Big Sigh

I put my head in my hands sometimes and just sigh. I wonder if you do too? In the middle of a tough moment or at the end of a big day or week? Without really planning to or thinking about what you’re doing?

You might like to stop reading for a second and do it now? Just rest the weight of your head into the palms of your hands, cover or close your eyes, take a big breath in and let it out, let it make some noise as it comes out.

On the surface it’s a gesture of being beaten, of giving up or maybe of not knowing what to do next.

It’s also an example of how brilliant your instincts are, how your body often knows what it needs and can be finding what it needs without you even realising.

Stress is one of my favourite topics to study and share about. It might seem like a strange thing to love but the better I understand it the better I manage it and the effects it has on me. That’s what I love.

I now understand a little part of my brain called the Amygdala and how throughout my life it has done a brilliant job of perceiving threats to my safety. Probably too good a job but it is what it’s meant to do. It has perceived when I wasn’t feeling safe, perceived threats in the unknown, in my lack of control at times, in various examples of discomfort and doubt and in the pressure I have put on myself with my huge expectations.

Its job is to set off my threat or stress response and my entire body follows to help me to ‘survive’. My pupils dilate so that I can be more alert, my heart rate speeds up to pump blood and adrenaline around my body, my hands get clammy and I get antsy like I can’t sit still, my digestive and immune systems slow right down to send energy elsewhere and my thinking brain goes offline. It all helps me to be able to put distance between myself and the perceived threat, to focus on getting away and defending myself if the threat is moving and able to fight back. My nervous system and this response don’t know what’s what, a threat is a threat and it prepares me the same way as it would for a tiger stalking me. If running or fighting don’t seem like good ideas then it can also help me to freeze and essentially play dead until the threat has left. These parts of my biology and yours are pretty old and haven’t changed much to keep up with the way the world has changed around us. The threats that cause us stress these days are very different from the tigers we used to need to run from, they’re much more prevalent and also more subtle and the way that we process (or don’t process) the stress that we experience causes them to build up and up and up in our bodies.

This process used to happen for me every day, multiple times a day and sometimes threats would bank up and set off this response over and over all day long. It was exhausting, unhealthy, and damaging, especially when I was unaware of it and unaware of the things I could have been doing to counteract it.

This week has been complicated for me by a child with a cough. It’s not a big deal, she’s healthy and will fight it off in a few days but for a few days it’s been rough. Beginning with a night of literally no sleep. She dozed on and off but lying beside her as she coughed and coughed and coughed I did not. Every cough registered as a threat and had me awake, alert, switched on and ready to fight or flee. The days since that night have been a blur of putting one foot in front of the other, getting on with as much as I could do, while being gentle on myself and still looking after her. Whenever something like this happens it’s a harsh and confronting reminder of the time between 2012 and 2015, before I fell pregnant with her, when I didn’t sleep more than one night through in a row. The fog I have felt this week was my ‘normal’ functioning for all of that time and to feel it again becomes an exhausting ongoing threat in itself.

I’ve been putting my head in my hands this week and really feeling the value and the magic of it. When I put my hands over my eyes I reduced the sensory input I’m experiencing and that my nervous system is processing. I can’t see the room anymore, the lights or all of the things around me that need doing, that I don’t have the energy for. When I take a deep breath in, my breath slows and when I sigh out loudly my exhale is long. This way of breathing tells my nervous system that actually, it’s ok, I am safe. It might take a couple more moments and a few more big breaths and long exhales but my amygdala stands down, my thinking brain starts to function again and even though the situation hasn’t changed, my ability to deal with it has. I have had to tell my nervous system over and over this week that I am ok and that I am safe because of the constant messages it has been getting, mainly from my own thoughts, suggesting that I am under threat.

I’m tired. I can’t keep up. Cough cough. I’m going to have to call in. The cupboard is getting bare. Cough cough. She’s still not better. I’ll have to stay home. None of this is done. Cough cough. When am I going to be able to get to it. I’m tired. Cough cough.

That moment of putting my head in my hands and letting out a big sigh is my instincts giving me exactly what I need. A momentary break in sensory input and a long exhale.

I thank my instincts, I thank my awareness and then I think about doing those two things more consciously. For every threat my amygdala picks up, for every stress cycle that begins out of something that is not a tiger chase but feels like one, I breathe or I use another strategy to complete the cycle so that the stress can leave my body as close to the rate it is created as possible.

Our days, even in a good week, may be filled with moments and experiences that can easily switch on our threat response causing stress in our bodies. They are also filled with opportunities to switch it back into a rest response allowing repair in our bodies.

We can breathe ourselves into rest, move ourselves into rest, cry, create, laugh and connect ourselves and our nervous systems into rest. Where our immune systems are strong, our digestive systems move freely and process efficiently, we think clearly, our bodies repair, heal and prepare for whatever we might come up against next.