Supportive Lifestyle

Imagine this…

You got slammed with surprise deadline at work and need to put in extra hours to be able to hit it. You are excited by the opportunity and want to do a good job, so you go full tilt for a whole two weeks.

By the end of that time you are feeling draggy, tired and a little burned out. You really haven’t slept much, and have been leaning on caffeine and sugar to get through the early mornings and late nights. You also haven’t been working out like you used to, and have inadvertently given up on the meditation practice you had started to build.

You feel tired but wired at the same time and are unsure what to do about it. You know that there will be future deadlines on the horizon, and want to be able to hit them without being so rattled or thrown.

The impact of stress on lifestyle:

Modern life is busy, and ripe with many people, events, notifications and news feeds, meetings, celebrations and sometimes emergencies. All of these call for attention, and can sometimes seem to compete for overlapping sections of time in the 24 hours we have in a day.

This is overwhelming and stressful to try to manage in one off situations, and even more so when these one offs stack on each other, and/or for the situations that actually aren’t one off’s at all, but are actually more long term and ongoing.

As humans facing these stressors, we are commonly impacted in ways that counter our ability to manage stress well, like sleep, exercise and eating throughout the day.

We all know how we can get short with people when we are running on little sleep, or how crabby we get when we’re hungry, or how difficult it can be to focus when feeling stressed.

While it is not possible to avoid all of the things that can cause stress, it is interesting to notice what impact these types of stress have on our mood, our routines and vice versa. With this awareness, we become better able to organize and align around lifestyle actions and routines that support our ability to manage stress in our lives, both in the average day to day and in peak times as well.

Why is it important to know about this?

A lot goes on in our body, mind and emotions when we experience stress. When this occurs, our nervous system responds by initiating a series of reactions to help us be better able to deal with the stressful circumstance at hand. These include an increased heart rate, body temperature, rate of breath and also the tightening of muscles. 

Physiologically speaking, all of these changes are designed to support our survival, however in the present time, the stress response is regularly triggered in non-life threatening situations, but rather ones that are very ‘normal’ in our day to day. 

When a stressor like a traffic jam, a deadline, a slew of emails and texts to respond to, or an upcoming interview is detected, our nervous system responds by initiating a chain of events that begins in our brain, specifically our hypothalamus, which acts as a type of command center for communication between us and the stressor (s) in our environment. 

This happens though the coordination of two complementary parts of our nervous system, the sympathetic and parasympathetic. By working first with the sympathetic nervous stem, our brain is aiming to help us to have the ability to ‘fight off’ a stressor thanks to the release of adrenaline and cortisol which produces the physiological responses listed above and keeps our system primed to be able to continue to do so once the stressor has passed. 

When the stressor has passed, cortisol levels decrease, which signals to our brain that it can shift gears to helping our system to calm down and relax rather than stay revved up. 

As you can imagine (or maybe know from personal experience), being caught up in a hamster wheel of the stress response is challenging for our physiological and psychological well-being.

Is there an off switch?

As was mentioned earlier, there are many sources of stress in our lives, and while it is not impossible to avoid them all, 100% of the time, we can support our ability to manage stress through supportive lifestyle efforts that counter the stress response and promote our ability to relax.  

Three primary ways to do this are: 

Sleep - The quality and quantity of our sleep is really helpful in countering the stress response. As more and more emerging research is showing, sleep and rest are times where our bodies are physiologically able to focus on countering the effects of stress in our day. Because a lot of this, quite literally, goes on under the surface, it can be hard to recognize the value of the impact here, but when we are have sufficient time in what is sometimes called ‘rest and repair’ mode, our system will be better able to take on what comes in the subsequent day.

Exercise - Our bodies are designed to move and it is well documented that movement and exercise have strong and positive impacts on our ability to manage stress. Because it helps us to deepen our breathing and engage our muscles, we are able to counteract the impact of adrenaline that is causing for those to become shorter and tighter. Exactly what the exercise is that you are doing should be personalized to you, but having regular and consistent movement as part of your life, including in higher stress periods, will be very supportive of navigating the circumstances at play. 

Regular eating - Eating is most often impacted by stress in one (or both) of two ways, eating less or eating more. We can lose track of time and forget to eat, and/or we can look to food for comfort to help calm the stress we are feeling. When we decrease the frequency of eating, we can actually add more stress to our system because our blood sugar gets low. And when we eat with greater frequency or volume, our body then has more to digest, and since its resources are primarily focused on overcoming the stress at hand, this process is often compromised and can lead to digestive malaise. While there is a lot to potentially unpack here, one helpful thing to focus on is the regularity and volume of when we eat so we can keep our body best able to manage the stress at hand and not add more to it. A helpful way to start is by aiming to eat three meals and two snacks each day.

How do I know if I should make changes to my lifestyle?

How do you know if you could benefit from investing in these areas? Ask yourself the following questions: 

• What is the average amount of sleep (in hours) that you get per night?

  • If under 7 hours, this could be an area to explore as the CDC recommends that adults over 18 get 7 or more hours of sleep a night. 

• How often in a week do you get at least 30 minutes of consistent physical activity?​

  • If less than weekly, this also could be something to explore further. The American Heart Association Recommends that adults get 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise per week

• When was the last time you practiced proactive self-care?​

  • If more than a month ago, you may benefit from doing this more often. It can feel selfish to prioritize ourselves when there are so many other things calling for our attention, but showing ourselves care, especially in stressful times, is a great support.

    • If you are curious about how to begin here, speak to your coach or therapist for help with brainstorming or setting goals around this.

Tools

Building Routines and Setting Goals

A great way to enlist some support here is to look at the overall area(s) we want to address (sleep, exercise, regularity of eating) and to begin to take action by looking at the micro efforts one can take one week at a time. 

One way to look at this is via the use of SMART goals, which is a framework to help us set out efforts that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. 

Find the Octave SMART Goal Setting tool HERE

As an example, ‘I want to exercise more’ is not as SMART of a goal as ‘I will go for a 20 minute walk two times this week.’ The more specific we can be with our efforts, the more likely we will be to hit our targets and promote success. 

If you want to receive additional support, it is a great idea to speak to your coach or therapist about what you want to do here, and they can help with breaking it down into smaller goals and checking in regularly to see how it is going.

Lifestyle, as a concept, is a powerful way to promote our well-being in a regular and consistent way. Active participation with things like sleep, exercise and eating routines goes a long way towards helping us manage stressors present in the day to day, and can be leveraged during extra-ordinary times to help ourselves navigate each and every day.

Talk to your therapist or coach about your lifestyle as is currently, and ways you could look to make some changes to bolster your ability to manage stress and overall well-being.