Want to Treat Yourself and Others Better? Use This Stress Management Strategy.
Have you ever noticed how easy it is to make snap decisions when you’re stressed, only to regret them later?
Stress hormones can force us into a “fight, flight, or freeze” state, where you lose the ability to make decisions based on who you’d prefer to be and how you’d prefer to behave. In everyday life, these rushed choices often work against us. In the moments when you don’t like yourself, or regret how you treated others, that’s because you’re stuck in a stress reaction. The solution is relaxing enough to assert your preferences.
Preference assertion isn’t about controlling others or even getting what you want all of the time. A preference practice can help you reduce stress, strengthen self-respect, and improve the quality of your relationships and daily life.
Let’s explore how preference assertion works and why it can be such an effective stress management strategy.
Why Preference-Based Thinking Reduces Stress
Reflecting on your preferences is both relaxing and clarifying (preferential thinking is only available at levels 3-7 on the Stressometer). As you consider your specific preferences, you can get to know yourself a little better, which builds self-respect.
The decisions you make while relaxed align more with who you truly are, because you’re calmer, thinking more clearly, not rushing yourself, and using your preference as the primary decision-making tool. Personal preference decisions aren’t always exciting. For example, you may find that your preference is saying “no” instead of going to a party. But these preference-based decisions are an act of self-care. They show you that you respect yourself and have your own best interest at heart. This builds confidence and a better relationship with yourself.
Alternatively, when you’re under the influence of the fight, flight and freeze stress hormones, the decisions you make are more like automatic reactions, without much conscious thought involved.
Stress hormones can make us feel strongly compelled to act suddenly or impulsively. These “stress reactions” provide instant gratification, making you feel satisfied in the moment. That’s because stress hormones work by causing us to make decisions faster in life-threatening situations.
This approach isn’t necessary and can be harmful in non-life-threatening situations. For example, letting stress hormones make decisions for us is how we end up “coming to” after a fight with a partner, wishing we’d handled the situation differently.
If you’re thinking, “How do I know what my preferences are?” This could be a sign that you’re spending too much time stuck in a stress reaction. Allowing yourself time to return to a calmer state of mind often throughout the day will help you access your personal preferences.
This preference practice and the self-respect you build as a result is more useful for reducing stress than even getting what you wanted. So ask for what you want or just become more aware of what you would rather see happen, whether you think you’ll get it or not. Over time, preference practice will become an easier stress management tool to pull out when you need it, and you’ll be better able to treat yourself and others how you’d prefer to.
What Is Personal Preference Assertion?
Personal Preference Assertion involves stating and thinking about your personal beliefs and desires in a flexible way, based on your freedom of choice. You can start to recognize your preference by asking yourself, “Am I making this choice based on what will make me happiest in the long run, or right now?” Choices that make you happiest in the long run are preference-based choices.
In other words, true preference is the path to greater satisfaction overall, even if it comes at the expense of short-term gratification. For example, shouting at a loved one may release tension in the moment, but you’ll likely regret it later. You may even think to yourself, “What was I thinking? I wasn’t acting like myself.” And you’d be right. Your behavior was a reaction to stress hormones rather than a response aligned with who you truly are.
Finding and honoring your true preference, whether or not you get the outcome you hoped for, helps you align your thoughts, emotions, breathing, and behavior more with your creative and unique core self. This way of operating differs greatly from a demand or a command, which is usually verbalized in a more controlling and pushy way.
It’s important to express your wishes through preference-assertion and practice delayed gratification, even for things as small as deciding where to sit on the couch, or which coffee mug you’d prefer to use today. Asserting your preferences often helps you strengthen this skill, so you can stay calmer and aligned with your values, even under daily pressures.
The Goal of Preference Assertion
The goal of preference assertion strategies and preference thinking habits isn’t to get what you want all of the time. Life doesn’t work that way. The goal of this practice is acceptance of self and other’s differences. At first, you may have anxiety spikes when trying this strategy, especially if you’re used to people-pleasing or other subconscious stress coping strategies. Stick with it anyway.
These scared moments dissolve soon after you stand up for yourself with calm preference assertion. Over time, your stress and anxiety in relationships will diminish significantly and you will feel calmer. Alternatively, relationships that cause you to live in a stress reaction too much of the time may find their natural end when you honor your preferences.
If you hide your preferences during a relationship to fix the other person’s issues, your stress and anxiety will rise, and the relationship will suffer. If the relationship does not have enough room in it for each person’s preferences, and asks you to surrender your decision-making abilities to your stress hormones, then it will not last.
It’s our various preferences that make us different from each other. When you accept your own and other people’s preferences and differences as OK, stress levels begin to drop. Reminding yourself that the goal is acceptance rather than agreement or getting your way allows for more ease within yourself and your relationships.
When acceptance is the goal, things are obviously and openly imperfect while being relaxed and accepting, too. On the other hand, if agreement is the goal of a relationship, it will become increasingly stressful, rigid and perfectionistic over time.
Demanding-ness, harshness, and/or persuasiveness become the thinking and communicating strategy when you’re stuck in the stress reaction (i.e., 8, 9 & 10 on the Stressometer). When the goal is to push for agreement, stress levels rise, and relaxed, kind communication aligned with you you’d prefer to be becomes impossible.
Since we are all so different from each other, we usually cannot agree on many things. If we don’t allow that to be OK, conflict can begin to overtake the relationship.
The general emotional feeling in pushy relationships is heavy. So I call this general emotional feeling “the heavy weight of pushiness.” It’s more realistic and practical to agree to disagree and negotiate with each other based on preference and acceptance. When you have more discussions and spend more of your day in a calmer, preference-based state of mind, you will notice your internal thoughts become less harsh and more kind, too.
Lightening the Load with Tolerance
Since the goal of preference awareness and assertion is based on accepting the self and other’s differences, it naturally improves our tolerance of discomfort, frustration, and distress, even when we don’t get the outcome we hoped for.
This attitude of tolerance of life’s daily frustrations, distresses, and discomforts allows us to remain a little calmer in our relationships and daily life in general. The emotional feeling inside is usually like feeling a little lighter. So I refer to this emotional lightness feeling as “the feather weight of preference.”
This calmer self will have a better quality of life each day. Not by getting what you want but by at least knowing what it is. Observe your preferences and honor them with thoughts, words, and behavior some of the time while also remaining tolerant and flexible to unexpected outcomes. This more tolerant and calm attitude improves our performance under pressure in all of your non-life-threatening activities, like:
Relationships
Weight management
Sleep
Athletics
Business meetings
Addiction recovery
Public speaking
Romance
Test taking
School work
Creativity
Writing
Depression recovery
Anxiety management
Pain management
Stress management
I’ve created several tools to help you make preference-based thinking a regular part of your stress management practice. You can purchase posters of the Whitworth Stressometer for a relaxing corner in your home, workplace, or even the lobby of a medical practice right here in my shop. I’ve also recorded free relaxation training audios you can listen to anytime. The 6 Minute Preference Reset Relaxation Training Exercise in my audio library is a great place to start.
