Chronic stress can cast a long shadow on our lives, impacting our daily activities, overall well-being, and sense of empowerment. In this insightful article, I cover three keys to unlocking chronic stress and finding balance and empowerment.
By delving into the multifaceted aspects of this experience, we uncover strategies, approaches, and resources that can breathe new life into their existence. Together, let’s explore the path to finding harmony, enabling those who suffer from chronic stress to reclaim their vitality, embrace joy, and cultivate profound well-being.
Understanding Chronic Stress
Chronic stress is the experience of feeling consistent pressure, including feeling overwhelmed, over a long period. Some symptoms of chronic stress are physical pain, fatigue, insomnia, isolation, and inability to focus. These symptoms are a direct effect of the stress response being out of balance.
Chronic stress can impact our daily routines, overall health, and sense of grounding in the world. Common sources of chronic stress include pressure experienced in a job, family relationships, school, and the environment.
Over time, because the stress response is out of balance, the brain, mind, and body undergo significant wear and tear, and changes can occur at the epigenetic level. Emotionally, chronic stress contributes to symptoms of depression, anxiety, and frustration, reducing the quality of life. Socially, it leads to loneliness, strained relationships, and decreased participation in enjoyable activities. Such continuous stress can lead to a number of diseases, such as heart disease, depression, hypertension, and chronic pain.
The Importance of Empowerment
We can enjoy a better quality of life if we are equipped with the appropriate tools, knowledge, and support to manage our reactions to the pressures we experience in everyday life. With such resources, we can better navigate the challenges we encounter and ultimately live happier, healthier lives.
- Increased sense of feeling grounded in the world: Empowerment allows us to feel confident that we can handle the challenges in life as we experience them and make informed decisions about ways to build our capacity for resilience.
- Enhanced self-efficacy: Empowerment builds confidence in our ability to cope with the pressures we experience and feel a sense of mastery in the face of them.
- Improved emotional well-being: Empowerment promotes a healthier mindset and emotional resilience, reducing the effects of chronic stress, such as anxiety and depression.
- Overall quality of life: When we feel empowered, we are more likely to engage in activities with others, maintain social connections, and be able to rest and relax, ensuring a healthier, more balanced lifestyle.
Unlocking Chronic Stress
The key to unlocking the imbalance in chronic stress is to address the hierarchy of healing in this order: internal balance, external balance, and adopting new strategies for coping with the pressures of life.
Internal balance (regulate)
In chronic stress, since the stress response is in disharmony, we need to start there and apply tools to help regulate the nervous system. This includes breath practices tailored to calm the nervous system, moving it from fight-flight-freeze mode to rest and digest mode. Techniques that tone the vagus nerve, such as singing, humming, chanting, laughing, and gargling, can help increase heart-rate variability and vagal tone. There are many other ways to increase vagal tone, which I will address in a separate blog. When we increase our vagal tone, the body can relax faster and better handle the pressures we experience daily.
External balance (co-regulate)
Part of building our resilience to what we experience is having safe and regular social engagement. When we feel safe with others, we feel connected to them and can co-regulate with one another. In this secure environment, we can relax enough to participate in meaningful, fun, and engaging relationships. Such an environment reinforces balance in the stress response.
Empowerment (learning)
Once we have established internal balance through regulating the nervous system and external balance through co-regulating with others, we are then ready to learn new things, such as optimal strategies to avoid experiencing chronic stress in the first place. These new ways of coping effectively in the world provide us with empowerment. We all experience stress in the world. A balanced stress response reacts in a healthy way to the pressures we face. Only when we react to our environment in a way that throws our stress response out of balance do we experience chronic stress and its harmful effects.
Understanding the nature of the problem of chronic stress leads to its solution
Understanding the nature of chronic stress is the key to finding a solution. How we approach life and the strategies we use to cope with it determine whether we experience normal stress or chronic stress. By effectively managing the nervous system and building vagal tone and resilience, we can manage stress and improve our overall well-being. Using the three keys to unlock chronic stress, we maintain balance and find empowerment in our lives.
Elizabeth Kipp is the author of The Way Through Chronic Pain: Tools to Reclaim Your Healing Power. She is a Stress Management Specialist, Addiction Recovery Coach, and Ancestral Clearing Practitioner.
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Elizabeth is a Health Facilitator, Empowerment Coach, EFT/Tapping and Ancestral Clearing Practitioner, and Kundalini Yoga Teacher, helping people to step into the power of their own healing. She has turned her attention as a patient advocate and health facilitator in service to the alarmingly high population of people who suffer from stress, chronic pain, and the quest for a life free from suffering.
