When you’re stressed, it is so tempting to fantasize about being not stressed. You imagine feeling peaceful and relaxed later--when you get home from work, or when this project is finished, or when this exam is over, or when you get to the beach, or maybe when the kids grow up, or maybe when you retire.

But fantasizing about being unstressed at some other time or place doesn’t help you in this moment, right now, right here, in the midst of the stress. And if you don’t do something to unstress yourself here and now, there is real risk that that the stress, because you are holding on to it, will become part of you.

Yes, patterns of stress, if not released, seem to get lodged in the body and mind. They can make you tight, jumpy, caustic. They can distort your posture, influence your beliefs about life, limit your ability to listen to others, and add unpleasant tones to your voice. You become a stressful, stressed-out person.

The techniques below are not about eliminating the “cause” of your stress. Nor are they about helping you become a saintly being who never picks up stress and who radiates calm everywhere she goes. (Chasing that ideal is something that can make you even more stressed.)

Instead, they are intended to help you unstress now. They give you something to do as soon as you get stressed, or as soon as you realize that you’re stressed, or as soon as your friends tell you that you’re stressed. They help avoid getting stuck with the stress. And they help you not pass your stress onto someone else.

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Last year, for National Stress Awareness Month, I published a series of articles here about how stress can be contagious. And I asked readers to vow not to pass their stress on to others for one day.

This year, for National Stress Awareness Day, I want to raise the stakes.

I want you to take that vow formally and publicly. I want you to invite your family and friends and coworkers to take the vow, too.  I want to see if we can create one day in the world that is noticeably less stressful … by taking responsibility for our stress and vowing not to pass it on. (See the end of this article for details.)

It’s really very simple.

When you are suffering from long-term, chronic stress, or just the repeated hassles and incivilities of modern life, you are more likely to make a mistake, drop the ball, kick the dog, blow a fuse. You are also more likely to be sleep-deprived, which makes the other effects of stress, already bad, much worse.

You are also more likely to be hypersensitive, quick to anger, abrupt with your children, or rude to some innocent stranger on the street who just happens to get in your way.

In other words, once you get stressed, if you don’t release that stress quickly and effectively, you are very likely to contribute to someone else’s stress. This is what I call “stresscalation”-- the way in which we pass our stress on to other people, often unwittingly.

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According to this article in today’s New York Times (“How 1-Minute Intervals Can Improve Your Health”), High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) has significant physiological benefits.

HIIT is an approach to exercise that involves alternating short, intense bursts of exercise with equally short rest periods—for example, one minute on and one minute off—for a total of about twenty minutes.

Although athletes have been using HIIT to boost speed and endurance, according to new research, HIIT has other benefits, too. These include the improvement of blood sugar regulation and insulin sensitivity, improvement in the functioning of the blood vessels and heart, lowering the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, and the “creation of far more cellular proteins involved in energy production and oxygen.”

The most attractive thing about HIIT, however, has to do with its user-friendliness. In general, the research subjects tested seemed more motivated to do HIIT than the longer, if less intense, forms of aereobic exercise typically recommended.

I was delighted to read about this research, not just because I am a fan of HIIT and do it regularly at the gym, but because  short, intense physical training provides a wonderful metaphor for the short, intense mental training that I have been teaching, which I call "One-Moment Meditation." 

The key idea of One-Moment Meditation is that short, intense bursts of meditation have some significant benefits. And taking a short break after a short period of meditation (before you do another such period, or before you go back to everyday life) has some interesting benefits, too.

For many people, shorter forms of meditation are attractive because they fit more easily into a busy schedule. Shorter forms of meditation are attractive to people who have tried longer forms of meditation and “failed.”

Beyond that, as with HIIT, there seems to be some value in approaching these short intervals of meditation with intensity. Indeed, when I train people in the first exercise, which I call the Basic Minute, I actually encourage them to “go for it”—to put some oomph into it.

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Let me be brief, as there is a hurricane coming and I have lots to do.

But I really need to say this:

Over the last two days, I have heard many politicians and emergency officials on the East Coast reminding us to be "smart" or "cautious."  But I wish that one of them would also remind us to be kind.

Maybe that would be stepping outside the bounds of conventional politics—straying into a more spiritual kind of leadership. Maybe, in preparing for a disaster, kindness just isn't as important as smarts. But still, I feel the need to hear someone remind us about its value.

Of course, health and safety depends on many very practical factors, such as how well we have prepared and how effective the emergency services are in our area. But I expect that much of our experience of a natural disaster also depends on whether we have taken the opportunity to experience a moment of kindness with a stranger.

Let me back up a step.

On Thursday evening, my family and I were evacuated from Cape May, the first place in the Northeast to face a mandatory evacuation. When we heard the order, we had only a ¼ tank of gas, and there were already long lines at gas stations. Nonetheless, we had to join the bumper-to-bumper traffic getting off the Cape, with no sense of when or if we would get gas, or how far up the coast the traffic (or panic) would continue.

I noticed how easily tempers could flare in such a situation, even three days before the hurricane was due to hit. Once we did find a gas station with supplies and a reasonable line, two vehicles—a car and a huge RV--actually cut in line. The RV actually put itself in a position that made it impossible for even those people who already had gas to leave. This astounding and inconsiderate action caused other drivers to become quite angry, not surprisingly, and a shouting match ensued.

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