Soften your stress response
If you’re feeling jittery, exhausted or overwhelmed, this post is for you. Whether you’re experiencing these symptoms in response to an unsettling event, one you’re anticipating or disruptive thoughts, you can learn to soften your stress response and foster a state of calm.
When you’re stressed, you’re more likely to forget things and lose focus as well as experience poor emotional regulation and a depressed immune response.
In contrast, when you’re calm, you can:
make level-headed decisions
devise creative solutions
respond to challenges with equanimity
approach life with optimism
nurture your physical agility.
So, how can you get to this calm place now?
Understand your stress response
One morning, in the wake of the escalating COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself climbing back into bed, wondering how I was going to muster the energy to get through my day. How was I meant to play with my children, support my clients, research my next podcast episode, maintain open communication lines with friends, complete the household chores and scrounge together a few quiet moments for myself?
I was frustrated, exhausted, and ashamed of myself. Surely, these were very privileged problems to have. Who was I to complain?
As I lay there, wallowing in misery and beating myself up for it, my 5-year old leant over the bed placed her small hand in mine. She said,
“Mummy, don’t worry. I can see you’re feeling sad now, but it’s just the river of life. Soon you will feel joy again.”
At first I was startled!
It seemed my hippy-mama talk had not been falling on deaf ears! Hooray!
Then I wondered:
What if I could draw on my understanding of science to soften my stress response in the same way my daughter is drawing on her understanding of life to soften my sadness?
So, I decided to revisit my course notes from The Neuroscience Academy where I studied with Dr Sarah McKay, and this helped me reframe my situation. Suddenly, life didn’t seem so dire, and that’s a pretty big leap to make when you’re feeling down and out.
To help you combat the stressful situations that will inevitably arise in your life:
Let’s take a closer look at ‘stress’ so you can understand what’s going on in your body when it seems that your world is falling apart.
What is stress?
Stress is a highly orchestrated physiological response to a perceived threat or challenge. It may be stimulated by:
an external event, like a societal emergency, natural disaster, relationship breakup or job loss
an internal trigger in the form of disturbing or inconsistent thoughts, beliefs or attitudes.
Regardless of whether your stress is externally or internally stimulated, your brain reacts to the stressor by releasing a flood of neurotransmitters and hormones (most notably, adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol). These chemicals jumpstart a physiological response to help you face-off the perceived threat, including increasing your glucose levels and fat metabolism, speeding up your breathing and heart rate as well as depressing inessential functions such as your reproductive drive, immunity and digestion.
When your stress response is mounted at an optimal level, it keeps you safe. However, if you over or under-produce neurotransmitters and hormones, can’t adequately access them or are exposed to them for longer than necessary, your wellbeing is compromised. The likelihood of experiencing disruptive symptoms is determined by your age, biology and life experiences. Newborns, the elderly and people with a genetic predisposition to being highly sensitive or a history of trauma are more likely to experience a suboptimal stress response.
Your unique response is controlled by your autonomic nervous system (which regulates unconscious bodily functions like your heart rate and breathing) and is therefore largely out of your conscious control.
Learning to accept your stress response can help quiet your inner critic and amplify calm.
Calm yourself now
Before we dive into a discussion of calming techniques, here’s one you can sample right now. It is a beautiful and powerful grounding technique that one of my clients swears by — thank you, Graeme! It takes less than one minute and you can do it in any position (sitting, lying down, even walking if you keep your eyes open), so it’s a wonderful trick to have up your sleeve.
One-minute calming technique
Gently close your eyes and scan your body, starting at the top of your head and working gradually down towards your toes. The idea is to pay attention to the sensations in your body as your attention flows over each particular area.
Some sensations may be obvious, like the pulse of blood in your temples, the expansion and contraction of your lungs, or the tension in your shoulders.
Other sensations may be more subtle, like the warmth under your arms, the softness of your hair against your neck or the colours that flicker through your eyelids.
You do not need to assess or solve anything during your body scan.
Your job is to simply ‘notice’ each sensation in your body.
That’s all.
Are you willing to take a minute out of your day to try this exercise now?
If so, how do you feel after completing your scan? Lighter? Heavier? More at ease?
The power of this technique lies in its ability to address your physiology, so you can meet your stress response on the same level at which it is occurring.
Having said this, each of us will have a preference for how to best connect with our physical bodies. While basic mindfulness (which the body scan is an example of) works to calm some of us, others may find it exacerbates a busy mind. If that sounds like you, then engaging in a familiar, enjoyable physical activity may be more effective.
Here are some ideas you can experiment with to moderate your stress response and find a calm state. Rather than viewing them through the lens of ‘This would or wouldn’t work for me’ or ‘I must do this exercise 5 times per day’, try to approach these suggestions with curiosity. In this way, you’ll be able to find at least one technique to lean on right now and identify others to mould into your own customised calming solution.
Rest
Getting sufficient rest is the foundation for promoting an enduring sense of calm and wellbeing, yet it’s the solution we most resist. Inadequate sleep inhibits stress regulation, cognitive function, emotional regulation and physical health. It also exacerbates psychiatric disorders.
Ideally, you should be getting around 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep every night. If this is not possible (I hear you, parents of young children, and my heart goes out to you), it’s important to supplement nighttime sleep with daytime rest or naps.
Naps work best when taken early afternoon and capped at 30 minutes. This timing minimises the chances that your rest will impair your ability to fall asleep at night and keeps your sleep shallow so you can wake up feeling refreshed rather than groggy. Another option for daytime rest is yoga nidra, a type of yogic sleep in which you retain mental awareness.
Move
When you move, you connect with your physical body, which helps regulate your stress response.
Some people find that slow, steady movements accompanied by slow, steady breaths are most conducive to calming their nervous system. Others find it beneficial to shake off stress with 10-20 minutes of intense exercise, which sends your body the message that you have agency and can ‘flee the lion’, so to speak! The key to finding the right movement for you is to pick one that feels good.
If you enjoy practicing yoga, dancing, singing, painting or any other activity, you can choose a riff from it to create a one-minute calming practice. In yoga, this might be child’s pose. If you’re a dancer, perhaps it’s a plie. A singer? Scales. A painter? Sliding a paint brush across a blank canvas. The point is to create a short, easily performed physical movement that you will enjoy relaxing into a few times per day to centre yourself. Of course, if you have the time, extend the minute for as long as it feels good for you.
Spending time in movement that you enjoy is indescribably healing.
Touch
Another powerful way to connect with your physical body is via touch. You’re probably familiar with studies that link the mental and physical health of newborn babies to the extent to which they receive loving touch. This mind-body connection also exists for adults, which means you can use quality touch to induce a calmer state during stressful moments.
Touch-based solutions include massage, hugs, tapping or any other tactile activity that takes you out of your head and into your body. All of these suggestions can be adapted for self-application or use with a trusted partner or professional.
Even a 20-second hug can completely reset your stress response; but ONLY if it’s with someone with whom you feel 100% safe.
Prolong your state of calm
I hope you can use the facts and strategies in this post to cultivate a greater sense of calm.
By accepting your stress response as natural and experimenting with simple techniques to regulate stress at the physiological level, I trust you can make a profound difference to your performance and demeanour in the face or stress.
For longer lasting effects, you can add a psychological layer to this physiological foundation. This involves identifying and resolving unconstructive thought patterns and other internal triggers that spin you out of a calm, clear-headed and confident state and into distress.
If you would like to explore how we can work together to help you manage your stress response, rise to challenges and achieve goals with a greater sense of calm, you can book a private consultation.