Stress Modulation

Why is it important to modulate your stress? Stress is everywhere, especially in today’s world. While acute stress can be life-saving, such as when you need to run into a burning building, pursue a suspect, or restart someone's heart, chronic stress significantly weakens your body. When you’re stressed, your body pools all its resources to help you survive. It shuts down all “irrelevant” processes like digestion, reproduction, the immune system, etc., and revs up inflammation, your heart rate, blood sugars, etc.

This is cool when it comes to dangerous situations. But when you’re under chronic stress, this makes you more susceptible to health conditions such as cancer, heart disease, digestive issues, sexual dysfunction, infertility, and depression. It’s impossible to completely avoid stress, but you can change the way your body perceives and responds to stress by performing regular stress modulation exercises. Practicing these exercises daily will help to mitigate the negative effects of chronic stress and transform you into a stress ninja.

Stress Ninja Mindset

  • Cultivating the mindset of a stress ninja is key to developing a healthy lifestyle and resilience toward job demands
  • Practice kindness to yourself and others
  • Practice self-compassion
  • Practice speaking kindly to yourself
  • Say thank you and express appreciation to others
  • Practice regular self-care and make taking care of yourself a priority
  • Practice gratitude for anything and everything
  • Practice acceptance
  • Practice empathy
  • Practice forgiveness
  • Perform regular acts of kindness

Minimize unnecessary stress

  • Choose your company (when possible)
  • Limit your time with people who thrive on drama, conflict, and negativity
  • Limit your exposure to the news, or aim to balance it with positive news such as The Good News Network
  • Learn to lose pointless arguments
  • Prioritize your time and practice time management
  • Practice regular social media and electronic breaks (nightly and longer multiple-day digital vacations)

Shift your perception of stress

  • Practice re-framing your situation - viewing a stressful situation as a challenge or growth opportunity can drastically lower your stress response
  • Develop realistic, healthy expectations about stress
  • Remember acute stress is a natural, healthy response that can save your life - it’s part of your job - consider how stress helps you be a better firefighter, police officer, or EMT
  • Use the SEE Method:
    • Separate yourself from the emotion - you may be feeling a certain way but it does not define you
    • Embrace the emotion - it’s trying to tell you something and help you get a need met
    • Evaluate what to do next

Stress Ninja Practice

Taking action will stock your stress ninja arsenal. This is a practice. You don’t have to be perfect at it or even good at it. Just the practice will yield results.

Start a daily stress modulation practice

  • Aim to do 1 stress modulation technique for at least five minutes daily. Choose your favorites from the next section, Stress Ninja Techniques and Tools!
  • Start small. Just five minutes daily can have a dramatic impact on your mental and physical health. The consistency is more important than the amount of time you spend each day.
  • Make stress modulation a top priority. Sleep, nutritious food, regular movement, AND stress modulation are the pillars to achieving and maintaining great health.

Stress Ninja Techniques and Tools

Build your stress modulation toolkit. Some days sitting still on the cushion and meditating may feel great and other days a movement-based practice such as yoga or a walking meditation may feel better. Take your pick from the list below, or brainstorm your own ways and add them to the list!

Meditation

Meditation has been found to reduce inflammation and strengthen the immune system. Meditation is a formal exercise designed to cultivate awareness and compassion. There are several fantastic apps and online programs to learn meditation. Here are a few:

Guided Imagery

  • Calm App is mind, body practice using your imagination to create peaceful images in your mind to stimulate relaxation and healing.

Devices

  • Muse is an electroencephalogram (EEG) device, evaluates the electrical activity in the brain, and provides immediate feedback to guide you in your meditation.
  • David Delight is an Audio-visual Entertainment (AVE) device, which utilizes pulses of light and sound at specific frequencies to gently and safely guide the brain into various brain wave patterns such as relaxation.
  • Vielight 810 Infrared (Brain) is gentle brain stimulation using 810 nm nearinfrared wavelength, which helps release the calming neurotransmitter serotonin.
  • HeartMath/Inner Balance uses real-time coherence feedback measured through heart rate variability (HRV) to help you achieve a state of relaxation, focus, and calmness.

Tai Chi

  • Tai Chi for Health Institute features “meditation in motion”. Slow, low-impact exercise that activates the parasympathetic nervous system and induces calmness, relaxation, and healing.

Qi Gong

  • Chi Center and QiGong Institute use a combination of movement, meditation, and breathing to increase relaxation, health, and healing.

Yoga

  • Glo and Gaia feature mind, body practice with various styles that combine physical postures, breathing techniques, and meditation to cultivate relaxation, peacefulness, and healing.

Hypnosis

  • A psychotherapy that uses guided relaxation, concentration, and focused attention to achieve a heightened state of awareness. It has been shown to improve anxiety, sleep disorders, depression, PTSD, and lower stress levels.

Tapping

  • Mercola EFT, Nancy Lowe EFT, and The Tapping Solution offer techniques using Tapping, also known as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), on meridian points to rebalance the nervous system and rewire the brain to respond to stress in healthier ways. Over 100 clinical trials have demonstrated EFT’s efficacy and many agencies such as the US military are using EFT to treat PTSD.

Somatic Therapy

  • The Somatic Experiencing® method is a body-oriented approach to the healing of trauma and other stress disorders by focusing on your perceived body sensations.

Breathing

  • 4-7-8 breathing technique is from Dr. Weil, which he describes as “a natural tranquilizer for the nervous system.”

Nature

  • Take your “Vitamin N”. A study published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2019 showed that a 20-30 minute walk or sitting in nature without distraction (music, exercise, social media, phones, etc) significantly reduced cortisol levels.

Play

  • Set your inner child loose to play. Research has shown that play can trigger the release of endorphins, the body’s natural feel good chemicals. Create opportunities to play in your life. Examples include playing with your dog or kid(s), riding your bike, or dancing without inhibitions.

Exercise

  • Exercise (the right amount) is a positive stressor on your body and promotes healthy adaptations that make your body stronger and more resilient to stress. Over-training causes excess stress to your body. Signs of over-training may include poor recovery from workouts, a plateau or decrease in performance (your regular workout feels harder than usual), weight gain in your mid-section, poor sleep, restlessness, anxiety, fatigue, GI discomfort, muscle or joint pain, frequent illness, and depression.

Social connection

  • Feeling socially connected lowers stress hormones. It also slows the aging process and is a powerful tool to optimize your health! This may include volunteering, performing acts of kindness such as helping a neighbor, friend, or stranger, joining a club, or talking to a close friend.

Sleep and relaxation

  • Acute stress can be useful, and this is a healthy response that our bodies are built for. However, after bouts of acute stress our bodies need to rest. An example is a caveman who is chased by a tiger. He runs away to save himself and then would sleep in his cave for 8-10 hours. You need to do this as well. Take care of yourself after acute stress.