Stress is inevitable, and unfortunately, it seems to be on the rise. We live in a world where being busy is often glorified, working hard gets mistaken for burnout and social media is setting us up for comparison and distraction.

The nervous system as a whole is complex, it’s what makes up our brain, nerves and spinal cord and it’s how our body communicates and regulates itself with the outside world. The two main divisions we will focus on today are the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system.

The sympathetic nervous system is our “fight or flight” response. This is activated in times of real or perceived stress (think anxiety, a stressful email, overthinking). Because this is a state of survival mode, our body releases stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline which are good short term so we can run from a threat BUT - more often than not, we are moving through life in this state which is where the problem arises.

The parasympathetic division of our nervous system is what we ‘rest and digest.” This state is achieved when we are calm and balanced and is the most optimal state to be in. Our body feels safe to function optimally as stress hormones are not elevated so our digestion, hormones and mental health will feel really good here.

It is important to understand that our brains are designed to deal with stress - (we wouldn’t be able to get out of bed without that morning surge of cortisol!). We shouldn’t avoid it because that's unrealistic, instead we must learn how to adapt to stress. In our modern lifestyles today, the majority of our stressors are chronic (whether we notice them or not). Think bills, emails, traffic when we need to be somewhere, jobs we don't feel fulfilled in, body image, relationships, health issues. When we have all of those things accumulating within us, we may be unknowingly walking around in a sympathetic dominant state, meaning our cortisol is being chronically elevated and our nervous system then becomes dysregulated.

The most important thing is noticing and acknowledging how you are feeling before it catches up on you (because no matter how hard you push, stress always wins in the end). Some common first signs of a dysregulated nervous system could be poor sleep, racing thoughts, random bloating, anxiety and agitation over small things, unstable energy or loss of motivation in everyday life.

My top three tools for adapting to stress are as follows:

1. Learn how to be bored and do less! The more uncomfortable this feels, the more you need to lean into it.

1. Learn how to implement breathing into your daily routine. Start with 3 minutes of intentional breathing per day in a quiet space - making sure your out breath is always longer than your in breath.
2. Improve your sleep quality. The brain has its own waste clearance system called the glymphatic system that only works when we sleep! So the better our sleep quality is, the better we can optimise our brain health.

I hope you can implement these stress management techniques into your weekly routine so you too - can learn to stress less. x