Stress and Stress Relief
The stress response is a physical reaction in your body that is often called the “fight or flight” response. This is triggered when you run into a dangerous situation, like a wild animal, or a mugger. Your body prepares for survival by sending an alarm through the sympathetic nervous system, which curiously doesn’t have anything to do with being sympathetic, but has to do with surviving a crisis. The sympathetic nervous system sends signals throughout your body that increase your heart rate and blood pressure, make all your senses more acute, and shunt blood to your large muscles to supply extra strength for the emergency. You become supercharged for survival. This is the state we hear about where mothers move cars to save their babies, or people perform heroic acts that defy belief.
Stress researchers refer to the scenario I just described as “Type 1 stress”: there is a clearly identifiable threat, an action that can be taken to resolve it, and one way or another, it’s over quickly.
If you survive the threat, your body goes back into a compensatory rest period, called the relaxation response, which allows the brain and the body to relax, repair, and recharge. Brain and muscle chemicals are replaced, energy is renewed, and injuries are healed. The relaxation response signals travel through what is called the parasympathetic nervous system, which relaxes the muscles, sends blood back to the digestive system, and lets the brain, heart and blood vessels relax.
Fortunately, in modern life, we rarely run into wild beasts or direct threats to our lives. But in the course of our daily life we are confronted with many things that are also threats, even if they are not so immediate. And even if we aren’t confronted with them, we hold them in our minds and worry about them. We worry about mortgages, and taxes, and wars, and jobs, and health, and loved ones…and the list goes on and on. The thing is… the brain reacts to these worries, even though they are only thoughts, images, and fears, as if they were real. They can trigger a stress response in your body, even if it is not full-fledged. The sympathetic nervous system is aroused and the body starts running on high alert even when it doesn’t have to … stress researchers call this “type 2 stress” … triggered by multiple, chronic, sometimes even vague worries and hassles, that often have no clear path of resolution. This kind of on-going stress is what wears us down, depletes our energy, erodes our mood, and often causes us to reach for the closest form of comfort, which may or may not be good for our health.
Because the situations that trigger this response are often insoluble, the solution to Type 2 stress is to learn to become less preoccupied with worrying, learn to reduce our reactivity to stressful thoughts, and learn to trigger the relaxation response on a regular basis. We interrupt, reduce, or relieve Type 2 stress by using the same part of us that caused it in the first place, the brain and the mind.
There are two major skills in resolving or reducing stress – one is resolving stressful situations that can be resolved, the other is changing the way you react to an unresolvable situation.
Our Stress Relief Through Guided Imagery CD will teach you to reduce your stress with simple breathing techniques, deep relaxation, and creative problem-solving through guided imagery.
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