Parenting and Your Stress Response

Some people say parenting is "stressful". Spoiler alert, it is! But what do we mean when we talk about "stress"? This episode breaks down what happens to your mind and body when you are stressed and how you can use this information to better manage stress with your children. 
And we will be having our First Book Club Book- The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children will be Glad You Did). 

Show Notes: 

Lion’s Breath:  https://www.emilygoldyoga.com/blog/2018/4/12/lions-breath

Our First book Club Book: The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children will be Glad You Did). 

The music you here at the start of this and every episode was created by the "Wonderful" Obediya Jones-Darrell. You can check out his work here.

Transcript

0:31

Parenting and the stress response. This is one of my favorite things to talk about, your stress response. As a yoga therapist, I do lots of work with the stress response with the nervous system. This is a topic that fits in with many other things we've talked about or we'll talk about on the podcast. I recently did a podcast on inherited trauma and stress response. I have one coming up on mom Rage. So while the stress response itself isn't directly related to parenting, I've heard parenting can be stressful for some of you. I don't know anything about that, but I've heard, no, I'm just kidding. parenting is extremely stress. Understanding our stress response and what does it mean when we talk about stress and being stressed is extremely important. So the first thing I wanna say is stress. Feeling stressed is normal, is natural. If you tuned into this thinking that I was going to give you some advice on how to never be stressed, how to avoid being stressed or feeling stressed, experiencing stress, you're not gonna find a podcast on that because this doesn't exist. If I knew how to tell you to do that, I would be an extremely rich lady. But as it is, that's not what this podcast is. what this podcast is about. This episode is going to be what actually happens when we're stressed and what we can do about it. When we talk about stress, we're talking about our nervous system, our central nervous system, specifically our sympathetic nervous system, which is our stress response system. And then we will talk about our parasympathetic nervous system in a moment, which is the contrast to that. our response to stress is an evolutionary response, and unfortunately, it is very out of date. Basically, we respond to stress the same way our caveman ancestors did. We do the things that they did to survive. You might have heard the term fight or flight response. Sometimes we hear fight, flight, freeze, or fawn or fight, flight, freeze, befriend. But basically fight or flight are the two major recognized ones, and we also have some people who experience stress and they freeze or they try to fawn over the situation. These are different ways our body responds to stress, which worked really well when we were cavemen. And the kinds of stress we dealt with were predators, like let's say, A lion. So if you were a cave person and you were out on your day and you saw a lion, you might prepare to fight that lion. You might prepare, prepare to run away from that lion. You may prepare to freeze and hide from that lion, or you may prepare to befriend that line, feed it something else, be kind to it. Those that didn't do any of these things that maybe just sort of stood there. didn't pass on their jeans because the lion ate them. These are successful responses to stress. When these types of stresses were predators, they're extremely useful. When we are stressed, we prepare to do these things. Our body naturally has evolved to do these things. Your heart might beat faster, your shoulders might tense. blood will flow to certain systems like your respiratory system. Your heart's speeding faster. You might, your breath will normally get faster and shorter to prepare to run or fight. Your muscles might tighten up. You might crouch down to hide. You might feel really quiet like you're going to befriend something or really loud like you're going to fight something your fists might tighten. So again, these are really great things if a giant predator is coming your way. There are just a few problems for us today. Well, the first thing is for most of us, our stresses aren't predators. I haven't had to fight a lion for a while, and when my toddler is refusing to go to sleep as much as I want to. I can't run away from her. When my six year old is singing the same three lines from the song Wrecking ball for the 200th time at seven o'clock in the morning, I can't hide from him. So my body is wanting to do these things, but unfortunately these responses don't work well for my current stresses. The second thing is in the caveman analogy, if you got away from that lion, however you did it, you got to take a break. You got to go back to the cave or to the watering hole. but for most of us today, we're dealing with chronic stress. There's not really a break. We go to work, there's stress. We bike or drive home, and if, certainly if you live in Brussels, that's extremely stressful. You get home, there's parental stress, maybe you're then that's affecting your sleep. You're not sleeping well because of technology and light and how our days are aligned, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. so we don't get a break, and especially as parents, we really don't get a break. we have these great stress responses that are not great for our current stresses. So what can we do? Well, besides going and living in a cave, which at seven 30 in the morning when I'm listening to wrecking Ball might sound really feeling What else can you do? First thing is what I'm doing right now is acknowledge that things are stressful. There is so much pressure on parents today to be perfect. and you don't have to be. Nobody is actually perfect. Not even the people we follow on Instagram, the perfectly dressed, perfectly equipped parents. We see it drop off. Just acknowledge that we're all dealing with stress, we're all managing it in different ways. There are also some really applicable things you can do to deal with your stress. I mentioned one of the things that happens when you are stressed is your breathing gets fast and shallow. This happens to almost everyone when they're stressed. It's a really common stress response. When you are feeling stressed, one of the easiest ways to break the stress response. is to take control of your breathing. Your breath is a response that is both voluntary and involuntary, so you don't have to tell yourself to breathe normally, you're just breathing and so it's involuntary, but you can also control your breath. So if you are feeling one of the easiest things to do is to take a deep breath into your belly and let it out really slowly. maybe even make a little noise, a sigh because your exhale is the part of your breath that is part of your parasympathetic nervous system. So your sympathetic nervous system is a part of your nervous system that is tied with your fight or flight response. But we wanna ignite the counter to that, which is your rest and digest response. And when way to do that is to have some nice long exhales. So like I said, one of the easiest ways to do this, let's, we can even do it right now on the podcast, if you have a moment, is to take a breath in. Maybe take a breath in for a count of 1, 2, 3. and let's all breathe it out for five or six counts. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. This isn't a breathing podcast, but if you wanna pause and do it again, please do that as long as you like. Along with that would be to breathe into the belly, because I noted when we're stressed, we tend to breathe very shallowly, which makes sense. If you're about to run, you wanna take a lot of breath in, but that is igniting and encouraging your fight or flight response. So breathing into your belly can. ignite your rest and digest response. So we can try that right now if you have free hands. Otherwise, you can try this later at home. Put your hands on your belly and let's do another breath in. Breathe right to your hand. Your hand should lift a bit, and then another breath out. hand should move down a bit. Okay, so we just did that with a focus of doing it right now. What can happen over time is our breathing becomes habitually fast and shallow. If you ever looked at a baby sleeping, they tend to breathe nice and slow, and they're bellies, they have big belly breaths. And over time we've evolved to have these more shallow breaths. We aren't always using the correct muscles to breathe, and over time it becomes harder and harder to take these deep breaths. but it's also one of the easiest things to fix. So one of the best ways to do that is to just keep breathing into your belly whenever you notice you're stressed. But also just if you have a moment even it's a good thing to do if you can't sleep, is to just take some belly breaths. I'm gonna leave it there for now because like I said, this isn't a breathing or meditation podcast, but I'll have some resources in the show notes if you wanna learn more. Another thing to do when you are stressed, Is, notice your body. So I mentioned our bodies are getting ready to fight or run away so you can notice where you hold stress. Very often we lift our shoulders up towards our ears. You might make fists with your hands. So if you notice those things happening, maybe they're even happening right now. See if you can let them. This is another one of those situations with, with chronic stress, we tend to hold these things more and more, but just like the breath, the more you practice on doing them. The easier it'll become. This is often where the yoga comes in. Yoga is great for this, but yoga's not for everyone. Massage is great. Other sorts of exercise is great. Really any sort of moving,, when you're in that stress response, all these things are gathering in your body. You're preparing to run away, you're preparing to fight. But like I said, you're not, you can't actually do this. You can't actually fight your boss for when they keep you late on a Friday afternoon. So what you can do is when you're holding onto that stress after is move it help release some of the stress hormones and release the actual physical holding. And another way to do this is actually working on retraining the mind a bit. So again, this is not a mindfulness podcast, but mindfulness is an amazing practice for this to actually change the way we are noticing what's happening in the present moment. Because often the stress we're feeling. Like I said, it's not happening in the present moment, but a bad start to a day can stay with us all day because we've sort of become ingrained to always feeling stress. Noticing if you're feeling stressed, checking in what's stressing, what's causing that, where are you feeling it in your body, and a regular mindfulness practice or a yoga practice can be really great for. So some more practical tips of just getting out of their stress response. A really big one is trying to take a break, even if it's just a moment between those stressors. I work for myself. I also know the most stressful parts of my day are like that time right after school and crush pickup. And I know what helps for me is if I take some time, even if it's just five. When I close up my day, before I pick up my kids, sometimes I have a lot more time and I do some yoga or I work out. Sometimes I just put on a favorite song and dance, take a couple breaths. Really it can be two minutes, take a few breaths before I get along my day, and it really does help. So if you can take a break, taking a break Also when the stress is happening, so you know, if you're at work, if you can actually just step away from your desk for a. when it comes to kids, how do you take a break? Well, when they're really little, sometimes you do just have to put them down just for a moment in a safe place and walk away. Come back a minute later, they'll be okay. I'm not saying like, leave your kids at home. Walk out of the room. If you have a baby in a crib for a moment or two is okay. If your kid's a little older, we have this wonderful tool. It's called screens. You can put them in front of a screen for five minutes. put on a meditation podcast. Take some breaths, take a walk around your room. Whatever you need to do it is going to be okay. We're going to have a whole episode on screen time, but really five minutes as opposed to just feeling stressed for all day and taking that out on your child. That was five minutes of tv. I promise is going to be better. So I'm specifically mostly talking about how you can deal with the stress response in the moment with your children. One thing I love to do is dancing with my kids. I know when I'm like feeling like I am just about to burst with stress, we put on some music. I mentioned wrecking ball. That's a big one in our house, but we've got a lot and we just dance around and it can often, a good song can help us feel better and moving our body can actually bring us out of the stress response. I'm no longer getting ready to fight that lion. One of my favorite tools is a breath called lion's breath. The way it works basically is you breathe in through your nose, you breathe into your belly, and it's a long exhale, sticking your tongue out and folding your body down like this. Ha. I will tag a video of it in the show notes. I had a situation a few years ago when my son was a toddler and I was just feeling so stressed and I just did this lion's breath and then he did it, and so I was already feeling better after I did the breath, and then he did it and it was so cute and I had him do it again and I took a video. So I'll see if I can find that and share that as well. Another thing with your stress response is checking in with yourself and your triggers. So what's going on for you? Are you hungry? I am a super hangry person. Ask my husband. He will tell you that. Are you tired? Are your children hungry and tired? Is that, are you in like, a little bit of a cycle where everyone's hungry and tired? Tireds a little harder to fix? But you can give yourself a break. Maybe take it easy, hungry. You know, eat something even if it's not the healthiest thing, just to get your blood sugar up. Notice what you're feeling stressed about. I know sometimes if I'm feeling stressed about something with my business, it sort of hangs over me. And if I notice it, I'm like this, this is not, I can't do anything about this right now. This is right now is kid time, and I do the best I can, and if it comes back into my brain, I can continue to notice it. Moving your body. I've said it several times. Move your body, whatever you need, shake your body out, tap your body. This is a fun thing to do with kids too. Kids like moving. know that stress is totally normal. We're all feeling it. Even the people who look like they're not feeling it for one, they might express it in different ways. They might have been conditioned to show it in different ways. People might think you're one of those people that's never stressed. So just know that it's totally normal and the best you can do is learn to manage it. And the more you do these practices over time, the you break a cycle and it can become less chronic. So I'm gonna leave us here for now with that because we have a couple episodes coming up that are all going to feed into the stress response. Like I said, we're going to do an episode about Mom Rage. That definitely feeds into the stress response and a few others as well. If you are not already, please sign up for my newsletter. It's on my website, emily gold yoga.com. You get all sorts of stress response tips, as well as updates about the podcast and as well as everything I have going on in Brussels and online. if you are in Brussels, I have an ongoing prenatal and postnatal yoga class, and if you are in Brussels or anywhere in the world, I am setting up some more mom classes coming soon. So stay tuned for that. We do a lot of stress management in the, in those classes, if this was interesting to you, we'll go much more in depth. I mentioned the book club in our last episode, so you can join the newsletter to get updates on that. We will have the book club coming up soon. Thank you so much for listening. If you can please subscribe and review, it really does help the podcast. I wish you a wonderful day with limited stress and no lions.