Episode 56: How to Release Stress

Hello everyone. Welcome to today’s episode. I am so excited you are here. I want to talk about stress. Have you ever been in a situation where you’re like, “Oh my God, please get me out of here. I can’t stand it. I don’t want to do this. I’m so stressed out. Get me out of here.” But there’s no escaping it.

And I’ll give you an example. My husband and I, we were going to go see my nephew’s baseball tournament for the weekend. It was awesome. We were so excited to go there. And it was supposed to be a three-hour drive at most. And in this three-hour drive, it became a five-and-a-half-hour drive because of traffic, and my internal alarm system was going off. My stress was at its maximum capacity in that particular moment. And part of the reason why my stress was so high was I mentally prepared myself for 3 hours. I did not mentally prepare myself to be in the car for five and a half hours. And every time we just saw the navigation system just never moving in, the amount of time only increasing, even though we’ve been sitting in the car long, it gets really. really stressful.

And I think that it’s really important when we are in a stressful situation because that’s only driving. Like, our primal bodies really don’t understand how to handle everyday stresses. Our primal body is meant if there’s danger, you run. If there’s danger and you can’t run, you freeze, you play dead. Our internal system doesn’t really understand how to handle the person that’s annoying us in the office, or that’s annoying us in the grocery store line, or looking at something on social media and how it triggers us.

Our internal systems don’t fully understand how to process the stress. When society tells us to be nice, to be kind, to be compassionate, but our primal system is going, “I can’t stand this, get me out of here.” But then you have to shove your feelings down. You have to shove your emotions down. And I think that this is where the shoving of the emotions happens very unconsciously sometimes.

Where we are in just everyday situations where stress can be pressing against us or be influencing us in some way, shape or form. And we’re not able to process the stress in that particular moment. And so it’s really, really important to process the stress when you are able to. And for me, it didn’t end with the car. I’m going to tell you how I processed my stress once I got out of the car.

So we finally arrived where my husband and I were to meet my inlaws and it was an insanely busy intersection. My husband like, “I don’t even think we’re going to be able to cross this for like 20 minutes.” So he suggested that I take our daughter and I just walk across. Well, I thought it was like maybe like a block down to where a traffic light was, so I can cross six lanes of traffic. So to add more stress to my already stressed-out primal body, I take my daughter out and then realize as I’m walking down to get to where I need to be, there is no traffic light.

And so my entire nervous system is trembling. I have to cross six lanes of traffic with my almost two-year-old. My system was taxed. Did I make it across? Yes. People were kind enough to stop for us, which was awesome. By the time I got across the street, my stress was at beyond its maximum capacity. I was done. And so the first thing I did when I saw my family, I did not hug them, I said hello and I shook out my entire body. I made some sounds. I let it all out because all that stress was being pent up, pent up, pent up, pent up. And it had to go somewhere, and somewhere was out. It wasn’t down, it wasn’t in my body. It had to get out.

And so the best thing to do when you are stressed is to get the stress out of your body. Get those emotions out, get those feelings out to complete the primal system of stress and the primal system of stress to complete the stress system is to let it out. So back in the day, we would run from the tiger, we would run into our village, we would see our people, we would find a safety place, and then the system naturally would start to relax because you got all the stress system out. But when somebody is, let’s say, annoying you while you’re at a dinner party or at work, and you can’t just run away because you have to stay in the meeting or you have to continue in the dinner conversation or whatever the reason is, it’s really important that you completely release the stress at some moment that day.

You can release it by shaking your body out. You can release it by exercising. Yeah, exercising. Exercising is a great way to release the stress. I know for me, if I go for a walk, I feel much better if I go for a walk than if I didn’t go for a walk because it allows me to let go of the mental stress, the physical stress, the spiritual stress, the emotional stress that I am feeling. If you don’t let it out, it just gets pent up. And then distortion, disease, within the body occurs. And then what ends up happening is the stress will come out at some point in time, but that’s usually through burnout, injury, mental health. So we want to complete it.

Another thing to do is to move your body in whatever way. So if you don’t like the term exercise because some people don’t like exercise. Some people can’t physically exercise either. And if you’re in a state where you have some physical things going on, where you can’t physically exercise that’s hard to be like, “Complete the stress cycle by exercising.” No, you actually don’t have to exercise in order to do this.

One of the things you can do, which I used to love teaching this when I used to teach yoga, is you can tense up your muscles. And so you can, like, make a fist, tense up your arms, squeeze them hard next to your body, engage your legs, and then release it. And you can do these releasing exercises, which is really awesome because it allows like a flush of blood, fresh, oxygenated blood, to go through your body. And so you can tense one little section of your body at a time, starting at the feet, going up to the legs, up to the knees, up to the butt, up to the tummy, the chest, the arms, even like, scrunching up your face and then relaxing it. You can do one section at a time, or you can do the whole body.

This is also very helpful to do if you’re in a situation where “You know what? I’m super stressed out. These people are stressing me out. This situation stressing me out.” You can literally just do it with your arms down by your side or you can excuse yourself and go to the bathroom to allow the stress and the emotions to be processed healthy, in a healthy way, and release them. You’ll start to notice how different your mind, body, soul feels by doing this.

Also, exercise, if you can exercise or doing some sort of stress release is going to help keep the brain healthy as well. If you’re in a state of stress, that also puts you in a state of negativity. And I find that we can get into these loops of negativity where the loop keeps going over and over and over and over again. We keep repeating the same patterns, saying the same things to ourselves because we haven’t allowed the stress to be completely released from the body.

And so one of the best things to do when this is happening is to recognize that, “Hey, I realize that this same thought is popping into my brain over and over again. I’m telling myself this lie over and over and over and over again. It’s time to release it. It’s time to let it go.” Go outside in nature. If you can’t go for a walk or go for a run, or you can go and just stretch your body outside, do some breathing exercises. The breath is an amazing way to release the energy as well.

I think that that’s super uber-duper important. And so if you’re not in a place where the physicality part of it breathe, bring yourself back to the conscious breath. Remind yourself you’re safe. Remind yourself that it’s okay to let go of the emotions. Let go of the stress. Remind yourself it’s okay to feel good too. It’s okay to feel good. It’s okay if I’m feeling this in this moment, I know it will pass. I’m going to release it with the breath that I take.

The more that you get in tune with the stress that your body, your physical body, is feeling, your emotional body is feeling, your spiritual body is feeling, the easier it’s going to be for you to recognize and release it and choose something different. You deserve to feel good. Yes, you do. So allow stress to be released out of the system on a daily basis in some way, shape, or form.

And like I said before, you can shake it out. You can make some primal sounds. It’s super healthy. Super, super beneficial. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. I hope you release a ton of stress today from your physical body.

I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Please make sure you like and subscribe. I will see you soon. Bye.