During moments of stress, we often feel our heart racing, our jaw tense or our stomach upset – sensations that end up intensifying our negative emotions. The situation soon becomes a vicious cycle in which your body and mind get on each other’s nerves.
The good news is that you don’t have to let this happen. The body has an innate ability to calm itself – often within minutes – and by tapping into it, you can feel better and protect yourself from stress symptoms before they appear.
For clinical psychologist Jenny Taitz, who works with many patients suffering from panic and other anxiety disorders, she has a few favorite strategies for relieving the physical signs of stress so that she can face challenging situations more effectively. Here are five techniques for you to try:
1- Relax your face with a half smile
Because stressful moments cause tension in your face and jaw, you’ve probably become accustomed to tensing your facial muscles when you’re under stress. Your facial expression can also influence your emotional experience. Studies have shown, for example, that botulinum toxin injections – which erase wrinkles on the eyebrows and forehead – relieve tension headaches and help alleviate negative emotions.
Instead of botulinum toxin, try the technique known as a half smile. Often used in dialectical behavioral therapy, it improves the ability to accept and deal with suffering. Just lift the top corners of your lips slightly, which automatically releases the tension in your eyebrows.
Consciously relaxing your face and adopting a calm expression brings calm from the outside in, paving the way for you to accept what you are facing.
2- Find comfort in touch
From the moment we are born, touch is a source of comfort – like, for example, when we hold the hand of a loved one. You can replicate this snuggle by placing your right hand above your heart and your left hand on your belly, which reduces levels of cortisol, the main stress hormone.
In one study, participants who used the hand-on-heart technique after giving a short speech or counting backwards from 2043, jumping from 17 to 17, both stressful situations, showed a faster reduction in cortisol than those who They didn’t use the strategy. Psychologically, this subtle gesture of self-compassion is also a good reminder to be kinder to ourselves in difficult times.
3- Expand your gaze
When the body’s fight-or-flight response to stress kicks in, the pupils dilate, narrowing the field of vision and making perspective difficult, literally and figuratively. But if you intentionally take a more panoramic view – for example, looking up at something further away – it will be easier to face something that seems challenging.
This broadening of perspective, among other reasons, helps explain why brief walks in nature can improve mood. Looking beyond your stress (or your phone) to a more open view can also avoid ruminating about everything that’s wrong and even pave the way for you to feel more gratitude for what’s in front of your senses.
One study found that brief visual distractions, like viewing colorful slides, can free people from those distressing mental loops.
4- Breathe through your nose
Gently closing your lips to breathe through your nose has surprising physiological benefits. Stress is associated with high blood pressure, and nasal breathing lowers blood pressure and improves heart rate variability.
When you breathe through your nose, your lungs extract oxygen more efficiently, so you breathe more deeply. Your nose is also a powerful filter, purifying the air you breathe in, which can improve your immunity. Breathing through your nose also improves sleep apnea and sleep quality – a big plus, since fatigue makes everything more stressful.
If you need extra help remembering to breathe through your nose, James Nestor, author of Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art [“Respiração: a nova ciência de uma arte perdida”, em tradução livre] recommends applying a postage stamp-sized piece of surgical tape to the center of your lips as a reminder, whether while you work during the day or when you go to bed at night.
5- Practice embracing panic
Instead of succumbing to stress-triggered symptoms, you can prepare in advance for challenging situations.
Take a few minutes to think about the sensations you feel most when you are under stress – butterflies in your stomach before a work presentation, shortness of breath when taking a flight or tremors due to overload of tasks. Then, try to reproduce some of these sensations when you are in a safe environment. For example, you can induce feelings of shortness of breath and panic by slowly spinning in a circle for a minute and then intentionally hyperventilating, breathing in and out very quickly for a minute. Allow yourself to feel the reactions for a few minutes and repeat the next day, for several days in a row.
By intentionally recreating the body’s habitual response to stress, you will realize that the unpleasant sensations, although distressing, are temporary, which takes away their power to scare you. So, when the physical symptoms of stress appear in high-risk situations, it will be easier to disassociate them from catastrophic interpretations.
This technique is formally known as interoceptive exposure. If the idea of reenacting your panic sounds daunting, try working with a cognitive behavioral therapy specialist.
