Stress management myth busting

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just turn the stress switch off or just tell yourself to relax?

Managing stress requires deliberate action which includes completing the stress response cycle.

Stress happens when something alarming occurs, But originally, it was designed to help us survive life-threatening emergencies.

In our distant past we had to respond to acute threats such as a fierce predator by fighting, running away, playing dead. Otherwise we would be truly dead.

Survival would complete the stress response cycle.

The stress response cycle has a beginning, a middle and an end:

An assessment of the danger

A subconscious decision how to respond to it, there’s an action (fight/flight/freeze)

The realization that we made it

In modern life, stressors aren’t always acute. So it’s harder to identify their beginning, middle and end.

SO our nervous system activates different body systems in the face of any stressor. It will raise your heart rate and blood pressure.

And now, the process can’t always get resolved successfully by running away or fighting the situation. So the sympathetic energy gets trapped in the system.

This is how we get stress symptoms.

To  complete the cycle, we need to discharge this energy.

If you create a safe space, which will tell your nervous system that everything’s OK right now.

Then the fear can be felt and move through the body. Cycle completed.

The strong conditioning in our society against feeling our feelings can make this challenging.

That’s why an understanding therapeutic environment is so crucial.

Completing the stress response cycle is a physical thing.

There needs to be a safe space and a complete trust in the body to what it knows to do.