the quick & sneaky way to lower stress

Stress

Pandemic stress creeps under our skin. We breath it in — invisible and dangerous like the virus itself. Most people live closer to an edge or on an edge. We carry the conscious and subconscious stress of a lost world — a warped reality defined by lost smiles, lost school days, lost holiday traditions, lost jobs, lost lives, and a lethal threat lurking in the air. The thick, heavy weight of loss makes it hard to fully breath even without an infection. Our level of patience, understanding, and rational thinking sinks lower and lower. This drowns our threshold for extra stress and potential bull. Our baseline stress level shifts from a green-yellow to orange-red or higher. Our internal alarms ring under the surface. We are angry. We are grieving. We are ready to point fingers. We are primed to attack.

The Stress Response

Many of us are living our lives triggered — ready to fight, flight or freeze.

Most of us have heard of the infamous stress response. Stress triggers the fight, flight or freeze response. It is a useful response in acute situations like facing a fire, lion attack, car accident or robber. It saves our lives. But our modern life stimulates it every day and multiple times a day — from dealing with a screaming toddler, reckless drivers, and a frustrated customer to handling an irate boss or nagging partner. We become hyper-alert but unable to concentrate, focus, and think clearly. Our primitive, emotional brain is triggered and ready to run on autopilot. There is no time for a thoughtful response, only for a reaction. Many of us are living our lives triggered — ready to fight, flight or freeze.

The Plan

It is okay to grieve our expectations for ourselves, others, and our community.

We can’t fix a problem that we deny exists. We have to acknowledge and accept that at some level we have all felt the impact of the pandemic. We are all mourning our past reality and many are mourning loved ones. While, we cannot flip the switch and stop the stress response cold turkey, we also cannot ignore the grief and anger. Ignoring our true emotions only leads to a deeper, darker spiral. It sets us up for a bigger fall later.

While we cannot stop our emotions, we do not have to become them. We do not have to embody anger or sadness. Emotions do not have to possess us like demons hijacking a powerless mind. We have a choice on how to interact with our emotions. We can lean back. We can zoom out. We can take one step back or two steps back and see the big picture of our life. It is okay to grieve what we have lost. It is okay to grieve our expectations for ourselves, others, and our community. But we cannot let our grief and rage take over. We have to recognize these emotions, then step back from them and see where this moment fits into the bigger picture of our day, our week, our month, our year, and our entire life.

Once we acknowledge the emotion and accept it, then we can work on shifting our grief to relief and our rage to courage. Letting go of our expectations, accepting our reality, and seeing the whole picture is the only way to move forward.

Lowering Our Baseline Stress Level

Once we have recognized and accepted our strange new world, we can focus on lowering our baseline stress level. A five-fold approach to building physical, mental, and emotional stress resilience focuses on improving our fuel and environment. Our food, activity, sleep, resilience, and relationships all impact our baseline stress level.

· Food: Eat real, whole, and unprocessed food low in sugar and plant-based

· Activity: Thirty minutes of movement a day (walk, dance it out, online class)

· Resilience: Carve out 10 minutes a day for something you truly enjoy doing

· Sleep: Follow a wind-down routine (with limited evening screen time) to ensure 7–8 hours of quality sleep

· Relationships: Connect with other people (you like) everyday

The Quick & Dirty Way

Darn, those Doritos look good

So, we have all heard this before, right? If we lead a healthy lifestyle, then, we will feel better and be healthier. It is not so easy to flip the healthy lifestyle switch. Darn, those Doritos look good. . . But it is easy to do one thing. It is easy to make one tweak. Ideally, it would be a tweak or fine tuning of one factor in each of the five categories but let’s be real, we aren’t going to do that overnight. The quick and sneaky way is to trigger our relaxation response every day. The relaxation response is considered the opposite of the stress response.

Relaxation Response

*lowers heart rate

*lowers blood pressure

*slows down breathing rate

*relaxes muscle tightness

This means spending at least ten minutes a day doing something joyful. It could be reading cheesy magazines, doodling, walking outside, playing with a pet, cooking, yoga, self-massage, a warm bath or any other screen-free activity. There is irrefutable data that mind-body activities such as meditation, mindfulness, yoga, breathing exercises, tai chi, and qigong decrease stress and inflammation. This is down to a molecular level. We can change our inflammatory gene expression with these activities. Got ten minutes? If you do not have ten minutes for self-care every day, then fix that problem first because you can’t grow anything without investing in it.

Ready, Set, Go

Four breaths to a better life.

One of the easiest ways to step back from stress and pull away from a default triggered, emotional response is through breath exercises. A simple exercise is practicing four cycles of 4–7–8 breathing as developed by Dr. Andrew Weil. This means sitting upright with a downward gaze or closed eyes if possible. Ideally, you tongue maintains contact with the top of your mouth behind your teeth throughout the exercise. Next, you breathe in through your nose for a silent count of four, hold the breath for a count of seven, and breathe out through your mouth for a count of eight. This is one cycle and you can do three more. The longer exhalation triggers the relaxation response (opposite of fight, flight or freeze reaction). It is great to do this every day. Also, you may use this exercise to stop the stress spiral — before you write back to that nasty email, respond to a rude a comment or storm into your co-worker’s office. It helps reduce tension, lower anxiety, control anger, handle cravings, and ease us into sleep. It builds space to step back. Four breaths to a better life. Ready to try? I dare you. I double-dog dare you.

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This piece is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice. All lifestyle changes and breathing exercises should be cleared by your own physician.