Change your bodies stress response

Have you ever been so stressed that you had trouble calming down? Most of us have, and it’s not surprising considering a lot of people don’t listen to the signals their body is trying to send. It’s hard to relax if your sympathetic nervous system has taken over. That’s when you need to fight back & take back control, but how?

The Nervous System

Your body has multiple functions that it does automatically. That’s a good thing, because it takes a lot to keep the body running. These things are called the autonomic processes & includes involuntary responses like digestion, heartbeat, & saliva production. You don’t have to think about making your heartbeat, your body just does it. The autonomic processes are broken down into two categories.

The first is the sympathetic nervous system. This is the fight or flight response, the bodies way of readying itself for a tiger attack or running from a bear. Now luckily most people don’t have to deal with those stressors anymore. But your body still has this response from back in the day when it was vital. Even now it often can’t tell the difference between the cortisol (stress hormone) released due to a lion verses cortisol released due to heavy morning traffic or a short deadline on a project.

Fight-or-Flight

The sympathetic nervous system does everything to ready itself for flight or flight, this includes dilating your pupils to see threats better, shutting down digestion so more energy can be used for running, increasing heart rate, constricting airways for more efficient airflow to the blood/brain, shutting down reproductive functions, releasing cortisol & adrenaline in case of a fight, & shutting down the discharge of fat for more immediate energy uses. All that is great if you really do have to run or fight, but when the stressor is a screaming child or a long list of chores, you might be left tense, out of breathe, & wondering why you can’t loose weight.

Rest-and-Digest

The opposite is the parasympathetic nervous system. It’s the rest & relaxation mode, or the bodies brakes. It helps your body recover from ‘fight or flight’ mode when it thinks the threats are gone. It does this by slowing your heart rate, constricting your pupils back to their normal size, returning proper functioning of your organs such as your liver, reproductive organs & your digestive system, relaxing airways back to their normal size, processes muscle recovery & heals injuries, & begins to process the ridding of fat cells. This mode can only be achieved if your body believes it’s safe enough to begin using energy for normal functions rather than conserving it for perceived threats. So you have to make your body believe it’s safe. But if all these things happen automatically (aka without you consciously controlling it), than how do you force your body into a resting state if you are stressed & overwhelmed?

Techniques

There are quite a few ways to do this. The easiest & simplest is to do deep breathing exercises. Practice your box breathing (check out our other blog that goes over how to do box breathing!) By deep breathing, you trick your body into thinking it’s ok because you couldn’t deep breathe if you were running from a lion. Another way is to meditate or do yoga. Both of these activities simulates the bodies parasympathetic response such as slowing down breathing, reducing blood pressure, & slowing heart rate. If you do activities that mimic the PSNS response, it will also activate it.

Finally, the biggest thing you can do is to reduce stress. Sometimes this looks like getting regular massages, or having lunch with a friend weekly, or maybe getting into a hobby like gardening or playing an instrument & carving out time to practice it daily. While it’s impossible to avoid stressors entirely, you can reduce the stressors within your control, as well as control your reaction to them. A trained therapist can help you discover your triggers, assess your typical reactions to these, & formulate a plan to use alternative behaviors in order to reduce your overall stress. In addition, they can help go over the more ways to activate your parasympathetic nervous system. So give us a call so we can help tell your body that there really aren’t any lions around, so it (and you) can relax!