Coping with Stress
You glance up at your laptop and see an email coming in from your boss about the big presentation this week. At the same time your phone goes off and you see a text from your teenager asking you to bring their science project to school because they left it on their desk at home. You sigh, grab his assignment and jump into the car and hear the tell-tale “ding” as you turn on the engine. Somehow you’re going to need to find the time take your car in for maintenance. Another “ding”, this time your phone, “Mom, can you also bring my lunch?”. Your body tenses up, and you let an exasperated sigh. The stress just never seems to end. You are not alone in your struggles with stress. Most of us are feeling overwhelmed with our overscheduled, and grinding lifestyles that we often do not feel like we have choice in. With the ongoing pandemic, we are feeling more stressed than ever before.
Stress like our other emotions, is both natural and necessary but also like with any other emotions in excess it can cause problems for us. First let’s understand what stress is. Stress is closely related to anxiety and in its most basic form, the stress response is known as “fight or flight”. We feel stress in our body, as a tension in our muscles or constricted shallow breaths. When we are stressed we can feel achy in our body, we may also notice our palms feeling sweaty or clammy. Stress has a very physiological response in our bodies that we have when we perceive danger. The human brain does amazing things but it hasn’t quite adjusted to 21st century living. The brain has a hard time differentiating between the danger from a hungry predator and a big work/school deadline. When the brain picks up on a potential threat, it triggers our “fight or flight” response and we can feel overwhelmed and burnt-out when we are inundated with multiple stressors. The good news is we can help our brains and bodies better respond to our daily stress by doing little activities that help regulate the nervous system.
Before starting this exercise, rate the tightness in your muscles on a scale of 1-10.
1. Take a deep breath in through your nose, filling up your belly with air, and exhale gently through your mouth or nose.
2. Now bring your shoulders up and down a few times (like your shrugging or you can alternate one side up and one side down, whatever feels good).
3. Gently tilt your head forward, back and side to side.
4. Raise your right arm and just like you’re doing the hokey pokey “shake it all about”. Next move over to your left hand and you’re going to do the same, letting it get really floppy and “shake it like a polaroid picture”.
5. Now you are going to stand up and shake your right leg out and let it get real jiggly. I’m not even kidding about the hokey pokey, just like you did when you were a kid, “shake it all about!”. You know what’s coming next, get the left leg moving all about.
6. Now that you’ve shaken all that tense energy out and I want to stand up straight, feeling your feet on the floor, and take a deep breath in and out.
7. Gently do a forward fold, and let your arms dangle for a count of 5 and then gently come back up
Now that we are at the end of our practice I want you to rate that tightness in your muscles again on that same 1-10 scale. If it went down, this exercise worked! This is something you can try at several different points in the day as a way to release physical tension and stress. Try this out and let us know if this worked for you!
