How You React to Stress
- Suzi Wilkoff
- Jan 11, 2025
- 4 min read
Stress is an everyday fact of life. You cannot avoid it. Stress is any change that you must adapt to, ranging form the negative extreme of actual physical danger to the exhilaration of falling in love or achievement so long-desired success. In between, day to day living confronts even the well-managed life with a continuous stress of potentially stressful experiences. Not all stress is bad. In fact, stress is not only desirable but also essential to life. Whether the stress you experience is the result of major life changes or the cumulative effect of minor everyday hassles, it is how your respond to these experiences that determines the impact stress will have on your life.
The Stress Response in your Body
Your body operates very differently when it is under stress. It creates negative stress response effects such as anxiety, depression, digestive problems, cold hands and feet, shortness of breath and muscular pain to name a few. When you are in the stress response, as you know, it is very difficult to be connected and centered and the communication to your inner guidance within is severely compromised.
The Alarm!
Your body under stress actually sends messages to the cerebral cortex or “thinking brain” and that cortex then forwards the stress message onto the hypothalamus. Now the hypothalamus is the main switch for stress response, kind of like turning your alarm clock on or off. When you turn the alarm on it blares to wake you up and that alarm stimulates you to wake up. Well that alarm in your body actually stimulates your nervous system out of a calm and centered place and into what is commonly known as “fight or flee” or what I like to call the alarm state.
A series of changes are stimulated in your body.
Your heart rate, breathing rate and muscular tension, metabolism and blood pressure all increase.
Your hands and feet get cold as blood is directed away your extremities and digestive systems into the larger muscles that can help your fight or run.
You experience butterflies in your stomach.
Your diaphragm and anus lock.
Your pupils dilate to sharpen your vision and your hearing becomes more acute.
That alarm says to all of your major body operating systems “we need to speed up and shift our attention to places in the body that will help us run away from danger!”
Your body, mind, and spirit surely cannot tolerate being in this way of operating for very long periods of time. When the alarm response continues uncheck and unchanged something else happens that can have long-term negative effects. Your adrenal glands start to secret corticoids (adrenaline or epinephrine and norepinephrine), which inhibit digestion, reproduction, growth, tissue repair, and the responses of your immune and inflammatory systems. In other words, some very important functions that keep your body healthy begin to shut down.
Chronic stress accumulates in your body and the time to recuperate from them may be a longer process that expected. Each person experiences different stress related disorders for example your body’s preferred system may be the skeletal system where you feel muscular tension, pain, lack of strength and fatigue. Others may have affect in their digestive system, showing up as constipation, loose stools, acid reflux, and so on.
The point is that stress inhibits repair and rebuilding in the body and even worsens conditions such as arthritis, chronic pain, diabetes and more.
However, the internal stress and demands of this fast paced life often triggers the body into this state continuously throughout the day. Often times consecutively. The good news is that you now know that you do not have to operate in this mode and the very same mechanism that turns the stress response on can turn it off!
Your Daily Practice and the tools we will explore today shift you out of the alarm state and into the relaxation response. Your body during this time will have an opportunity to begin restoring and repairing itself and your possibilities of listening deeper, creating calm within and thus helping your mind and body live healthier can then take place.
The Relaxation Response Parasympathetic After studying the physiological effects of the 'flight or fight' stress response, Cardiologist Herbert Benson discovered that by eliciting the 'relaxation response' the opposite was also true (1996). This physiologic state of calm is an equally essential survival mechanism, providing us with the ability to heal and rejuvenate our bodies. Today, the relaxation response is crucial when considering how often the fight or flight response is triggered inappropriately.
When our minds become focused through meditation, repetitive prayer, or mantras, the body responds with dramatic affects. There is a decrease in heart rate, blood pressure and metabolic rate (Benson, 1996).
How to Elicit the Relaxation Response
Pick a focus word or short phrase that is firmly rooted in your belief system.
Sit quietly in a comfortable position.
Close your eyes.
Relax your muscles
Breathe slowly and naturally, and as you do, repeat your focus word, phrase, or prayer silently to yourself as you exhale.
Assume a passive attitude. Don't worry about how well you're doing, When other thoughts come to mind, simply say to yourself, 'Oh, well', and gently return to the repetition
Continue for then to twenty minutes.
Do not stand immediately. Continue sitting quietly for a minute or so, allowing other thoughts to return. Then open your eyes and sit for another minute before rising.
Practice this technique once or twice daily.
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