Modern stress, ancient reactions and creating positive responses
Why does stress feel so disempowerment? I bet it has to do with the fact that a lot of stress happens automatically. None of us consciously decide “hey, I think I’m going to be stressed today! I think I’m going to tense my shoulders and breathe too fast and have thousands of negative thoughts going through my head every minute until I hit erratically.” hay tonight!” Instead, we simply find ourselves subconsciously experiencing all of the above signs and symptoms of stress. Stress hits us like a wrecking ball, and like a wrecking ball, we often feel like there’s no way to stop stress devours our lives.
Think about it: if stress were a conscious response, all we would have to do to dissipate it is resolve to constantly feel relaxed and calm. However, since stress is an automatic and unconscious response, we must take more concrete measures if we want to prevent it from dominating our lives.
And the first step to banishing stress lies in understanding what stress really is.
your biology betrays you
To understand stress we need to take a step back. HAS great a step back, a step back to the earliest days of the human race, when the stress response was more likely to save your life than ruin it.
If you were one of the first humans to walk this earth, you faced far more danger than you are likely to encounter today. You had to worry about all kinds of animal predators, you had to worry about rival groups of humans who were at war with your people, and you even had to worry about being killed by your own people if you couldn’t follow the rules for the card. Death was an ever-present reality in those days, and if you wanted to survive, you needed a proper way to deal with the many life-threatening dangers you would encounter during your everyday life.
Fortunately, you had a way of dealing with life-threatening situations connected directly to you, directly to the inner workings of your biology. It’s known as the fight or flight response, and it’s the beating heart of stress.
The fight or flight response is easy to understand. When you’re faced with a threatening situation, your body remixes the hormonal profile that flows through your bloodstream, overloading you with adrenaline. This new hormonal cocktail narrows your senses, shuts down your brain, and turns you into an automated life-saving machine, a machine that’s ready to fight for its life or run faster than ever until it’s past the danger at hand.
Guess what? Although you probably won’t come across many saber-toothed tigers in your modern day life, you still have that fight or flight response built into your biology and it still kicks in whenever you feel threatened. And while the harsh light of logic may negate the life-threatening nature of those modern stimuli that trigger the stress response within you, your body still reacts to being overwhelmed in the same way, initiating the fight or flight response. .
In other words, stress is an automatic biological process that used to save your life and is now likely to ruin it. If you are going to dissipate stress forever, you must learn to interrupt your negative automatic responses. prior to It sends you spiraling down, down, down.
How can I control an unconscious biological reaction?
This is a fair question, and to understand the ways you can interrupt the stress response and get your life back on track, you need to understand the way your automatic responses work. All of that probably sounds a bit lofty and hard to understand, but it’s actually simple and easy to understand.
You see, the stress response is really only made up of a few different elements: a stimulus, a reaction, and a response.
· You encounter a stimulus by which you feel threatened.
You unconsciously react to stimuli (experiencing fight or flight).
You respond negatively to stimuli because you are caught in the middle of adrenal fight or flight overload, creating additional negative stimuli that drive you further and further into your stressed state.
Getting through the process and regaining a calm and relaxed life relies on accurately throwing a wrench into this process right where it can engage the gears most effectively. But where could that be?
· You really can’t control the fact that you’re going to encounter threatening stimuli.
· You really can’t control the fact that your body will immediately go into fight or flight when you encounter this unavoidable and threatening stimulus.
You they canhowever, control your response to stimuli by dispelling fight or flight reactions. after start goal prior to you respond.
Creating this gap between reaction and response is the wrench to dissipate stress from your life, and it’s easier than you think.
First, create space
Instead of automatically responding to threatening stimuli, you take a minute to walk away from them. If you can physically escape the stimuli, do so, even if it means going to the bathroom or conference room for just a minute. If you cannot physically escape the stimuli, take a quick, quiet moment by closing your eyes and taking a deep breath, escaping internally.
When you take a minute to escape from stimuli that threaten you, either internally or externally or a combination of both, you give your body a chance to stop perceiving itself as threatened and as such shut down its response of fight or flight You can turn off the response almost as fast as you turn it up. Even a minute of space can drastically alter the hormonal cocktail coursing through your veins.
Second, be present
When you run away, you need to focus on something other than the stimuli that threaten you. After all, you haven’t really escaped if you keep thinking about it over and over again. Focus on your breathing, notice what the inside of your eyelids look like, admire the designs at play on the chairs in the conference room…it doesn’t matter what you focus on, as long as it’s not what’s bothering you. first.
Third, Feel the Moment
Put your hand on your heart and soften it. Send compassion to yourself and to the stimuli that threaten you. Hardly anything is really bad deep down: the saber-toothed tiger of yesteryear was more hungry than malicious, and your boss probably feels just as stressed and pressured as you do. Feel compassion for the source of your stress and you will no longer see it as a threat, dispelling the chances of your fight or flight response kicking in again and allowing you to respond positively.