Stop trying to eliminate stress and start learning how to manage it…
You seem so stressed lately.
Are you feeling okay?
What’s got into you these days?
Life is full of ups and downs. Sometimes things happen that are out of our control. Sometimes people say things that affect us in ways they normally wouldn’t.
What many of us try to do is to eliminate all stress from our lives, but in the process of doing so, we end up stressing ourselves out even more!
Not all stress is bad for us.
Eustress is something that we need. If we didn’t have it we wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning and do the things we need to in order to survive. It’s the type of stress that keeps us motivated in life and helps us to work towards the life we desire.
But we all know there is also other types of stress that stops us from doing all of the above. We become demotivated. We are constantly on edge. We get irritable or angry. We get into niggly fights with our partners or scold our children over the slightest things.
This is the type of stress we are trying to get rid of because we know that we’d be much nicer people if it wasn’t part of our lives.
Here’s the thing…
We are never going to be able to eliminate stress from our lives. Unfortunately our society and the way we live, especially in the western world, has evolved in a way that has us exposed to stressful challenges, situations and people every single day.
It doesn’t matter what we try and how many stress management tools we use, we still end up feeling stressed on some level.
So what can we do?
Many of us try to eliminate our stress by using tools and practices, such as meditation, mindset work, exercise and self-care, all suggested to us by family, friends, our medical practitioners and health advocates. And these are all beneficial, with many being scientifically proven to lower stress levels.
And for a while they work, until another scenario shows up in our lives that has us feeling stressed again. We use our tools to feel comfortable, but what we don’t do is address the issues causing the stress in the first place.
We don’t go that bit deeper. And this is understandable. To go that bit deeper and start to uncover what and why we feel stressed can be as uncomfortable as the feelings of stress themselves.
We’re happy to keep the stress at bay, or manage it by using these feel good tools. What we don’t understand is that by doing so we’re putting our long term mental and physical health at risk.
Being able to understand the situations, challenges and people that cause us stress and have our nervous system coming out in retaliation or shutting down, can help us to build long term strategies to not only manage the stress, but help us become more resilient to it.
One of the ways that has helped me to identify the roots of my own stress and my stress responses, was to track my nervous system.
I tracked the following things:
1. State
I got to know and determine what state my nervous system spent most of the day in. Was it in a sympathetic state getting ready to deal with threats and dangers? Was it in a dorsal vagal state which had me feeling helpless or frozen, or was it in a ventral vagal state where I felt calm, open and curious about what was going on internally and externally?
I noticed that I moved through different states depending on what was going on around me and who I was with. A healthy and resilient nervous system can move between states, sometimes without us even being aware of it. But when stress starts to become chronic, we may find ourselves in one state for prolonged periods of time.
Understanding how different nervous system states show up for you is an important step to managing your stress.
2. Emotions
Depending on the situations we find ourselves in, we can feel a myriad of emotions. These all lead to a core of 6 or 7 base emotions (angry; happy; sad; disgusted; surprised; fearful; bad). I was able to determine what emotions were underlying how I felt, and this helped me to see what had me feeling stressed.
What was my overwhelm really telling me? Why did I feel isolated or numb?
These are all questions that helped me to go that little bit deeper and start to resolve where my stress was coming from.
3. Physical Sensations
Again, depending on the situations we find ourselves in, our bodies can experience our nervous system responses in different ways. Knowing how your physiology changes and experiences different situations and emotions gives you an indication of what is happening when your body is feeling stressed.
A Body Scan exercise is part of my daily routine enables me to notice sensations ‘in the moment’ without too much impact to whatever else I’m doing.
It took a bit of time to get used to doing this, but with practice it became easier and provides me with much needed information about what my nervous system and body is experiencing in times of stress.
4. Resourcing
Taking all of the steps above helped me to determine how you resource myself. Listening to my body and letting it tell me what it needed in order to feel resourced has been key to managing my stress.
Do I need rest? Do I need food? Do I need to interact with others? What do I need to bring myself back to a sense of internal safety?
Rather than trying to eliminate stress from your life, tracking your nervous system, even for a few short weeks, will help you to see how your nervous system responds in different situations. You’ll be able to notice when old habits start to show up. You’ll be able to determine what you need in order to feel resourced so that stressful situations no longer derail you. Instead, you’ll be able to meet them head on, rather than wanting to run away.
If you’d like information on how to track your own nervous system, please reach out to me for more details.
Much love,
Harmesch x