I want to start out by saying that (obviously) you cannot get rid of stress. Life is stress! In many different ways. But the key to not letting stress run our lives for us is knowing how to relieve stress quickly, once it has served its purpose, or if it’s out of place.
In this post I’ll share the two fastest and most effective ways to do this in real time. And I’ll also explain why stress is not necessarily a bad thing and how it’s good that we have this “tool” (even in a world devoid of saber-toothed tigers)!
There are a million techniques and tools to reduce stress, such as exercise, meditation, dancing, laughing, journaling – a million! However, these usually require some level of consistent practice, skill learning, perseverance, periodicity, and sometimes overcoming specific states of mind to get yourself to do it.
I’ll not be covering any of them here. The two techniques I’m sharing require none of the above and have an effect in real time. You’ll be able to use to relieve stress quickly anytime you’re feeling anxious.
The other stuff is great to have too, but they tend to be more useful as maintenance, or in a preventative way, so we’ll save those for another post.
Let’s get started.
What is stress?
All organisms maintain a complex balance (homeostasis) that is constantly challenged by internal and external forces (stressors).
When that balance is threatened, or perceived to be threatened, you have what is known as stress. The body needs to be able to respond to reestablish the balance and this is regulated by our nervous system (sympathetic and parasympathetic).
The nervous system has influence over many other systems and operations of the body. For instance, the sleep-wake cycle, reproduction, cognition, reward and fear systems, metabolism, immune system, digestion, circulation – you get the idea! (*)
When the body is in homeostasis (balance) there is wellbeing, tasks are performed successfully, social interactions run smooth(-er). If there is imbalance, it can lead to behavioral or physical conditions, impaired growth, body composition, and development.
Good stress vs bad stress
Is there such a thing as good stress? The short answer is yes.
The long answer is that stress is a general response meant to reestablish homeostasis (balance). Whether that response is good or bad for you will basically depend on the time scale and regularity.
How long and how often do you endure that heightened, activated stress response?
How stress affects you
Stress can be divided into three types, as it’s related to duration – short-term, medium-term, and long-term. Depending on that duration, it can be bad stress or good stress and there are different tools you can use to manage it.
Like I mentioned previously, there are many tools and techniques. However, learning how to relieve stress quickly when it’s unnecessarily activated should be at the root of your approach.
Short-term stress
The short-term stress response is that immediate activation of the sympathetic nervous system, when confronted with a stressor.
This stressor can be physical, like cold water, exercise, physical injury, pathogens and viruses. But it can also be a “perceived” stressor, meaning anything that plays on your fears and insecurities, that you personally interpret as a “danger”.
We have a group of neurons running from the neck to the navel that are activated and release acetylcholine. While another set of neurons release epinephrine (or adrenaline) into particular organs.
Acetylcholine, among other things, is important for the twitch response of big muscles. And epinephrine will act in 2 different ways.
- it increases the heart rate and dilates certain blood vessels for things like big muscle activation.
- and it acts on secondary systems, like the reproductive and digestive system, by contracting blood vessels. This limits blood supply to those areas, so that it can be directed to “more important” tasks, such as running like the wind, if necessary.
This immediate stress response is designed for action to be taken, if needed. For this reason you feel agitated, like you have to move or talk, or DO something.
Along with acetylcholine and epinephrine, we also get a spike of cortisol, which helps the body to produce bursts of energy, also if needed.
The short-term stress response also helps to boost the immune function and lower our sensitivity to pain. This happens through the deployment of killer cells by the spleen, which start to scavenge for intruders, viruses and pathogens.
All of this together is good for combating infection, sharpening cognition, and priming you for action and focus. These are the reasons why stress CAN BE a very good thing for you.
Related content: How To Boost Your Immune System Naturally & Holistically
Medium-term stress
Medium-term stress is stressful states that can last anywhere from several days to several weeks.
Its effects on health will vary between individuals, depending on lifestyle, stress threshold, and how well we are able to bring our bodies back to balance and calm the stress response.
It can cause short-term physical issues and, of course, psychological and emotional distress. These are those times in life when you’re going through a greater work load, breakups, loss of loved ones, etc.
When life is momentarily off-quilter and you’re trying to get back to “normal”.
Long-term stress
Long-term stress is anything that goes on for longer than that. For some people that’s a constant state of activation that can last years and, in fact, almost be a lifestyle.
This is incredible dangerous to your health. It’s the bad side of stress everyone has heard about.
It can cause anything from behavioral to somatic (physical) conditions. It can interfere with normal tissue growth and body composition (fat to lean body mass), the reproductive and thyroid hormone levels, your digestion, metabolism, your immune system. Long-term stress can mess with basically everything.
It causes overall inflammation in the body and accelerates oxidative stress – literally aging you faster in every way.
HOW TO RELIEVE STRESS QUICKLY
– The Tools
Now, as we’ve seen, the stress response is a normal and healthy part of the everyday operations of the body. You need to be able to deploy it. It becomes unhealthy when we’re not able to bring the body back to balance, or to base.
We need to be able to calm the body down when it’s triggered unnecessarily, or once the stressor is no longer there. There are many different ways and tools to handle stress, but the best and fastest way to do it, in real time, is through breath.
Breathing has a direct effect on the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, which are responsible for amping us up and calming us down. They work in tandem in a see-saw fashion, meaning that the best way to influence one is to deploy the other.
When we feel “stress” our sympathetic nervous system is engaged. The best way to bring down the stress response is to engage the parasympathetic nervous system to confront it.
There are many different therapeutic breathing exercises you can do to engage your nervous system and other parts of the body. An example is the whole Pranayama world, that you may or may not feel attracted to.
However, there are 2 very simple, very basic breathing “techniques” that are really ALL you need to deactivate and relieve stress quickly.
1 – The physiological sigh (the fastest way)
Physiological sighs are basically deeper double inhales that happen every few minutes, whether we consciously notice them or not.
They also occur when we’re about to fall asleep, throughout our sleep period, whenever we’ve been crying hard (to recover some air), or in claustrophobic environments.
Sighs are actually necessary to maintain lung integrity and proper gas exchange (breathing). They re-expand the tiny sacs that make up our lungs and prevent their collapse.
They also induce a state of relaxation and it’s something we can deploy consciously to calm down our nervous system, within just a couple of minutes.
To use it to relieve stress quickly:
2 – Shorter inhale, longer exhale
This is another simple “trick” to breathing that will also calm down your nervous system.
Even if you don’t “sigh” (inhaling twice), anytime you exhale for longer, or more vigorously, than you inhale, you gradually relax the body.
This happens, in part, also due to the fact that when you inhale, your diaphragm rises. This means that there is less space for the heart volume and the blood will circulate inside the heart quicker. At this point the brain will tell the heart to calm down, which will also relax the nervous system.
To use it to relieve stress quickly:
It’s important to remember that the stress response is a good thing and absolutely necessary for maintaining homeostasis (balance). It’s a valuable and ancient tool the body uses to rise to the challenges of everyday life, although it may often feel uncomfortable.
However, the body is not meant to live in that state and if, it’s forced to do so, it might lead to disease and illness (physical, emotional, psychological – you name it). Not to mention it’ll also make life considerably less fun!
Learning to relieve stress quickly and to calm your body down when you need to is one of the most useful tools you can have.
I hope you found this information useful. Let me know in the comments below if you try it and feel free to share any other tips to relieve stress quickly that’ve work for you.
