How stress affects your nervous system (and what you can do about it)…
If you’ve been trying to mindset your way out of your stress and it’s not working, I want you to know you’re not alone.
We’ve often been taught and told that if we change the way we think about certain situations, environments or people, we’ll be able to reduce or eliminate our stress.
But stress isn’t just something that is in your head and can be easily thought away.
When we are feeling stressed we experience physical changes in our brain and our body. Our nervous system starts to ramp up and come online in case we need to take action.
Let me give you a quick overview of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems:
Sympathetic nervous system:
This is what you might know as ‘flight or fight’. It’s those responses in your nervous system that have your adrenaline pumping and your heart racing. You start to experience changes in your body that have you preparing to fight and defend yourself or have you getting ready to run away or flee. Your body may become tense or ready to spring into action.
Parasympathetic nervous system:
This is what you might know as ‘rest and digest’. Although it sounds as if this is the state of the nervous system we want to be in as much as possible, this isn’t the case. Our body starts to slow down (to aid rest and digestion) but when it comes to stress, we may feel ourselves becoming numb or disassociating from the situation we are in. We may start to feel collapsed and find it hard to motivate ourselves.
When we think about what our body starts to do or how it reacts when we are stressed, it really depends on your individual stress responses. Not everyone experiences stress in the same way and that’s why it’s a good idea to start understanding your own stress responses. When you do, you’ll be able to distinguish what types of situation or challenges activate your sympathetic nervous system, and what types of situation or challenges activate your parasympathetic nervous system.
Some ways in which our body reacts to stress:
- you may experience more aches and pains than usual
- your immune system becomes weakened and you may be more prone to colds and flu
- you may experience weight loss or weight gain
- you may experience headaches
- you may encounter changes in breathing.
This list isn’t exhaustive and you may have experienced other types of changes when you’ve felt stressed.
When we do start to experience stress, most of us want nothing more than to get past it, or get rid of that feeling as soon as possible. We don’t want to feel stressed one little bit!
This is where our choices and patterns of behaviour come into play. Choices and patterns that have been learned over time. When the symptoms of stress come up, this is where we start to reach for the sweet or savoury treats. This is where we start to think about having a drink or we pick up our phone and start looking through our various social media apps.
These are the behaviours and patterns that make us feel safe, or bring our nervous system back to safety. But these behaviours and patterns are also keeping us from attending to the things that are causing our stress symptoms in the first place.
These behaviours and patterns keep stress stored in our body. We don’t complete our stress cycle and disperse the stress that we are feeling. Trying to deal with it by using food, technology or alcohol can bring about further problems such as physical limitations and illnesses.
So what can we do about this?
Well, this is where we get to make a choice. We can try to continue dealing with our stress and it’s symptoms in the same way that we are currently doing. A way that we know isn’t working for us.
Or…
We can start to uncover what the root cause of our stress is and deal with it in healthier ways. I’ve listed out a few steps below. My clients can often find this a bit uncomfortable, but I encourage you to try and go through the following steps in turn. There’s no need to rush, take your time…
1. Understanding what is causing your stress response.
In order to understand your stress responses you need to determine what situations or challenges you are facing, or have been facing, that are causing you to feel stressed?
2. How is your body reacting?
Think back to some of these challenges or situations that cause you to feel stressed. What are you feeling in your body? Where are you feeling it? Are you feeling constricted or collapsed when revisiting these situations?
3. How do I currently try and feel safe?
When you start to feel stressed, what is your go to? Are you thinking about reaching for a bar of chocolate? Are you thinking about grabbing a glass of wine? Are you thinking about picking up your phone? Or maybe you’re not thinking about these things at all, maybe you’re doing them automatically.
4. What can I do instead?
What we want to do when we are feeling stressed is to complete our stress cycle. When we don’t, we store those symptoms and reactions in our body. There are many ways to release these feelings of stress. Exercise, somatic practices, or journalling are just a few. Anything that helps you to process your feelings is beneficial. It’s important however to pick something that works for you, or you’ll just end up feeling more stressed!
Creating better habits to deal with stress is an important step to building resilience and creating a stress management toolkit. Learning how to resource yourself will help you to heal your nervous system so that instead of dealing with stress, you can start bringing more balance to your life.
Much love,
Harmesch x