In my last post I talked about making changes to diet. Unfortunately, you can eat all the kale and lemon and drink all the green tea in the world but if you’re constantly stressed, you’re not going to be healthy. In fact there is research that shows that if we’re stressed our bodies react to even healthy foods as if they are inflammatory.
One way of understanding stress is to see it as how you react when you perceive a situation as being too much for you to cope with. It’s a response to a real or imagined situation but it’s the perception that’s important and this explains why different people will have different reactions to the same situation.
Our nervous systems basically have three ‘modes’ – ‘freeze’, ‘fight or flight’ and ‘rest, digest and heal’. In ‘fight or flight’ mode energy and blood flow goes to our muscles and to our organs of perception. We are perfectly ready to run away from an animal or to fight someone who is threatening us. We are not so ready to write a report, or deal with a difficult person, or figure out our financial problems. Those are the kinds of things that tend to create stress in our contemporary lives.
We’re supposed to run away from the animal, tell our family about the scare we got around the fire, and then get a good night’s sleep. When that doesn’t happen, the stress hormones just keep circulating in our bodies.
Stress directs blood flow away from our digestive systems and it plays havoc with our immune systems. It can also lead to weight gain because of the effects of the stress hormones and glucose. We can’t heal or digest properly if we’re stressed constantly.
A woman on a facebook breast cancer support group that I’m part of said that her doctor had told her to avoid stress. That’s a ridiculous instruction. Avoiding stress would mean avoiding doing anything new or challenging, and that’s no way to live. It can also lead to a situation in which a person experiences stress, then feels additional stress because they are stressed and they believe they are supposed to be avoiding stress.
I do think it’s helpful to avoid unnecessary stress. I sometimes cause unnecessary stress for myself by leaving home five minutes later than I should. And then if I can’t find my keys or I get to my car and realise I’ve left something I need in the house, I create a stress response that could have been avoided if I had given myself more time.
The main thing I’ve tried to learn to do is to become more resilient to stress. So I can experience stress but I try not to get ‘stuck’ there for too long. Slow ‘belly’ breathing is one way to calm yourself. If you feel your belly going out as you breathe it means you’re breathing using your diaphragm and you’re breathing right down into your lungs instead of just at the top of your chest. It’s soothing and it’s something you can do pretty much anywhere and at any time.
Paying attention to the present moment, which is what most mindfulness practices are based on, can also be useful. The kinds of thoughts that cause us most stress tend to be about what could go wrong in the future or what did go wrong in the past. Often the present actually isn’t that bad. If we can take a moment to notice sounds or sights going on around us, or just pay attention to our own breath, we can take a short break from the workings of the ‘monkey mind.’
It’s also possible to strengthen nerve pathways for other kinds of reactions or feelings. If we make a conscious effort to list things we are grateful for on a regular basis, we can find that our minds more automatically ‘jump’ into grateful mode and not always straight into stress mode.
