This post was developed via a partnership with BetterHelp.
There are stressful situations that can lead us to feel our heartbeat racing and our breathing get shallow, and that's natural. We all experience stress in some form, but some people experience the symptoms of stress more acutely and more often. It's healthy to look for ways to feel calmer and more in control of our body and minds.
One way to learn how to feel less stressed and more calm is to seek support with a therapist. Anyone can do it. You don't need to be diagnosed with a mental illness to work with a therapist, just the desire to work toward becoming more mentally healthy. To explore more about working with a therapist, check out this BetterHelp guide to finding quality counseling online:
https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/general/betterhelp-counseling-quality-online-therapy
In this article, we'll look at how the stress response works in the body to protect us. Even if it doesn't feel helpful, stress is a protective mechanism that evolved in humans to ensure our successful survival. Understanding the process of how stress works in the body is a good first step toward better managing it.
Know How The Body's Natural Stress Response System Works
First of all, stress in itself isn't a bad thing for humans in general. Stress is released in the body to help protect us, the issue is with how we manage stress.
What makes stress harmful is the amount of stress that we experience. If we're constantly feeling under attack, then we may begin to experience debilitating anxiety, and physical symptoms like heart disease, tension headaches, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Yet stress is an important part of the way we evolved as human beings and have survived to the present day.
How Stress Works To Help Us Survive
Going back to cavemen times, the human body evolved to survive attacks from dangerous predators like saber-toothed tigers. Here's how it works: When a person is faced with a threatening situation, the body releases cortisol and other stress hormones like epinephrine (adrenaline) to help give us the energy and focus we need to fight off a blood-thirsty predator. This is what's commonly known as the fight-flight-freeze response.
The fight-flight-freeze response helped increase chances of survival by encouraging a person to stand and fight, take flight, or freeze and hope the predator wouldn't notice them. The scientific name for this process in the body is the sympathetic nervous system response. The sympathetic nervous system is an automatic system responsible for helping increase our survival skills, while also turning down non-essential bodily functions that will not aid in survival.
The fight-flight-freeze response of the sympathetic nervous system can cause issues with vital functions, such as digestion. Why? Because your body doesn't want you getting distracted by eating a hamburger while you fight off a wild tiger. The body is turning down these systems to focus on survival while in fight-flight-freeze mode.
This explains why experiencing prolonged stress could lead to issues in the digestive system, growth processes, the reproductive system and other vital functions throughout the body.
Learning To Better Manage Our Fight-Flight-Freeze Response
While there's no way to turn off the fight-flight-freeze response, we can learn to tone the response down. In reality, we wouldn't want to lose out on the protective functions of our sympathetic nervous system. We can also learn to activate the body's parasympathetic nervous system, which helps to dampen the effects of cortisol and other stress hormones.
Let's take the example of a person who is driving to their job dealing with traffic. Being stuck in traffic can be stressful. There's often no way to avoid it. But we may be able to change how much stress we experience in the body. Even though traffic is unpleasant, it's not a life or death situation worthy of setting off a full-body stress response. Learn to reframe stressful situations in your mind so that your body understands you're annoyed, but not in danger.
Once we've learned how to lessen the stress response, the other part of the equation is bringing more calming hormones from the parasympathetic nervous system. There are many activities that can be used to activate the body's parasympathetic nervous system. Walking in nature, crying, yoga, singing, deep breathing, meditation, massage, and yawning are all ways to signal to your body to bring the calming hormones and lower stress.
In Conclusion
Even though there's no reliable way to eliminate stress in our lives, there are effective ways to learn to better manage stress. Learning how stress works in the body is a good first step to better mental health, but it doesn't take the place of working with a licensed therapist who can focus on treating you.
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