Coming down from stress

Many people who spend their days with busy responsibilities have difficulty coming down from the high stress levels.  The problem is that life is constantly demanding urgent responses, and the pressure on the internal bodily system is too great.  We get locked into a physically ‘electrified’ state, with no escape, simply because life is not letting us take a break, much as we would love to.

Symptoms include:

• Headaches and muscle tension
• Digestive issues and disruptions
• Cardiovascular changes
• Sleep and fatigue problems
• Immune problems

Most of these symptoms are caused by too much time relying on a fight-or-flight response, managed by the sympathetic nervous system, which is designed to maintain tightness and tension in an emergency.

Two key chemicals here are cortisol and adrenaline.  Adrenaline is the short-term emergency drug, and cortisol backs it up over the longer term.  The problem is, they are both chemicals designed to help us temporarily.  They’re not long term solutions.

Imagine you are a car facing a heavy back-to-back racing season.

Adrenaline is like driving fast races without giving the car time in the garage.  The mechanics are constantly patching up the fuel system and hydraulics, and never get to do deep, long-term maintenance.  Eventually a pipe or pump will clog up or fail at a crucial time.  In our bodies, this is what causes a stroke or heart attack.

Cortisol is like having a longer term, systematic bias in a car’s management towards speed for this season only, suppressing not only medium term care and maintenance, but also long-term design and development issues.  Eventually, since even the mechanics are focusing narrowly on short term needs, the car overall will become tired and out of date.

If you want to stop being that car, you have to start allocating time and resources to rest, care, recovery, review, design and development.

Most people answer me that they simply can’t do that – that life won’t let them.  It’s like the national press when a prime minister goes on holiday.  Journalists love criticising any time away from the job as neglectful.  The morality of the journalists’ argument is that, if you are dealing with important things, you can’t let up.

The only answer to this is similarly radical in the opposite direction.  Stop.  Just stop.  Take time away from the urgent stuff, whether or not you feel allowed to do so.  It is the only way to let the body climb down from its hyper-electrified state.

Either you believe that you are allowed a rest, or you don’t.

If you do believe you are allowed a rest, then here are some suggestions.

SHORT-TERM TACTICS

First, some short-term tactics to reduce hyper-stress:

1. EXERCISE – an hour a day of exercise  burns off the chemical surges, so that the rest response becomes easier and more instinctive.
2. NO-PHONE TIMES – three hours, every day, away from  phone and messages.  This can be the first hour, the last hour, and the middle hour
3. SINGLE-TASKING – one hour, every day, doing one simple low-pressure task only, to the exclusion of everything else

To implement the above three suggestions takes three hours a day if you overlap no-phone times with the other two, and five hours if you don’t.

If you can’t do the whole hours, start with ten minutes and work up.

LONGER-TERM STRATEGIES

Here are three strategies to make life more sustainable in the longer term:

1. MINIMALISM – Instead of accumulating problems, simplify everything.  Your life becomes a small, simple design from which you exclude anything that doesn’t fit with your new approach.
2. ROUTINE-FOCUS – Lose the goal focus.  Instead, focus on a daily routine that actually works for you.
3. DIARISE REFLECTION DAYS – Block off a whole day, at least once a month, to slow down, catch up with yourself, and think.  Thinking here means a gentle, unpressured flow of thought and sensation, the kind of thing experienced on a walk or a good holiday.

Think of a monastery.  It achieves peace by being minimally-designed, focusing on routine, and allowing plenty of time for reflection.

ONE MORE PHYSICAL RECOVERY STRATEGY

As a footnote, my favourite quick win is to sit upside down on the sofa, with my head on a footstool and my feet up on the back of the sofa. This helps to reduce strain on the heart, stimulate lymphatic drainage, and trigger the nervous system to shift into a resting state.