that activated stress just hangs out inside us, making us sick, tired, and unable to experience pleasure with sex (or with much of anything else).
Second, our emotion-dismissing culture is uncomfortable with Feels.
Our culture says that if the stressor isn’t right in front of us, then we have no reason to feel stressed and so we should just cut it out already. As a result, most people’s idea of “stress management” is either to eliminate all stressors or to just relax, as if stress can be turned off like a light switch.
Our culture is so uncomfortable with Feels that we may even sedate people who’ve just been in a car accident, preventing their bodies from moving through this natural process; this well-intentioned medical intervention has the unwanted consequence of trapping survivors of traumatic injury in 5freeze, which is how PTSD gets a foothold in a survivor’s brain.
But third, even without medication and an emotion-dismissing culture, our ultrasocial human brains are really good at self-inhibition, stopping the stress response midcycle because, “Now is not an appropriate time for Feels.” We use this self-inhibition in order to facilitate social cooperation— i.e., not freak anybody out. But unfortunately, our culture has eliminated all appropriate times for Feels. We’ve locked ourselves, culturally, into our own fear, rage, and despair. We must build time, space, and strategies for
discharging our stress response cycles.
complete the cycle!
How?
Well, just as you can’t grit your teeth and make a garden grow, you can’t force a stress response cycle to complete. Completing the cycle requires that, instead of hitting the brake on our stress, we gently remove our foot from both the accelerator and the brake and allow ourselves to coast to a 6 stop.To do that, you create the right context and trust your body to do its
thing.
So what’s the right context?
Think about what your body recognizes as the behaviors that save you from lions. When you’re being chased by a lion, what do you do?
You run.
So when you’re stressed out by your job (or by your sex life), what do you do?
You run . . . or walk, or get on the elliptical machine or go out dancing or even just dance around your bedroom. Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle and recalibrating
your central nervous system into a calm state. When people say, “Exercise 7is good for stress,” that is for realsie real.
Here are some other things that science says can genuinely help us not only “feel better” but actually facilitate the completion of the stress response cycle: sleep; affection (more on that in the next section); any form of meditation, including mindfulness, yoga, tai chi, body scans, etc. (more on that in chapter 9); and allowing yourself a good old cry or primal scream —though you have to be careful with this one. Sometimes people just wallow in their stress when they cry, rather than allowing the tears to wash away the stress. If you’ve ever locked yourself in your room and sobbed for ten minutes, and then at the end heaved a great big sigh and felt tremendously relieved, you’ve felt how it can move you from “I am at risk” to “I am safe.”
Art, used in the same way, can help. When mental health professionals suggest journaling or other expressive self-care, they don’t mean that the construction of sentences or the task of drawing is inherently therapeutic; rather, they’re encouraging you to find positive contexts to discharge your stress, through the creative process.
I’m inclined to add grooming and other body self-care to the list.
Though I’m not familiar with any specific research on it, I’ve talked with lots of women for whom showering and the rituals, part social, part meditative, of painting their nails or doing their hair or putting on makeup —generally “getting ready” to go out (or stay in)—fully transition them from a stressed-out state of mind to a warm, social state of mind. These anecdotes aren’t data, but I’m inclined to call them evidence and say, Yeah, spend time treating yourself with affection.
I have a pet theory that these rituals and behaviors are related to “self- kindness,” which I’ll be talking about in chapter 5, but to my knowledge no 8 one has ever specifically measured it.Anyway, our fellow apes eat insects out of each other’s fur; maybe bath bombs and body glitter are the modern human equivalent.
Everybody has something that works—and everyone’s strategy is different. Whatever strategy you use, take deliberate steps to complete the cycle. Allow yourself to coast to the end without hitting the brake.
Emotions are like tunnels: You have to walk all the way through the darkness to get to the light at the end. I say this so often my students