A Body-First Approach to Responding to Stress  

This week I’ve been thinking about the mind/body connections of stress, anxiety, and negative emotions. When emotional triggers pop up in life, one of the most effective things we can do is to give ourselves space by interrupting our physical stress response. It’s nice when we can interrupt disruption and uncertainty with a mindset shift, but sometimes we’re too trapped in our bodies to think our way out of a problem.

Calm Your Body to Calm Your Emotions

So let’s go with the body as a way to deal with an emotional reaction. Someone makes you angry? Take a slow breath and let it out before responding. A solved problem un-solves itself and you’re frustrated or stuck? Hit the gym for a quick post-workout hit of inspiration. Someone texts you something terrible you don’t know how to receive, throw out your arms to breathe and exhale “so that happened.” 

If all we ever learn to do is use our breathing to calm down our heart rate and return to homeostasis, we’ve found a powerful treatment for the negative symptoms of emotional overwhelm. Emotions cause a physical response — so, we need a physical lever to pull to deal right? When our brain perceives certain kinds of stressors we often experience things like:

• Tunnel Vision
• Fixed Attention
• Elevated Heart Rate
• Sensitivity to Sounds

Believe it or not, each of these things is adaptive (they’re useful). For example:

• Tunnel Vision gives us a break from worrying about other things so we can give all our focus to the high priority in front of us
• Fixed Attention (which can manifest in worry or rumination) helps us stay with the problem long enough to solve it
• Elevated Heart Rate pumps blood and glucose to our brain and energizes our body to respond on a cellular, muscular level. 
• Even Sensitivity to Sounds (which is why we hush people when we’re trying to process new emotional information) is a way of tuning in for new information — while instinctively trying to filter out inconsequential input.

Just as the emotional triggers around us set off physiological reactions, our ability to influence and calm our physiological response helps us to interrupt the impact a stressful input has on us.

Is Relaxing from Stress Pointless?

Taking a calming breath is a short term solution to an emotional reaction. If someone has hurt you, thinking of what they’ve done can set off a stressful emotional response. Calming yourself with a relaxing breath may unhook* you from the emotion in the moment, but as soon as you think of the offense again, you’re likely to be back in a triggered state.

Does this mean it’s pointless to “calm ourselves” from the emotional stress response we have that keeps getting triggered? Though it may not be the whole solution, two major reasons to calm down exist even if the calm doesn’t last. 

Staying in Stress is Harmful

First, letting your body remain too long in a stress state has physical consequences. This is what some healthcare providers call “chronic stress” and can be related to what we’ve come to call “stress-related illness.” We don’t experience stress related illnesses because our bodies go into a stress state. Our bodies were BUILT FOR STRESS!** We start to develop stress related illnesses when our body stops moving back out of stress to return to homeostasis in a timely fashion. 

Maybe stress is like the faucet. You want the water when you flip the handle. You need to wash your hands, or fill a fish bowl, or clean some dishes. But when you’re done using it, you turn the water off. Why? Because water has a purpose, it has a cost, and wasting it leads to problems later.

Leave the sprinkler system running all day and you won’t just feel it in the water bill; you’ll probably have neighbors frustrated by the flooded sidewalk, dirt and mulch eroded from your yard and flowerbeds, and mud tracked into the house and cars because previously clean and dry surfaces are now covered with dirt that’s wet enough to hitch a ride on you (and the dog and the kids’ scooter). 

Worse, remember the last time someone used up all the hot water before everyone showered? Maybe you still have water; but what's left is ice cold. 

I’ve experienced an inside out effect during the sweltering Floridian summers as a kid. When you first flipped on a kitchen faucet there’d be a certain amount of cool water to work with, while the system pumped in the water that had been hiding under the house for a few hours. But once you used that up, you ended up with warm — sometimes hot — water, pumped in from pipes that ran closer to the sun-soaked ground. I remember saving the colder water to wash veggies and fruit (especially lettuce) because it always seemed to wilt in the solar heated water that came after. But if I lollygagged, some sad piece of lettuce always paid the price. 

Stress Responsiveness Degrades If Prolonged

It seems like our stress response is a lot like that. A freshly-triggered stress response is adaptive, it’s healthy (hot or cold as appropriate), it calls our attention to something that needs to be addressed. If we address it and return to homeostasis, we used the “good water” and finished our task. Next time we need it, we’ll have good water again because it’s had time to reset. 

But if we leave it unresolved, we end up having a less and less appropriate stress response. 

We’ve all benefited from a healthy, fresh dose of anxiety to prevent serious harm; “wait I’ll be late if I don’t leave now” — and we go. Anxiety called, and we calmed it by leaving to protect against lateness. 

Other negative emotions work the same way. “My friend is so uncomfortable that I’m giving this to her in front of everyone… let me help her escape the spotlight right now.” The spurt of shame for having caused discomfort when we meant to give joy woke us up to reality so we could address it. “This person has misrepresented things to me three times now. I need to address this with them because it’s killing the trust in our relationship.” The flash of anger signals for a crucial conversation before the relationship is hurt beyond repair.

Emotions Signal a Need for Action

The second reason to calm our physical stress reaction is this: we need to take quality action if we’re going to address the cause of our stress. Each emotional response is happening in order to force us to deal with a problem that (almost always) we would avoid facing if we could. Getting good at dealing with emotional triggers is at least partly about learning to calm yourself physically, analyze what the emotion is warning you to address, and getting practice at taking action to resolve the emotional cause.

Maybe you’re dealing with a cause of anxiety that you can’t fix. Check out a more advanced technique for dealing with anxiety in our next blog. But for now, think about your own stress faucet. Is the water running longer than is healthy? Are you being hooked by a physical stress response that muddles your mental clarity?

Use your body to get unhooked. Breathe. The better we get at interrupting and addressing our stress, the better our responses to anxiety will become. Sometimes a good, old fashioned breath is enough to interrupt our emotions, but if the noise is too loud, consider trying a more physically involved way of breathing. The biofeedback*** you get from one of the following methods might make all the difference to tune you in.

Fun Ways to Breathe (+ boost biofeedback):

• Place a hand over your heart and imagine breathing into and out of your heart.
• Use two hands, on the top and bottom of your stomach to follow the expansion and compression of your breath. 
• Alternately breathe in and out through one side of your nose at a time with Alternate Nostril Breathing.***
• Or check out a Stress Reduction Technique from our Video Coaching Archive designed to Boost Resilience.