LIVING WELL IN STRESSFUL TIMES

What a time of transformation we are living in. It feels scary and exciting and overwhelming and brimming with new possibilities all at once. How are you navigating your stress? How are you cultivating resilience? In my years as a pharmacist and a health and wellness coach, I have learned skills and techniques to minimize my stress triggers, reduce my overreacting and cultivate choice. Sometimes I even successfully utilize them! Let’s just say I practice them many times throughout my day.
Your stress response is innate survival gear built in your body and neuro pathways as you develop throughout your life. You are hard wired to stay safe and avoid danger. You are continuously assessing through your many senses your internal and external experiences. If you detect a threat, your system turns on the neurochemistry of the survival brain. You move into a mode of protect and defend, also known as fight, flight, or freeze. If you are in jeopardy (actually occurring in the present moment OR imagining by ruminating or worrying), your body is flooded with many physical and chemical reactions including stress induced hormones and neurotransmitters. Your pupils dilate, digestion slows down, blood pressure and heart rate increase, and muscles become tense. This autonomic stress response is fantastic if you are running from a tiger. It is destabilizing and harmful if it becomes your ongoing experience.
How do you bring your body back to balance instead of being engulfed in ongoing stress?
First you have to notice.
What are your stress triggers? What sets you off? The news? Your teenager? The weather? Worrying about the future or past? You can experience a stress trigger that originates from your internal feelings and thoughts or an external event. Tracking what triggers you can be useful. Once you are aware of them, you can use strategies to reduce being triggered. You can monitor the input of social media or the news if those are a trigger. You can notice your negative thoughts and create action steps to deal with the issue or direct your attention back to the present moment. Noticing your stress triggers provides you freedom to choose how you respond rather than conditioned, automatic, and exaggerated reactivity.
Next, increase noticing your stress symptoms.
• How do you behave when you are stressed? Do you lash out, withdraw, eat more, sleep less?
• What emotions do you notice when you are in a hyper vigilant condition? Are you more disgruntled, distracted, depressed, hostile, suspicious, pessimistic, or agitated?
• What happens in your body? Do you have headaches, stomach aches, tight shoulders, lethargy, or hold your breath?
• Do your thoughts change? Become more pessimistic, negative, blaming others, helpless, repetitive, or hopeless?
I had a spiritual teacher, Jan Adams, who was also a physician, and she had a compelling reason to notice stress responses, triggers, and symptoms. Metaphorically speaking, first they come as a whisper. Next a tap on the shoulder. Next a punch in the gut. Next a two by four across the head. Noticing at the whisper is the goal!
Practicing mindfulness – paying attention on purpose in the present moment with as little judgment as you can manage – is a practical tool to navigate stressful times with as much ease and flow and choice as possible.
When you are stressed, can you influence the situation or is it is out of your control? It is easy to fall into the disempowered perspective of a victim of circumstances if you choose to get all worked up and exhausted about something or someone you cannot immediately impact. In this condition, you convince yourself you can only react. The goal is to be proactive. What small steps can you take to have a positive change on the stressful circumstance? How can you increase your circle of influence and decrease your circle of concern? Shifting your perspective is an effective tool in living well and reducing your stress.
Remember you are a powerful agent of positive change. The world needs you as we all co-create who we are becoming together during these stressful times of transformation.
Have comments, feedback, interested in more details on the research? Is there a holistic mind-body health or wellness topic you would like to see in this column?
Be in touch.
Michele@CenterWithin.com
612-465-9775