Changing Your Relationship to Stress with Awareness

Having an awareness of how stress manifests within you can be helpful when you begin the empowering practice of cultivating a sense of safety and resilience.

If we develop a relationship with our stress response through awareness, we have the opportunity to recover and create change. This does not mean we won’t ever experience stress again. Stressors are a part of everyday life. However, through awareness of our response to stressors, we can begin to develop a deeper understanding and more tools for regulation. 

Let’s remember that stress is a natural response that occurs in your nervous system. If your nervous system perceives a threat (neurocepts threat), then stress is activated. This was something really important for me to learn from Elizabeth Stanley, PhD.’s Mindfulness Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training, if your survival brain perceives a threat, you will have stress activation and at that point, the only thing we have control over is what we do with it. 

Stress is nothing to be ashamed of. We all experience it, even when we aren’t aware. Even the good things in life like a new home, a new job, a new relationship can all be stressors. Shame actually can cause us to become more activated and less able to rationally respond and learn. 

Becoming aware of what stressors already exist in your life is an important exercise in developing more awareness. Taking a stress inventory can be a really helpful way to start developing more awareness of where it already exists in your life. It is important that we take this inventory with an attitude of kindness and curiosity. It is also important to work with stress inventory safely on your own. If you have experienced trauma, it is best to work with a skilled professional when addressing those specific events or if you are feeling continuously activated when trying to become more aware of stressors. 

When a stressor is perceived as a threat, the limbic system in our brain (survival brain) initiates the stress response. Stress chemicals such as adrenaline and cortisol are released into the bloodstream preparing us to fight, flight or freeze. Our heart rate increases, blood pressure elevates, and our ability to self-regulate our emotions, reason, and learn decreases. In other words, our thinking brain goes offline and our survival brain comes online. We experience other physiological changes such as an increase in fats, sugars are released into the bloodstream for quick energy. When stress activation is completely overwhelming, we can shut down. This may be helpful in a true emergency but can lead to long-term negative impacts on our health if we are not able to return to homeostasis.

Some symptoms of stress activation:

• Elevated Heart Rate

• Elevated Breath Rate 

• Restlessness

• Irritability

• Fatigue

• Anger

• Anxiety

• Rumination

• Digestive discomfort

• Muscle Tension

• Inability to learn, solve problems or focus

• Numbing out 

Developing awareness of the symptoms and sensations we experience when we are feeling stress helps us to recognize what happens for us when stress is occurring. This process is called mindful interoception. This is the investigation portion of RAIN practice. (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture.)

Strengthening this pathway gives us insight into our unique response to stressors and the opportunity to learn practices that will help us to recover. 

When we can attune to stress and use tools such as body awareness practices and affect labeling or “name it to tame it,” we then have another opportunity to create some distance by engaging our thinking brain. 

When we have stress recovery practices that we access when we are aware of stress activation, we shift to being empowered and not helpless in the face of stress. This doesn’t go unnoticed by our survival brain and can affect future perceptions of stressors. This strengthens our resilience. 

Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog that will map out some useful practices to help recover from stress activation.

Resources:

Widen The Window, by Elizabeth Stanley, Ph.D.

Radical Compassion by Tara Brach