Body Whisperer: The invisible language of stress
Years ago, in a former life, I spent a lot of time on horseback. Never anything truly competitive but I loved riding and being and working with my horse. I hung up my saddle for a while but when my daughter wanted to learn to ride I was happy to live vicariously through her. She is now a horse trainer working with off the track thoroughbreds.
It’s fascinating hearing her talk about the training process, working with horses that have a past, known and unknown. I’m often reminded of one of my favorite movies, The Horse Whisperer. Maybe you remember it? 1998 was a long time ago, kind of makes me feel old. In the movie the girl and her horse are injured in an accident that affects them physically, mentally and emotionally as all traumas do. At its heart it’s a story about rebuilding trust. Not just between the rider and the horse but within the rider and the horse. Without that trust, without that communication there’s really nothing but struggle.
A horse and rider are in constant communication, whether they are consciously aware of it or not. Part of becoming a great equestrian is learning to listen to the signals your horse is sending you and to become aware of the signals you’re sending to your mount. It takes time and patience to become fluent in that language.
Horses react to everything in and around their environment and everything that’s going on in their internal environment. Your horse can’t just tell you it has a stomach ache or it’s back hurts. So instead maybe they buck or kick or lay their ears back or rear up when you try to turn right.
Whatever the choice that horse makes the way it communicates is rarely something that's clear. Oh the stories my daughter can tell… But I digress.
As a rider, you have a choice: you can be patient, pay attention and figure out what that pony is trying to tell you so you can help them or you can write that horse off as unrideable, jump off before you’re thrown off, give up and walk away. Riders have choices, they have self awareness. They’re human.
Humans aren’t much different except when your body tries to communicate that something is wrong we have the ability to ignore it. What we can’t do is get off and walk away. No we’re stuck in here. Our only choice is to live with our reflexive adaptations or to deliberately become our own body whisperer.
It’s true what they say that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it makes you any mentally, physically or emotionally healthier. It just means you survived. The first step to making deliberate changes to how we react to stressful situations is to recognize how and when the body is becoming overwhelmed by stress.
When we talk about trauma, ptsd recovery or resilience and stress management and in mind body modalities like yoga & Pilates we often encourage people to “listen to their bodies”. To do this there are a lot of vague instructions thrown around about mindfulness, presence and trying to notice things in the body but not a lot of direction on what to do with that information.
So today I want to talk first about the ways that the body communicates and then give you some tools that you can use in real time that can help interrupt those very real physiologic responses to stress.
So first I want to explain a little about this internal communication that’s happening in the body all the time, literally all the time. Most of the conversation between your body and your brain is coming from your body, 80% of it. It’s like a super highway between the suburbs (your body) and the city(your brain) with 8 lanes going into the city and only 2 lanes going out to the suburbs.
What does that mean? Well it means your brain is receiving a lot of information coming from the body that you might not be consciously aware of. And that’s ok. Because if you consciously knew everything that your body was doing all the time, it’d be pretty distracting. If you felt it all, it would be really hard to get anything done.
But part of your nervous systems job is security. That’s not just external danger and threat but also internal threats as well. A lot of that communication that’s running from your body to your brain is simply security status reports and check ins. And these are coming from everywhere down to the mitochondria in our cells.
When things are ok, all systems go, you won’t notice anything. When the cells, body, mind or primitive brain senses any kind of threat, alarms are triggered, the immune system is mobilized, all of your defenses are activated, muscles, heart, lungs, and anything not necessary is turned down to conserve your energy for survival. All of this is totally normal and once we take action to address the threat or it passes things should return to normal.
But because we’re really good as humans at ignoring what our body tells us sometimes those alarms can get stuck on or overwhelmed and then instead. Then those signals from the body to the brain can start to get louder. Unfortunately they don’t always exactly make sense to our conscious mind. For example experiencing a panic attack on your way to a massage or plantar fasciitis after a family reunion or getting the flu after your first ½ marathon.
Unfortunately, most of the time we can’t hear the body until it screams. And most often that comes in the form of pain or discomfort but sometimes it’s things that we think are or have become for us “normal”. Let’s look at some of those things.
What are the ways that the body whispers? What do we need to watch out for?
Changes in how we sleep
Not being able to get to sleep or stay asleep for many nights in a row
Sleeping but not feeling rested.
Or sleeping way too much.
I consider sleep to be a canary in the coal mine of our stress & resilience and overall health. That’s because we’re wired to be able to stay alert and awake whenever we tell ourselves to. It’s part of our survival response. You might not like it but you can do it if you have to.
Unfortunately we’re not wired to be able to tell ourselves to go to sleep. We simply can’t talk ourselves out of alertness once all those hormones are running around. Cortisol, adrenaline, epinephrine, etc. In order to rest and sleep well we have to calm that response physiologically so our sleepy time and safety hormones come on line. Namely Serotonin and melatonin.
Non-sleep deep rest protocols like yoga nidra, like irest and guided meditations are just as good for the brain.
Everyone has had a bad night's sleep at some point. And that’s because everything you do, ingest or are exposed to can have an effect on your circadian rhythm even if you don’t notice it.
Food - healthy or nutrient deficient both what you eat and when
Drug - over the counter or prescription - legal or illegal
Drink - alcoholic or stimulant- h2o
Light exposure
Chemical exposure
Temperature
Chronic stress - pain or illness, physical, mental, emotion
Exercise timing and intensity
You name it, it affects our sleep patterns for better or worse. While every once in a while having a bad night's sleep ( 2-3 nights a month) might not be anything to worry about we can and should pay a bit of attention to our own sleep patterns. Key word is pattern.
Feeling tired all the time is NOT normal. The body likes patterns...habits...because they’re easy of course. Easier anyway and take less energy for most things. And the good news is that there are some really easy natural ways to reset your clock and make it easier to sleep and easier to get up.
Changes in digestion and appetite.
Lack of appetite
Cravings
Gut dysbiosis = pain
Changes in digestion, constipation, diarrhea
Anxiety around food
This could be constipation, diarrhea, gut pain, any kind of dysbiosis in the microbiome, ulcers, autoimmune disorders, changes in appetite and the list goes on.
This reaction to stress can get very medically complicated because the health or lack of health in our gut affects every other system in the body. And it gets tricky because by the time we are feeling our gut enough to pay attention, our perception of our stress level may have become normal. And it can become a snowball effect adding another layer of hypervigilance to the stress response.
How do we affect the gut and digestive process? Through the gut….with food. With the caveat that if you think there is something really wrong always always seek the advice of a medical professional. I'm not a doctor, I'm a health coach. I can’t tell you what to eat only that every human I know needs to eat to maintain good healthy function. Food is fuel, not therapy and the sooner we can detach ourselves from the judgement we have around food and diet the better off we are.
That said...you need to understand that it's your gut or more accurately the neurons & receptors in your gut including your stomach that tell you brain how to feel...about pretty much everything. It’s sensing things that you can’t even taste in your food that can affect your energy levels, satiety, or lack of it, your sense of wellbeing or lack of it and all those messages trigger responses in the brain through neurotransmitters that you might have heard of, dopamine, adrenaline, serotonin, melatonin ...and more. Of course it’s never ever about only one thing in the body.
Gut issues are tricky because everyone is different. We all have a gut microbiome but each one is different so what works for one person might not for another.
I’ll tell you I’ve tried lots of different eating patterns myself for lots of different reasons. So many that at this point I really have no agenda or true opinion about any of them. Except to say that It’s important to let yourself try to find a balance that feels good to you. If you need permission, I’m giving you permission to try something different. It takes about 28 days to reset the gut so if you’re going to make a change in what , how much or when you eat try to give yourself at least that long to let your body and those brain connections adjust.
Pain - anywhere in the body
Reiterate that all pain should be check out by a doctor it’s not to be ignored
We need pain - serves an important purpose
Physical pain is tied to perception very subjective
Now don’t freak out here. I'm not saying that it’s all in your head. When you perceive pain, you’re having pain. It's a real perception.
But the brain body connection is so powerful that you can have tissue damage and not feel pain and have no tissue damage or injury and feel excruciating pain.
Couple of examples:
Xray thing
Nail through the boot
Phantom limb pain experiment
I say all this to say that what you think, how you perceive a situation, what you tell yourself about what’s going on in and around your body is powerful and it goes beyond what we think of as a placebo effect.
It’s actually powerful enough to measurably change our physiology. If we can harness it it becomes a super power.
Milkshake study
Maid study (housekeeping)
What you think about that sensation can make it better or worse. This is why overall elevated stress for a long time can make you sicker and more vulnerable to disease.
Because so many of the body’s whispers are subtle. Meaning many of the first symptoms of chronic stress sneak in so quietly and are so common that they become our normal. It's even more important that we make a conscious effort to listen for them before they become too loud that we can’t hear anything else.
Interestingly when the body is whispering stress and discomfort it tends to respond better to whispering types of regulation. Movement, nutrition and sleep aids as well as social connection that are lower on the intensity scale and can communicate a sense of safety.
The key here is that word again. Patterns. We need new deliberate patterns of action. It’s good to be aware and start to do this through
This is where we can use new and different types of movement that practice awareness and downregulation for the nervous system, moderation in nutrition and sleep support as well as deliberately use our power of visualization to give the brain different images or pictures of what’s happening in the body. Using guided body scans to direct attention to places without pain to help remap the intensity of that pain. Activities and tools that reorganize and replace the reflexive patterns of stress response with deliberate action that can help us get unstuck.
All these things work but they take time but what do you do when you are in the thick of it. And you notice your rise in heart rate and you’re feeling your anxiety rise or a panic attack coming on or you know you’re going into a situation that has triggered you in the past. Most of us don’t have time to quickly go do a yoga practice or a meditation right then. What can you do in that moment to quickly down regulate and start to reprogram and find your baseline state of calm.
2 tools to activate your emergency brakes.
Physiologic sigh -double inhale exhale - breath
Sit down - not near water
Body does naturally to calm itself - yoga uses variations of this technique
Quickly 30-90 seconds lower heart rate bring breathing back to normal and interrupt panic anxiety attack
Basic Exercise - Stanley Rosenburgh The healing power of the vagus nerve
Activates the social engagement part of NS
Creates a soft break
Look for the sigh or yawn
Sometimes finding what works for you can feel overwhelming and lonely but with patience Awareness, guidance, connection, and curiosity you can turn your mind into a superhero or your own personal supervillain. What’s it going to be for you?
The Work IN was sponsored today by Kinetic Grace Resilience - Private trauma release exercise online -Learn to shake off stress tension and anxiety from the safety of your own home with a certified TRE provide to learn more and sign up for your first session package visit elementalkinetics.com
I’m Ericka
I teach a powerfully effective modality called trauma release exercise that works through the body without the need to relive the story.
Whether your fight is on the frontline or the home front, past or present, personal or professional... chronic stress & stress injury can be a debilitating enemy.
You can step off the battlefield.
I offer online, on demand private sessions, courses & memberships for individuals, small groups and corporate clients looking to build resilience and recover from stress injury.
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