Do This First When Managing Your Stress

In Coffee Chats with Cara today, we learn the FIRST thing to do when stressed and about the 5 key ways your body influences your mind and your experience of stress.

Let's talk about a stress management framework that I believe that all working moms need to have. There are a lot of very well-meaning, maybe even sometimes effective stress management strategies out there, but they're often overlooking a key foundational factor: the power of the body to influence your mind. 

Important stress management strategies like mindset work, changing priorities, reshuffling the schedule, and trying to change the stressors themselves will all work so much more effectively if you understand a key mind-body connection framework. And you’ll feel much more fulfilled and whole as a person with this approach! 

Working mama, let's not put ‘increase your stress management skills’ as yet another to-do item on a never ending checklist as a working mom. Instead, let’s understand the vital role your body plays in the way your mind interprets and responds to stress, so you can take practical and simple steps to soothe the mind-body connection and transform your daily experience.

As a Licensed Professional Counselor, I’m trained in a clinical framework called Polyvagal Theory. It helps us understand the role the nervous system plays in our minds, emotions and relational behavior. We can apply that wisdom to everyday, common sense self-care strategies that effectively elevate our wellbeing. 

Let’s talk about your Autonomic Nervous System now. It’s in charge of monitoring a few really important physiological aspects of your health: like your respiratory rate, your heart rate, your digestion and your immune system. But little known fact: it also plays a key role in your stress experience, your inner psychology and your biobehavioral survival responses. 

Your nervous system directly influences a few really important psychological things happening in your inner world. I want you to remember this friends: next time you're feeling yucky, crummy, next stressed, pressured, irritable, fearful, overwhelmed, reactive, depleted, blah, and just like slumping, scrolling and withdrawing…that is not a personal weakness or moral failing. What it's saying is that your mind-body connection, the portal to your inner world - your nervous system - is in need of support. 

When you’re experiencing stress in this way, your nervous system has gone into a protective survival stance that isn't conducive, often, to getting your best mind on track. It is conducive to keeping you safe, to protecting you from threats by either mobilizing or shutting down. In this modern world, with a relentless 'working mom with young kids to care for' pace, there's so much need to learn how to support what's happening in our bodies so that we have our best, most open, most connected and creative minds available. 

Let me explain to you just a little bit more about the way that the nervous system affects your inner world. Your nervous system influences your mind in 5 key ways:

1. Your nervous system state will influence the types of thoughts you have while in stress. Your thought patterns will fall in line with the type of protective nervous system state that you're in. So if you're in a fight or flight nervous system state, your thoughts are going to be more reactive, harsh and pressured, or more avoidant and fearful. If your body is in a nervous system state that's more collapsed, shut down, and seeking to get safety through disconnection, then your thoughts are going be much more “all or nothing”, relationally distancing, and telling you the story that ‘there's not really a way forward and you might as well just withdraw.’ So your nervous system really affects the types of thoughts that your brain provides you, and stories you tell yourself about what’s happening within and around you.
2. Your nervous system state also really influences your perspective. So depending on the state of your nervous system you're gonna look you're going to perceive the same situation in really different ways. The situation will remain the same, but your perception of it - the way you’re looking at it and what you pay attention to will dramatically change. Your perception of what’s actually happening, of others motivations, and of the possibilities to move through it will all be significantly impacted depending on the state of your nervous system.
3. Your nervous system state also influences your mood, and more specifically, it influences the way that you move through your emotions. So all emotions are welcome, but depending on what nervous system state you’re in, you’ll either have a more resilient, figure-outable, compassionate, and strategic way to relate to those emotions, or you’ll feel really pushed around, stuck in, overwhelmed by, resistant to, or avoidant of those emotions. So yah, your nervous system impacts your mood.
4. Your nervous system state also influences your desire to be connected to other people. A main function of your nervous system is to be a protective social engagement system. So when your nervous system is “in the green,” feeling safe to be social and open (regulated), you're much more likely to want to move toward people at work, your friends, your family, your kiddos and even yourself. When you're in a protective nervous system state, you're more likely to feel clunky or out of sync, at odds with others, overly annoyed by, just not on the same page with, or downright preferring just to keep your distance - even from the people that you care about the most.
5. Your nervous system state is also a key influencer of the actions you take. It's responsible in a large part for the urges, the impulses, and the behavior patterns that you have. When our minds and bodies are working with difficult thoughts, emotions and sensations, and if our protective nervous system states are activated, it more than likely our behavior will follow suit. When possible, we want to learn how to access a connected, calm, and integrated state. That way we know that our actions are based on our best mindsets, from our values, and promoting behavior that is effective and supports what we care about the most. 

So friend, if you're curious about learning more about your nervous system and effective stress management, please check out the Calm Kit Course. It’ll give you accessible and approachable self-regulation through my Get Calm Framework. I help you map out your nervous system so you know when your individual signs of a regulated vs. dysregulated state. And also I give you some really concrete, easy to implement and effective tools to help you move back to a regulated place. 

My goal for this coffee talk is to offer you the understanding that when you're feeling like: you're in a funk - you're pressured and stressed - you're fearful and overwhelmed - you're starting to feel paralyzed and shut down - when you feel like you don't have a ton of oomph to give to whatever is at your feet - whether that be work projects or important family things…

I want you to know that you are simply a normal human being, having a normal nervous system experience, and that there are really practical and simple ways to help yourself. First, notice that you're not feeling your best. And rather than pushing through it or retreating and numbing, I'd like you to take 10 for yourself. Take 5 to 10 minutes to do something for your body that’ll signal safety and soothing to your nervous system. 

Now, that can be things like taking a walk outside, having a conversation with a treasured friend, having something nourishing to eat and drink, taking a hot bath, splashing some cold water on your face, self-massage, deep breathing, giving it a sleep, and then picking that problem back up in your mind once you're feeling a little bit better. 

But a lot of those body safety-signaling strategies take more time and other factors going our way until we really start to feel like our best self. So that's why I created the CalmKit Toolbox. It has over a dozen guided audio practices that will help you get back to a regulated, integrated state in 10 minutes or less.  And I have a freebie for you to try out. It's my 10 min Get Calm Guided Audio Practice. I hope you'll give it a try and let me know how it goes. 

So the number one stress management strategy: pay attention to your body. DO THIS FIRST: do something that provides soothing and signals safety to your nervous system when you're in a moment of stress. Remember that your nervous system state is directly influencing the way that your mind is working, the way that your emotions are working, and it will really push your behavior around until you do something to care deeply for that mind-body connection. Your body is working tirelessly at all times to help you and support you. My working momma friend, let's learn strategies together that help your body do that job with more grace, calm, clarity, and connection.

Thanks for chatting today! Drop me a note with your thoughts. Warmly, Cara