The Stress Response: Am I safe? (Part 3)

 Welcome back. If you missed part 1 and part 2 (or the original article) of this stress series, I highly recommend you read those before you check out this next segment!

As we move forward, keep in mind our working definition of stress:

Stress is when your demands exceed your capacity. 

Now that you have assessed the stress in your life, can recognize your reactions and symptoms of stress, and have some understanding of what is happening in your brain during all this, let’s dive right in to the first step of mastering stress!

Stress: Answering Your Survival Brain

My goal in this post is to slightly adjust your thinking about stress--recalibrate your "stress lens," if you will. Your brain is telling you that something is wrong--it may be at the, "Am I safe?" survival level, or it may be in the, "Am I loved?" emotional level, but like Miss Clavel (Madenline: Ludwig Bemelmans), we can switch on a light and say definitively, "Something is not right." We'll look at the emotional level next time, but for now, I ask you to approach your stress with curiosity. 

Instead of a reactive stress response, curiosity allows for a proactive and intentional mastery of stress. Remember back to our discussion of how your brain processes information. The first level of our brain to sift/respond to information is the survival "instinct" level. In a moment of acute stress, what was the first question we need to answer?

Am I safe? 

It was assumed for much of modern history that our brain controls every part of our body, and in a sense, it does. But in another sense, it's a two way street--for example, our heart rate is raised when our brains signal DANGER (Am I safe? NO!) but if we slow and control our heart rate, our brains think, "Oh, wait, I must not be in danger after all." The processing can move, then, to our emotional core since the survival question has been answered. 

The simple tool here is a combination of two things God has already told us to practice--self control and prayer. We are told to pray without ceasing (I Thessalonians. 5:17) and to practice self-control (I Timothy 1:7). And the crazy cool thing is, God designed our brains and bodies to function better when we obey these things! 

You can slow and control your heart rate by breathing deeply and slowly, (around 4 seconds in, 4 seconds out, and repeat 4 times), which silences that survival alarm. And consider that as a Christian, when and how are we are supposed "still ourselves" (and breathe) before the Lord? We are supposed to be still before the Lord in prayer--and we're supposed to pray all the time. (Philippians 4:6, Habakkuk 2:20, Psalm 46:10, Micah 7:7) 

So, when your brain sets of alarm bells, and that stress response is rising in you, instead of reacting to that response and being stuck in a stress cycle, you can immediately meet that with a response of a deep breath (or four) and prayer. Dear Lord--help me! Am I safe? 

Are we safe in the Lord, regardless of our circumstance? Yes!

As we do this, we switch off that survival alarm level of our brains, which is the first step in preventing an acute stress experience to turn into chronic stress. 

Am I the only one who feels like I should've been taught this in Sunday School along with other foundational Christian life basics? It's so clear in Scripture how anxiety and worry should be met with prayer--and yet I feel like those "daily" worries (which turn into chronic stress) were never the things I was supposed to dwell on when I hit my knees.

Let me leave you with this little assignment. 

I want you to breathe (you can try box breathing if you want to) and pray. 

Try to do it at least 3 times a day besides your usual quiet time/family time/meals/whatever. This should be both as response to a stressful situation and as a proactive habit-forming exercise, but either way, spend intentional time this week pausing in daily life and breathing , and pray over whatever little daily things are happening to/around you. You can keep it under 30 seconds, or you can spend as much time as you want--but try and sprinkle it throughout your day. 

If you have trouble remembering, you can try some habit-forming tricks like set a reminder on your phone, connect it to an existing habit (i.e. every time you wash your hands, also breathe and pray), or leave reminders around your house (like sticky notes) to trigger you into practice. 

In our next post, we're going to talk about the next step, responding to the emotional level of our brains in a chronic stress response--and I'll give you a hint: Gratitude! 

Click here to go to Part 4, Gratitude.

This article is part of a series originally written for the Crossroads Women's Ministry Blog, cbcwm.blogspot.com. Special thanks to Katie Kimball for launching me on this stress mastery journey!