Today we are going to examine the stress cycle. I first heard about this concept from an author, Ph.D., and an American researcher, Emily Nagoski. She’s written two amazing books; the first one is called Come as You Are. I highly recommend this to all women and men who want to learn about women’s sexuality. The second book she co-authored with her twin sister Amelia, is called Burnout. Both books discuss the stress cycle. I loved the concepts so much I put them into place in my life right away and I’ve seen quickly that there have been some great benefits in doing so.
Firstly, let’s understand the difference between a stressor and stress. Your stressors are the things that activate your stress; they’re usually external to you, although they can be internal as well. Examples of external stresses are kids, partners, jobs, pressures from society to look a certain way, finance issues, family issues, and the list goes on. There are also internal stresses; these are things like self-criticism, the little voice in your head that tells you that you’re not good enough or not doing enough. Internal stress can come from illness and disease as well. Those are the stressors. Stress is what happens inside of our bodies as a result of the stressors. It’s the activation of the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. We need to learn that stress and stressors are two very separate things. Removing the stressor doesn’t mean that the stress is gone.
I can recall a very stressful morning in my life a couple of years ago. I was running late; late to drop the kids off at daycare and school, and late for work. As I arrived at the first stop, day-care, I quickly realised there was nowhere to park. My only alternative was to go to the local shopping centre and park there and walk my son up to his centre; thereby making me even later for dropping my daughter off at school, racing home, and catching the train to work. As I pulled into the shopping centre, I saw the sign to indicate they had put in a new system for paid parking, and guess what? I had forgotten my wallet. In my tired and stressed-out state, I attempted to do a 50-point turn to get out of the car park entry, without having to go through the boom gate and pay. Just as I was carefully maneuvering the car back the way I had come another car came flying down the entrance towards me, horn blaring. In my haste to get out of the car park and away from the a**hat on the horn, I scraped the entire side of my car on a pole. It’s fair to say this was not a good day.
The stressors that morning flew thick and fast:
· Being late
· No parking
· Unexpected paid parking
· No wallet
· A**hat driver
· Damaged car
What was the effect? An absolute shed load of STRESS. My heart was pumping, my hands were shaking, my children heard swear words they had never dreamed of.
In the book Burnout, the authors describe how in our caveman days our stress was activated by things like being chased by a lion or a hippo. We were quite rightfully scared for our lives. Things have changed and scary lions and hippos have turned into crappy bosses and fears of being fired. Those things are very different, but they still make us feel the same way.
This brings us to the actual stress cycle. Stress is like other emotions in that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s like a tunnel and the only way through it is to come out the other side. You can’t really get halfway through and then turn around and go back the other way, you must make your way all the way through. And that’s what the stress cycle is — going from the beginning all the way through to the end. When we are feeling stressed by a stressor what we are really feeling is fear. Our natural responses to fear is to fight (shout and argue), flight (do everything and anything we can to avoid the stressor), freeze (our brain totally shuts down), and fawn (feel awful and guilty and try and make other people feel better).
Like eating and sleeping, it’s essential that we make our way through our stress cycle and come out the other side because we all know what happens when we don’t. It’s called burnout. If you hadn’t heard of burnout before COVID, I’m pretty sure you’ve heard of it now. Burnout is on the rise — people are feeling the stress of how the world has changed in the last couple of years. According to the authors, there are three elements to burnout. Firstly, emotional exhaustion. Second, is a decreased sense of accomplishment. And lastly, depersonalization.
If you think back to the peak of COVID, that’s a good example of when many people were beginning to feel burnout. People were scared and worried, and they were scared and worried until they exhausted all their scare and worry, and then they felt numb — emotional exhaustion. In those situations when you’re that stressed out, you don’t feel like you’re accomplishing anything whatsoever. You feel like you’re treading water and you might be treading water forever just to keep yourself afloat, you’re not getting anywhere. This is the decreased sense of accomplishment. Finally, when you’ve cared all you can and you’ve worried all you can, and you’ve tread water for all the time that you can, you stop caring because that’s the only way you can keep going — this is depersonalization. All of this equals a case of burnout.
Whether we are feeling daily stress, or right in the middle of an episode of burnout, we need to complete the stress cycle each day, so our daily stresses don’t turn into something bigger. In reading the book and understanding the stress cycle it was apparent to me that deep breathing and moving your body are essential to completing the cycle. When we are in a stressful situation, the sympathetic nervous system activates the flight or fight (or other Fs) response during a threat or perceived danger, and the parasympathetic nervous system restores the body to a state of calm. What we want to do is get the parasympathetic nervous system activated, and there are several ways that we can do that.
· Deep breathing. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about breathing techniques, mindfulness, and for me, that’s something that I’ve done on and off in my life to combat stress. To be honest, it never really worked. It wasn’t until I found a breathing technique called 4–7–8, which is based on yogic exercises, that I really understood how deep breathing can slow everything down and release stress. Research shows that it has a lot of benefits for stress reduction and relaxation. This technique was developed by Dr. Andrew Weil; he called it a natural tranquilizer for the nervous system. The way that you do this particular type of breathing is to breathe in for a count of four, hold that breath for a count of seven, and then exhale for a count of eight. You can do that cycle as many times as you want to or need to. I’ve got an app on my phone that I use, and it does the counting for you, so you just need to concentrate on your breath. It tells you when to breathe in, when to hold, and when to breathe out.
· Laughter. I’m not just talking about a giggle, I’m talking about a giant belly laugh, the kind where tears stream down your face. Not only does this get us breathing all the way down to our stomach but it activates the lovely chemicals in our brains that make us feel good. A study completed in 2013 found that laughter may reduce stress and improve NK cell activity. As low NK cell activity is linked to decreased disease resistance and increased morbidity in persons with cancer and HIV disease, laughter may be a useful cognitive-behavioral intervention.
· Affection. There are a few different ways that we can incorporate affection into completing our stress cycle. Sex and orgasm are amazing for coming out the other side of the tunnel of stress. We breathe deeply, our heartbeat increases — it can be quite cardiovascular. Sex isn’t the be-all and end-all of affection however, another is called the six-second kiss. This was developed by married psychologists called the Gottmans. They recommend having a six-second kiss each day. The kiss releases those beautiful oxytocin hormones, and it calms us down and allows us to connect with another person. There’s also what’s called the 20-second hug. The time of the hug isn’t so important, but it’s got to be a good amount of time for you to relax into the hug. It’s important to stand straight and not lean on the other person, but to hug them for a decent amount of time and again feel the stress cycle complete through connection.
· Ugly crying. This is amazing for getting rid of stress. I don’t know about you, but there have been times that I’ve had such a crappy day that I’ve come home, and I’ve just burst into tears, told whoever was there to listen about all my woes, did big sniffles, and hiccups and blew my nose. At the end of it, you get a point where you have this big sigh — that’s the stress cycle completing.
· Cardiovascular activity. Running goes back to caveman days of the lion when we often ran for our lives from predators. It really doesn’t need to be running, anything that gets us moving, our heart rate up, and our lungs taking in big and powerful gulps of air, helps us to complete the stress cycle. You could go for a brisk walk, swim, dance, or anything else you can think of.
Now the question remains, how do we know when we have completed the stress cycle? It’s kind of like when you’re eating and you realise, you’re full; your body tells you. You might experience it as a shift of mood or a mental state, or you might feel it as a release of physical tension. It doesn’t matter at first if you can’t tell, because especially if you’ve spent a lot of years or even maybe your entire life holding on to your worry or your anger, it’s going to take a lot of time to get rid of that accumulated stress. If you complete your cycle daily, you will eventually get rid of the backlog.
Want to know more about how to discover your true self, beyond the layers of what others expect you to be at home, at work, and socially? Join my Authentic Self — The personal revolution Facebook group here — share in a positive and supportive community.
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