This article outlines a new approach to success over stress and how it can be permanently resolved in your life. This is intrinsically linked to how you respond to stress.#stress #success #stress management
The two secrets to resolving stress permanently in your life are:
a. you need to repair your physiology first, then
b. you need to increase your energy
and
– The one key to unlock those two secrets is that you need recognise that your stress response is a habit and by changing one aspect of that habit you can change forever how you respond to stress.
A big claim!
Let’s look at the make-up of a habit.
Charles Duhigg in his book titled: “ The Power of Habit –why we do what we do and how to change” defines a habit as a process with three parts:
1. a cue – a trigger, a thought, belief, attitude
2. a behaviour/routine which we act out – the physical reaction of what we do when triggered,
and
3. the reward – what we do or give to ourselves as compensation.
- Take for example smoking. The three elements of a smoking habit could be:
a. cue – happy, sad, grief, depressed, anxious, etc.
b. the behaviour/routine is- smoking the cigarette
c. the reward – could be a sense of relief or calmness
We all know that the quickest way to change the behaviour of smoking is to simply stop smoking! It is a habit! To change the cues or the rewards may take a long time. So, the simplest way is to act on the behaviour. Then, you have to install new behaviour patterns and routines.
Our body systems such as: breathing, digestion, survival, endocrine system, elimination etc. run automatically by the subconscious, and therefore something that we do not have to think about
Initially our stress response mechanism was an instinctual subconscious mind function with which we were born, to help us survive our hostile environment from “real” or “actual” threats of attack from wild beasts.
Is our subconscious survival function a habit?
It is not a habit. It was a necessary function designed for our survival.
Over time, the list of “real” threats, those that endangered our lives has abated.However, we seem to have retrained the stress response mechanism to respond to “perceived” or “imaginary” threats. These kinds of threats we learned from our parents in our formative years. These perceptions have become a habit when we “perceive” we are under attack. The “attack” could be verbal, emotional, mental or physical. We have then activated the stress response mechanism in an artificial way from what was originally intended.
So, what we have done over time is, we have changed and adapted our stress response mechanism, to create a new habit of response to stress out of this original instinctual survival function. The new habit becomes ingrained when it is repeated over and over, and becomes an automatic function
“Modern life stress response can be viewed as a “learned” habit which has been based on a false premise – that of ‘imaginary” or “perceived” threats. If it has been based on a false premise then it means that it has been “learned”. If it has been “learned” it can be “unlearned”. (C. Healy
When observing the patterns of physiological behaviour in a stressful situation, it was noted that the pattern of how people respond to stress what they do and what the outcome is of that pattern, is that they gasp for air, i.e. take in very shallow breaths. Over time this shallow breathing has caused a contraction of the breathing apparatus and limited oxygen being circulated throughout the body and hence reducing the nourishment needed for repair.
We are so constricted in our breathing mechanism and we simply are not getting enough oxygen into our systems. We have created a new, really bad, breathing habit.
When we can break this bad habit, and install a new one we will get on top of our stress response. When we do this, we start to repair our physiology, and stop the energy leaks which occur when the body goes into fear of survival.
So, you can see that when we alter this one aspect of our stress response mechanism, our behaviour pattern of breathing, and learn to breathe properly, we will have cracked the two secrets of repairing our body and increasing our energy.
You see. The consequence of not doing anything is twofold:
a. if you continue as you are, you most likely will slide on down to being even more stressed and eventually creating disease, or
b. if and when you do take action to resolve your stress permanently you will have healed your body/mind and retrained your stress response mechanism in a new positive habit and at the same time increase your overall health and well-being on all levels.
Celine Healy is a Stress Resolution Specialist.
A Speaker, Author and Trainer, her expertise lies in taking women and corporate business from Stress to Success.
To arrange an initial, complimentary consultation to see if and how she can help you go from stress to success, call her on
+61 408 646 887 or email info@stresstosuccess.com.au.