Your Mind On Stress
Feeling stress is normal and we all experience it. Part of a self-care practice is recognizing when you are experiencing stress. This is the first step to finding the path towards increasing your ability to tolerate stress as it arises in your life. Notice I didn’t say “eliminate stress” or “stop feeling stress.” Why? Because stress is just plain inevitable. How we relate to it is where we have a little more choice and ultimately more freedom.
Stress affects your body and mind in various ways resulting in a nervous system response that shifts your physiology. Stress takes your sympathetic nervous system (SNS) online. This part of the autonomic nervous system is responsible for arousal, action, and in real or in perceived danger, it activates your fight, flight, and freeze response. Your SNS is counterbalanced by the parasympathetic nervous system, responsible for downregulation, relaxation, and recovery. These two important parts of the autonomic nervous system work together to maintain balance.
When you are in what your nervous system perceives as a danger, the limbic system in your brain initiates the stress response. Your brain shifts into survival mode. This response creates changes on a physiological level in the endocrine and nervous systems preparing us to fight, fight, or freeze.
It is often more accessible to experience what stress feels like in the body. For example, you may feel an increase in heart rate and breath rate, an increase in muscle tonus, such as a clenched jaw or shoulders, digestive issues, or chronic pain. The process of feeling what is happening in your body on a physiological level is called interoception. When we become mindful of these experiences, we are better able to sense when we are in a stress response.
There are other signs of stress that may be very subtle and may not be recognized as stress. Once you know how stress can affect your mind, it is easier to tune into what your unique stress response may be and find the right form of self-care to shift into a more regulated state.
When stressed, your ability to self-regulate your emotions decreases. You may feel defensive, irritable, overwhelmed, and unsafe. The ability to understand your mental state or the mental state of others decreases. Stress may show up as feeling distracted, an inability to focus, feeling indecisive, or being unable to assess what needs to change in order to adapt to a new situation. Understanding new information, accessing memory, or solving problems may be challenging. Another sign of stress is feeling numb or checked out. Chronic stress takes a toll on our emotional and psychological health and may result in anxiety, depression, anger management issues, and insomnia.
Mindfulness practices are an excellent way to become more self-aware on both a physiological and psychological level bringing our habitual reactivity in body and mind to light. Developing awareness of the full experience of stress allows for the ability to make better choices in how to relate to ourselves and others, as well as the practices we choose to help create a sense of safety.
Sources for this post:
Yoga Therapy Theory and Practice by Ellen Horovitz and Staffan Elgelid
Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection by Deb Dana
Image: Luis Villasmil