There are mechanisms built into the body.
Both to induce stress and turn it off.
Our body controls our level of arousal and calmness.
Our level of alertness and calmness determine what is our level of
sensation, perception, feelings, thoughts, and actions.
5 states that we can be in:
Panic,
very stressed,
stressed,
highly alert,
alert & calm.
Being stressed is not optimal for most activities & well-being.
But stress is necessary, to catch a plane that is leaving.
Stress feels unpleasant, and biases us toward impulsive actions.
If we have been stressed for a long time, stress negatively influences our immunity, mental and physical outcomes.
To get out of stress we reduce our alertness and enter states of calmness…
In a stressful situation, our pupils will be bigger than if we calm down.
For instance, to see a forest.
If we are stressed we get more focus on one specific tree and everything else gets blurred out; if we calm down, we see the entire forest sharp, this is called a tunnel vision anxiety symptom.
The same happens with our auditory system, stressed we get a tunnel hearing symptom.
You can apply this analogy to every problem…
We understand better and solve better our problems when we are more relaxed.
How can we control our level of alertness using breathing?
There is a correlation between alertness and calmness…
How we breathe controls our heart rate.
If you want to increase your heart rate, speed up your brain, and want more alertness, you should inhale more and longer than you exhale.
If you are stressed don’t inhale deeper, or don’t tell yourself to calm down…
You can’t control with your mind, your mind…
So you control with your mind, your body to calm down…
If you want to calm down, extend your exhale so that you exhale longer than you inhale…
Make the exhales deeper and extend them…
Physiological sights:
Animals and babies do that and we do that during a night of sleep when facing a nightmare:
DOUBLE INHALES FOLLOWED BY EXHALES TO CALM DOWN!
You inhale 2 times briefly and fast; then you exhale slowly one time and this pattern you repeat until you have calmed down.
A Stanford University study proves that if we do one of these 5-minute exercises every day our stress level goes down.
1. exercise
It is a 5-minute mindful meditation with closed eyes:
Double inhales followed by exhales to calm down.
This is a tool that is easy for us to do in a stressful situations.
2. exercise:
You train yourself to be in a stressful situation; – to be comfortable in uncomfortable states.
You rapidly inhale and exhale to increase your heart rate, so that you hyperventilate for 5 minutes. Look what happens…
3. exercise
Inhale, hold; exhale, hold… for a 5 minutes duration
Look what happens.
My Video: New Stress exercises from Stanford University. https://youtu.be/Nbvfu8LmOdQ
My Audio: https://divinesuccess.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/Podcast2/New-Stress-exercises-from-Stanford-University.mp3