Happy April!  April has been recognized as National Stress Awareness Month to help bring awareness to the negative effects of stress. 

Now, we know not all stress is bad.  For example, we need to “stress” our muscles in order for them to get stronger.  Or sometimes we need the “stress” of a deadline to get us inspired to complete a project.  As resilient beings, we can adapt to stress.   Ideally,  however, once the stressor is gone, we then recover.

But when the stress is chronic and we don’t get a break from it, it can become harder to adapt.  We become less resilient, and might feel exhausted, burnt out, and overwhelmed.  It might even be more challenging to focus or to actually get work done. And chronic stress can lead to a wide variety of health issues including high blood pressure, heart disease, anxiety, and depression.

Things like yoga, or any mindful movement/exercise, conscious resting like we do in restorative yoga, breathing, meditation, massage, using a weighted blanket are a few tools we can use  to helps us relieve stress and down regulate the nervous system.

The nervous system connects to every part of our body and influences everything from our muscles to our organs to our minds.

Real quickly, our nervous system is made up of two main parts: the central nervous system (CNS) and the peripheral nervous system (PNS). A part of the PNS  is the autonomic nervous system, which breaks down into the sympathetic aspect of the nervous system  - the doing, creating efforting,  fight or flight aspect  - and the parasympathetic aspect of the nervous system – the rest and digest, calming, quieting, abiding aspect. 

Ideally, we want the body to be able to regulate back and forth between the two so we can call on each of them when we need to.  If there’s a fire, we want to be able to act quickly.  But once we are out of harm’s way, then we want to be able to calm everything back down.  We want the body to be able to shift from using all the energy to engage the muscles and create movement to moving more internally where it can heal, repair, digest, rest.

Over the rest of this month, I’ll be sending you brief practices to use as tools to help you better manage stress and to help you move toward parasympathetic dominance to balance out the stressed-out, sympathetic dominance mode we are all so familiar with.

You can access the first practice here.

**This practice, like any other yoga/movement/meditation practice should not be used as a substitute for professional medical or psychological treatment. Please remember to be in touch with your healthcare provider. 

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