April is Stress Awareness Month, a chance to learn and grow our understanding of stress and how it plays a role in our lives. It is important to understand that the events of our lives are an opportunity as well as a challenge to work with our stress response in healthy ways to optimise our wellbeing.
The Polyvagal Theory of Stress: Social Engagement, Fight/Flight and Freeze
The nervous system has commonly been categorised into two states; ‘fight or flight’ or ‘rest and digest’. However, Dr Stephen Porges suggests the Polyvagal theory that the vagus nerve expresses three states; ‘Social Engagement’, ‘Fight/ Flight’ or ‘Freeze.’
The vagus nerve innervates the muscles of the throat, circulation, respiration, digestion, and elimination and so the vagal tone/feedback is critical for the body’s homeostasis. It originates in the brainstem and connects your physiological expression of the rest of your body to your brain and so it is a major example of the Mind-Body connection. Our awareness of our nervous system can help us regulate ourselves out of stress and back to a social engagement state.
How To Move from ‘Fight’ ‘Flight’ or ‘Freeze Into ‘Social Engagement’
Self-Awareness
If you are at the social engagement level, you may be able to consciously catch yourself becoming stressed. At this level, you can capitalise on the curiosity and openness still available to you and use it for self-awareness. Turn your attention internally to your body and ask yourself are you feeling ‘fight’ or ‘flight.’ If you are approaching a fight state then you will likely sense tension across your chest and down your arms. If you are in the flight state, you may feel your diaphragm, lower back and legs become tense.
This interoception or inner-awareness will allow you to self-regulate your stress more effectively, especially if you make the effort to label your state every time you become stressed. This is because this interoception allows you to hold both self-awareness and stress state awareness at the same time.
Fight-State: Walk It Off
If you become frustrated or angry then you are in a fight state. Deactivating out of the fight-state can also be done by walking and engaging wider eye vision. Going for a walk, or even pacing around your house, can help expand your field of vision as you see more in your peripheral vision and it helps get your nervous system out of the hyper-focused fight state. This is because bringing your focused vision into softer peripheral vision relaxes the nervous system and signals that the threat is over and no longer needs your full attention.
Flight-State: Balance Your Breathing
Down-regulate from flight stress by balancing out your breathing. When you breathe in flight mode, you may experience a degree of hyperventilation or over-breathing, whether at a conscious or unconscious level. Hyperventilation most often occurs when you breathe through your mouth, rather than through your nose. The problem arises because mouth breathing allows for too much exhalation of carbon dioxide, relative to oxygen, causing a downward spiral of a perceived lack of carbon dioxide which is needed for the krebs (energy producing) cycle, resulting in greater degrees of hyperventilation. Return to a balanced breath by only breathing in and out of your nose and aiming for a breathing rate of 6 breaths per minute, which is a 5 second inhale, and a 5 seconds exhale.
Freeze Response:
Freeze Response is the most protective state that humans use as an adaptation to stressful events. Freeze state is experienced when the fight and flight stages have been unsuccessful in escaping or fighting off a threat. Freeze is a conservation-of-life state, rather than a proactive one. This may lead to a feeling of being trapped and overwhelmed and so dissociation is used as a way to cope. This disassociation between mind and body is what can lead to negative emotional states outlasting the situation and becoming maladaptive resulting in nervous system states, such as depression.
To release from the freeze state, the mind-body’s natural system restorative response is to shake it out or ‘tremor’ which is the contract-and-release of tension. This can be induced through resistance-based strength training to challenge muscles or a targeted solution is shaking out the psoas muscle (the lower back) via a hip bridge exercise called Tension Releasing Exercise (TRE).
Mind-Body Awareness
With the goal being to return to nervous system regulation and social engagement, it is helpful to identify the most direct path, by first identifying the stress-response state you are in and then meeting the need of your nervous system. Doing this strengthens the mind-body connection over time, leading to greater nervous system regulation.
If you are finding that your stress levels are an over-reaction to the event at hand, then your nervous system is using the opportunity of a current event to dispel the nervous system charge stored from a previous event memory. This is when mind-based therapeutic methods that help you mentally process past experiences have the most benefit for your nervous system.
Stress Awareness Month is an opportunity to focus on helping yourself and others to gain self-awareness of the stress response and how to manage your state in healthy ways for optimal wellbeing.
To find out more about Stress Awareness Month and for access to resources, visit: Stress Awareness Month 2022 - The Stress Management Society
