Your brain on stress

Not all stress reactions are created equal. We all experience an immediate physiological reaction to stress, but some of us also experience what I call a “delayed stress response.” If you’ve ever experienced a sudden, inexplicable wave of sadness or anxiety several hours or even days after a stressful event then you’ve probably experienced a delayed stress response.

Here’s a few things that are important to understand about stress: 1. Stress activates our brain’s threat response systems, which produce stress hormones like cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine. 2. Stress hormones prepare our body to go into fight, flight, or freeze. 3. The threat response system in our brains activates our parasympathetic nervous system which results in an increase in blood pressure, heart rate, and hyperfocus on the stressor.

In most stressful situations in modern life, however, it would be fairly inappropriate to fight or run away. As a result we’ve systematically reinforced our freeze response. Think of the last time you got annoyed with your boss, your coworker, or your best friend. You might have said something “passive aggressive” or just waited for the moment to pass. Most likely you didn’t immediately bolt out of the room or punch your boss when you felt stressed. While this was great for your ability to keep your job and not ruin your relationships; it also did not allow your body to release the tension that built up when the stressor occurred. This also required a lot of “top-down” control from your thinking brain over your emotional brain.

When a delayed stress response occurs our emotional brain (limbic system) is trying to work through coping with a stressor and it usually does this somatically so you may experience any number of physical responses: anxiety, shaking, crying, a flash of anger, restlessness, irritability, etc. These responses may appear irrational because they are removed from the immediate stressor, but they make perfect biological sense. It’s just your body’s way of releasing tension and complete the stress response cycle.

Here are some ideas for completing the cycle:

• Check in with your breath and your body. Close your eyes. Scan the body from head to toe paying attention to any areas of tension, tightness, numbness, or tingling. Allow yourself to ground into any part of your body, however small, that feels calm, grounded, or neutral and from this place see if you can check in to the areas of the body that feel uncomfortable. Allow yourself to follow and explore those sensations. Allow emotions to arise naturally and let yourself feel whatever arises. This can be delicate, so best done in a safe and comfortable space where you will have privacy.

• Dance to your favorite song. Go for a brisk walk or run. Do cardio. Do any physical activity that raises your heart rate: cleaning, pulling weeds, swimming, etc.

• If you are not able to exercise you might try progressive muscle relaxation. Tense your muscles as you inhale and relax as you exhale. Repeat for 5-10 minutes.

Whatever comes up; try to stay present and not judge the process. Use this, instead, as an opportunity to learn and observe your unique process. If you’re looking for additional resources on self-compassion practices check out self-compassion.org.

Sensory self-soothing techniques

Our senses are an extremely important part of how we interact with the world. They help us relate to others and understand our environment. We can also use our senses to help soothe and regulate our emotional distress. From a developmental perspective, it makes sense that some of our most fundamental self-soothing mechanisms tend to be fairly primal; things like eating, eye contact, movement, and sound. When we soothe a crying baby we typically engage in rocking, cooing, or some other sensory stimulation to communicate safety to a baby’s limbic system. As adults, our brain’s self-soothing mechanisms are not all that different from a baby’s, we just have a wider repertoire of available behaviors.

If you struggle with anxiety, irritability, or depression you may want to try creating your own self-soothing kit. I usually recommend that it be something portable so you can move it around your space as needed. You can start with items that target each of your basic 5 senses: taste, touch, sound, sight, and smell. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Taste:

• Peppermints, breath mints, lemon drops, Jolly Ranchers, tea, or a small snack of your choice.

Touch:

• Fidget cubes, dryer balls, fuzzy or silky scarves, squishy toys, hacky sacks, textured stickers, worry stones, Play-Doh, and thera-putty.

Sound:

• Consider creating playlists based on your mood or of songs that remind you of a particular time in your life. This is a great opportunity to practice some mindful listening and notice how music affects your mood.

• Wind chimes, nature sounds, ambient noise from an open window, rain sounds, and forest sounds (if you want to get really fancy with the forest sounds, check out Tree.fm or timberfestival.org both of which compile recordings of forests from around the world).

• Bilateral music has also been shown to reduce anxiety and increase focus in deeper brain regions because of how it alternately stimulates sound in the left and right ears. You will need headphones for this to work. If you’re looking for a playlist, I recommend checking out David Grand on iTunes.

Sight:

• Consider collecting pictures that are meaningful to you; they might be of friends and family or even of your younger self. I personally enjoy fun art and pictures of my cat looking silly.

• You may also be mindful of your space in general and choose to fill it with interesting things to look at such as crystals, rocks, bits of amber, or plants. If you prefer a more minimal space, you might choose just one item to be the focal point and trade it out every few days or weeks.

• If you’re feeling particularly artistic you might try making a vision board or a collage to keep inspiration going in your space and help you visualize your goals.

Smell:

• Candles, lotions, and room sprays can be great options for a soothing scent. If you have a more sensitive nose I would recommend opting for milder scents or even creating your own room spray at home using an essential oil or some fresh or dried herbs.

• Keep a small container of your favorite spice on hand i.e. cinnamon, rosemary, cloves, bay leaves.

• Some stores will sell small roll-on versions of essential oil perfumes that are both portable and mild; just make sure you’re not allergic before applying.

Hopefully this gives you some ideas to get started with. If you’re feeling extra adventurous you might also try keeping a bubble solution on hand to make breath-based mindfulness more fun or take a gander at making your own glitter bottle or jar; because bubbles and glitter are fun for all ages in my opinion. Above all, remember to have fun with it!

Urge Surfing

If you’ve ever found yourself standing in the kitchen mindlessly eating string cheese at the end of a very long day, you’re probably familiar with the powerful mechanisms that create and maintain stress-related coping habits. You may not have intended to eat three cheese sticks in a row, but there you are 10 minutes later, looking at the curled up, empty cheese packets on the kitchen counter, feeling slightly puzzled as to how you got there. Or maybe that’s just me?

Your way of coping may have nothing to do with string cheese, but perhaps you find yourself in your own version of what I’ve just described. Your version may involve ice cream, shopping, sex, alcohol, or self-harm. The mechanism is the essentially the same. We experience an intense emotion: stress, sadness, anxiety, anger, numbness and we look for ways to cope. The more often we repeat a particular pattern of coping the more hardwired it becomes in our brain’s neural network.

Our ability to cope with emotional distress in ways that promote our health largely depends on our ability to manage our immediate urges in an intentional way so we can help our brain build new neural connections in response to stress. Sounds fairly simple, but will actually feel like you’re trying to dig a path through 6 feet of snow. This is one of those expectation vs. reality internet meme situations.

There are a few important things to remember here: the fact that it’s hard to generate new responses to stressors when you’re experiencing overwhelming emotion is completely normal and not a sign that you are bad, weak, or broken. What’s actually happening in that moment is that your neocortex (the bit of your brain that makes logical, rational, well reasoned decisions) gets hijacked by your limbic system (the bit of your brain that contains all the structures that produce the neurotransmitters that make you feel emotions) and your neocortex becomes physiologically unavailable.

In simpler terms: think of what happens to a lightbulb in a power surge. If your emotions are the electricity and your neocortex is the lightbulb, then too strong of an electric current will make the lightbulb flicker and burn out. This is why it’s so hard to think when you’re feeling stressed. Depending on the intensity of the particular surge, the damage done may vary. So if you’re feeling a little blue, you might have a good cry in the car and some ice cream and feel better. If the surge is great enough to trigger overwhelming hopelessness, you might find yourself engaging in any number of much more dangerous behaviors including self-harm and suicidal ideation.

Urge surfing is a mindfulness practice that invites us to focus on our urges and extend our ability to tolerate their presence without acting on the urge itself. Think of it like upgrading our electrical systems to handle power surges by modulating the intensity of the current, like installing a surge protector. Emotions are inherently wave-like, meaning that they naturally flow, peak, and ebb. The better we can tolerate the flow of emotion the less intense the peaks become and the sooner the emotion and the subsequent urges will ebb. On average most emotions will ebb in somewhere between 5 and 20 minutes. Over time, urge surfing allows us to reduce the power surges of emotion enough to be able to implement new behavior patterns in response to the emotions creating the urge.

Here are some ways to practice urge surfing:

• Practice square breathing (4-count inhale, 4-count hold, 4-count exhale, 4-count hold) for 5 minutes when a strong urge comes up to increase the time between the urge and the action. Evaluate if you still want to engage in the target behavior after taking this space or if another behavior may better meet your needs. Repeat as needed.

• Practice progressive muscle relaxation for 5 minutes. For this practice you will tense individual muscle groups with your inhale, hold the tension, and then relax with your exhale. For example, inhale, clench your firsts, hold, then relax your hands as you exhale. Repeat with each group of muscles. Evaluate if you still want to engage in the target behavior after taking this space or if another behavior may better meet your needs. Repeat as needed.

• If you’re struggling with a recurring target behavior: create a decisional balance list. This is basically a fancy pro-con list. You’ll need a grid of 4 boxes: pros of your target behavior, cons of your target behavior, pros of not engaging in your target behavior, and cons of not engaging in your target behavior. Always start with the pros of your target behavior; this will help avoid the dreaded shame spiral by reducing judgement and validates the reality that our behavior is just an attempt to cope. It also increases the likelihood that we will actually follow through on our intended replacement behavior if we’re more compassionate to ourselves in the process (I find this is last bit tends to be true for most things in life; see this post on building self-compassion). Once you have the list, take a picture on your phone or stick the list on your fridge or some other visible space so you can easily revisit it to remind yourself of why you are working to build new behaviors.

• Make your urges less accessible. If you struggle with impulsive shopping don’t have your credit cards readily accessible, saved on store websites, or in the auto-fill function on your devices. If you struggle with self-harm, make it harder to access those methods. It’s important to be honest with yourself here about your behavior patterns; don’t make it harder on yourself than it needs to be. You might go so far as to writer out a behavior chain to help you identify triggers, vulnerabilities, and links in your behavior patterns. The more space you create between the trigger and the behavior the more opportunities you have to re-evaluate.

• Body-based mindfulness: for more advanced mindfulness practitioners you may work on identifying where in your body the urge resides, take time to explore the sensation of the urge, and ask yourself what the urge is in response to. Usually there is some unmet need there that we can give ourselves the opportunity to address in more adaptive ways.

As with everything else, please remember to be gentle with yourself in the process and seek additional support from your natural support systems and mental health providers when working through intense and/or potentially harmful behaviors. You can also check out the additional resource page if you are in need of immediate support.