Once The Stress Is Gone

What would you like to try implementing in order to see how it feels and what works for you? It was at a point in my life when I was completely overwhelmed and felt that I never had a minute to myself without feeling exhausted or having a migraine. I realized that I had to get ahead of it. If I didn’t intentionally start making changes and decisions, it would keep on happening the same way, day after day, and I would continue to feel worse and worse. So one day I decided to start making shifts. I didn’t change everything overnight, but I did start by identifying one task that someone else could do instead of me. I was a single mom without family living nearby, so I didn’t have others in the household to help. I needed to create a line item in my budget for me to hire the best person for that task. With gentleness and the intention of nurturing, ask yourself, how do I want to spend time in my life? What do I want to be doing, contributing, and accomplishing? And how do I want to be feeling as I do it? If not feeling well is taking up too much time, let’s change that. Let’s create a schedule that allows you to take care of you, first and foremost. Patients sometimes ask me how they will know that what they are doing is working. They don’t want to do something that isn’t making a difference, and they want to know that it’s worth their while. Some people can tell right away, simply because they feel better.

All Things Must Pass

Patients have reported feeling ten or even fifteen years younger than they are now. They say, I feel like I did when I was forty, for example. When your energy, mood, and focus improve, it’s easy to notice that you feel like a new you! Sometimes these changes happen gradually, so they are less noticeable. Perhaps others notice before you do and say things like, Wow, you look great! At the same time, you may find yourself wanting to do things you haven’t done in a long time. Please be careful, because when you pass your new limit, you are likely to find yourself on the couch for a couple of days recovering again. Now that you’ve recovered from stress mode, your body is more likely to tell you when you’ve hit your limit. It can feel frustrating at first. You may find yourself questioning your body as to what happened. Heartburn, a headache, or joint pain will be back to remind you that you overdid it. You are human, after all. If my patients go back into stress mode, they fit the same stress type they had in the past. Occasionally it shifts to a different stress type.

Take It Away

If you return to stress mode, doing the assessment again will ensure you know how best to help your body recover. If you tend toward high cortisol as a Stress Magnet or Sluggish and Stressed, you’ll know to add back in banaba leaf and phosphatidylserine at the time of day that your cortisol is too high. The good news is that once you’ve recovered from stress, your body has learned how to do that, too, and it will be a lot easier to recover next time. Just know that it is normal to take steps forward in terms of your health, and then a step back every so often. This is part of the learning and recovery process. Expect three steps forward and one step back. As time goes on, this will add up to lots of forward movement. If you have a bad day, or feel worse, keep in mind all that has been going well, what you’ve learned about what your body needs, and that doing these things will make you feel better again. We need to shift the pattern of how we handle stress in order to prevent adrenal distress from happening again. Anything else is simply working against us. Accept that this is the body you live in. These are your genes, your stress exposure, and your stress type.

Time After Time

Now, with that information, what will you do with the body you live in? Do you want to be mad at yourself and create more stress, or forgive yourself for being human and learn from the experience? Studies show that it is possible to create new neural pathways. Our brains and nervous systems are not set in stone. If we change the environment and input into our nervous systems, they can learn new patterns. They support the growth of new neural pathways. This is true of mindfulness and meditation. And biofeedback helps establish new neural pathways and can be used to establish positive emotional states plus new routines. Use these tools to help you shift away from stress patterns and toward resiliency. As you do, you are also using epigenetics to positively affect your gene expression. The genes that turned on and created your stress type can turn off again. The same goes for the genes that predispose you to certain health issues. You can literally reset your health by mastering your stress. You’ll also find that you achieve a greater balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, which is the definition of resilience. You will be ready to respond to stress when it comes along and as you choose your optimal stress activities, but you will also be just as ready to rest and recover, based on your stress type, once the stress is gone. Pick and choose what piqued your interest and inspired you to want to make changes in your routine. It may be different now from what it will be as you progress through the Stress Recovery Protocol, and that is okay. It’s important to listen to your intuition when deciding what to try. No matter what you start with, you’ll be able to learn and grow and adjust as you go.