Episode 9: Working With Your Body's Stress Response

We’re getting nerdy today. This episode takes a closer look at the physiology of your body’s stress response. These processes exist to keep us safe and protected, however our modern lifestyle has us living in a constant state of stress. We’ll dive into the effect this has on us and review a common tool to combat stress, deep breathing.

Download my free Less-Stress Challenge Guide here for 16 stress management tools and a monthly stress tracker.

Episode Transcript:

INTRO MUSIC: Welcome to The Compassionate Wellness Podcast. I'm Alex Treanor. I'm a Nationally Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, and I am so excited you're here. The wellness industry is full of do's and do not's, should's and should not's. But I like to take a different approach. I'll be sharing all things health and wellness from a joyful, real-life compassionate perspective. If you're ready to drop the cookie-cutter approach and create a life you truly love, while eating a cookie or two along the way, let's dive in.

Hey, fam! Happy Tuesday! How is your less-stress July going? I hope it's going well. Hope you're feeling a difference. So far, I'm already feeling a difference! I feel like I noticed after just three days that my anxiety, the stress that I was feeling, decreased. So feeling good about that so far. I hope yours is going well. Send me a message, tell me how you're doing.

As promised, last week I mentioned that I had some nerdy things to talk about and I've got it for you today. This week, we are talking about first how awesome and how cool your body is, and what the stress response is. I think it's really cool that our body has a stress response. We'll talk a little bit about what engages that response, what's helpful about it, and what maybe isn't as helpful about it, and how we can reduce the stress response through some different breathing exercises. Sound good? Let's dive in.

So let's start with how awesome your body is. In your body (this is probably a review from eighth grade health class) you have your nervous system, which sends messages throughout your body to get everything accomplished that it needs to do. To move, to keep you alive, all those things. Some of those things you are aware of, right? You can say, "hey, I want to move my arm" and your arm moves. Some of those things we aren't aware of. You don't have to tell your heart to beat. You don't have to tell your digestive system to take care of your lunch, it just does that on its own. Your lungs breathe. It happens automatically. That automatic part of your nervous system is called the autonomic nervous system. Within that part of your system, there's two subsystems. One is called your sympathetic system. One is the parasympathetic system.

Even if these terms are not familiar, you probably know what they do, or have heard of their purpose before. Your sympathetic system is commonly called your fight or flight response. It's what's engaged when we feel stressed. You can think of it as being like a gas pedal; that sympathetic system gives you the gas to fight or to flight.

The other system is the parasympathetic system, commonly called the rest and digest or your brake pedal. Like most things in health and wellness, it's not all or nothing. I know we're describing it like a brake and a gas pedal, which you usually only use one at a time. These two systems work together, but we'll explain them like they are a little bit more separate than maybe they are in real life.

So let's give an example of how this works. Let's say you are walking in the woods. It's a beautiful day, clear skies, nice scenery, everything is wonderful. Then you turn a corner on the trail, and there's a bear in the middle of the trail. Usually, when we see something, or we hear something, or we smell something, that information gets processed through the thalamus, which is a part of our brain. All the information goes there, tt's processed divvied up. It's kind of this information center that then your brain says, "yep, we need to act on that" or "no, we don't". And that usually takes one to two seconds for that processing to happen.

However, if you turn the corner and there's a bear on the trail, that one to two seconds might be too long. You might need to act before that. So in your brain...this is so cool...there's a part of your brain called the amygdala, which is always looking for danger. It's sitting there looking at all the information that's coming in to say, "Does this pose a threat to me? Is this potentially harmful?" And if it feels like "yup, that's a problem" then it bypasses that thalamus system. What happens is the amygdala sends a message to your hypothalamus which alerts your adrenal glands to start producing some stress hormones. The stress hormones, you've probably heard of before, epinephrine, which is also called adrenaline, and cortisol are the main ones that we hear about. Hormones are essentially chemical messengers. So it sends a message to your body once these are released to do something.

What the stress hormones do, there's a couple physical responses that they have on your body, so your heart will start to beat faster and harder, which increases your blood pressure. Some of the blood vessels will begin to narrow so that the blood is directed where it needs to go in order to fight or flight. So it'll narrow around your digestive system, because when you're looking at that bear, processing your turkey sandwich from lunch is not a priority. Instead, that blood goes to your heart, to your brain, your muscles in your legs to be able to run or to fight. It's really targeted towards what is most needed in that moment. In addition to these things with your heart and your blood, your breathing rate will also increase. Airways in your lungs open up so that you can take in as much oxygen as possible. Which is really cool, because some of that oxygen is going to go to your brain so that you can be as alert as possible. Your senses will sharpen so that you can think as clearly as you need to to be able to handle that situation. You also have glucose stored in different sites throughout your body, which is released into your bloodstream to give you the energy you need to move those muscle groups, right? So glucose is sugar, essentially, your blood sugar rises so that you can have the energy you need to fight or flight or handle that stress, whatever it is that's triggering you. And all of this happens instantaneously, it seems. You see a threat, you see a bear, and you immediately feel that change in your body, the physical change. Or, for example, I came home the other day, and I was on the phone with someone and I thought that my husband might be home, but wasn't really sure I didn't really see him. So I turned the corner and he jumped out at me. I felt that stress response immediately. I was ready to fight or flight before I even recognize, "oh, it's just my husband jumping out to scare me".

So after the stress response is triggered, eventually, that bear passes or you evade the bear. Or you recognize, oh, this is just my husband jumping out at me. And you'll begin to press that brake pedal. That parasympathetic system engages, which is going to bring you back down to a baseline. Your heart rate slows back dow. Your breathing rate slows back down. Blood pressure, blood sugar come down. Your body starts promoting digestion, again. You come back to that regular state.

When you think about it, this system is so cool. It was perfected over thousands, millions, I don't even know how many years, that you can get stressed, respond, and then come back down to baseline. And that's how we survived, right? If you were being chased by a lion or a woolly mammoth, or whatever big creature was dangerous at the time, you could survive that moment.

The problem is that today in today's society, that stress response gets triggered way more often than when we see a lion. I've never encountered a lion in my day to day life, but I feel that stress response quite often. And when it's constantly being triggered, it's a lot harder to engage that brake pedal. There's not as much time. You used to see a lion, run from the lion, go home, and you had some peace and quiet in your cave to decompress. We don't really decompressed anymore. We're just constantly triggered by stressors throughout the day.

We have work deadlines. We have laundry. We have children. We have sports. We have doctor's appointments. We have relationship drama. We have social media. And that's just your day to day things, nevermind the societal stressors that we have. There's mass shootings. There's racial tension. There's politics, health care. There's always something seemingly in today's world, that you can be constantly living in that stress response.

And that's when stress becomes harmful, because your gas pedal is constantly engaged.

Now I get to give you a Formula One reference, which I've been waiting for. You know, I've been waiting for it. So I am a Ferrari fan. Ferrari is one of the teams that competes in Formula One. When I started watching Formula One and I was drawn to Ferrari, I was like, "sweet" because it's a Ferrari, right? It's top notch quality. It's expensive. It's got to be reliable. And that is kind of a joke if you do anything about Formula One, because Ferrari is maybe not the most reliable when it comes to Formula One. Even though it's a top quality, very expensive piece of machinery, if that gas pedal is engaged as much, and as frequently and as powerfully as it is, sometimes that car just dies. And it's so strange, right? There was a race last year, where one of the Ferrari cars was in the lead and the car just died, just stopped. And that is comparable to like burnout. That's what happens. We have that gas pedal constantly engaged, and at some point, that stress response, if it keeps going, it's just going to wipe us out.

So in your body, what that looks like, is constant high blood pressure, which damages your blood vessels to your arteries, increases your risk of heart attack of stroke. If you constantly have these high stress hormones, high cortisol, that can impact your appetite hormones. Because your digestive system is getting placed on pause, maybe you feel less hungry, maybe you're not eating enough. Or maybe your body is saying "no, we need energy to be able to manage the stressor, I need to eat more". So it impacts our appetite and our eating habits. It also contributes to several mental health concerns. Anxiety and depression are very much related with stress. It's a lot harder to maintain health behaviors when we are feeling stressed. That's why it's one of the key components of a healthy lifestyle routine is managing stress. One of the most commonly cited reasons that we don't maintain health behaviors is because of stress. "I'm so stressed, I don't have time to exercise", or "I don't have the energy to exercise at the end of the long day." "I'm not able to sleep as much as I want to, the quality isn't there", all these things are interconnected.

Because our sympathetic system, that fight or flight, that gas pedal, is constantly engaged, I think it really highlights the importance of purposefully and proactively engaging your parasympathetic system. By manually pushing that brake pedal to say "I need to take a moment to slow this down." You just got to pump the brakes sometimes. And that was really the idea behind this less-stress challenge throughout July. The goal is to take just a few moments each day to press that break, and to give yourself a little sliver of the rest and digest in your day that's full of fight or flight.

I want to give you one of the main tools for doing this, to engage that brake pedal, your parasympathetic system, and that's deep breathing. It sounds pretty simple, and I'm not gonna lie, it is simple. It's not too complicated. It's the basis for many stress management techniques. But it does take intentionality to do it.

When you take these deep breaths, it sends a signal back to your brain that it's safe enough to go back to that rest and digest. In the same way that your brain tells your lungs, "hey, we need to speed up I'm stressed". If you purposefully say "I'm going to breathe slower and deeper", it sends a message back to your brain that it's okay, and that's really the point of deep breathing.

In case you are new to deep breathing or haven't done it before, I thought we could walk through how it works and what to think about and how you can practice this because it is helpful to practice it, it does take time to develop a deep breathing practice.

When I do my deep breathing exercises, I like to lay on the floor to do it. You can definitely do it in a chair, you can do this standing up. That's one of the beauties of deep breathing is it's very flexible, you can do it anytime anyplace. I choose to do it on the floor, because what we're going to be doing is pushing out your belly, and it's a little bit easier for me to do that when I'm laying down. It's harder when I'm sitting, you may feel a little bit cramped. I feel like I can get a good deep breath if I'm laying down with my back on the floor.

Also, this might be challenging for some of us. It definitely was for me. Especially those of us who have been taught to suck in our belly at all times. Maybe that sounds familiar. It feels very different to push your belly out. It feels unnatural, almost. But if we think about it, when you look at a newborn baby, you can see their belly moving as they breathe. The stress that we feel throughout our life makes us breathe shorter and shallower breaths which is more from the chest. It is natural but it feels unnatural, if that makes sense.

What we're going to do is get comfortable. And before we start, you want to unclench your jaw. Relax your face. Relax your neck. I like to roll my shoulders back, drop them down, just prepare for a moment to take a couple of deep breaths. Then what you'll do is place your right hand on your belly right over your belly button and you'll place your left hand over your chest right, over your heart. You can take a couple breaths just to see which hand do you notice is moving more. Typically, it's going to be your left hand on your chest.

When you're ready, you're going to take a deep breath in and breathe into the hand that's on your belly. Think of it like you are inflating a balloon. So we're going to push that out as the balloon inflates. Breathe in for several seconds, typically counting to around four or five, pause, and then you'll breathe out. The exhale is typically a little bit longer than your inhale. So if you did, let's say five seconds, on your inhale, maybe you aim for six or seven seconds to exhale. If it helps you to stay focused, while you're doing this breathing, you can count while you're doing it. So one would be your inhale, two would be your exhale. Usually we aim for doing about three to five breaths each time.

I have heard some people get dizzy with this, so if you feel dizzy, stop, you don't want it to be harmful for you. It's meant to be helpful. So just something to be aware of.

Do the three to five breaths and notice how you feel. It does take practice, so it may take a few times before you feel that stress release. But if you keep trying it, the more you keep practicing with it, the easier it's going to get.

Sometimes when we talked about stress, it feels very negative. And the stress response can feel negative. But I hope today we also showed some of the benefits and how amazing it is and that it's worth being grateful for. We just need to learn to work with it and to purposely take those moments to pause when we need to, because our stress response is trying to keep us safe. I hope we fulfilled a little bit of the nerdiness for you today. And I hope I also gave you a helpful tool that you can use if you're feeling like you need a little bit of relief from that stress as well. Thank you for joining me on this week's episode and I can't wait to talk to you more next week!

OUTRO MUSIC: Thanks for joining me on this episode of the compassionate wellness podcast. If this message resonated with you, please share it with someone you care about. I'd love to connect with you as well follow me on Instagram @alextreanor.coaching, or visit my website alextreanorcoaching.com. And as a reminder, Treanor spelled kind of goofy, it's T-R-E-A-N-O-R. For any references mentioned in this episode, be sure to check out the show notes. I hope you have a wonderful day and don't forget to make time for something you enjoy.