Stress can be your friend
Not so long ago, the doctor’s advice for any injury recuperation was rest. Nowadays, doctors force you to stand up from bed no matter how battered, tired, and achy you feel after the surgery. You have to keep moving, discomfort aside.
ANY tissue in your body - whether it's tendon, muscle, or bone - needs a certain amount of healthy stress to reach optimal function and to prevent you from injury. Unused muscle atrophy. The bones that don’t experience any weight-bearing become brittle, and so on. But: too much stress can damage tissues, too. The secret is to know your window of tolerance and very gently stretch its upper limit over time.
If you wanted to place stress on the respiratory system, you'd hold your breath, particularly on the out-breath. At first glance, holding your breath doesn't seem to make sense: why would you consciously deprive yourself of oxygen and create discomfort in your body?
I won’t get into too much details so let's say you might do it to break your patterns of hyper-sensitivity to the higher levels of CO2 in your bloodstream. Panic attacks are closely linked to fear of suffocation: you feel you need to breathe more, and what you do instead is hyper-ventilation. Tiny breath holds, introducing some pauses, and slowing down the breaths can entirely reshape your breathing pattern. So that over time, you won't overreact to increased CO2 levels. It won't tip you into a panic attack anymore.
Just like with the bones that need to bear weight to strengthen, this builds your resilience.
But the resilience of the nervous system might be the kind of resilience that has the most significant influence on your life. If you want to bounce back from a crisis without falling apart, you need to foster resilience.
How to do it?
Same way as with other body systems. You need to consciously stress your nervous system within the limits of tolerance. In other words, you need to stay with some dose of discomfort at will.
There are many ways your nervous system can become hypersensitive. After an injury, your nervous system might become hyper-vigilant about any sensations, not just in the area of the original injury but sometimes throughout the body. Without staying with slowly increased doses of discomfort, there is no way forward. Your nervous system will be stuck in a hyper-sensitive response where even light touch becomes painful.
It's crucial to know your tendencies which you developed over the years. You might tend to avoid any discomfort or always push well beyond your tolerance window, causing overwhelm.
If you constantly run away from emotional discomfort into various forms of self-soothing (no matter if it's alcohol, watching Netflix, or even yoga), you won’t have the resilience that could help you to go through the difficult moments faster and easier the next time round. Yes, many people meditate or breathe their problems away. They are spiritually bypassing their real-life challenges. This doesn't make them more resilient - it's another avoidance strategy. Even if arguably healthier than other addictions.
You might be wondering by now what to do to avoid the overwhelm. How to take those healthy doses of stress? This is possible through titration: diluting little bits of discomfort with larger doses of comfort so that it becomes more manageable. You do it through pendulation: swinging your attention between a source of stress and safety cues from the internal and external environment.
It might sound very complex but in fact, those practices are really simple and accessible.
If you’d like to try them out, head to:
First-Aid Toolkit for Dealing with Anxiety, Fear, and Worries
and Masterclass: How to Deal with Your Worried Mind?