Hi,
Thank you for joining me.
I'm Pam Axe,
Self-Proclaimed Neuroscience Geek and Certified Mindset Coach.
I'm so excited to be spending this time with you talking about ways we can lower our stress levels using brain-based and somatic tools.
You know,
Most of us move through the day caring more than we realize and sometimes we're caring other people's stress,
Anxiety,
Heavy feelings,
What we call emotional contagion.
So in this time together,
This is a simple,
Simply a chance to give your brain a little support and explore a few tools that will help lower those stress levels and make things feel lighter and more grounded.
I would love to encourage you to have something you can take notes with because I'll be asking you some questions to help you create some awareness around your own reaction to stress and how it impacts your body and your thinking and you might want to have those answers handy and available as a way to create more awareness.
Feel free at any time to pause this recording so you can give yourself time to answer any of the questions that I ask,
But let's start with a simple check-in.
On a scale of 1 to 10,
1 being low and 10 being high,
What's your stress level right now?
Capture that,
Write it down at the top of your paper,
Wherever you're taking notes.
Okay,
So now that you've done that,
I'm going to ask you to do one more thing with me.
Take a really deep breath in through your nose and release it out your mouth.
Do that one more time and this time notice the floor under your feet and how that feels.
Now let's do it one last time,
But this time focus on the breath coming in through your nose and notice how the air feels as it comes in through your nose as well as how it feels coming out of your mouth.
Fantastic.
Thank you all for doing that with me.
What we were doing was really priming our brains to be open to what we're going to be exploring because today we're going to look at how stress shows up in the brain and the body and why it hijacks our thinking and our energy and what you can do in the moments when stress is really trying to run the show.
These are tools you can use anytime at work,
At home,
In the car,
When you're having a difficult conversation,
Anytime you're noticing stress,
Or anytime you're feeling off.
See,
So let me ask you a question to get us started on on our journey together.
When stress hits,
What's the first signal your body gives you?
Now for me,
My shoulders become earrings and my neck gets really tight.
So think about it.
You can write down a couple of words or a sentence,
But what do you notice in your body when you're stressed?
What you're actually naming are warning signals.
This is the body's way of saying something feels really off and these signals often show up before we may even be consciously aware and registering that we're in a space of stress.
That's why it's super important to pay attention,
You know,
To how your body feels,
What you're feeling.
I used to live in total transparency.
I used to live from the neck up until my own coach encouraged me to develop a multi daily practice of checking in with how how I was actually feeling physically.
So what I did was I set a reminder in my calendar morning,
Midday,
And evening to do a check-in and I did a quick scan of my body to notice where I was feeling and if I was feeling any tension and what I was noticing and that was super helpful to really inform me as to when I was in a space of stress or when I maybe needed to take a pause.
Okay,
So I'm gonna switch gears on you and get a little geeky.
When the brain perceives threat,
Whether it's a physically dangerous situation or an email from your boss,
Your brain's gonna shift resources away from the prefrontal cortex,
That's the part that's responsible for things like planning,
Creativity,
Empathy,
Clear thinking,
And it's going to direct those resources to the limbic center of your brain which is responsible for triggering your fight,
Flight,
Freeze,
Or fawn response.
Now just as a little side note,
The fawn response is something that was added to the to the stress response in the early 2000s and it's just another way of saying people-pleasing which is what we may do when we're in the middle of a stress response,
Totally natural response and reaction to stress depending on what you're dealing with.
Now your system is doing what it's wired to do and that is to protect you from anything it perceives as danger.
Here's the thing,
Your brain can't tell the difference between actual physical danger and discomfort caused by an upsetting email.
It's going to respond the same regardless.
So let me ask you another question here,
What non-dangerous things trigger your stress response most?
Is it a work email,
Back-to-back meetings,
A tight deadline,
Difficult conversation?
Give that some thought and capture your response because what we're doing is we're creating awareness around the things that actually trigger us so that we know in advance,
Oh my goodness I'm getting ready to open my email from my boss,
Maybe I need to do something that's gonna lower my stress before I become super stressed.
So you've named how stress shows up in your body and what tends to trigger it.
Let's add one more layer of awareness.
What do you notice that happens to your thinking when you're stressed?
Now for me I may go into a bunch of what if-ing,
Should-ing.
I may find it hard to focus on my my mind and brain and thoughts might be a little scattered but I want you to think about your usual thought patterns when your stress levels are high and then you know complete this sentence for me.
When I'm stressed my thoughts tend to fill in the blank.
What do your thoughts tend to do?
Capture that because again this is awareness creating so that you know you're in a state of stress if this is happening.
For example maybe your thoughts race,
Maybe you go to worst case scenarios or shut down or get super critical on yourself.
Write down whatever fits for you because what you're doing is you're naming your stress-driven thought patterns,
Your brain's way of trying to protect you.
Okay I want you to hold on to that because in a moment we're gonna look at what's happening in the brain that makes those patterns so very common.
Okay so you just wrote down your own thought patterns and explored those when you're stressed so now let's talk about why those patterns show up so consistently.
See your brain runs on a very tight energy budget,
All of our brains do.
Despite making up only about 2% of our body weight it uses a big chunk of our daily energy,
About 20% which is a lot for something that only weighs about 3 pounds.
So under stress your brain starts reallocating that energy.
It's going to divert more energy to survival systems like your heart rate,
Your muscles,
Your vigilance and that means there's going to be less energy available for the things we rely on as humans trying to function in daily life.
You know for example our perspective,
Our patience,
Our emotional regulation,
Our creativity,
Our language,
Our ability to put together coherent sentences.
Since everyone experiences stress a little differently this you know this list is definitely not a comprehensive one.
So when you're stressed what's the first thing to disappear on you?
For me it's sometimes my ability to make a coherent sentence or to forget what I'm about to say next.
So what is it that disappears on you when stress,
When when you notice that you're in a space of stress?
You know as I was sharing earlier when we're talking about the fight,
Flight,
Freeze or fawn responses what your brain is really doing here is prioritizing protection over performance or as I like to say survival over success.
When your system registers a threat it's going to lean more on the faster more reactive circuits of your brain so that's why it's sometimes difficult to make a coherent sentence or to remember what someone just told you.
So to get a little more geeky on you there are chemical responses that actually kick in when stress hits the scene and those chemical responses impact not just our brains and our bodies but also our energy and the two main ingredients in a stress cocktail are adrenaline and cortisol.
You know think of them as your body's own brand of go-go juice that's brewed for short intense emergencies.
Adrenaline is the first responder it's the jolt you feel when you get that unexpected we need to talk text.
You know it's that a massive immediate surge of energy it's powerful it's fast and it burns out really pretty quickly which is probably one of the reasons why we can feel really tired after an intense stressful situation.
And then there's cortisol.
Now cortisol helps us get up in the morning but it's also what I will call the long-haul strategist because it's released more slowly to keep your system on high alert.
It basically says okay this situation or emergency might take a while so let's keep the energy flowing and going.
Now for a single crisis this system is genius.
You know it helps you power through a presentation or handle a tough conversation but when your brain is in a state of constant threat that cortisol tap never really turns off.
And this is where that go-go juice can turn toxic because chronic high stress can lead to things like brain fog so it's harder to think clearly or to find the words that we want to say.
It can lead to things like a hair trigger reaction when you're you know where you might be more jumpy and may see more of the negatives.
It could lead to burnout you know because sleep is disrupted or when you might have that feeling of wired and tired most of the time.
And it can also lead to getting sick more often because your immune system isn't getting the same level of support and rest.
So the key isn't to never feel stress.
The key is to have ways to calm your nervous system down so your brain can shift resources back to clearer thinking,
Steadier emotions,
And more sustainable energy.
So we've met the brain's alarm system,
The limbic center,
And its chemical messengers,
Cortisol and adrenaline.
That's the body's gas pedal.
That's part of the sympathetic nervous system.
It's all about go go go.
What we all need are practical ways to find the break and that's where the parasympathetic nervous system and the vagus nerve comes into play.
I'd like to think of the vagus nerve as our body's built-in emergency brake and this is a massive nerve that wanders from the brainstem all the way down into your belly to the base of your spine connecting to your heart,
Your lungs,
Your gut.
It's the main highway of your parasympathetic nervous system or we can call that the rest and digest system.
Its job is to counteract the fight-or-flight chaos that stress can cause.
So when you activate the vagus nerve,
It's going to send a powerful chill-out signal to your entire body.
It slows down your heart rate,
Lowers your blood pressure,
And it tells your brain that the tiger has left the building.
The strength of this braking system is called vagal tone.
The better your vagal tone,
The faster you can bounce back from stress and here's the really cool part about all of this.
You can train your vagus nerve and strengthen its tone and the fastest way to grab the emergency brake is with your breathing.
You see your vagus nerve is also physically intertwined with your diaphragm so you can manually control it with breath.
One of the most effective techniques,
Which is backed by neuroscientists like Stanford's Dr.
Andrew Huberman,
Is called the physiological sigh.
This is your in-the-moment stress killer.
It works by forcing open the little air sacs in your lungs and then on the long exhale dumping a ton of carbon dioxide which sends a massive calming signal up the vagus nerve to your brain.
How you do this is you take a deep inhale through your nose and when you think your lungs are full you sneak in another short sharp inhale without exhaling.
This is the magic part.
Then you take a really long slow full exhale through your mouth sighing as you exhale.
You make it last as long as you can and that's what what helps and you do this two or three times just until you start to feel yourself really calming down.
One to three cycles of this can instantly dial down your body's stress response.
Remember the magic part is taking that that short sharp inhale when you think you can't fill your lungs in with any more air.
All right so I want to offer you three additional experiments to try and these are ones you can also share with the people you care about.
The first one is the longer exhale than inhale very similar similar to the psychological sigh or the physiological sigh without the noise.
So if you're not in a you're not comfortable or you're not in a place where you can feel comfortable audibly sighing like we just did you can get this little breathing experimental world but I'm going to ask you to put both feet on the floor drop your shoulders about an inch and take a slow inhale to a count of four a slow exhale to a count of six.
Now let's try this together I'll count for you inhale two three four exhale two three four five six let's do it again inhale two three four exhale two three four five six that's it the longer exhale sends a message to your brain and your nervous system that everything's safe that you're good that you're okay.
All right the next one is called five finger breathing.
I actually learned this from someone here on Insight Timer and it's fantastic and I absolutely love it and if my brain is buzzing this is something that is so super helpful.
This one gets the brain focusing on something else while the breathing calms the nervous system so what you're gonna do is you're gonna hold up one hand in front of you and you're gonna use the index finger of your other hand as your tracer and you're gonna start on the outside of your pinky and as you so as you slowly trace up the outside of your pinky you're gonna breathe in and you're gonna pause briefly at the top of your finger and as you trace down in between your fingers down the other side of your pinky you're going to breathe out and you can even say the words in out then you're gonna move to your ring finger your middle finger your index finger your thumb and when you get to the base of your thumb on the outside of your hand you're gonna go back the other way.
This isn't another like I said another great way to calm your nervous system but also give your brain something to think about particularly if it's if you're if you find yourself ruminating or there's your thought pattern is is taking hold.
The last one is the ear massage so what I want to encourage you to do is take a deep breath relax your shoulders and you're going to gently massage the outside of your ears because your ears have a bunch of tiny nerve endings that are connected to your vagus nerve so when you gently rub or massage your ears you're basically sending a message that it's okay we're safe and this can help you know settle your heart rate you may notice that your muscles loosen and your system shifts out of high alert into a more grounded steady steady state it's really simple and it feels good and it's something you can do quietly in a meeting without anyone really noticing okay so you can start at the top of your ear and move all the way down to your lobe massaging your lobe and then massaging back up and do this a couple of times until you start to feel that calm takeover all right my friends I want to check in with you we checked in at the very beginning on your stress level let's check in now on on a scale of one to ten one being low ten being high where would you put your stress now notice it if it's still kind of high maybe five or higher give those breathing techniques or the five finger breathing technique or the ear massage a try a few other times and notice what what it does until you start to feel that calm settle in you know I just want to leave you with one final thought stress is data just like the engine light on your car is data to alert you to the engine needing some attention stress is that data that alerts you to something in your world that needs some attention and if you and stress have been besties for quite some time please do yourself a favor give yourself some grace as you're finding the best ways to lower the impact of stress any habit good or otherwise it just takes time to implement or change so the more you use stress-reducing tools when stress appears the more you're training your brain to respond differently I want to thank you all so much for spending this time with me sending you all much peace much love and much light be well
