Land with you again? Maybe a look into the land of the rising sun will help, so that you can stand above things again.
Nobody will deny that we Germans do not necessarily have the most relaxed lifestyle. Punctuality, discipline, compliance with rules – for such "virtues" we are not for nothing respected and ridiculed abroad. We are also generally quite strong when it comes to complaining and whining: No matter how well we are, as Germans we almost always find something to criticize.
Of course, there are advantages to growing up in such a culture and being brought up in this mindset. For example, it makes it easier for us to be reliable and we don't just take things like that. However, these typical peculiarities of our culture also make us more susceptible to stress and self-pity – but we can counter this by looking at other countries, for example Japan.
We take these anti-stress strategies from Japan
The psychologist Scott Haas lived in Japan for a long time and observed and internalized three cultural peculiarities for himself that allow the Japanese to deal better with stress, suffering and crises than some other societies. They helped him personally, for example in the corona pandemic, writes Scott in "Psychologytoday", which among other things resulted in a drop in income of around 80 percent. According to the psychologist, the following anti-stress strategies are elementary components of the Japanese way of life and attitude.
1. The awareness that everything will pass
"A big part of Japanese culture is celebrating things that don't last," Scott writes in Psychologytoday. As an example, he cites the famous cherry blossom festival, at which the Japanese celebrate the few days of spring when the fruit trees bloom every year. This deep and constant awareness that everything will pass not only help the Japanese to appreciate beautiful moments, but also to take difficult phases more easily and to endure them better.
Every crisis and every stress begins the moment it begins to strive towards its end again. Even if we couldn't do anything to turn things around for the better except to wait, they would. If we have in mind that our pain is guaranteed to pass, we can deal with the time afterwards and imagine how our life will be when the crisis is over. "We look beyond the pain," writes Scott, and put ourselves in a mental state that can detach us from the current stressful situation and make us more independent.
2. Observe
A second central element of the Japanese way of dealing with stress is observation, according to Scott. Instead of reacting directly and impulsively, the Japanese first consider relationships in detail and purposefully. On the one hand, this helps them to better grasp and classify the situation and, on the other hand, enables them to distance themselves emotionally from what triggered the stress in them. Knowing that the mess will pass one way or the other will certainly make it easier for the Japanese to calmly put themselves in the observer's position – the three points work best in conjunction and so the third and last one ties in directly to the one just mentioned .
3. Sympathy
"From a more distant perspective, we can see that other people around us are experiencing the same or a similar level of stress as we are – we are not alone," writes Scott. And if our fellow human beings can cope with it, then we can certainly somehow master our crisis. "Empathy makes us aware that others have found ways and strategies that we can copy or learn from to manage our stress," said Scott. And we can now try out how well this works in the next crisis.