How to Dial Down Your Stress Response

Finding Moments of Stress Relief in Our Challenging World

Imagine reading this sentence without any punctuation it just turns into one sentence running into the next in one big jumble the words all begin to run into the next now imagine your life was lived similarly without any punctuation one moment and day and week running into the next carrying around stress without setting it down.  Whew!  You get the idea?  Especially during the pandemic, many people are experiencing this kind of one day running into the next phenomenon.  For those working from home it can feel especially challenging to not have the normal transitions that we are used to (e.g., commuting to and from work with natural starts and stops in the day).  For many of us, with everything going on in the world and in our personal lives, it is easy to feel a constant drip of steady stress that follows us through the day like an unwelcome guest. 

Here are some things that don’t take much time but that can help to punctuate your day — and dial down your stress response:

Creating Punctuations

The Comma 

Create mini pauses in your day.  Our nervous systems are designed so that after bursts of stress we are supposed to return to physiological baseline.  But in our modern lives we can often miss these opportunities to reset.  Robert Sapolsky, in his book Why Zebras don’t get Ulcers, explains how after a zebra is chased by a lion in the wild, if it survives, its nervous system returns to baseline… but this is not necessarily so for our us modern day humans.  We can keep our stress response going just by thinking about all of the things we have to do, much less all of the things we are worried about.

One way we can create healthy pauses is through regulating our breathing.  When we breath in, our heart rate naturally increases and when we breath out our heart rate naturally slows down.  When we get stressed, we tend to take more shallow, rapid breaths.  While the process of breathing is most often out of our awareness, when we bring it into our conscious awareness it gives us an opportunity to dial in what we need and help our nervous system reset.

Try 2:1 breathing to help dial down stress

2:1 breathing involves making your exhalation longer than your inhalation (by as much as twice as long).  When doing this kind of breathing, let the inhalation come in naturally through your nose without effort and focus on slowing down the exhalation.  (Many people make the mistake of breathing too deeply and effortfully on the inhalation which revs up the nervous system instead of calming it).  You might even experiment with exhaling through pursed lips, as if you are blowing out air through a straw.  This kind of breathing helps to reduce stress, can regulate our autonomic nervous system, can help to induce more positive emotions and has even been shown to reduce essential hypertension.

Create sensory pauses

Another kind of pause, that doesn’t involve the breath, is connecting in with our five senses.  When we bring our awareness to our senses (literally “coming to our senses”), we step out of our ruminating mind and incessant thought stream and land in the present moment.  It can be a little bit like coming up for air after being under water for a while.  We often don’t realize how much time we spend caught in our own thinking loops and how much our thoughts contribute to our feelings of stress.  When we step out of them for a moment through engaging our senses, we can begin to loosen the grip of our ruminative thinking. 

Try mini sensory and mindful pauses such as looking out the window and taking in the colors and shapes; feeling your feet making contact with the ground when you walk; stopping to listen to the sounds around you, or feeling the textures at hand such as the softness of your clothing or the cool smoothness of the glass you pick up.  Spend a minute noticing something that you otherwise wouldn’t even pay attention to.  Be curious about what shifts (emotionally and physically in your body) when you do this.

The Period – Hard stop.  

Make sure to have some hard stops in the day.  Especially with the COVID world we are living in and so many people working from home, this feeling of a hard stop is slipping away for many people.  Create transitions.  Get creative.  These hard stops need not take a lot of time in your day.  I bought a tuning fork and am experimenting with it as a way to signal the start and end of my workday.  I make sure to put away my makeshift desk, and change into my comfy clothes after work, to signal this transition.

Plan daily and weekly hard stops – going for a walk; playing your guitar, doing that crossword puzzle, making cookies with your kids, or blasting your radio and jamming out in your kitchen.  Don’t wait for these to happen by chance — put them on the calendar and schedule them into your day (though spontaneity is great too!). 

Exclamation points!

Find small things that you appreciate in your day, and take the time to savor these experiences for a minute or more.  Rick Hanson describes that due to our brain’s negativity bias we often miss positive experiences in our day, and when we do notice them we often miss the opportunity to “install” these experience in our brains in ways that can begin to grow lasting inner resources.  

Install Good Experiences:

One way to install good experiences is to notice something good in your day and take a minute to make the experience vivid and big in your mind and feel the positive emotions in your body that this thing evokes, as if you were a sponge absorbing the positive emotions you are calling up in your mind.  You might also try this Quick Coherence Technique (combining heart focused breathing with calling up a positive emotional experience) which has been shown to change heart rhythms that help create physiological resilience in the face of stress. 

When people think about finding good things in their day to be grateful for they often think of the big things.  While this is wonderful, it can also be helpful to just notice the small stuff.

How is that cup of coffee tasting right now?  How about that warm shower that perhaps you got to linger in for a few minutes this morning?  Maybe it’s the text message you got from a friend earlier today.  Or maybe it’s the fact that you got to roll out of bed today and hop onto a zoom call, getting that extra 30 minutes of sleep without needing to commute the usual 30 minutes.  Notice one small thing and savor it – add that exclamation point!

The Question mark:

Bring curiosity, open mindedness and flexibility into your day.  While it may feel that there is much out of our control these days, here are a few questions you might ask yourself:

What can I choose in this moment, or today, that aligns with the best version of myself?

What is one small thing I could do today to take care of myself? (It may be something that doesn’t add time to the day, like talking with kindness or encouragement to yourself).

Who can I bring “light” to today?  It can be as simple as sending a “thinking of you” text, picking up the phone, or expressing appreciation to the grocery clerk.

What can I prioritize, and what can I let go of today, that will best serve my well-being (and/or the well-being of others)?  (I’m choosing to prioritize and write this blog today and letting go of oh so many other things on my to-do list).

Adding punctuations to our day won’t make the stressors in our lives go away, but it might just help to bring a bit more ease amidst our challenges. 

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Article originally published on PsychologyToday.