The Ultimate Stress Relief Cheat Sheet (Part 2 of 3)
The Ultimate Stress Relief Cheat Sheet (Part 2 of 3)
If you can stop your nervous system from trying protect you, you can lessen your pain and quell your 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.
Picking up where we left off last week with Part 1 of the cheat sheet, let’s keep exploring everyday foundational practices for stress relief. Think of these as preventative care.1 We’ve already covered 1) somatics and 2) polyvagal exercises, so now it’s time for…
3. Brecka breath
I do this practice every morning as part of my somatics/polyvagal routine. It was recommended by a somatic teacher who said, “It may look and feel a bit bro-y, but if you are oxygen-deprived due to stomach gripping or tension myositis syndrome, this kind of breathing can help you.”
What separates this practice from others, as far as I can tell, is the intentional pause you take between rounds of breath. In this special pause you relax and tune into the sounds of the world around you. Stay in that space for a few beats before slowly inhaling, exhaling, then returning to the next round. It took me a while to catch the hang of it, but now I really love that pause.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
How to Brecka breathe
When just getting started, you’ll do 3 rounds of 10 breaths.
Inhale deeply as shown in the video. Exhale naturally. Do this breath 10 times in a row.
Let your shoulders rise as you breathe in. Fill your chest and belly on the inhale. Allow the exhale to follow the inhale without overthinking it.
Once you have finishes one round of 10 breaths, pause on the inhale. Do not exhale.
Tune into the sounds around you and try not to tense up as you very gently hold the breath. Relax into the feeling. Check out the video to see what this looks like.
Once you’ve held that inhale as long as you can, slowly inhale and exhale, then get ready for round two.
Do another round of 10 breaths, same as above, then pause again on the inhale.
Repeat one last time.
Over time, build to 3 rounds of 30 breaths.
4. Mindset/emotion check-in
Every day I set aside at least 10 minutes to “tidy” my mindset. Depending on the day, I do this by journaling or sitting quietly in the sun. The goal is the same — to create the internal space to understand what’s happening that day on a deeper emotional level.
I use Nicole Sachs’ approach to journaling. It’s called Journal Speak. When you sit down to Journal Speak, your goal is to speak directly from the emotion itself, unmediated by thought or analysis. This is radically different from the way I journaled throughout my 20s, which was filled with overthinking and self-analysis. Remember, many of us unintentionally suppress and avoid emotions we perceive as negative.2 When we give voice to unconscious negative emotions, we’re defanging them and soothing our nervous systems.
When I’m not in the right place to journal, I do this same practice without paper, sitting quietly in the sun to tune into the negative chatter in my head. I try to feel the emotions surfacing in my body. I allow myself to rest in uncomfortable emotional spaces. This is not easy but I know that it’s important: By teaching myself emotions aren’t as scary as they seem, I am regaining control of my nervous system’s master switch.3 Once I’ve done that enough,4 I send soothing mantras/phrases to the parts of my internal self that are complaining the loudest. I’ll explain more about how I landed on those messages in Part 3 of this series.
5. Afternoon gear shift
Nervous system regulation is best practiced in small and frequent ways. It’s important to learn to shift gears periodically throughout the work day — moving from the sympathetic part of the system (“flight or fight”) to the ventral (“safety and connection”).
Learning to relax in between tasks is another way of mastering your nervous system’s light switch.5 I do this by taking a quick moment in the middle of the day to connect with nature. This could be 5 minutes spent in my backyard, a small walk up and down the street examining tree leaves, or sitting and petting my dogs. I tell myself, “It’s OK to coast sometimes. I don’t always need to be in overdrive.”
I’m a broken record but will say one more time: the goal is to teach yourself that you are safe. If you are able to do that, your entire system can relax, your pain will be lessened, and your anxiety will plummet.
— End of Part 2 —
This is a good place to stop for now. I know it might seem a bit overwhelming — so many exercises! Give them a try and see if they work for you, but if they don’t, that’s OK too.6 What matters is that you keep experimenting with ways to bring safety to your system. Let me know how it goes in the comments below—you know I love to hear from you.
So far we’ve talked about daily foundational practices to expand your window of tolerance. Next week, I’ll send out Part 3, the final part of this cheat sheet, which will delve into exercises you can use in the moment to regulate your system when stress hits.7
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
In Part 3, we’ll explore in-the-moment practices for acute stress relief.
“How can I be angry at my son? He’s just a little boy.”
“I have to show that I always know what I’m doing at work so I probably shouldn’t admit — even to myself — that I feel fear every time I walk through the front doors of the office.”
“I don’t want to disagree with my partner about politics so I will just push down the feelings I’m having to get along.”
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. Your nervous system’s master switch is buried within a sea of internal confusion. 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.
It’s always hard to gauge what enough is. You want to feel the emotional fangs become less…fangy. If or when a softening occurs, that is likely enough.
Your nervous system is 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.
Each person is so different from the next person. What we need is different. You’ll likely different practices than what I will need, but in order to figure that out, you gotta start experimenting.
If you are too curious to wait, you can read the entire cheat sheet now on bevoya.com.