The Ultimate Stress Relief Cheat Sheet (Part 1 of 3)

Techniques to lessen pain and quell anxiety

Hello reader! I’m Meredith Arthur. I work as a Chief of Staff for Pinterest’s product incubation studio and am the founder of Beautiful Voyager, a content and community site for overthinkers, people pleasers, and perfectionists.

I first started my journey into mental health research in 2015 when the neurologist treating my migraines diagnosed me with Generalized Anxiety Disorder. At the time, I found the Google results for “what is an anxiety disorder?” sorely lacking and I created Beautiful Voyager to fill the gap. My curiosity only deepened as I asked the same question over and over: Why didn’t I ever know that anxiety was contributing to the terrible physical symptoms (migraines, nausea, fainting, back pain, cramping) I was experiencing?

In 2016 I expanded my research by taking over the editor-in-chief role for Medium’s largest mental health publication, editing hundreds of personal mental health essays from people around the world. In 2020, just three months into the COVID pandemic, I published my first book on anxiety. That same year, I started working on the nonprofit

How We Feel

app with Ben Silbermann and Dr Marc Brackett. Since then, thanks to my partnership with the Pinterest social impact team, I’ve gotten to know the founders of many mental health nonprofits and stayed close to new trends in the space. It’s an ongoing journey that I find fascinating both on a personal level and a societal one.

Why a stress relief cheat sheet? My understanding of anxiety has changed radically over the past nine years of curious investigation. I’ve explored many schools of thought and approaches to anxiety treatment. Take a look at how my answers to the following questions have changed over the years: Why didn’t I know that I was suffering from anxiety? Is anxiety connected to the terrible physical symptoms I’m experiencing?

• 2015: I don’t care why I didn’t know. I want to know why the therapists I saw didn’t know.

• 2017: Seems like, in the field of mental health, you need to know what’s wrong with you for people to be able to help you. At least I have Lexapro now.

• 2019: I guess I hid it so well that I unintentionally hid it from myself? I still have physical symptoms. I continue to be grateful for Lexapro, which helps me turn down the thermostat on my internal environment, especially on anxious mornings.

• 2021: I am still really sick—nausea, muscle aches, migraines, lightheadedness. Is anxiety connected to the physical pain I am in? I still don’t get it. COVID hasn’t helped.

• 2023: After a year spent in bed, something finally helped: I had a hysterectomy. I’m grateful to see a decrease in my physical symptoms, but I am still in pain. I don’t know what to do next. I suspect my nervous system plays a role here.

• 2024: I finally get it —I have spent a lifetime in a state of nervous system dysregulation. I believe I can improve my physical and mental health by regulating my nervous system. My pain is diminishing. It’s a daily practice, but I am healing.

I’m writing this cheat sheet to help you skip some of the steps I labored through over the years. Everything I share here is an honest recounting of what’s working for me based on personal experience.

Who you are: If you’re reading this, I’m assuming you’re a fellow voyager, a curious overthinker learning to navigate the choppy waters of stress and anxiety from other wayfaring overthinkers.¹

The philosophy behind this cheat sheet: If you can stop your nervous system from clumsily trying protect you, you can lessen your pain and quell your anxiety. Teaching yourself that you are safe is where this work begins.² Your nervous system’s off switch is buried within a sea of internal confusion.³ To become skillful at using the switch, you must find a path through the internal cacophony and learn which part of yourself to listen to when. A great place to start is with actionable nervous system regulation tactics.

Let’s get started.

Every technique I’m including here has the same goal: to teach your body that you are safe.⁴ The best approach to all nervous system regulation is “little and often.” In other words, these exercises send messages of safety to your body (which, in turn, send them to your mind, helping you feel better overall).

Foundational, everyday practices

If you start reading about nervous system regulation, it won’t be long until you start hearing about the “window of tolerance.” Your window of tolerance is, quite simply, your ability to tolerate the challenges of daily life. It’s your body’s ability to move from a hyper-aroused (fight or flight) or hypo-aroused (withdrawn, frozen) back to a more grounded self and place.⁵ These foundational daily practices build your window of tolerance so that you can recover more quickly and easily from nervous system arousal.⁶

1. Somatics

I’ve come to think of my daily somatic practice as meditation with movement. Every morning I unroll my yoga mat and follow one of Sarah Warren’s online classes, usually first thing in the morning, in order to release muscle tension and teach my body what relaxed is supposed to feel like. I recommend starting with her level one course. It is a guided experience that builds upon itself every day, costs $45, and take two months to complete. It takes around 20-30 minutes a day.

2. Polyvagal exercises

I bundle the following three lateral eye-movement exercises with my morning practice. They are adapted from Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve by Stanley Rosenberg. Critics will tell you that we don’t yet understand the mechanism that makes this kind of exercise work, warning you to sidestep the hype. While I support a healthy dose of skepticism in all wellness endeavors, it doesn’t hurt you to give them a try as they are easy and totally free. I’ve definitely found them helpful for releasing my trapezius muscle and easing my morning anxiety.

The Basic Exercise

• Sit tall wherever you are.

• Interlace your hands and clasp the back of your head between your ears, sending your amygdala a message of safety.

• With your EYES ONLY, look to the right and hold.

• Breathe, relax, and allow your body to soften.

• Hold 30-60 seconds until you yawn or feel an internal shift. It can take practice to recognize the shift, but the yawn is a dead giveaway that this is working.

• Repeat on the left side.

Seated Salamander Exercise

• I like to do this exercise on my hands and knees so that gravity helps me inhale with my belly sticking out. You can also do it sitting up. Whatever works for you to get the release.

• With your EYES ONLY, look to the right and hold.

• Allow your right ear to melt towards your right shoulder (not turning your head).

• Breathe, relax, and allow your head to be heavy and your body to soften.

• Hold 30-60 seconds until you yawn or feel an internal shift. It can take practice to recognize this shift, but the yawn is a dead giveaway that this is working.

• Repeat on the left side.

Sphinx with Head Turn

• Lay on your belly and prop yourself up on your elbows with your chest and head facing forward.

• Anchor your pelvis by pressing down through the pubic bone.

• Draw your shoulders down out of your ears and extend your neck naturally (don’t look up too much).

• Turn your head to look over your right shoulder and hold for 1 minute. Again, you are looking for that yawn or internal shift into ease.

• Repeat the same exercise looking over your left shoulder.

— End of Part 1 —

This is a good place to stop for today. Give these exercises a try and let me know if they help you in the comments below! Whether you’re at the beginning of your journey or a seasoned mindbody traveler, I would love to hear from you.

Next week, I’ll send out Part 2, which will delve deeper into daily, foundational practices, and set the stage for stress relief in the moment.⁷

Love, Meredith

Recommended Reading

• The Pain Relief Secret: How to Retrain Your Nervous System, Heal Your Body, and Overcome Chronic Pain by Sarah Warren

• Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve: Self-Help Exercises for Anxiety, Depression, Trauma, and Autism by Stanley Rosenberg

• The Mindbody Prescription by Dr John Sarno

Recommended Listening

• The Cure for Chronic Pain Podcast with Nicole Sachs

• SOMA: Releasing Muscle Tension and Reliving Chronic Pain with Clinical Somatics Podcast with Sarah Warren

• Using Polyvagal Theory to Balance the Nervous System on The Adult Chair Podcast with Michelle Chalfant

1. You may also just be a colleague, or a former colleague, or a friend, or a neighbor. I appreciate you for reading these posts, whoever you are.

2. That is as hard as it sounds.

3. I’m simplifying the nervous system here — there’s no simple on and off switch. Your nervous system is more like fancy LED lights. The switch allows you to change the color and flashing patterns of the lights to give yourself the right lights at the right time. No one needs fluorescent disco lights at 9 AM on a Monday morning.

4. I could get into lots of details about why this is important, but I will leave that for other posts.

5. If you’re interested in learning more about these three states, a great place to start is Stanley Rosenburg’s book on polyvagal theory.

6. The nervous system exists to protect us. It is doing its job by going into an aroused state. The goal is to build a window of tolerance that allows you handle inevitable daily stressors gracefully and intentionally, avoiding your system being hijacked without you knowing it.

7. If you are too curious to wait, you can read the entire cheat sheet now on bevoya.com.