Beating Stress

Stress impacts you in a variety of ways. It can:

Make you anxious
Make you angry
Make you argumentative
Make you aggressive
Make you depressed
Cause you to be “uptight”
Make you less productive
Affect your relationships
Affect your quality of sleep
Affect your quality of work
Make you weaker
Affect your breathing
Affect your thought patterns
Affect your movement patterns
Cause chronic over-secretion of stress hormones, such as cortisol
Affect your emotions
Affect your heart’s health
Cause excess bodily tension
Suppress your immune system – you get sicker easier and more often
Impair your brains’ function, especially memory
Decrease your ability to absorb new information or learn new skills

... and a whole host of other repercussions that come along with repeated exposure to stress.

According to the American Institute of Stress, stress is a somatic experience. That is, you experience stress with your whole self, throughout your entire body. It’s not just a “mental” thing.

Stress has a corresponding pattern of muscular action that goes along with it, and this pattern of action is individual to you.

Some feel pain in their necks. Some feel pain in their backs. Others have anxiety attacks.

For that specific reason, there is no one prescriptive answer to reduce stress (i.e. – you need to work out to relieve stress).

On the other hand, however, there is a single answer for how to prevent the fallout from stress.

First and foremost, you need to understand how stress affects you.

In order to do that, you need to be able to feel.

To feel?

That’s right, you need to be able to feel.

Sounds easy, but most people have been exposed to stress for such long periods of time, that they have repressed the feelings and bodily sensations that accompany it.

So, in order to reconnect with your feelings (not just your emotions, but the sensations that come from your body), you need to slow down.

Slow down?

Yes, slow down.

Based around the scientific laws that govern how your brain takes in and processes information, in order to develop and expand your capacity to feel, you need to slow down.

Slowing down allows your brain to take in, and process, larger amounts of information.

You become more in tune with the sensory feedback your body is giving you.

And remember, stress is a full body experience.

So, when you are able to tune in better to your sensory feedback, you are able to sense much earlier when stress is sneaking up on you.

When you feel stress sneaking up on your sooner, you have a better chance of not letting it get a grip on you.

And if you can prevent it from getting a grip on you, you can be more productive.

And a less stressed, more productive “you” makes everyone happy!

LET ME ASK YOU SOMETHING…
What do you do to prevent the effects of stress in your life?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…
For more information on what “slowing down” actually means and how you can implement it in your life, send us an email and we’ll send it to you for free!

*****

Chad Estes
Movement Specialist
cestes@etmconsultants.com

Sit Up Straight!

I always chuckle internally when I see ergonomic posters detailing proper posture.

But I temper those thoughts because I also realize that those posters are placed there with the best of intentions. Employers don’t want their employees to get hurt, for pete’s sakes! (I’ve always wondered, who is Pete anyway?)

The thing is, we can’t do anything with it.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Everyone needs to know how best to arrange their workstation in terms of chair and desk set up, as well as placing what they are routinely working with in close proximity to them.

However, we simply can’t make use of well-intentioned information that tells us to sit up straight, stand up straight, or "use your entire body to turn while lifting heavy luggage…"

We need to feel what whole body participation feels like.

This is a completely subjective experience – the way in which we feel ourselves taking action – and not one that can be relayed through objective ergonomic posters or diagrams.

You see, we are built to move. And in order to move efficiently, our nervous systems’ need to be able to experience as many different variations as possible.

These variations allow us to make better choices when we move. We are able to draw from a larger pool of experiences in order to best execute an action - whatever that action is.

In terms of brain science, it can be explained this way: Experience modifies the connections between neurons so that they become more efficient at processing information.

In order to work and move in more effective ways, you must develop new neural pathways and break out of the cycle of habitual movement patterns.

So, the more experiences we have (the more variations in movement we feel), the more we will be able to move and work more efficiently and effectively.

Which translates into more effective action.

And regardless of how effective you are presently, there’s always room for improvement.

LET ME ASK YOU THIS…
What are you doing to increase your effectiveness?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…
For an article that provides tips on increasing your effectiveness, send us an email and we’ll send it to you for free!

*****

Chad Estes
Movement Specialist
cestes@etmconsultants.com