What if stress made you stronger?
One way to think about our nervous system is like a seesaw: when stressful things happen, our sympathetic nervous system (SNS) goes up, leading to a cascade of stress hormones. The SNS is commonly known as our “fight or flight” system. It activates adrenaline and cortisol, which are necessary to access the energy needed to meet short term challenges. However, if high levels of stress hormones are sustained over a long period of time, this can lead to exhaustion, inflammation and burnout.
In order to combat the effects of chronic stress, we need to bring the other side of the seesaw up: our parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). Our PNS is commonly known as our “rest and digest” system. It is responsible for maintenance and repair of the body.
Ideally, a good ratio is to be in parasympathetic mode roughly 80% of the time, and sympathetic mode only 20% of the time. For most of us, juggling jobs, family and school, living in a noisy urban environment or navigating hours of traffic, the ratio is usually flipped – 80% of our day is spent in sympathetic mode and only 20% - if we’re lucky – is spent in parasympathetic mode. So, we’re told, we need to slow down, breathe deeply, meditate, eat better and slower, make sure to get eight hours of sleep, go for a walk and stop and smell the roses.
This is all really good advice! But sometimes the flood of information about all the things we’re supposed to do to relax can just make us more stressed out. If we start to think of stress management techniques as another endless list of things we need to do, it can have the opposite effect of leaving us more overwhelmed and less likely to actually do the things we need to do to relax.
In resilience education, we flip the model:
Rather than trying to manage or eliminate stress in our lives, we learn to appreciate stress as a trigger that prompts us to change strategies.
Instead of applying stress relief techniques after we’re already overwhelmed, we take a proactive approach to learning resilience skills that help us strengthen our nervous system and our social connections
This approach builds resilience by fostering an attitude of gratitude and genuine positivity that creates an upward spiral of resilience rather than a downward spiral of burnout and “stress management.”