Stress triggers — uncovering and releasing them
Jun 27th, 2008 by spaceagesage
Have you ever seen an animal whose fur matches the landscape so well that it is hard to spot them at first? Have you seen chameleons on a nature show blend into their surroundings? Or how about those walking stick insects that you can barely distinguish from a branch or plant?
These creatures have the ability to hide by making themselves look like the background around them. For us humans to see the most accomplished of them, we have to 1) realize they exist and 2) go beyond a superficial glance. As a kid, it took me 15 minutes once to find a green walking stick on a bushy weed. I finally saw it only because it moved, and I had 20:10 vision back then.
Both stress triggers and early stress indicators have clever ways to hide from us, too. They slip just below the surface of our regular activities. We don’t pay much attention to the cues because they are so entrenched in our daily habits and way of being. And even if they surface for a moment in our minds, the busyness of our lives usually overrides and hides them again.
~ Note: This is the follow-up to the previous post entitled Stressed out? Learn to Deactivate Your Triggers, which is located here. The first post focuses on the causes of our triggers. In this second post, I discuss ways to reduce our stresses.
Let me give an example of hidden stress cues. I noticed a few years ago that I become anxious when I make an evening meal from scratch. My shoulders hunch forward as if to hurry myself. My breaths shorten. When peeling carrots or grating cheese, I feel compelled to move at warp speed. Heck, even writing about it right now made me hunch over and try to type faster.
The earliest I recall this happening is over 10 years ago, but for some reason I haven’t done a thing about it until recently. Why? I think part of me felt that — in a hidden, subconscious way — I had to be so intense because that’s how some meal-making was in my family. I pushed it aside because it seemed normal.
Whatever the cause, I finally notice how much it detracts from cooking, and I have finally decided it’s got to go. Like looking for the walking stick, I have to put effort and focus into it so I am aware when my body tenses and then take time to relax. As I do so, I also try to relax my mindset from “hyper busy bee” to calm, relaxed supper maker. When I do chill out, the whole world seems to mellow out as well.
Since stress manifests in the body as a wake up call to us to relax, the best place to start is by doing checks of the tense spots, the pain points, and the dull aches that may be anywhere from head to toe.
1) Become aware of the hidden messengers in your body
Take an inventory of your body as you read this post:
- Can you let your shoulder muscles relax enough to drop your whole shoulder area down a quarter or half inch? How far can down do your shoulders go when you let them relax?
- How tight are the muscles in your face? Can you slowly tell each quadrant of your face to loosen, soften, and relax like the loosening of a knot in a rope?
- Now lean forward or back to a different posture until you feel any tightness in your back fade. Find the most relaxing position and relish how much better it feels.
- How about your breathing? Is it shorter and faster than when you are relaxed? If something stressful is upcoming, take some deep and relaxing abdominal breaths and let go of any rigidness, stiffness, or tension in the abdomen.
- How’s the heart area? If you “feel” your heart with your mind and emotions, do you have a happy, fulfilled, and relaxed heart? If not, take a minute to think intently on something or someone you are deeply grateful for. Please, give it a try right now. How do you feel after a minute of this?
- Now look inside your mind at how it is doing. Does it feel focused or overwhelmed? Filled with clarity or molasses? Ready to be creative or barely able to function?
As you notice the stress in your body, heart, and mind; do you also notice how hard it is to stay focused on being relaxed? Doesn’t your mind want to dance way to something else, and when it does, don’t you find that your body resets back into tension mode? Try to return to the more desired state of calm and peace.
How to relax
To work on this, I pick one area of body tension a day and focus just on it. I used a loose rubber band on one of my wrists as a reminder. (You can use whatever reminder methods that work for you like posting notes to yourself.) The first time I did this wanted to relax, soften, and unwind the stress in my facial muscles. It was perfect because I often tense while typing, and the rubber band was always right there in front of me to act as a reminder. I was surprised how often I had to loosen the facial muscles to get them to release from tightness, but by the end of the day, I had a great start on catching my face tension and replacing it with relaxed muscles. It seemed to reduce wrinkles, too.
2) Become aware of the unnoticed sounds we make
Our mindset and thus our stress often “leaks out” in the form of sounds. My mother, who spent a lifetime masking her true feelings, unconsciously uses at least a dozen vocalizations or breath sounds to “hide” her displeasure, boredom, sense of shame, frustrations, and anger. For example, there is a little downward inflecting, mini-humming sound she uses when she sees a pile of dishes she doesn’t want to do and her subconscious parental voices are screaming at her to do them anyway.
What sounds do you make in reaction to tension and stress?
- Negative humor
- Sighs
- Sighs with a low rumble of disgust
- Profanity
- Inward groans
- Word or phrases said under your breath
- Ugh
- Ohhhhhh
- Sheesssshhh!
- Man oh man!
- Arrrrggghhh
These stress indicators, even if done unconsciously, set an inner and outer tone of negativity that feeds our stress even more. It’s as if we are whipping ourselves and pulling ourselves down with unhelpful and unconstructive pessimism. That is stress in action, so release yourself from it.
How to be more positive
The negative sounds and breath noises are limiting to us, so we need to notice them and let them go. We can do this by being more kind and patient with ourselves. Why buy into being our own taskmaster? We really are too hard on ourselves. Instead, cut yourself some slack. Embrace the idea of loving and approving of yourself. Trust me, this is best done now before, like my mother, these kinds of stress indicators get louder in the form of stoke, heart problems, high blood pressure, and Alzheimer’s.
3) Become aware of reflexive emotional habits
A lot of stress triggers lie hidden in habitual reactions. If you are deeply worried about fuel costs for your car and home and angry at the government about it, you will probably fly off the handle more easily when faced at work with other uncontrollable realities. If you feel trapped by life’s unfairness, you will probably whine about things more. If you are a perfectionist, you will probably berate yourself more over perceived imperfections.
Each time we react to life’s situations negatively out of habit, we cut a deeper rut from which escape becomes more difficult. Each reaction has an accumulative effect, building upon itself.
If we are wired to the following emotional habits, we trigger our stresses more easily:
- Religious hatreds
- Racism
- Snobbishness toward the lower classes
- Reverse snobbishness toward the upper classes
- Having a quick temper
- Harshly judging others
- Blaming others for problems
- Harshly blaming ourselves
How let go of the negative emotional habits
Watch yourself closely when you react out of these emotional habits. Remember how stress triggers and indicators can hide. Can you feel your body tighten, your breath shorten, and your jaw or fist clench? Have you seen a person on the news or in your life venting with rage or hatred? How can this be good for anyone? Our health suffers when we fill up our emotional tank with negativity. It fuels our stress, too.
Making the world into a reason for emotional self-flagellation or making life into a battleground, an angry soapbox, or a line in the sand may help keep our adrenaline-junkie side happy, but it won’t relieve our stress. To let go, we need to value our well-being over our need to be critical.
Dr. Wayne Dyer says that it is better to be happy than to be right. For the most part, I agree. It has taken me years to get here, though. I grew up rather feisty with a bit of chip on my shoulder. The feistiness I have turned into a creative force for writing and teaching, but the chip … well, the chip was worthless. The last time it got knocked off, I just walked away. My health and well-being has been so much better ever since.
Worry, anxiety, or doubt rarely crop up without a trigger. Finding them can be tricky, because stress can hide in our body’s tension and aches, among our inner and outer vocalizations, and within our habits. By uncovering and releasing ourselves from these puppet-like responses to triggers, we can learn to relax.
Stress is inner biofeedback, signaling you that frequencies are fighting within your system. The purpose of stress isn’t to hurt you, but to let you know it’s time to go back to the heart and start loving.
~Sara Paddison, The Hidden Power of the Heart ~
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Photo credit: speech path girl
[…] Stress triggers — uncovering and releasing them My mother, who spent a lifetime masking her true feelings … The last time it got knocked off, I just walked away. […]