Tag Archives: relaxation

Now just relax and read this blog post about how people know when they’re stressed

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I’ve thought a lot about the topic of relaxation and its evil twin, stress. I’ve had good reason to. I’ve had a stress disorder, I’ve had stressful jobs, and I’ve lost colleagues to illnesses exacerbated by stress.

Still haven’t found the original citation of the oft-seen statistic that 90 percent of doctor visits are stress-related…

I asked a question on Facebook:

How do you know when you’re stressed?

Here are some answers. Please feel free to comment with your answer. I’m seriously interested in this topic and wanting to aim my right livelihood at helping people become more relaxed.

  • Either I feel very tired, or my ears lay back like a dog’s or cat’s.
  • I get snappy.
  • I second the snappy.
  • Everything is bunched up between my shoulders and neck…and often, I get a headache or cranky or both!
  • I have headaches and fogginess in my eys, drowsiness and anxiousness in my belly. I fluctuate between giggles and frustration.
  • Sometimes I get a small eye twitch. It’s a signal to slow down and let go of things on my to do list. My experience is that as I’ve responded to my stress signals earlier and earlier over time (instead of waiting until they’re completely debilitating — like a migraine), the signals have gotten smaller and smaller.
  • When heavily stressed: Catch myself holding my breath, get obsessively task focused, drawn to eat lots of chocolate. When super stressed I get a little anxious which manifests in my mind generating risks and possible bad outcomes at every turn (e.g., while driving, the idea of someone running into my car will flash for me). I’m quick to recognize that as a sign of stress.
  • Question might be: How do you know when you are more stressed than usual?  🙂 My back gets tired. Lower and upper left shoulder.
  • as if i’m ever not stressed?! ha ha ha, that’s a good’n, mary ann! ha ha ha ha ha!

I notice that some of these are felt in the body (fatigue, tightness, headache, holding the breath), some are felt more as emotions (anxiety, frustration), and some are behavioral (snappy, cranky, giggles, drawn to chocolate, obsessively task focused).

There’s so much more I want to know, such as how you know that you’re not stressed? (Apparently some people never feel unstressed.) Then what do you do to de-stress or lower your stress level once your realize you are stressed?

Claiming some me time

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Like the Energizer bunny, I’ve just kept going and going, with work and training and teaching and transitioning toward a new home, and then things started to go not so well. Low back-ache, fatigue, muscle tension, losing things, not handling a situation well, emotional sensitivity, feeling close to overwhelm.

As in, “If one more difficult thing happens, I’m going to lose it, and it’s not going to be pretty.”

As much as I like to meet life from a place of strength and resilience, sometimes that isn’t what’s real.

So I declared this afternoon as me time. You know. Solitary unpressured time — several hours of it — to rest, ruminate, and recover.

I even cancelled my restorative yoga class, which I try not to do, because I know when you need it, you need it, and it’s disappointing if it’s not available.

Yogis and yoginis, namaste. It’s savasana time for me, and for you if you need it! And, I am changing our class time to 7:30-9 pm so we can all have more “day” to enjoy on Sundays, then eat lightly, do the class, drive home, and go to bed all relaxed.

How does that sit with you?

We all need time to be active, time for sleep, and time for rest. In this case, I have not been getting enough rest.

Rest is when I check in with myself and get back on track, reconnect with myself and recenter.

It’s actually one of the best parts about being human. That we can do this!!!

And now, I’m going within, to get in touch with my feelings, breathe, maybe cry a little, curl up with Mango, and get some rest. And plan how to intervene with myself a little bit sooner so this doesn’t happen again. I hate disappointing people! I believe it may be time to restart my regular sitting practice, which has become irregular.

Yep. This is what happens when I don’t meditate. Yep, I’m really remembering that now.

 

To relax, to improve health, to change the world, just breathe

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Last night I attended the monthly Austin NLP meetup. Katie Raver, who was raised by an NLP-trained mom and who is a co-founder of Austin NLP and who created Year of the Breath in 2009, presented on the topic Breathing Life into Rapport.

Note: Katie is my temporary roommate. And she loves my cat, Mango. I may be biased.

Katie drew on her experiences in Hawai’i (where ha means breath, thus Hawai’i, aloha, ha‘ole — without breath, ha prayer). When she returned, she noticed how shallow breathing negatively impacted a work-related meeting she was in, and she experimented with pacing and then leading the alpha person at the meeting (not the speaker, but the key decision maker) to breathe more deeply, thus changing the state of the meeting for all 17 people present. Only Katie — or as we call her, the instigator of love — was aware of how that shift occurred.

We had fun doing exercises like matching someone’s breathing while talking to them and matching their breathing while they’re talking to you. Sorry you missed it.

I must say, it’s a lovely experience to have a room full of people breathing in unison. It’s on a par with hearing a room full of people all chanting OM. Deep. Alive. Powerful. 

 Today an email led me to this NPR article dated Dec. 6, 2010, Just Breathe: Body Has a Built-In Stress Reliever.

As it turns out, deep breathing is not only relaxing, it’s been scientifically proven to affect the heart, the brain, digestion, the immune system — and maybe even the expression of genes.

Yogis and meditators know this. Breath is powerful.

But more importantly, [breathing exercises] can be used as a method to train the body’s reaction to stressful situations and dampen the production of harmful stress hormones.

Click the link to read up on the latest scientific findings about using breath to influence health and well-being.

You can also make meetings more satisfying. At least you won’t be bored.