Chronic stress is the real epidemic. It affects us all in ways most of us don’t realize. The vast majority of health challenges we all face are stress-related.
It’s estimated that more than 90% of all illness and disease is stress-related. And, about 75% of all visits to the doctor are for stress. Stress is a problem that must be dealt with.
There’s no eliminating harmful stress! Trying to “manage” stress is a recipe for more stress. So, what do you do? You retrain your body to handle stress in a completely different way. The more often you are exposed to stress the easier and easier it is for your nervous system to go to ‘fight-or-flight’.
Let’s use that same process to reverse the trend and spend more and more time in rest, recovery, and ease.
Chronic Stress is Slowly but Surely Destroying Your Health
Here are a few facts regarding stress:
- We live in a soup of stress: the very nature of our lifestyle and culture is the source of continuous daily stress.
- Stress activates the primitive Sympathetic ‘Fight-or-Flight’ portion of your nervous system.
- Over time your Sympathetic system becomes overactive, a condition called Sympathetic Dominance.
- Your Sympathetic system is wired for survival, causing a reduction in all the processes responsible for rest, recovery, healing, thriving.
- 90-95% of ALL illness and disease is stress-related
- 75% of all doctors’ visits are for stress-related
Here’s What I did to Transform Stress
If you can’t eliminate or overcome stress, what can you do?
You can change how your body reacts when exposed to stress. A few years back I experienced a significant stress in my life that caused a lot of problems from sleep to fatigue to pain. So I immersed myself in the study of proven strategies to strengthen my nervous system and how I responded to stress.
I wasn’t completely sure how it was working until I encountered a completely unexpected disruption in my life. Instead of experiencing challenges like sleep disruption, headaches, fatigue, and muscle tension; I moved through this episode smoothly as though nothing had happened.
Those practices are now part of my daily life as I know how devastating stress can be. You can do the same. We use a neurological principle called ‘Neurons that fire together, wire together’. Instead of firing the Sympathetic Nervous System we activate the Vagus Nerve of the Parasympathetic system.
The 4 Critical Stress Recovery Actions
Here are what I consider 4 critical actions to not only recovering from chronic stress but also to build resilience. The very same process in the body that resulted in the effects of chronic stress can be used to rewire your nervous system.
It will take time and repetition. That’s the same path you took to chronic stress. Instead of training and wiring your nervous system for stress you’re going to rewire it for resilience. Here are 4 core actions that are part of every stress recovery plan in my office.
1. Breathing: how we breathe for most people is a perpetuator of stress in the body. The first place to start is to close your mouth and breathe through your nose. Your mouth is for eating, drinking, and talking. Use your nose for breathing. When you breathe through your nose you produce nitric oxide which dilates blood vessels and helps the delivery of oxygen to your body.
Nasal breathing also slows your breathing down and that is a message to the nervous system that everything is safe. Try slowing down to 5 to 6 breaths per minute, breathing slowing in and out through your nose.
2. Abdominal or Diaphragmatic Breathing: stand in front of a mirror and take a normal breath and observe what part of your upper body moves. Does your chest or shoulders or neck move? If it does, you are perpetuating the stress cycle by activating the Sympathetic ‘fight-or-flight’ system.
Diaphragmatic breathing will activate your Vagus Nerve instead of the Sympathetic System. Over time this will increase the tone of your Vagus Nerve which in turn will lower the activity of your Sympathetic system.
Here’s how to practice diaphragmatic breathing. It can be challenging at first. It should be the natural way you breathe so if it is difficult look at it as an indication of how much it will benefit you.
- Practice breathing down into your belly. Start lying down then go to sitting and finally standing.
- You can put a book or your hands on your belly.
- Breathe in through your nose into your belly so that your belly raises the book or your hands with each breath.
- Breathe slowly and focus all the movement of your breath on your abdomen.
3. Sleep: Sleep is critical. Poor quality sleep is a stressor itself that will worsen any stress-related issues. Long-term poor sleep will result in fatigue, pain, and often anxiety.
Sleep can be tricky. Stress disrupts sleep, yet quality sleep diminishes the effect of stress. Here are a few sleep basics:
- Go to sleep about the same time every night
- Sleep in a dark room with no electronics. You might need black out curtains.
- A cool room around 65o or lower is best.
- No stimulants like coffee after noon.
- Eat your last meal at least 2-3 hours before bed.
- Avoid stimulating screen time before bed.
4. Body Awareness: We live in a culture that has not placed much emphasis on caring for and nurturing our bodies. We often pay little attention to what is happening with our bodies until the symptoms become so strong, they can’t be ignored.
If you want to recover from chronic stress then it’s time to start paying attention to your body. I call symptoms the language of the body. They start out as a whisper and gradually grow to a full blow scream if we ignore them.
Start by simply sitting still for 5 or 10 minutes and put your focus on your body. Just notice what you notice. Don’t label anything you feel as good or bad. Don’t try to change anything. Simply start at your feet and slowly move up your body to your head.
Those are the foundational actions you must integrate into your routine if you want to recover from chronic stress and make yourself more and more resistant to stress.
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