Stress Busters and Immune Boosters: Staying in Your Zone with Help Now Skills!

Contrary to popular belief, stress is good for you. But like red wine and dark chocolate, only in moderation. A moderate amount of stress can motivate you, give you energy, help you run a race faster than you thought possible, or give you laser-like focus for a challenging task. Amazing things happen when our bodies face stressful situations. Without any conscious thought, our heart rate and breath rate automatically increase in order to pump oxygen-saturated blood to our muscles. Our liver gets the message to release extra glucose for energy, and our adrenal glands start sending out cortisol and adrenaline for some power boosts. All this is important in order to meet the demands of the stressful event. This is great if you have to run away from a momma bear in the woods, but not so great when it happens because you are trapped in the house with a lot of wiggly children.

 

Although most parents navigate numerous stressors on a daily basis--and might I say do so with remarkable finesse--over time, heightened stress can begin to impair our ability to function optimally. Especially during a mandatory quarantine when you might be trying to both work from home and help your children stay on a schedule with their screen time and school time and chore time and play time. This increase in stress can be hard on the nervous system, hard on the cardiovascular system and hard on our immune system. It can also be taxing on our relationships because we tend to have a smaller resilient zone in times of chronic stress.

 

The good news is that there are some simple activities you can engage in that can enhance your functioning and widen your resilient zone.

But with the typical stressors of life, and especially the current stress of a whole new world of at-home work and at-home schooling, our zones might feel narrower, and it might be easier to bust out into our “High Zone” or drop into our “Low Zone.”

 

On the flip side, if we get bumped into our Low Zone, we sometimes feel the opposite. We feel frozen or numb, maybe dissociative, or simply have a very hard time focusing. There might be a buzzing, activated sensation inside of us, but externally it’s hard to move, or we feel like we are in a cloud or brain fog. We sometimes label this state of being as “depression” which is a way to categorize the felt sense of helplessness or hopelessness that is generated by a frozen nervous system. (This Low Zone response is a biological response to stress and can be useful in the short term--think of an opossum trying to avoid a predator--so I prefer to think of it not as mental weakness, but as a biological stress response that only becomes problematic when we get stuck there.)

 

The good news about our nervous systems is that they are constantly in flux. We experience the charge and release of energy day by day and moment by moment. So whenever we feel the sensations of being up in our High Zone or down in our Low Zone, we can avoid getting stuck there by learning a set of skills that can help our nervous system regain a sense of balance.

 

This skill set requires us to hone our ability to read our nervous system and determine the difference between sensations that are pleasant and sensations that are unpleasant. For example, when I am sitting on my back patio on a Sunday morning listening to the birds and feeling the warmth of the sun trickle through the awning, I notice several things in my body. My breath tends to come more easily, my shoulders and neck are more relaxed, I feel softness in my cheeks (maybe even a smile) and there is a gentle slowness to my thoughts. These are all pleasant sensations, and they suggest that I am in my Resilient Zone with my stress response at a low level. But when I am on the freeway and someone cuts in front of me with little warning causing me to have to slam on my brakes, I immediately feel a tensing of my jaw, hands and torso. Often a harsh word flies out, and I feel some heat in my head and face.

Sometimes I can even feel a sensation like a quick electrical current running through my body. All of these are part of the sympathetic nervous system “turning it up” in order to protect me. If I don’t do something quickly to “shake it off” (literally shaking it out is a good thing!), I can end up in a rage state, which rarely impacts my driving ability for the better. I would label all of these sensations as “unpleasant.”

 

Some people might find that they struggle to notice where they experience pleasant or neutral sensations in their body. This is common, because sometimes we can become so “in our heads” that we forget to check in with the body to see what it is telling us. And sometimes checking in with the body is so unpleasant we don’t want to do it at all. So, if this is the case with you, and you discover that you don’t really notice what is happening “on the inside,” please respect that as your experience. I will offer you a few tips about ways to notice pleasant sensations in your external environment instead.

Today’s skills are the “Help Now!” skills from CRM (Community Resiliency Model) of the Trauma Resource Institute.

 

Help Now! Skills are for those moments when you are so activated and busted out of your zone that you need something to quickly move your attention to a sensation that is more pleasant or neutral. These skills are not rocket science, but they are based on neuroscience. In fact, you have probably done many of these things automatically when you are upset or frustrated. The difference between doing them automatically versus doing them with intention, is that when you consciously focus on doing these skills you can begin to track the pleasant changes that occur within your nervous system. And what you pay attention to grows. Just like in a garden, what you water grows. The goal of CRM is to learn how to “water” the more pleasant sensations in your body.

 

As humans, we tend to naturally pay attention to unpleasant sensations because they are loud and well-deserving of attention. For example, if you stub your big toe it’s going to draw a lot more of your attention than the other 9 toes. The other 9 toes are still there, and they might actually feel quite fine, but all that is yelling at you is your one big, swollen, painful stubbed toe.

 

This can be true in our current environments as well. We could have our favorite cozy slippers on our feet while we work at our desk, but if our kids are fighting in the other room, we might not notice how pleasant our feet are feeling. This is what we can work on changing in order to balance our nervous systems. The loud, unpleasant experiences aren’t going to go away, and of course we must attend to them as well, but in order to stay in our Resilient Zone, it is important that we work on building our “pleasant sensation” muscle in order to counterbalance the onslaught of less pleasant sensations.

 

If you notice that you don’t like the sensations, then stop doing the skill and try another one. Every skill is an invitation only because each of our nervous systems is different. What might be comforting and soothing to one person, might be less pleasant for another. Each skill will also have a link to a short video of me talking you through the activity if you would prefer that to reading.

 

1) Drink a glass of water. As you drink, notice the temperature of the water in your mouth. Feel the weight of the water, and the fullness of the sip. When you swallow, notice how the water moves down your throat toward your belly. As you drink, play attention to any sensations that are more pleasant and neutral. If extraneous thoughts try to weave their way into your “sensing,” just notice them, and then go back to focusing on the sensations of drinking that are more pleasant or neutral. (And yes, you can do this with coffee or tea too!)

2) Look for colors. Look around wherever you are and notice colors. I sometimes suggest to my students that they look for colors in the order of the rainbow. But if you are outside in your backyard, you can choose to look for different shades of green, or any peeks of colors from blooming plants. After you have found 6 or more colors, let your eye rest on a color that you find pleasant or neutral. Just notice that color and as you do so, begin to notice any changes that may be happening on the inside that feel more pleasant or neutral. Do you notice any changes in your breath rate, your heart rate, maybe muscle tension?

3) Touch a surface. Notice the different surfaces that are near you. Maybe it’s the smoothness of a table in front of you. The softness of a blanket, or the ridges of the edges of a sofa cushion. Use your fingers and palms to touch the surface and notice what it is like. Notice that you can shift your attention to a surface that feels more pleasant or neutral. Keep your attention focused on the sensations of the surface for as long as it feels pleasant or neutral.

4) Walk around the room. As you walk, if you notice that you are in your head thinking a lot of thoughts, it can be helpful to move your attention to your feet, or to counting backwards from 20 or 10. You might feel the weight of your body rolling from your heel to your toe as you take a step, or you might notice a slowing of the thoughts as you count slowly backwards. As you walk, play attention to any sensations on the inside that are more pleasant or neutral.

5) Push on a wall. When you are highly activated, or dropped low in a freeze response, mobilizing energy is helpful. This is one of my favorite Help Now! skills when I am super charged, or when I am feeling sluggish. Find a solid wall and push both of your palms into it with as much pressure as feels pleasant. You might also prefer to lean with your back against that wall and push with your back. (Try both ways and notice which way is more pleasant for your nervous system). When you let your arms drop to your sides, or you stand back up from leaning, notice any changes in sensation within your nervous system that might be more pleasant or neutral.

 

Throughout these coming weeks, try to practice one or two of these skills every day—both on your own and with your kids--so that they become more automatic responses during moments of duress. Begin to learn how to sense yourself coming back into a state of well-being, and pay extra attention throughout the day to any moments in which you feel a sense of calm and/or joy. Focus on those more pleasant sensations for as long as you possibly can because as Rick Hanson, author of Hardwiring Happiness, writes, “the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.” In order to flip that around we need to make the pleasant sensations stick, and even just 15-30 seconds of “soaking it all in” can make a change for the good.

Here are some resources to help practice Help Now Skills in your family life: