Feeling stress in your body

OK, so how can we get better about recognizing the signs of stress early so we can do something about them? That’s a good question. I think it’s really important for us to recognize the signs of stress we have in ourselves, and it can come out a lot of ways. It can come out in our thoughts. We might be thinking more negatively in our emotions, being sad or maybe easy to anger. So that can also affect our relationships. And some people have difficulty sleeping or they have changes in their appetite and we also feel stress a lot in our bodies. Although we might not be aware of it all the time. Ashley, I’m curious.

How do you feel stress in your body? If I think about it, I tend to really hold my breath when I feel stressed, and I don’t even notice that it’s happening until I almost gasp. Oh yeah, interesting. What about you Carly? Ashley, I really relate to that. My breathing is also affected by stress and my shoulders get really tense. Just now talking about stress, I can feel my shoulders starting to creep up to my ears. Yes, Carly. Well I do the same thing with the shoulders. And usually I notice it later that those shoulders are up to my ears as you said.

So what’s happening, maybe for you both, is that we’re tensing, and for me as well, that were tensing our bodies, and when we tense like that, were also tensing around this area of the body, which means that we make it difficult for us to breathe because this is where the lungs need to expand into the ribs and into the belly in order to take a nice deep breath. So if you’re all tense here, your lungs have nowhere to go, and so you feel short of breath. So a very quick trick to begin to relax is to learn how to breathe well through the belly, and you can just put one hand here on your diaphragm.

And when you take a deep breath in, that hand should rise, right? So let’s take a deep breath. And then when we take an exhale, the hand will sink back in.

And this is how we begin to take nice deep breaths. When we do this, there’s some wonderful thing that happens. We breathe out carbon dioxide and our muscles automatically relax. We don’t even have to do anything special to make them relax. So a nice full deep belly breath will make all of our body feel better. Honestly, I felt that right away. Thank you. So for all of you at home, it’s your turn. Think about where stress shows up in your body and then write it in the discussion board so we can see how our community experiences stress. Go ahead and do that and then we will see you for more in the next step.