Understanding Stress: The 3 C’s to Keeping your Stress in Check
Stress can be your best friend… Or, in some cases, your worst enemy.
Article by Rebekah Davenport
Stress as Our Friend
In some cases, stress has been a useful tool in your belt.
Stress has helped you succeed: enabled you to ride those scary rollercoasters, and to talk in front of daunting crowds.
Increases in cortisol (the stress hormone) in the brain enables us to identify threats, alerting the emotion regions of the brain that we are to fear our environment and prompting our motor regions to act (or not to). This fight or flight mode that is initiated by stress can be positive, or even crucial to our survival. ‘Positive’ stress can reinforce the immune system and allow us to discover untapped physical hybrid-like-resources that enable us to fight an attacker or run from one with unseen speed.
Stress as Our Enemy
But what about stress as an enemy? What does it look like when stress becomes a partner in our lives — sending hijacking fight or flight signals to the brain when there is no real threat? We feel hopeless, fearful and anxious as our brains remain in a vigilant search for invisible threats. In contrast to positive stress, this enemy weakens our immune system, leaving us vulnerable to illness. After some time fighting, our bodies and our brains forget how to relax.
Each and every one of us are ‘wired’ to respond to stress uniquely. For instance, financial strain or increasing work demands may cause your next-door neighbour Jack to enter into state of crippling anxiety, whereas these stressors may have only a minor effect for you. You see, stress in our lives can be represented as a bucket — ‘we’ symbolic of the bucket and stress, of the water.
This bucket (our minds and bodies) has a naturally predefined capacity for water before it overflows. This capacity is determined by our genetics, our personality traits and tendencies and our experiences and adversities. For Jack, a culmination of these factors, cause him to feel anxious and on-edge. Sometimes negative feelings arising with reason, and at other times without it. Friends ask Jack “what is stressing you out?” and he cannot precisely locate a causal variable. Add a relational conflict to Jack’s existing stressors, and his bucket is suddenly overflowing. Fortunately for Jack, and for you and I, we can build stronger buckets by drawing upon and implementing evidence-based strategies.
The 3 C’s to keeping your stress in check
- CONSIDER how much your bucket can hold
There is no weakness in acknowledging our limited capacities — we are all human, none immune from stress or pain. By listening to our physical bodies, we can quickly learn the stressors our buckets can withstand (or, the depth of our bucket), and those that cause a total fracturing. Small or large physiological clues indicate the severity of our response to stress.
Whilst stress cues in the body varies from person-to-person, they more generally include:
· Increase in heart-rate
· Increase in breathing
· Changes in appetite (Very hungry or not hungry)
· Hypervigilance — your 5 senses becomes very sharp and alert
Remaining sensitive to physiological responses is not to amplify the impact of stress, but to help us check-in with our bodies and know when we need to reach out.
2. CONFIDE in support
Our unique responses to stressors in our lives make it difficult for us to feel understood by those around us. Very quickly, the feeling of being misunderstood can cause us to become socially isolated and depressed or anxious. Fortunately, the positive effects of social supports act as a buffer to stress.
Think of these supports as superglue for the fractures in your bucket — they do not entirely mitigate the impact of stress, but they help keep the bucket or us, strong and positively full. And for those most negatively affected by stress, the positive effect of social support is the greatest. So, when your body sends you stress clues, a fast beating heart or an increased appetite, confide in those you trust. These supports could be friends, family, a colleague, a psychologist or your Hug-a-group. As your Hug-a-Group, we volunteer to be your superglue; standing alongside you, helping you cope with the waves that come your way.
3. CULTIVATE a routine of mindful exercises
B-R-E-A-T-H-E, you’ve probably heard It before, right? And you’ve likely found that it yielded little benefit in those stressful times when you’re pacing frantically or rocking side-to-side. Like anything, and particularly when our bodies feel spent-up in stress, we need to practice mindfulness in order to perfect it. Just as our buckets are unique, so are our responses to mindful exercises. Therefore, we must aim to understand what things help YOU to relax. These exercises may include deep-focused breathing, yoga, guided meditation, or more simple practices such as time-out reading or listening to soothing music.
In our busy world, and with our busy minds, such practices can actually alter the activation patterns in the brain — specifically, steadying your mind by reducing the activation in the emotion region of the brain, AKA the ‘amygdala’. So, remain assured that intentional mindfulness is changing your life, one neurotransmitter at a time. If you’re stuck finding exercises that fit for you, confide in your Hug-a-Group for tips and suggestions. We are after all, in this journey of nurturing and teaching our bodies to feel good and strong together!
Take one step at a time and know that at whatever step you find yourself at — no one every expected you to carry the weight of your bucket alone.
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