BSB Ep 90
===
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bitesize Brilliance Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and on last week's episode, episode number 89, we talked about internal and external stressors and how to break through a thought/emotion loop. And I wanna build on that this week because I had a few clients reach out to me and they had an extremely stressful week with these external stressors.
And they had a very hard time pulling back their stress response. And I noticed a pattern between every single client is they did not do this one thing. They did not create a habit, a daily habit of stress release. And this is a big mistake that I don't want you to make, my friends. So we're gonna dive into it right now.
One thing you may not be aware of is how your body actually begins its stress [00:01:00] response. Now you may be thinking, _"I don't care. I just wanna get rid of it"_. But like anything in life, the more you understand something, the better you're able to navigate through it. More knowledge is really important, especially when it comes to how your brain and your body work together.
This is something that I'm talking about in my upcoming group coaching course, the Neuroscience of Stress. If you're interested in jumping on the wait list for that, I'll drop the link below. But I have found that when people know how their stress starts and they know why their stress is starting, they can stop it much faster.
And that's what I want for you, my friend. I don't want you to spend hours or days in this thought, emotion, anxious stress loop. So let's tell you how to break free from that. First, I would love for you to listen to episode 89, but we're gonna build on this in case you didn't. You [00:02:00] just wanna jump right into this one.
When your body senses some kind of threat. Now your body does something called neuroception. Neuroception is your body sending data to your brain via your senses, especially sight. Sight's kind of hardwired into that brain. When you have a stimulus, let's say you see someone shady approaching you, and your threat detector goes off.
Now what happens is your brain immediately sends out two signals. The first one is a fast response signal because if the person coming toward us is dangerous, we wanna be able to take care of that quickly. So a signal gets sent to your amygdala, the fear detector, and your brainstem to begin your stress cascade, in a fast response way. Your brain and body are being prepped [00:03:00] to fight or flight as the first response to a stressor.
Now you have a window of time to stop that stress response. You also have a slow signal that's being sent to your logical brain, your prefrontal cortex, which is right in your forehead area, above your eyebrows. That slow response is being asked to weigh in logically. Is this a real threat? Or can we handle this?
Are we making this up? What's the call here? Now, the reason the fast response takes priority is because you want to be able to react quickly if necessary. So the fast response always gets priority over the slow response, but the slow response does get to weigh in on how critical is this threat? Is this a real threat or are we just kind of doing it to ourselves and making this up?
Now, if the brain determines this is a perceived threat, [00:04:00] not that big of a deal, the person walked right past us. They're not paying us any attention. The threat should be over, right? Well wrong. This is where you can keep the threat activated by your thoughts, your behavior, and especially if you do not do anything to calm down the stress cascade.
What do I mean by that? And this is the trap my clients sort of fell into this week. If you keep your fight flight cascade going longer than about two to five minutes, and we keep this going longer by our thoughts and emotions that loop I talk about in episode 89. It's really important to bust out of that loop, and this is called your window of tolerance, which is how quickly can you return to baseline or a neutral state where your thoughts or emotions aren't whipping your brain and body into a fear-based frenzy. There are tools that you can [00:05:00] do that. There are mind based tools and there are body-based tools that you can use. The big mistake that people make is they only pull out those tools in the case of an emergency. And while that may seem helpful, I'm going to give you another tactic to try that's actually better . We spend about 40 to 65% of our day in automatic subconscious habit based behavior. So I want you to ponder this. Your reaction to stress may actually be a collection of habits. Habits can be changed, and there is something called muscle memory. You may be familiar with that phrase, but if you have been in athletics at all, muscle memory is used quite often and you're familiar with it from holding a pencil. You no longer have to consciously tell your hand how to hold a pencil. You just see a pencil lying there. You pick it up, you know immediately how to [00:06:00] hold it. The reason that works is that you have held a pen or a pencil millions of times in your life, so your brain has created a habit on exactly the steps needed to hold that pencil, and you no longer have to divert any conscious attention to it.
It is on automatic pilot. This is what I want you to get to when it comes to your stress response. If you get in the habit of every day practicing stress relief, you will create muscle memory and a habit like behavior, so that when you are in emergency times of stress or really high anxiety, you don't forget what you're doing.
And it's actually normal to forget all your training if you have not created muscle memory, habit based stress relief training. Here's why. That fast response is designed to hijack the prefrontal cortex or logical brain if you let it carry on longer than five minutes. [00:07:00] Longer than five minutes, the brain and body are getting the signal that you don't feel capable of handling whatever threat or whatever stimulus it is.
So the body is being instructed to marshal a long-term stress cascade. This is where you see cortisol rise. This is where you see e xtra adrenaline being dumped into the system where you get jittery and it's hard for you to think or focus. This is normal. It doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you.
The body is doing what it's designed to do and this makes it a lot harder for you to back that stress response off if you don't catch it early, especially if you have not created habit based muscle memory, stress relief tools. I have a blog over on my website. It's called _How I Handled a Very Bad Day,_ and you can see what some tools are in my toolkit.
But I want you to think about a toolkit of [00:08:00] your own. These don't necessarily have to be things that you carry with you like extra, but you always have the ability to use your breath. Slow, long and slow breathing is going to help you deactivate the sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight, and help you click back on your parasympathetic rest, relax, digest.
And if you're familiar with polyvagal theory or the vagus nerve, that is a long nerve that touches a lot of organs in our body. That helps us activate that relaxation response. So I encourage you to think about or investigate some somatic body responses to reengage the parasympathetic piece of your vagus nerve.
So here are a couple. Long, slow breaths will do it. Massaging your neck is another because the vagus nerves run through there. Tapping the [00:09:00] body in various places helps remind the body that, hey, you're still alive, especially if you have let your stress response go on for so long that you leave, fight or flight mode and you sink into freeze mode because we want to keep you away from there because when you get in freeze mode, the body's starting to lose hope in your
ability to handle stress at all, and I don't want you to get to that lower place where a sense of depression or apathy kicks in. We wanna keep you up into the relaxation place, so we want to pat yourself front and back. That helps remind your body if you are in a freeze state, that you are still alive.
Slow, gentle movement if you are in a freeze state. But one of my clients this week told me that the only thing that helped her was pacing. And so I asked her, _"Do you know why that helped you?" _And she said, "_no"_. So I'm gonna tell you [00:10:00] why. Your brain is instructing your body to fight or flee, but your logical brain has also weighed in that this is not a real life threatening threat.
This is not something that's going to kill you. This is what the logical brain would consider something minor that you are able to handle. So when that's the case, the logical brain does have some override ability. Since the logical brain has processed the stimulus and said it's not a real threat that's going to kill you, it backs off your ability to run or fight.
But your body is still being flooded with adrenaline. So if you are a person who is in fight or flight mode, you want to discharge the adrenaline to help you return to your baseline inside that window of tolerance. What I recommend is doing very short bursts of running in place, jumping jacks, [00:11:00] rage cleaning.
Anything. If you do that for normally five minutes or less, you're going to burn out the excess adrenaline, and it's going to help that parasympathetic nerve reengage your relaxed state, and you will know this if that is part of your muscle memory stress relief toolkit. So quick bursts of movement if you are in fight or flight.
If you are in freeze, then we wanna go long and slow. Gentle movement, like consistent, gentle movement because we have to raise you back up again and get you out of that hopeless place. I also recommend flower remedies, especially Bach Flower Remedy Rescue Remedy. You can add that to your water. It's great for helping with anxiety or shock or just feelings o f fear in general, so I often use that a lot. Grounding is really important, [00:12:00] so take a walk out in nature, breathe some fresh air. Again, long and slow breathing. It's going to help you return to that window of tolerance and your baseline. These are simple things that you can do. If you create daily habits of doing them, and they are so easy, my friends, and there's so much more.
I encourage you to investigate polyvagal theory or calming down your vagus nerve. There are many different breathing techniques out there. There's meditation. Grounding techniques, it all works. But the trick is you have to do something consistently to develop that habit and your brain loves to run on automatic programs, AKA habits, so you are training your brain and body how to work together through your own relaxation toolkit.
You won't be able to do that unless you create a program specifically for that. [00:13:00] That involves muscle memory. And so when you get in an elevated stress state, you don't lose your ability to cognitively get yourself out because your brain and body will know what to do. You'll know what to reach for, and you can take a stress response down from hours to minutes by doing this type of work. Now also in my one-to-one clients, I teach them a very specific technique to do as part of my Bespoke Brain System that involves top down and bottom up processing. So there's a mind based component and somatic body-based component that if you do this component, you can back that stress response off in less than 30 seconds.
But you know what? My clients forgot to do that too. Because they weren't used to doing it every day, and that's the key. So many things out there, work as long [00:14:00] as you work it. You have to do your part with consistency to create the habits that help you instead of perpetuating the ones that harm you. All right, my friends, if this episode was something that you really enjoy, please give it a like, give it a share. I love reviews. You can also book a one-on-one consultation with me at aprildarley.com to find out how the Bespoke Brain System might alter your perception and help your brain and body work together in a way that gives you a stress-free life.
Also, I'm gonna drop that link in the show notes for my group coaching program, the Neuroscience of Stress, get on the wait list because there's gonna be a lot of founders perks that you are going to be able to access prior to launching. So I'll see you next week, my friends. Thank you. Bye-bye.
