The Most Effective Stress Reduction Technique EVER

Yes, I said it.  The most effective stress reduction technique EVER.  AND it's natural, easy and free.  Don't believe me?  Read on.

Diaphragmatic breathing.  What on earth is that, right??  It’s a fancy term for deep breathing using your diaphragm.  Why is it important?  Let’s try an exercise to help figure that out:

Lay down if you can, but if you can’t, sitting works.  Put one hand on your chest and one hand on your stomach.  Now breathe as you normally do and try to notice a couple of things: Do either of your hands move?  If one of your hands does move, is it the one on your stomach or the one on your chest?  If you’re a busy, chronically stressed out person, my guess is that one of two things happened: neither of your hands moved much at all OR your hand on your chest moved.  So why does this matter?

It matters because how you breathe affects how you feel.  When you’re stressed out, scared, angry, etc., you take shorter, quicker breaths into your lungs.  When you take shorter quicker breaths into your lungs, you set off an entire stress reaction in your body.  Your heart rate increases, you might sweat, it’s more difficult to focus.  And it’s all of these physiological reactions that make you feel even more stressed.  For more details about this process read this.  Its one big cycle.

The good news is that you can interrupt this cycle by changing how you breathe.   Here’s how: when you're starting to feel stressed out in an unproductive way, immediately start taking low, slow, deep breaths into your stomach, NOT YOUR LUNGS, by gently inhaling and exhaling through your nose.  If you’re alone or so inclined, go ahead and put your hand back on your stomach; you should feel your stomach fill up with air and rise up lifting your hand.  That’s how you know that you’re doing it right.

Check out this video for a quick *video demonstration if that's more your thing:

The magic of this technique is that it’s as far from magic as you can get…its pure physiology.  But it requires practice.  So pick a time of day when you're typically pretty chill, lay down somewhere and focus on your breathing.  Even if you only practice for 5 minutes every day, after a few months of really consistent practicing, you can completely re-wire your nervous system and lower your overall levels of anxiety.  Pretty damn cool huh?  The more you practice breathing using your diaphragm, the more natural it will become and the less stressed you‘ll feel.

It’s nice when we can make our bodies work for us rather than against us right?

*I realize that I chose to post that video and it's mostly good (fun accent right??), but they are WRONG about breathing out of your mouth.  Far better to exhale through your nose.  If this is too uncomfortable for you, you may breathe out of your mouth, but exhale the air as if you are blowing through a straw with pursed lips.  If you open mouth exhale too much it messes stuff up (too much carbon dioxide blah blah) so...inhale AND exhale through the nose no matter what the nice Brit lady says ;)

Have your tried it yet?  What was it like?  How did it go?  Tell me about it on my Facebook page!

The Monster Within Part II - Understanding Your Monster

Ok, we can agree on the fact that we all feeling like losing our sh*t every now and then and it's, by definition, can be quite ugly sometimes.  I hope we can also agree on the fact that feeling like were losing our shit doesn't make us monsters, it simply makes us human.  Fine, fine, you say, but it SUCKS.  It feels terrible, sometimes we act terrible because of the feelings and then we feel even more terrible because of how we acted.  Wah wah.

BUT by understanding what's happening inside our bodies and brains when we're melting down, we put ourselves in a position to better manage our emotions when we're feeling our most monstrous.

So let's nerd out about this for a second.  Very generally speaking there is an animal part of our brains (limbic system and more specifically, amygdala) and a human part of our brains (prefrontal cortex).  The animal part is ALL FEELING and even more specifically, mostly rage and fear.  It doesn't understand time, place, person, CONTEXT.  Just feelings.

So when your toddler screams "no" at you for the 15,367th time that day or your husband walks out of the room in the middle of an argument (and you're a bit sensitive to loss), the amygdala is the part that goes CRAZY.

Remember the scene in Titanic where the water gets into enough compartments of the ship that it activates the alarm because the system has determined that it's going down?  (Don't tell me you haven't seen Titanic and don't tell me you don't love it.  Lies!!).  Horns are sounding, lights are flashing and all panic and anarchy ensue?  Well THAT is what is going on in your brain (and then body) when it feels threatened.  Seriously.

Crazy huh??

Let me refer you back to the examples that I gave.  Your toddler and husband being shits are not in fact mortal threats (though YOU may be a mortal threat to them if they keep it up ;)).  But try to tell your amygdala that.  If you are really scared or really angry, regardless of whether you could actually get dead or not, your brain goes into full on fight/flight/freeze mode, where you are literally ready to duke it out, run like hell or play dead.

Your body is being flooded by stress hormones (adrenaline and cortisol primarily) because your brain has determined that you might die.  So your blood is pumping, your heart is racing, you're possibly sweating, you might feel hot and flustered, you might even be shaking.  It's that intense (you probably already know that).

So does this sound like the ideal set up to make good decisions??  For you to be on your best behavior?  To talk to your loved ones or boss in a healthy and constructive way?

Hell no!

The part of your brain that's in charge of doing all that good stuff doesn't have enough blood to make it work!  The limbic system has taken over and you have turned into nothing more than a wild animal backed into a corner.  Physiologically speaking that is.

The take home?  This is NOT, I repeat NOT, the time to discipline your child, finish the argument with your husband, give your boss a piece of your mind, etc.  Because it will not end well, I promise.  This is when you will act like a monster while your body is being operated by the animal brain and then you will calm down, begin to operate under your human brain again and feel like a monster because of how you behaved.  And if you're anything like me, you'll beat yourself up about it and rake yourself over the coals for god knows how long.

So do yourself (and your kid and your husband and your boss) a favor: take a minute to calm down.  Let the blood get back to the places it's supposed to be.  Again, maybe you need to run, or swim or do something really physical to release the energy.  Or maybe you need to rest: meditate, nap, read, etc.  Figure out what that looks like for you and do it.  And whatever you decide that is, make sure it includes a lot of deep breaths...but more on that later.

Is there a time when your animal brain has taken over?  Does this help you understand what's going on in those moments?  Let me know on my Facebook page.

The Monster Within...And How To Deal

*So let me properly set this up for you. My family and I are moving to a new house (and city) in a few weeks which, if you've moved especially, with young children, I don't have to tell you how stressful this is. My daughter went from being a 6 week old who slept through the night beautifully to a 6 month old who is up every 2 hours at night. And I'm doing a lot of work on my business right now. Soo...I'm stressed. A lot.

Fast forward to a Sunday morning. We had just come back from breakfast and my baby was overdue for a nap but she will not go down. And this is like any other minute of every other day and they just all run together in one frustrating mess of half memories. This is nothing new by a long shot. And yet the anger I experienced felt very new.

No, it wasn't anger...it was rage.  And it wasn't just in my head or heart the way my feelings usually are.

It was in my body.

I wanted to kick something, hit something, scream at someone. Get the rage OUT of my body because it felt intolerable. I was crawling out of my skin.  I felt like an absolute monster/crazy person/some other terrible word for myself (which gave me a lot of empathy for my poor toddler who feels this way several times a day but I digress).

So as I was walking around trying to breathe and calm down (while I had safely placed my baby in her crib, I should add) I started to think about what I needed to do to actively cope instead of merely survive this moment. I decided I would go for a run as soon as my husband and son got home. No sooner than having that healthy, adaptive though, I immediately came up with 100 reasons why I couldn't do that: "You're being crazy", "Don't be so dramatic", "You have so much stuff you actually HAVE to do...what makes you think you should be able to go for a run??".

But the rational, kind part of myself reminded me that I can't take care of anyone or anything else until I take care of myself. So I put on my running clothes, laced up my shoes, and impatiently waited for my husband to come home.  And then I actually left.

Breathe.

Now I'm running, sprinting actually. I could stomp the ground as hard as I wanted, pump my arms and legs as fast as I could...and it felt good. But the tears came then. Rage tears, hot and wet on my face, blurring my eyes as I ran down the sidewalk.   But I let myself cry.  If I bumped into a fire hydrant because I couldn't really see, so what!  (I didn't - whew!)  If a passerby thought I should be institutionalized, who cares!  I cried and cried and cried as I sprinted through my neighborhood.  And slowly the lump in my throat that only existed because I had been fighting my emotion went away.

Breathe.

I kept running. Disgust is what came up next. Disgust at myself. That I could let myself get that angry. That I could feel that rageful toward people that I love, that (for the most part) have done nothing wrong.  That I could have my freakin' doctorate in feelings and still not be able to manage my own.  The intense anger felt SO TERRIBLE and it was hard to believe, awful to believe, that I was capable of feeling that way.

But at some point I noticed that compassionate part of myself starting to whisper about being human. Started reminding me of the enormous amount of pressure and stress that I'm currently facing and when you add total and complete sleep deprivation to that picture, anyone might feel some of what I had been feeling in that moment at my home. Or maybe they wouldn't feel what I was feeling but they would feel SOMETHING. Simply having unpleasant thoughts and feelings doesn't make me a monster, it's what I do with them that counts. And I was running. I could've been doing a lot of other not great things, but I was running.  So maybe I wasn't so bad after all.

Breathe.

I kept running and I started to fatigue from the sprinting. I could feel the anger draining from my body as my muscles finally began to tire.  So I stopped to walk and think. Think about what I was doing.  I didn't want to simply experience the feelings, I wanted to think about my thoughts and my feelings so that I could understand them. So I could later explain them to my aunt and husband who were waiting for me at home, undoubtedly wondering what the hell was going on. And I wanted to be able to explain it to you.

But then I noticed that when I stopped to think, some of the anger bubbled back up as I was walking. So I figured I should write about everything to better understand it. So I stopped in a park and sat in the grass, enjoying the beautiful fall weather while tears spilled down my cheeks, again, (I'm a cry-er, what can I say??) and let my thumbs fly across my phone screen writing all of this down.

Breathe.

So what's the take away?  What can you and I both learn from my mess of a morning.  Several things I hope.

1) When you are melting down, however that looks for you, you are not a monster/crazy/substitute some other terrible word about yourself. You are human. You are having a hard time. And you feel things. And sometimes those feelings are intense or feel intolerable.  But that's human too.

2) When you find yourself melting down, you need to actively cope. That sounds like me saying something incredibly obvious - did you know water is wet?? - but when we're feeling something really intensely, we often forget to cope. We start to spin around in our heads and all we can think about is the possibility of going down the drain - being sucked into these terrible feelings - so we fight it and freak out and we sometimes forget to cope. So run. Or meditate. Get a massage. Ask for a hug. Write. Breathe. Something. Just remind yourself that you are not crazy and Do. Something.

3) It's necessary to do something to actively deal with the feelings but often this isn't enough. Catharsis - getting energy out - is typically not enough to deal with it and ultimately feel better. We have to think about it, make meaning of it, understand it. That's why every time I would slow down during my run, the anger would bubble back up - because I was still thinking about my stressors in the same unhelpful, inaccurate way ("What the hell is wrong with my baby?!?!, "I want to kill my husband!!!", etc).  I needed to THINK through what happened, understand it differently ("Nothing is wrong with my baby - she's just a baby"; "My husband is stressed and human too") in order to actually feel better and move past it.

And here's the final take away, which will be familiar to those of you who follow my blog or know me. Now would be the time that I post this and immediately old fears come up. Cue the worry: "But my family and friends might worry about me", "My clients, current or future, might think I'm crazy"; "What if I am kinda crazy??".  And then the kind, compassionate, wise part of myself starts to whisper again about vulnerability. About how what ultimately connects us as humans being more than anything else is authenticity. The courage to put ourselves out there, the good, the bad, the ugly.  Even if it's scary.

So here I am. Human, occasionally wounded....but stronger every day.

What does your monster look like?  How do you deal?  I would love to hear about it on my Facebook page 

**This was written over 2 months ago and only now am I finding the time to edit it and post.  Yeah...shit's crazy.