Bloom Your Mind

Ep 112: Stress Cycles

• Marie McDonald

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Ever feel like stress just piles on stress? We all know stress is a part of life, but are we handling it right?

For most of us, we tend to get stuck in a cycle of feeling stressed, instead of finishing the cycle by shaking it off and actually resolving the issue.

In this episode, leaning into one of the two stress experts, the Nagoski sisters, I'll break down what stress is and our modern day stressors, share three stories that focus on the non-helpful ways we tend to deal with stress, and give you a few different ways that you can alleviate stress in your daily life.

What you'll learn in this episode:

  • Strategies for managing stress and reclaiming balance in your life
  • How burnout and trauma symptoms often overlap 
  • Actionable techniques for completing stress cycles to prevent burnout
  • Ways to integrate stress-relief practices into your routine

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How to connect with Marie:

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Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want, and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it.

Well, hello everybody and welcome to episode number 112 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. I'm recording this for you today from New Mexico. 

We're here in Taos, where my family comes once or twice a year, and I just love it here. We ski on incredible mountain slopes and, more importantly, we go in to experience incredible art and culture in this place, where we have the privilege of just seeing so much of the indigenous populations life and culture and way of life and we get to learn from it. 

We visit the Pueblo when we're here, which is a thousand-year-old population of people and settlement, and just have such a gift of, you know, experiencing the art and the culture and the story and the ceremonies here, as well as other types of art. And one of the most amazing things about being here in New Mexico is understanding why so many artists come here. 

The natural landscape is so beautiful, and it changes so much with the different times of day and the different seasons. It is just incredible. My husband and I were sitting last night in a hot tub looking around us at all of the little vignettes of the natural world around us that could be paintings. My nerdy painter's eye goes off while I'm here and I want to paint everything, just like Georgia O'Keeffe, who lived here. So, we are enjoying this beautiful time together and I just wrapped up coaching the bloom room and something came up that was amazing that I got to actually coach on today, which I had planned to record your podcast about today, which is completing the stress cycle. 

So, I'll tell you a story. I was coaching a client a few weeks ago and I have coached clients on the stress cycle for years and years, and I've talked about this before, but I have coached dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of people on burnout symptoms. When I coach someone on burnout, I am true burnout I am always stricken by how the symptoms of burnout are number one, so common in a 21st century lifestyle because of the chronic stressors that we all experience in our life, which I'll define a little bit later on but also how the symptoms of burnout emulate or relate to me to when I experienced someone who was talking about trauma. 

So, the symptoms of burnout and the symptoms of trauma overlap in this Venn diagram to me in a very striking way. And I'm saying that to tell you that I think in our culture we sort of gaslight ourselves for feeling stress. 

But everybody is so stressed out and I think oftentimes in our culture we say that it’s not stressful. That's not stressful when we're just living the ins and outs of our daily lives and when in fact almost everything is stressful these days. Our nervous systems are so triggered so often and these days there are existential threats that we're reading about, you know, in news cycles. There's just always something new that feels like an existential threat. And then we all have our own day-to-day life stressors that vary person to person. So that's two levels of stress. And then we have the stress that has come from the life that we've lived, internalized stress that we have never released or processed, from childhood or from any period of our lives. 

So, there are lots of different ways that we experience stress and lots of different ways that the hormones related to stress are released in our bodies. So today I'm going to talk a little bit about one client's experience with stress. Then I'm going to tell you what stress is in a way that really helps me to think about it. I'm going to tell you three ways that we treat stress weirdly, that I have just developed over time, these three or four different ways where we just kind of don't recognize stress. And then, lastly, I'm going to teach you a few different ways that you can alleviate stress in your daily life. So here we go into completing the stress cycle. 

So, I was coaching a client, a beloved client that I've had for years. She was in our original few bloom rooms. Then I coached her one-on-one and she was talking about an extremely stressful experience that she had over the holidays. She is an unbelievably high, functioning human being. She runs multiple businesses, she's an entrepreneur, she has multiple children, she has multiple homes. She's just built a life out of just effort and love and gratitude that is highly complicated and that requires a lot to keep up with. She is full of love and gratitude and is such an incredible human being too to be around, so she just does a lot. 

We've been coaching lately around sort of coming home to what she really wants in her life. Writing books and being in gardens and some of the things that are more based on who she wants to be, in her day-to-day experience and her presence and a little bit less about what she needs to give to other people, what she needs to give to other people. 

So, she was telling me about her holidays where a series of events related to family members, health issues and airplanes and travel and the expectations that family members have of other family members and so many things landed her in such an elevated stress level that she was just almost paralyzed by the amount of stress. She got through it as this very high functioning individual. She solved her problem, she handled it, but when she got home her body crashed and she got very, very, very sick and as she got, you know, she took care of herself as she was homesick. 

About a week or two later we met together and we're debriefing on the experience, and she said over the last week or two, after reflecting on the stress level of these holidays and over how my body responded afterwards, I've had it change in myself, I will not do this anymore. My body forced me to stop and rest and all of a sudden, this client is realizing what stress, chronic stress in the day in and day out of life has created in her body, in her system and in her set point for what is normal. 

And after living this for years and years and decades, she had a moment where it all sort of elevated at this apex of stress and then her body crashed and all of the sudden, she is having a grand reset where she's questioning all of the things that she does for other people that are not regenerative, that do not give her energy back. She's questioning how much she works, how much she volunteers, all of the things that have created stress as a norm in her life. She's learning about cortisol levels and about how they impact us as women hormonally and how they impact us as human beings on all the different levels, and how they impact us as human beings on all the different levels. 

Now, I have heard this experience too many times more times than I would like to count because unfortunately in our society, stress is so normalized and, as I said, gaslit right as like not a problem, and I have had many clients and heard many stories from people that I love and friends that had to hit a level of such high stress that their body shut down and required them to redesign their life. Now there are a couple of things here. 

Number one I've been there, I remember in the days when I was in a burnout cycle in my last career, before I became a coach. I have told this story before, but I was working really long hours, moving my family every summer, a couple of times a year, and just because I believed in the mission of my organization, I was way overworking myself and I experienced burnout when, by the end of a day of sitting by myself working on my computer with really high what I call fake stress, I would get to the end of my day and I would just want to scream and I thought something was wrong with me. I was like, wow, I am, something's really wrong with me. I'm not able to keep up with life in a normal way. 

I'm not able to just like be a normal human. I was gaslighting myself because I was experiencing stressors day in and day out and in the long term of things and never releasing the stress or even acknowledging how stressful my day-to-day life was. 

So I can completely relate to this experience that people have had, and what I hope that we can do is hear these stories and not have to each individually learn ourselves this sort of relevance in the bloom room participants that are working on all different kinds of things, whether they're traveling and working on sleep as their idea that they're making a real, a better sleep life, or franchising a business, or just being more present in life. I have a second person that's working on moving onto a boat. 

No matter what people are working on, whether it's creating an online course a very tangible goal or whether it's a goal in just being more present or having better health habits in the day to day of life, we have an experience of stress that we're not recognizing. So, we're working in the bloom room on completing the stress cycle too. So, what I'm telling you in this introduction is many different anecdotes, both my own through working in an organization where I was overworking and burning myself out. 

Through a client who has functioned at such a high level for so long that she's normalized her own stress and had to have breakdown of her physical systems in order to realize the stress levels breakdown of our physical systems in order to realize the stress levels. And through all my Bloom Room participants who are working on things from the very simple and the very day-to-day to large changes in life. We all are experiencing stressors day in and day out because of our lifestyle, because we live at the time that we live in and it is vital for every single one of us every single person listening to this podcast, one of the people that we love to build skill in recognizing stress and completing the stress cycle. 

So, what is stress? Well, I'm going to lean into one of the two stress experts that I go to the most, the Nagoski sisters. Emily Nagoski and her sister wrote a book called Burnout, and Emily Nagoski also wrote a book called Come as you Are. Burnout is about burnout itself and is an incredible resource for anybody wanting to learn about stress cycles, cortisol and burnout in our culture. Come as you Are is a book about female sexuality and is an incredible book for both anybody to read to understand human sexuality and also has an incredible portion around completing the stress cycle because it's written by Emily Nagoski. So, I'm going to lean into her to talk a little bit about what stress is. 

So, first of all, she likes to separate our stressors from our stress. So, in her book, come as you Are, she says your stressors are things that activate your stress response. So that's like bills our family life, our work, all the things we worry about. Our stress is the system of changes activated in our brain and body in response to those stressors. So that's an evolutionary adaptive mechanism that allows us to respond to perceived threats, or at least it was. It was an evolutionarily adaptive mechanism when we were being chased by tigers all the time which I've talked about before on the podcast we adapted our stress response when we really needed it to survive. 

So, let's talk about what the stress response is. We like to think of it in terms of fight or flight, and I also like to add on to that freeze and fawn. So, these are stress responses, and they are activated both when we have really stressful things happen in our life and also due to our chronic levels of stress that we experience our chronic stressors, which are sort of like long-term slow burn stressors. We experience little levels of fight, flight, freeze or fawn all the time. So, let's look at how it works. 

If we're looking back at being actually chased by a lion because this is really, you know, a very tangible way of understanding this Well, let's suppose that a lion is chasing you and you can read about this and come as you are. This is an example straight from Emily Nagoski and I love it. So if a lion was chasing somebody, we would immediately think I'm at risk. And what do we do if we're at risk? We would run, right, if we're running and we're being chased by a lion, we are in flight because we can't fight a lion, right, we're going to choose flight. 

There are only two possible outcomes from that we would either get eaten by a lion, in which case none of this would matter anymore, or we would outrun the lion. If we outran the lion, we would get back to our village. The rest of our village would help to perceive the threat and eradicate it. So, we would maybe kill the lion, cook the lion, feast on the lion, go to sleep and wake up in the morning. We might have a respectful burial service, Nagoski says, for the parts of the carcass we wouldn't be using, given reverent thanks for the lion's sacrifice. And we would have this complete cycle of having eradicated the threat, given thanks. 

And then how would we feel? We would feel relieved, we would feel grateful to be alive, we would feel grateful for our friends and family who helped us alleviate the threat. So, the complete stress response cycle would begin with I'm at risk. It would go through the middle, which is action. We would run away and then we would eradicate the risk and then it would end with a feeling of safety. Those are the three parts beginning, middle and end. I'm at risk, some form of action, and then I am safe. That's the normal set of behaviors. 

Now let's look at what happens if we actually can't take action to eradicate the risk. Well, in the animal kingdom, if we decide that we cannot fight and we can't outrun something that is putting us at risk, what will happen is we will freeze. That's when you see an animal play dead as a last-ditch effort to convince the animal that they're not worth chasing right. And when that happens, that's our freeze response. When we decide that a threat is something that we can't fight and we can't win, we get the stress response, where our parasympathetic nervous system is activated by extreme distress and our body shuts down. We maybe freeze. 

For me, when I go into a freeze response, time kind of slows down. Everything gets a little sluggish and slow motion. And what happens in the animal kingdom when an animal actually survives, that they get up and they shake really hard. You might see that an animal get up and shake itself out. So that is how we complete the stress cycle in a freeze cycle. So, you see that in with a lion, we're running away, and then we complete the cycle through action and we're safe with this freeze response. 

We're running away, we freeze, the threat maybe goes away in some way, and we get up and we shake, so we complete the stress cycle in that way. Both instances the stress is resolved, but in our current day life that doesn't happen. We have big stress events that don't ever get resolved. We have small stress events throughout our day-to-day experience that do not get resolved. 

So because we're not completing our stress cycles like these two examples of the animal kingdom, we have all kinds of stress hormones floating around in our body impacting the way that we move through the world, impacting our hormone levels in our body, all kinds of things in our system which I'm not going to go deeply into right now I haven't passed podcasts but you can research how cortisol and how stress impact the body on your own. 

What I do want to talk about are a few different examples of ways that we actually deal with stress in a non-helpful way in our current lives. Number one I talked a little bit about chronic stress versus acute stressors. Acute stressors are things like a tree falling on your car, a car accident, something that happens in the moment, that is an acute stress event. We can understand those really clearly and those require a completion of the stress cycle too. But what we don't recognize as much is chronic stressors. 

These are long-term stressors that are all over our lives, in our current everyday lifestyle, and that we don't really recognize as stressors. Our stressors, when they're chronic, are lower intensity and longer in duration and they're a little bit less straightforward and they have a less clear beginning, middle and end. But if our stress is chronic and we don't take deliberate steps to complete the cycle, all of those hormones from all of that stress just hangs out inside of us, and you can read more about this in Nagoski’ s books. Stress just hangs out inside of us, and you can read more about this in Nagoski’ s books. 

Now, there are four of these ways that we deal with stress. Number one when we have these chronic stressors, or what I like to talk to my kids about as fake stress, we have all of this hanging out in our body, and we just get really used to it. We experience things like emails or being stuck in traffic or missing a text or not texting someone back right away or saying the wrong thing in a social environment as stressors, maybe turning in our homework late. 

I talk to my kids about this as fake stress because our body is interpreting it as a mortal threat, as a lion, but really it's just a threat that is created by our own rules in society, and I think it's really important for us to at least in our minds, be able to differentiate between real stress and what I like to call these fake stressors, which are very stressful for us. What I mean by fake is not that it doesn't actually stress us out, it absolutely does, but I like to differentiate what is a mortal threat and what is not. 

The second thing that we do is in relation to either one of these types of stress whether it's acute and real and life-threatening, or whether it's a chronic stressor or something that is created by our society as, quote, stressful. With all of these different types of stressful events, when we don't complete the stress cycle and when we don't relieve ourselves from the stress, we actually get stressed, that we are stressed, and what happens when we do that is we make our stress more easily triggered. 

So, when we don't complete our stress cycle, we get stressed because we are stressed. So, I want you to just think about how you treat it when you're really stressed out. Do you treat it as something that's a normal? You know, stress plays an important role in our lives, right? It tells us when something is off, it tells us when there's a threat somewhere. So, stress is important. When we feel stress, we just need to recognize it, see what the threat is, take action. 

Stress or we feel it and we become stressed out that we are stressed with no resolution. And so, what happens then is we become more easily triggered. Our bundle of nerves that is responsible for anxiety becomes more and more and more easily triggered, so we get stressed out more easily, more and more easily triggered, so we get stressed out more easily. And what that does is, if you listen to how to learn new things the podcast episode from quite a while ago it shows you that it allows us to become less comfortable. 

Over time, the amount of things, amount of circumstances and environments where we feel comfortable and not stressed shrinks because we are stressed by more and more and more things. Our stress stresses us out and becomes more and more easily triggered. So, oh my gosh, how have we created this for ourselves as human beings, right? How have we created this for ourselves as human beings. Right, this system where the majority of our lifestyle really stresses us out. The majority of society is gaslighting that stress and saying, hey, that's not really stressful. 

We aren't completing a stress cycle where we're feeling stress all the time. It's impacting our health, our immunity, our well-being, but we're not doing anything to sort of relief the stress. Instead, we're feeling stress that we're stressed, allowing ourselves to be stressed in more and more environments and by more and more things, and also causing us to scan for threats more often. So, it's all self-perpetuating and it all has a very negative impact on our health. So, let's talk about what we can do to complete the stress cycle. 

Number one the most important thing that we can do is to introduce physical activity as much as we can during our day. You can go out for a long, brisk walk. You can, you know, use an elliptical or some kind of machine at the gym to get cardio. All of these things help to alleviate stress. But we can also do what's called the shake. If we're feeling stress in our body, do what animals do in that situation where an animal plays dead and freezes and then gets up and shakes it off. We can do that anytime we need to. You can get up, shake your body, jump up and down and shake off the stress. 

My daughter and I like to listen to the Taylor Swift song Shake it Off and just giggle about how we're literally shaking it off like animals. You can do the shake. You can also just squeeze your palms. I know a lot of individuals schedule physical breaks into their workday so that they have a way to just complete whatever stress has built up in their body. Every hour or two hours Some folks will do a dance break. I love a dance break because you put on music that actually changes your emotional state, and you shake off your stress through physical activity. That's number one. 

Number two is to share affection with other people. How good does it feel to just share affection Long hugs, a kiss with a loved one, sharing words of affection, prolonged eye contact, any way where you can feel really connected and allow those wonderful hormones that are related to love and connection to wash through our body. That can complete our stress cycle. Having pets around us that we can share affection with any form of shared affection can help complete the stress cycle. 

Number three literally let it out through a primal scream through a really good cry, as long as you're allowing yourself to cry and not get lost in it. Cry to just let out that emotion and then take a deep breath and come back out of it. But a cry or primal scream is another way. A fourth way is meditation or progressive relaxation, so really using that subconscious mind to remind yourself that you are safe, you're in an environment that's safe, and to release any stressors through those meditations that you've experienced, through breathing and meditation. 

And lastly, one of the things that I experience as completing the stress cycle and that Nagoski actually writes about in her book, which is the first person that I've seen write about is self-care. So, getting your fingernails done, taking a long bath, taking care of our physical bodies, taking time to get dressed and get ready, taking care of our physical bodies is an incredible last way to complete the stress cycle. 

So, what I recommend that we do is take intentional time in your week to complete your stress cycles, instead of just waiting until you feel stressed out to resolve the stress. Understand that stress is a part of our daily lives. There are no lions chasing us around, but there are daily stressors that feel very much like that lion to our bodies, in our society, and we're not good at recognizing them. 

So I hope today's podcast helps you to stop gaslighting yourself for being stressed and to recognize in you and the people around you the chronic stress, the long-term stress that's just inherent in being a person these days in the world that we're living in, and take some steps to use physical movement, physical activity, shared affection, primal screams or good cries, meditation or progressive relaxation and physical self-care to help yourself complete the stress cycle for a more balanced, healthier, fulfilled, connected day-to-day experience and long-term experience of your life. 

You'll see the books in the show notes if you want to dig deep into these concepts by the Nagoski sisters and by Emily Nagoski. It was just brilliant and that's what I've got for you today, so I will see you next week. 

If you like what you’re hearing on the podcast, you've got to come and join us in the Bloom Room. This is a year-round membership where we take all of these concepts, and we apply them to real life. In a community where we have each other's backs, and we bring out the best in each other. We're all there to make our ideas real, one idea at a time. 

I'll see you in the Bloom Room.