5 Surprising Micro Habits to Better Manage Stress

Some stress reduction techniques are best used during moments of immense stress. But others work best when you practice them, even on the days when you don’t feel stressed, says Susan Albers, PsyD, a psychologist at Cleveland Clinic.

“It’s important to do these stress reduction techniques before the stress hits,” Dr. Albers says. “It’s almost like learning how to swim before you’re in choppy water.” You’re setting yourself up to better cope with stress when it inevitably happens, she says “If you learn these techniques, they become your automatic go-to when you’re feeling stressed.”

Try the following research-backed stress reduction techniques, which can be done in just a few minutes. Practice them daily and you’ll start to find yourself doing them during moments, or in the aftermath, of intense stress.

1. Focus on Neutral Aspects of Stressful Situations

A practice called focused attention, which involves deliberately directing your attention toward neutral aspects of a stressful situation, has been shown to reduce stress levels, according to a study that followed 39 college students.

The participants looked at a series of images, some of which contained distressing scenes, and rated the emotional experience triggered by those images. They then underwent focused attention training (during which they were taught to focus on non-emotional elements of the images) and looked at (and rated) the images again. For example, when looking at an image of a traffic accident with an injured person, they were taught to focus on the neutral background (the surrounding roadway, buildings, and trees in the image), explains one of the study’s coauthors Sandra Monica Dolcos, PhD, research assistant professor in the department of psychology of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The second time around, the participants found the images less distressing. “We wanted to see whether the intervention changed participants’ emotional responses,” Dr. Dolcos says. “After the training, participants rated negative pictures as less negative.”

Some of the participants also underwent brain scans before and after the training.

After the focused attention training, the brain scans showed that the participants’ reactions to the images were less negative because they engaged regions of the brain involved in regulating emotional responses, and this reduced the stress the images brought up, Dolcos says. The skill helped the participants become more adaptive in stressful situations.

You can practice focused attention during or ahead of stressful situations by focusing on the non-emotional aspects of the situation. For example, if you’re stressed about an upcoming meeting with your boss, you can focus on the setting of the meeting, how you’ll prepare for the meeting, and what you’ll do after the meeting.

2. Try Humming

“Humming can also help, as it’s been shown to kick off the parasympathetic response,” Albers says. Your parasympathetic nervous system is a network of nerves that helps your body relax after stressful situations.

Your sympathetic nervous system activates your fight-or-flight response, and the two systems work together to help your body kick into action (this is the sympathetic part working) when you’re in danger and calm down after the threat has passed (this is the parasympathetic part working).

When you hum, your vocal cords stimulate your vagus nerve, a key component of the parasympathetic nervous system.

And accordingly, research shows that humming reduces physiological markers of stress when you practice it.

It helps if you do it regularly over time, too. A small study found that a daily humming routine can increase your heart rate variability (the degree of fluctuations in the amount of time between your heartbeats).

Higher heart rate variability tends to be a sign of a more active parasympathetic nervous system that is able to slow a stress response.

So, when you hum for a few minutes, it helps lower the body’s stress response in the moment. By implementing a daily humming practice (even for just a few minutes), you can increase the threshold at which you experience stress, Albers says. This means it’ll take more for you to start to feel stressed out.

Try humming for a few minutes in the shower, on your lunch break, or in the car on your way home from work.