Your unpleasant emotions are stressful on your body. Here are 2 easy tools you can start using to manage emotional stress.
For the longest time I believed stress was an event that happened to me. Be it getting stuck in a traffic jam or someone being unkind to me or even COVID. I believed something out there that was causing the stress. If you think that as well, you are not alone. Most of the population has been led to believe that stress is something that happens to them.
What I learned in my 10 years journey of healing and growth is that stress is not an external event but the emotions that we experience because of the brain perceiving the event as a threat. Stress in fact is the emotions such as anxiety, irritation, frustration, impatience, lack of control, hopelessness, guilt, and shame that people experience when they describe themselves as “stressed”. Our emotions are not only energy in motion, but these negative emotions also disrupt the physiological processes, inhibits our brain functions and depletes our energy. Stress induced diseases such as autoimmune diseases, heart conditions, cancer, headaches, sleep disorders, digestion issues, anxiety, depression, and many others health conditions are on the rise. Imagine how powerful we would be as a population if we all learned how to manage our stressors.
Stress is inevitable, how you manage your stress is the key to living your best life.
Here are 2 powerful tools you can start to you right away for transforming those stressful emotions:
- Gratitude practise: We have been programmed by evolution to always look out for threat. This is how our system is wired naturally. We no longer have the same kind of threats to our life that we previously had, yet due to our programming we naturally gravitate towards what is not working for us. When anxious our brain naturally only focuses on more things to be anxious. When depressed the brain naturally focuses on more depressing thoughts. When you feel angry, the brain focuses on things that angers you. By shifting our inner state to that of gratitude, we not only release feel good hormones such as serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine that makes you a happier human being, you also regulate your autonomic nervous system, making you a healthier human being.
There are different ways to shift your emotions to that of gratitude. You can do so by starting a gratitude journal that you fill in every morning and every night. Every morning write down all that you are grateful for and every night write down things that happened to you that day that you are grateful for. You can also start practising a gratitude meditation or practise a heartmath technique such as the quick coherence method that will help regulate your nervous system. I demonstrate the Quick Coherence Method in this video below:
- Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)/ Tapping: EFT technique can be used for managing stressful emotions. EFT is a process of tapping acupuncture points or body’s energy meridian points on the face and torso. From the Chinese acupuncture perspective, doing so clears the blocks or imbalances in the flow of energy in the body. Our negative emotions can be stored in the body as energy and through tapping you get to release these emotions. Harvard’s 10-year research on EFT revealed that stimulation of acupuncture points rapidly reduces limbic system arousal or our fight/flight response. With EFT you feel the feelings without turning on the fight/flight response that releases cortisol into the body.
In the video below I teaches you the basics of EFT and how to use it for managing stressful emotions.
