Burnout: Did you know that our stress cycle has a beginning, a middle and an end?

Stress is so ubiquitous in our society that we often don’t give it much thought beyond describing ourselves as being stressed.  But having a good understanding of the stress cycle can make a significant difference to how we manage it.

In their book, Burnout, Emily and Amelia Nagoski describe the stress cycle as another biological process in our bodies that has a beginning, a middle and an end.  They emphasise the fact that dealing with your stress response is a separate process to dealing with the things that cause your stress, the stressors.

Stressors are the innumerate number of things that cause us stress every day.  The work project, the job interview, our commute to work, being a parent…  All of these things have the capacity to activate the threat response in our bodies.

Stress, on the other hand, is the physiological response that happens in our bodies when our threat response is activated.  This response gets a lot of bad press but it is fundamental to our survival and developed to keep us safe in hostile environments.  Imagine if one of our ancestors is walking through the wood and they meet a lion (stressor), what they need in that moment is their brain to immediately spot the lion and activate their stress response to either attack (Fight), run away (Flight) or play dead (Freeze).  What is interesting about this scenario is that most of us believe that it is getting away from the lion (stressor) that reduces our stress when, in fact, it is the act of running or fighting that returns our bodies to a calm state. This is what our threat system was built for, short sharp busts of hyperarousal to help us survive life threatening situations. 

Most modern-day stress is not created by lions but things that we experience everyday - our commute to work, being a parent, an aggressive work colleague, meeting deadlines… Each of these things can activate our stress response but since it is not life threatening, we generally try to ignore the stress and keep moving forward.  But this is not a great plan.   Every time we experience stress our bodies are flooded with neurochemicals like adrenaline and cortisol.  If we experience this stress response infrequently and for short periods of time it has little or no impact on our emotional and physical health.  But most people are not that lucky, most of us experience ongoing low-levels of stress which we now know can have significant consequences for our health and wellbeing. 

So, what do we do?

What most of us would like to do is to remove the stress from our lives – who doesn’t want to take the day off when work is stressful or not bother paying the bills when money is tight … stress is part and parcel of life nobody gets away stress free.   Of course, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try and reduce the stressors in our lives, we should, but this is not enough we also need to pay attention to how we support our bodies to manage the days stress.   And we do this in two ways

·       We engage in activities that allow out bodies to siphon off the build up of neurochemicals

·       We send a clear signal to our bodies that we are now safe and the stress response can stand down

The Nagoski sisters give us some really good practical ideas about how to do this…. 

Move your body: This is the single most effective way to reduce the hyperarousal in our body and the good news is that any kind of physical activity is an effective strategy for completing the cycle.  This might be a 5-minute kitchen disco (recommend Lady Gaga), ten jumping jacks or even a short walk around the block.  It really doesn’t matter what it is just as long as you are moving.   

Breath: I know I know we are sick of people telling us to breath, but breathing is an actual superpower.  When you take slow steady breaths, this activates something called the parasympathetic nervous system.  This is essentially the bodies relaxation switch and our bodies literally has no choice but to reduce the level of hyperarousal when this switch has been flicked.   Maybe start with breathing in for 5 and out for 7 and repeat 4-5 times and see how you feel. The most important thing to remember is to keep the exhalation longer than the inhalation.

Positive social interactions: Casual friendly chat is one of the first ways of letting our brains know that the world is safe.  These can be big or small interactions; it might be saying thank you to the cashier in the supermarket or chatting to the guy next to you in the queue. This is a super helpful way of letting out brains know all is well.

20 second hug: I love this one.  If you hug someone you love and trust for a full 20 seconds the research suggests that this will change your hormone levels, lower your blood pressure and even improve your mood.  It lets your body know you have survived the threat and are now home safe.  This works best if both people involved stand over their own centre of gravity.

Crying: Have you ever had to leave a stressful situation and just have a big cry; I have and while I don’t particularly enjoy crying, I almost always feel better afterwards.  And the reason for this is that when we cry, our tears are actually a way of releasing the stress hormones in our bodies.

Laughing: If crying feels too scary or hard laughing is also really effective at regulating our emotions and reducing our hyperarousal.  When I work with children, I know that giggling is a sign that they are in a relaxed state.  For laughing to be helpful it needs to be genuine, the kind of laughing where your sides start to ache and your whole body shakes a little bit😊

How will we know when we have completed the cycle?

Some people are really good at recognising this and for others it is really hard.  We might experience it as a shift in mood or maybe a shift in how tense our body feels.  For many of us it’s that relaxed feeling we get when we come back from a run, we are not sure why we feel better we just do.  

What is important to remember is that most of us are going to experience some level of stress every day and this means we need to build some way of completing the cycle into every day,  Some days you will do more and some days you will do less and that’s OK, consistency is so much more important than intensity.