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4d • Mental Health 🧠
⚡Make Stress Your Partner, Not Your Predator
As the "busy" holiday season approaches, I'm hearing a lot of people talk about the stress that they feel in their lives, so I figured I'd write a little bit about stress.
Most of us grew up thinking stress is the enemy, something to try to get rid of and vanquish. The thing ruining our cortisol levels and creating toxins in the cells and killing them. While it's true that chronic stress can absolutely wear you down, the fuller story can be more empowering.
Stress is NOT always harmful. In many cases, stress is a built in biological performance booster which can be a cool force to our advantage. The problem is not stress itself but how we interpret it and how long it stays turned on.
Here are some different ways to think about stress:
💪Stress is Not the Enemy
Stress is a natural activation signal from your nervous system. It increases alertness, sharpens attention, and helps you rise to a challenge. This sounds like a good thing, right?
Short term stress can
-increase focus
-boost motivation
-improve memory
-sharpen problem solving
-strengthen resilience
-create meaning, because we only stress about what matters
When we interpret stress as a resource/partner rather than a threat, your body responds differently. The narratives that we create matter. Our cardiovascular system functions better and our nervous system shifts into a more adaptive mode. A lot of research backs up the idea that our mindset really does matter significantly. Your mindset acts as a lens through which you see the world. It impacts what you notice and how you interpret different situations. This takes place through the confirmation bias so it's imperative to look at what we believe about ourselves and the world because we have the endency to look for information that matches our beliefs.
💥 When Stress Becomes Harmful
Stress becomes destructive when
-it lasts too long
-you feel trapped
-you feel unsupported
-you have no sense of control/level of autonomy
-your body never gets a recovery window
This chronic activation can contribute to anxiety, inflammation, fatigue, sleep issues and difficulty regulating emotions. It's responsible for contributing to many inflammation type responses. It traps more toxins in the cells (has a harder time clearing those toxins) and cells die faster--this also contributes to faster aging (Ever seen someone that's fairly "young" and think "Wow, that person does not look their age"or "they must have had a rough life?"---stress can be part of the reason why that's the case.
So the goal is not to eliminate stress. The goal is to manage the duration, intensity and meaning you assign to it so that it can be viewed as a challenge as opposed to something that you are a victim to.
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🧠 How to Partner With Stress Instead of Fighting It
1. Label it as energy, not danger--Instead of saying “I am stressed,” (pointing ot victimhood) try “My body is giving me energy for this.” This shifts your brain into challenge mode, not threat mode. The story we tell ourselves matters!
2. Use your breath strategically -slow exhales activate the parasympathetic system which helps you reset (sympathetic: Fight/flight; parasympathetic: rest and digest).
3. Build recovery into your day: take micro breaks, hydrate, move, give your eyes a rest
4. Increase predictability where you can :our nervous system loves clarity. Schedules, routines and structure lower cognitive load and reduce unnecessary stress. Additionally, we can also work towards increasing our flexibility with uncertainty as well. (again, mindset)
5. Connect with others: social support is a natural stress buffer. It signals safety to the brain and calms physiological arousal (we talked about this in another post) Connection is the greatest protective factor for us :)
6. Notice your stress story : are we interpreting challenges as evidence you are failing or as evidence you are growing?Your interpretation determines your experience. I'm going to keep coming back to this-the stories that we tell ourselves really do matter!
7. Strengthen your baseline--we have windows of tolerance and there are things that decrease this window and things that increase it. Sleep, nutrition, hydration and movement directly influence our stress tolerance level.
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So, for this week and beyond, let's use stress as information to help us make moves that we need to make. :)
*Short and long video on stress response!
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How do you guys deal with stress?
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⚡Make Stress Your Partner, Not Your Predator
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