness of it all. I think about the heat my body is producing. I notice my cold fingers; I see my breath curl and cloud around me.

As I was running, I realized that even on the uphills that required more strength, I could choose to make it easier simply by thinking and running easy.

What?!

When I didn’t anticipate the hills and just took them as they came, I could adjust my gait as needed, think about being light on my feet, shorten my stride a bit, and float on upward. Sure, it wasn’t exactly floating. I breathed harder as I was doing it. But I didn’t feel I was overexerting. I was using the power I had in a smart way, and not tensing up in anticipation — all my tension went into each footfall and subsequent springing motion uphill.

I’d get to the top of the hill, focus on taking breaths and steadying my breathing cadence, and then use the downhill as a cardiovascular reset. Once the next hill appeared, my breathing was pretty normal.

It dawned on me as I was “putting my legs into first gear” — one bit of shorthand that helps me — to move up a hill, that this was also an approach I could use to manage stress.

Yes, the running itself is good: It’s good to get my heart rate maxed in ways that aren’t desk-job related. Not only does it keep me more sane and grounded in my day-to-day, it keeps my base heart rate low.

But this idea of minimizing anticipation of hard tasks, like decision-making, project work and uphills? And once in it, whatever that is, taking smaller steps, managing my breathing, and focusing on the moment-by-moment experience? Oh — and resting, to get my breath and perspective back to baseline between the big pushes so that I’m ready for the next one.

All of these are good lessons that apply not only to trail running, but other areas of life in which stress is just a sometimes unavoidable, but manageable, piece. I think I can learn to take even hard things a little easier.