How to manage your stress and increase your personal resilience during challenging situations?
SCOPE is acronym for five specific actions or "practices" that you or anybody can take to reduce stress accumulation. To help you understand how the elements of the SCOPE approach are applied in practice, let's go through each letter step by step.
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S is for Slow Down
At EMI we are known for saying, "Practice the Pause!"
The first step of SCOPE is to slow down and pause as much as you need. Be gentle with yourself.
The pause is meant to give you a moment to feel the stress activation and then make a choice. SCOPE gives you some of those choices.
For example: when you notice stress, big emotions, or reactions coming up, you might see if you can slow down your movements (or stay still) and be quiet for a moment.
If you have racing thoughts, you can notice those and see if you can slow those down too - or find little gaps between the thoughts.
C is for Connect to Your Body
The second step of SCOPE is to reconnect with your body somehow. Here are some ideas you can try and find out what works best for you.
Try crossing your arms and feeling your hands holding on to your arms. Even give yourself a hug. Or maybe just put your hands together or on your legs and notice that. Access your senses through touch.
Close your eyes if you want to, or see if you can shift to a soft focus.
Notice your breath. You don't need to change your breath; just feel it move through your nose and in your torso as you breath in and out.
If you are sitting, feel that your butt is in the chair. You can cross your ankles or plant your feet firmly.
If you are standing, try feeling your feet on the ground and maybe count out 10 slow steps if that's possible.
Is there any place in your body that's stabilizing or loosening up a bit?
If needed, let the energy of the stress activation physically complete as soon as you safely can and your body is ready. This may involve some shaking, crying, making some noise, or safely expressing some healthy aggression. Try to do this without getting overwhelmed or hijacked by the feelings by staying connected to the SCOPE elements. The right time for this may be in the moment or it may be later on.
Even if it feels really uncomfortable or urgent, there is no rush. Remember S: slow down!
O is for Orient Yourself
Next up for SCOPE is orienting. Look around you if it feels calming to do so.
You can look far away out a window or towards the horizon to give you a sense of space, or you can look at something close like your hands or legs.
Focus on some little details.
Find something pleasant or neutral to look at like a bright color or an interesting shape.
What do you see?
Notice what you can hear, smell, or taste if that feels safe.
Orienting to the space around you helps your nervous system know that there is no immediate danger, so that we can turn down the threat responses (flight, flight, freeze, etc.)
P is for Pendulate
What you can do next in SCOPE is move your attention back and forth between two spots in your body. Notice where you are feeling some tension and then notice where you are feeling more relaxed or neutral.
Slowly shift your focus from tension to ease and back again.
This helps you differentiate between ease and tension. By doing this you are engaging directly with your nervous system. We need to support the resolution of energy and survival responses that get kicked into gear so that we can get back to our range of resilience.
By noticing both states in our system - ease and tension in whatever physical or emotional forms they take - we begin to feel less overwhelmed and hijacked.
E is for Engage Socially
The last step in SCOPE is to make contact with another person. Human contact with someone you like and trust is a wonderful way to reduce stress.
The more we can relate to others who feel safe and have the skills to support us, the more we can get the social functioning of our nervous systems back online.
Being socially engaged helps us to restore our system to resilience in numerous ways.
That's why it's good to have a circle of friends and family that you can call on.
And we'll add: pets and animals are great companions too!
Why SCOPE?
SCOPE was developed as a tool for emergency and first-line responders to handle the tremendous stress of their day-to-day jobs.
Yet these practices are good for anyone to use every day to keep you in your range of resiliency and give you more capability to handle big stress.
If you practice SCOPE all the time, it will be a habit to do it when bigger stressors arise. We lose access to our higher level thinking when we're under stress, so it's necessary that we make these practices a regular way of being so that they come naturally. They will help us to moderate our reactions before any stressors knock us out of our range of resiliency.
It's also interesting to notice how much pets and other animals use SCOPE! These practices are drawn directly from the biology of staying safe and alive in an unpredictable world.
By working actively to nurture your range of resiliency, you'll be helping yourself stay in the mode of joy, curiosity, open-mindedness, compassion, and rational problem solving.
