Reducing Every Day Stress

Most of the time we think about stress as what is going on in our lives or our heads — that’s bothering me, or this is depressing me or stressing me out. We think of stress as a psychological experience. But we need to also realize that it is taking a serious toll on our biological system. Our bodies respond to everything we hear and experience around us, as well as to what we think and experience on the inside.

Eventually, stress can manifest in the body as tension. Tension, IS the stress response finding a home in the body.

In my past 25 years of teaching, I have never met a person who isn't harboring some level of habitual tension. Tension has a psycho-neurological component. Every time we don’t feel okay about something, we tense up in our body and it doesn’t release until we feel grounded, slow down, take a deep breath, and soften our body.

When we relax areas of habitual tension, we send a message to the body that we don’t need to be armoring ourselves and defending ourselves from a threat. The nervous system gets the sense that it’s safe, and it puts in motion physiological and neurological responses that allow us to begin the process of moving out of the stress response and into the relaxation response. When you relax and expand your ability to breathe, it stimulates the vagus nerve, which is the switch to what we call the parasympathetic nervous system (which helps us rest and digest). It sets the conditions, physiologically and neurologically, to tell our entire body that we can calm down.

I sat down to talk with Everyday Health about chronic Stress and how Deep Listening can help us meet our stress differently. Read more.