Calm Your Body & Mind, Reduce Your Stress 10 Easy Ways to Counteract Life’s Rollercoaster Holly Woods PhD Helping adults who are weighed down by stress or trauma and want to find a different way. http://HollyWoodsCoaching.com Stress: The Rollercoaster Ride Some people are deathly afraid of rollercoasters-­‐ the violent surging up then down, the pit in your stomach. At times, it feels as if you are floating, until you hit bottom again. A brief burst of relief, then another sweat-­‐inducing, gut-­‐in-­‐the-­‐throat roller. Maybe you’re one of the screamers with hands held high, enjoying the sensations. Or maybe you white-­‐
knuckle it the whole way, hardly inhaling a breath. Each passenger encounters the ups and downs, turns and twists differently. Most are relieved when it’s over, though some are ready to jump back on or find the next ride. Some swear never to do it again, it was so intense. Life is like that. Some times you embrace the ride, knowing it will end soon, and that you’ll walk on steady ground again. You easily anticipate your next stop at the carnival to shoot a duck at the arcade. On these days when you’re enjoying the rollercoaster and don’t mind the temporary hurly-­‐burly in your body, your nervous system is what a physiologist would call ‘well-­‐regulated’. Your body easily responds to the rollercoaster stress by countering the initial impulsive ‘startle’ response with an equally unconscious reaction in the brain designed to ‘calm your nerves’. This reaction prevents you from having feelings of anxiety or sensation that would normally turn into fear. Other times, you brace wildly against the inevitable ups, downs, twists and turns of life, unable to anticipate the end of the ride. Unable to stomach the uncomfortable sensations or the emotions they yield. If you find yourself in this space, bracing for the dreaded physical sensations and emotions that follow, yet not really facing a dangerous situation, your nervous system is likely overreacting to the stimulus. That kind of stress happens when your body is overwhelmed by cues in your environment, the ones that leave you feeling threatened. It is normal (and healthy) to have these reactions when you have authentic danger. Like when you see a growling dog approaching with bared teeth. Or you notice a small child wandering into the street. Your impulsive brain detects threat, your body sensations kick in (sweating palms, heart throbbing, knot in your stomach) and you can’t get off the rollercoaster. In cases of real threat, there is no ‘exit’ ramp, and your impulses are doing just what evolution trained them to do. React quickly, ramp up the heart and lungs, shut down the gut. No fear needed, just action. And when the crisis has passed, your nervous system calms down and returns to the pre-­‐crisis balanced state. No harm, no foul. But when your impulsive brain has to repeatedly respond to numerous stressors (like a continuous ride of conflict at home, anxiety at work, financial uncertainty), you may end up with a nervous system that never turns OFF, leaving you unregulated and in a constant state of fight or flight. Holly Woods PhD Helping adults who are weighed down by stress or trauma and want to find a different way. http://HollyWoodsCoaching.com Or even worse, it freezes, where your brain and body are so overwhelmed that you can no longer respond to normal stimuli. You may know this ‘deer in the headlights’ look in someone who is overworked, overwhelmed and sees no way out. Real or Perceived Danger? So what happens when your brain doesn’t realize that these everyday stressors are not ‘life or death’ threats? When your body doesn’t need the same kind of nervous system response as a car crash, but produces it anyway, you end up in a state of hyper-­‐reactivity. The throttle of your nervous system stays ON-­‐ the rollercoaster never stops. And when that happens, much like full-­‐scale trauma, your neurologic system may not be able to deactivate the fight or flight residue that builds up, causing harm to your body and psyche. In this state, you can’t tell if the threat is real or perceived, current or past. As a human, you perceive just about everything you encounter-­‐ it’s the blessing of your thinking prefontal cortex brain. The curse is that you then create a judgment about the event, and hang onto it. When you’re strung out on a hyperactive nervous system, insignificant events can trigger the same traumatic expression of your nervous system as the original event did. So, if you’ve been on the rollercoaster for a while, you may be feeling the same physical and emotional overwhelm as people who experience a tragic accident, assault, childhood neglect, combat military or abusive relationships. Some types of occupations, such as being a first responder or air traffic controller, are among the most notable for this kind of stress, but it can happen to any of us. So Why Do My Body & Brain React This Way? You likely imagine that your brain first recognizes threats and tells your body to respond. But in fact, your brain doesn’t sense the cues-­‐ your body does. Sweating palms. Knot in your stomach. Clenched jaw. Only after the body’s natural instinct senses the stress or danger, and produces these sensations, does your brain kick in with emotions and thoughts. And often, because we don’t recognize our body’s signals, we misinterpret them. In other words, your body is just doing what it was evolutionarily trained to do. But if you always overreact, thinking that simple stress is survival threat, your body’s nervous system may need some fine-­‐tuning. Part of this phenomena is because we have three brains, or what’s called a “triune” brain, made of three parts that work holistically. These three parts evolved over the course of time to help us survive in a Holly Woods PhD Helping adults who are weighed down by stress or trauma and want to find a different way. http://HollyWoodsCoaching.com challenging world. However, our brains are primed to use the oldest system first. This would be the brain stem and hypothalamus, or the “reptilian” brain, whose focus is to avoid harm. Originally designed to run away from stalking predators, the reptilian brain’s fight or flight modes are always ready to fire. While the brain developed two other systems to control feelings and emotions, create relationships, and coordinate body functions, you default to the reactive mode when there is any sense of danger. A rollercoaster ride. A burglar in your home. They invoke the same reptilian response in order to promote survival. It’s better to mistake a stick for a snake, than a snake for a stick. Because of the reptilian brain, the body has a “negativity bias”. As neuropsychologist Dr. Rick Hanson says, your brain is “Velcro for the negative, and Teflon for the positive”. In general, you need a ratio of 5:1 positive experiences to negative ones, in order to retain the positive. In processing these ‘danger’ impulses, you are just like every other mammal on the planet. Most animals demonstrate the same brief fight or flight reactions, followed by long responsive periods of calm to promote recover and repair. You, though, have a thinking brain that helps to make sense of the impending threat. Under normal conditions, with a healthy and well-­‐resourced neurologic system, you can decide if the threat is worth worrying about or not. Go to http://hollywoodscoaching.com/lighten-­‐your-­‐load/ if you want to read more detail about the science behind the Brain-­‐Body connection. What’s a Body to Do? Successful recovery from stress or trauma buildup in your body requires that you build ‘resources’ to allow recovery. These resources include neuroplasticity (changing the brain structure) and a reorganization (actively getting rid of the residue buildup) of the nervous system. It’s also beneficial for you to learn to read the body sensations that are signals about what is going on in your mind and body. The challenge is that you, like the rest of us, have probably become divorced from your own body and the nervous system that controls and responds to the body (and leads to emotions and thought). You no longer have the capacity to pay attention to how you restrict your natural healing processes. When’s the last time you paid attention to your body sensations when you left the room after a tense discussion with your spouse? In a nutshell, we think and feel with our guts. Most of us want to believe that our higher thought processes are masters to our body (e.g., all it takes is willpower!). In reality, our thinking brain is a servant to our evolutionary ancestor, the reptilian brain that’s trying to avoid harm. Holly Woods PhD Helping adults who are weighed down by stress or trauma and want to find a different way. http://HollyWoodsCoaching.com In essence, if you get out of your body’s way, it will heal on its own. The good news is that our body sensations are clues to know what we are feeling, and also how to fix the stress. The bad news is that we have abandoned our living, sensing, knowing bodies by creating stories about ourselves, leaving us fearful, angry and anxious. Chained to Your Past And if you have experienced any trauma, your ability to experience your body sensations may be hugely constricted, primarily because the rollercoaster is always ON. You become aggravated, frustrated or anxious with the smallest stimuli. Or you have learned to detach from sensation because you are “flooded” with emotions and neurologically disassociate from life. This can look like shock, depression, detachment or the numbing associated with substance abuse. Just as the ‘deer in the headlights’ freezes, so does your body when you are overwhelmed with emotions that you can’t process. Either of these processes prevents you from being available to the joy of being fully present in your life. You can’t have it both ways-­‐ if you shut down the fear through your self-­‐protective armor, you also shut down the pleasure. It is the unspoken hell of stress and traumatization. The Mind-­‐ Body Connection However, all is not lost. Regaining the sense of what your body is experiencing, so you can detect what you are sensing, feeling and knowing about yourself, will help you navigate the stressors of life, according to Dr. Risa Kaparo in Awakening Somatic Intelligence: The Art and Practice of Embodied Mindfulness. Mindfulness about your body provides real-­‐time feedback to make tiny shifts in awareness that can alter our health and happiness, both physically and emotionally. Of course, your thinking brain still has an important role in learning to deal with stress or trauma. In fact, it is this higher-­‐order capacity of your brain that keeps you from overreacting when you feel distressing bodily sensations and emotions, and to respond to highly stressful situations in a productive way. Holly Woods PhD Helping adults who are weighed down by stress or trauma and want to find a different way. http://HollyWoodsCoaching.com Calm the Mind & Body to Deal with Stress
You can learn new ways to deal with stress, and among the most important is human engagement. Social contact provides nourishment, empathy, compassion and validation. Dr. Stephen Porges, of the University of Illinois’ Brain-­‐Body Center, showed that the neural circuit that supports social interaction and engagement also supports health, growth and restoration of our bodies. The higher-­‐order brain also generates meaning from our experiences, derived from the sensations, images, behaviors and affect associated with an event. For instance, you may associate a birthday with celebration, decorations, good food, family and friends and find yourself immersed in warmth in your chest when someone invites you to a birthday party. These memory caches in our brain are some of what we call ‘joy’ or ‘happiness’. Unfortunately, in the case of stress and trauma, you create narrow and fixed beliefs about your world that don’t represent the whole experience. You may have experienced a severe auto accident, and find your gut constricted and teeth clenched when invited to get back into a car. Fortunately, you can retrain your body and brain to recall the pleasurable events associated with stress or trauma to diminish the memories that were unpleasant. This will reduce the negative impact of the event. The ability for the brain to rewire itself, and for you to retrain it, is called neuroplasticity. You can fundamentally alter the way the brain works, or create new grooves. You can learn to alter your brain structure through intentional practice and awareness. Because what “fires together, wires together” in the neocortex, you can learn to orient your thinking habits to fire pleasantries rather than threat. And, you can learn to gain mindfulness about your body’s sensations and the clues they offer for real-­‐
time feedback about what you’re experiencing (before you are aware of it). In that way, you decrease your reactivity to stressful situations. So now you have two major approaches to retrain your brain and body to decrease the amount of stress that you experience on a daily basis, as well as to ward off any potential trauma that you might endure. What does that look like in real life? You can lighten your stress and anxiety load by retraining your mind-­‐
body connection. The last three pages of this report include ten simple evidence-­‐based practices that you can integrate into your daily life. The intent of these practices is to: • positively improve the neuroplasticity of your brain, Holly Woods PhD Helping adults who are weighed down by stress or trauma and want to find a different way. http://HollyWoodsCoaching.com • develop a greater somatic or body awareness, and • cultivate a mindful presence to your mind-­‐body connection. If you try out some of these exercises and find that you still have a significant amount of stress in your life, or recognize that anxiety or trauma is holding you back, let’s get to work and find the sweet spot of peace, clarity and freedom. Contact me at http://hollywoodscoaching.com/work-­‐with-­‐holly/ or 970-­‐
331-­‐1639. It is possible to face the stress or trauma in your life, without having to relive it, so you can find joy again. With love and respect for all that you are and hope to be. Holly Woods, Ph.D. P.S. If you liked this report and want to share it with friends or colleagues, please send them to sign-­‐up at http://hollywoodscoaching.com/ to make sure they don’t miss out on other free resources, and the e-­‐
newsletter. P.S.S. Contact me at http://hollywoodscoaching.com/contact-­‐holly or 970-­‐331-­‐1639 to learn more about how Integral Coaching™, Somatic Experiencing® and Mindfulness Training can help you to better understand yourself and be free of the stress or trauma in your life. Holly Woods PhD Helping adults who are weighed down by stress or trauma and want to find a different way. http://HollyWoodsCoaching.com Practices to Retrain your Mind-­‐Body Connection (and Lighten Your Stress Load) Practice any these exercises daily to create new structures and connections in your brain, and to develop an awareness or “mindfulness” that will retrain your mind-­‐body connections. 1. NEARR: Get near the positive things in your life. Works for all kinds of stress, including mental health and chronic pain. • Notice First, observe, find, or create positive experiences throughout your day. Can be small and simple (sunshine, a bird song) or big and complex (a promotion at work). • Enrich Next, extend the positive experience in time. Make it real in your heart. Name the place it exists in your body. • Absorb Bring the physical sensations and mental experience into your whole body. Fill your body with the experience. • Report Write about or verbalize the experience. Journal or share with others where and how you felt it. • Relate Lastly, connect this positive experience with a past experience that may have been less than positive. Integrate the two experiences in the brain, but don’t get sucked into the past. Go back and forth between them, holding or pairing the positive and negative together. 2. You Are Alright, Right Now. Learn that the present is fundamentally OK. • Notice right now. Breathe in that you are not in danger, not in mortal pain. Lower your guard. • Accept the “enough-­‐ness” of life. Have gratitude for what is, right now. • Identify that you are cared about and loved, right now. • If you are experiencing grief, choose to focus alternately between grief and pleasure or joy. Honor and feel life’s challenges, and know they are within the context of life being OK. 3. Integrating the Three Brains. Upon waking, help your three brains to feel satisfied. • For your Brainstem: accept that you are under no harm, right now • For your Limbic system: express contentment and gratitude for the day ahead • For your Cortex: identify that you are loved and love others 4. Gratitude Practice. Choose one of these easy steps before bed every night, reflecting on the day. • New thing: Think of one thing you had never noticed to be thankful for before. It should be an experience you had during that day. [If you do this frequently enough, the exercise will create an impetus to look for things to be grateful for during the day.] • Three things: Think of 3 things you are grateful for that happened or that existed in your day. Holly Woods PhD Helping adults who are weighed down by stress or trauma and want to find a different way. http://HollyWoodsCoaching.com 5. Meditation. The evidence-­‐based benefits of meditation-­‐ physiologically, mentally and spiritually-­‐ are too numerous to detail here, but include neuroplasticity, improved stress tolerance, self-­‐
compassion, improved sleep and willpower. While there are many types of meditation, if you have not done much mediation before, start with a “centering” or relaxation meditation. Follow these steps (or any other type of meditation) and perform it daily for 5-­‐20 minutes or more. •
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Sit tall, but comfortably. Relax your muscles. Bring your attention to one small area of your body; for example, your left foot. Feel with your body any tension there may be in the foot. Say (in your mind) the word, "relax," and allow the foot to relax. Don't force it. Simply allow it to let go as best it can. Next move on to another body part, for example, the right foot. Repeat the process of saying the word, "relax", and allowing the body part to relax. Work with each part of the body in turn. Do this very slowly, gently, and with great openness. Do not force yourself to relax, or induce any strain. Do not get upset if a certain area will not relax all the way. Simply accept that it has relaxed as best it can, and move on. Also, do not attempt to move around, adjusting or massaging the body parts in an attempt to relax them. This is a motionless meditation, in which the stress in the body is just let go of, rather than manipulated away. Remember to really feel into each body part, noticing how it actually feels, and paying particular attention to any bit of it that feels like it "wants" to let go of tension. Once you have covered the entire body, you can either repeat the process as many times as you wish, or consider yourself done for now. 6. Body-­‐based Meditation. Using your body during meditation integrates the brain, both vertically and horizontally, as well as improving your energy, balance and strength. • Yoga • Tai chi • Chi gong 7. Breathing Exercise. Observing and slowing your breath can improve your stress response by increasing heart rate variability, which slows your nervous system responses (a good thing). Choose one of these techniques when you’re feeling stressed. • Breathe in slowly, pause momentarily after a full in-­‐breath. Then breathe out slowly as if you have a straw in your mouth, allowing your lungs to empty. Perform for two minutes. • Breathe in slowly, pause momentarily after a full in-­‐breath. As you exhale, gently utter “voo”, sustaining the sound through the entire exhalation. Expire fully. Vibrate the sound as if it was coming from your belly. Think of a foghorn. Perform for two to four minutes. 8. Exercise. Regular cardiovascular exercise increases heart-­‐rate variability, which creates more flexibility in our nervous system, so that we can respond better to stress. • Regular exercise 30 or more minutes per day will help your neural circuits as well as improve your energy, balance and strength. Holly Woods PhD Helping adults who are weighed down by stress or trauma and want to find a different way. http://HollyWoodsCoaching.com 9. Body awareness Exercise. Like meditation, there are many types of somatic (body) awareness exercises. The intent of these exercises is to promote mindfulness and presence in your body, and also to notice subtle changes to allow you to be more responsive. Start with this Gravity Reference Scan (to embrace ‘what is’ in your body) to see what feedback your body offers you. This exercise will take 10 minutes at first, then 1-­‐2 minutes when you’re familiar, could be repeated daily or several times/week, and can be furthered by walking while scanning. [It may be useful to do this at first with a partner who can prompt you and ask you the questions, the first time or two.] •
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Stand in a relaxed position without worrying about posture. While observing your body: o Notice any areas of pain or discomfort o Sense your weight distribution-­‐ what % falls on left vs. right leg o How much weight falls on ball of foot vs. on the heel? o Do you toes curl or grasp? o How much weight falls on the outside edge vs. the inside edge? o Is one shoulder higher than the other? o What is the angle of your head? Leaning forward, chin out in, up or down? o How pronounced is the curvature of your spine? Is the curve of your upper back exaggerated and bending you forward? Or curve of lower back exaggerated and hyper-­‐
extended? o What parts of your structure feel heavy or hard to hold up? o What parts of your structure feel light? o What parts feel hardly present or externally related? o What parts feel relatively fixed and what parts feel more flowing? o Where do you feel direct support from the ground? In your feet, through your legs? In your pelvis, lower back, upper back, neck, or head? o What is supporting your head? o Can you feel the support of the ground through your skeleton, or do you rely on the muscles of your neck to hold your head upright? o Where do you sense your muscles tensing to hold yourself up? In your neck, in your upper or lower back, in your thighs, calves, ankles, your shoulders? o What structures move when you breathe? Your belly? Which ribs? Back or front? Do you sense any movement in your legs or arms or head? o Observe your observing-­‐ how do you watch, how does your attention operate? o Does your attention operate like a flashlight, shining from point to point? o Is the process of paying attention changing the way you are? o Now make a mental picture of your posture (i.e., the alignment of your structure) and whatever you discovered, so later you can notice changes that occur. 10. Smile, often and big. Believe it or not, just smiling improves your nervous system’s responsiveness to life. • Smile inside, to yourself and with others Holly Woods PhD Helping adults who are weighed down by stress or trauma and want to find a different way. http://HollyWoodsCoaching.com