How To RELIEVE STRESS or Feeling Triggered

SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna show you how you can start to regulate how you feel without the use of food. Hi, I'm Shelly Treacher from Underground Confidence. I'm a somatic psychotherapist and I help people to learn how to shift their states from one of stress or comfort eating so that they can manage comfort eating very differently. In the first part here, I'm going to tell you about a well-known psychological tool called the Window of Tolerance. This is a really useful image to bring to mind when you're triggered, when you're feeling stressed, or when you're in the throes of a binge urge or craving. Because as I've been saying in previous episodes, your body is in a certain state at those times. And the idea is to move towards being in less of a triggered state or more in your window of tolerance and expanding that. So if you imagine a window or a square, this is your window of tolerance, and I'm going to describe how you get into that state and how you can trigger yourself out of that state. But this is your comfort zone where you feel emotionally regulated. You have the ability to soothe yourself, to soothe others, and the ability to regulate any emotions that you feel. Here you can be really rational and reasonable, and you can make really good decisions for yourself. You can be empowered and confident, and you can take with ease what life throws at you. We all have this window of tolerance. Now if you imagine that around the edges of this comfort zone are zones that you might not feel so good in. They're separated into two distinct types of zones, so one is where you might feel a bit hyper and manic and stressed out. This is known as the fight-flight response, where you might be rigid, obsessed, you might have uh compulsive behaviours or thoughts, you might be overeating or restricting, addictions, you might be impulsive, you might have anxiety, overwhelm, or chaotic responses, or even outbursts of emotion or aggression. And you might feel angry, even rageful here. This is a zone where we call it hyper-aroused, where your nervous system is hyper-aroused. If you are imagining a diagram, if you have a window of tolerance, above your window goes this hyper-aroused state, this state where you feel too much energy and you're a little bit too stressed out. And things become difficult there. And then if you imagine a bar below your window, this is a collapsed state where you lose energy. This is the freeze response. And here you might feel dissociated, not present, not engaged, absent-minded, you might have memory loss, you might feel disconnected, and be on autopilot. You might even be displaying flatness and no emotion whatsoever. This is called the hypo-aroused state. So these are two states to watch out for. See if you can recognize any of those signs next time you crave something or next time you notice that you're not quite feeling right or feeling yourself. You might have gone out of your window of tolerance. In this state, emotional and physiological dysregulation happens. You don't feel yourself, and everything becomes more difficult. And now if you imagine a pair of curtains on the sides of your window, there are curtains that can be opened, curtains that can be closed. So you can lessen your window of tolerance and you can increase your window of tolerance by opening or closing these curtains. It's well recognised that there are tons of different things that might trigger you out of your comfort zone, out of your window of tolerance, and into one of these hyper-aroused manic fight-flight responses, or hypo-aroused freeze response or collapse response. And these things could include what your unconscious thought processes are, could be your body feelings, could be a lack of feeling of control, and it most certainly would be that you're feeling unsafe. You might feel that you don't exist, you might feel abandonment feelings, you might have felt rejection, and you might also have trauma-related core beliefs about who you are. Happily, just as there are reasons to go out of your window of tolerance and to lessen your comfort zone, there are also things that can help you stay in your window of tolerance and increase your capacity. These are things like mindfulness, being present in the here and now, grounding exercises, breathing exercises, all kinds of techniques for self-soothing and calming the body and emotional regulation. Deep, slow breathing is well recognised as something that really helps quite quickly. Recognizing your limiting beliefs can also help, and countering them with positive statements about yourself and about what you expect in life can all really help to comfort you, lessen that stress response, and help you to feel more regulated and better. In the next few parts, this week, next week, I'm going to be talking about different ways that you can open that curtain on your window of tolerance. As I said last time, when we're worried or feeling anything uncomfortable, maybe we're shocked, stressed, grieving, angry, scared or upset, or feeling any other kind of human difficulty or feeling, our bodies can go into a hypersensitive or underactive collapse state. Our need is to bring the body back to a more balanced window of tolerance. To move into the part of your brain that's rational, reasonable and compassionate. This is a totally different part of your brain from the part of you that deals with stress. It's where you regain a sense of yourself and can make really good choices for your well-being. This part can stop you from overworking. Procrastination can be a triggered state too, and it can help you to stop using comforts and addictions and can help you to choose to rest. Self-regulation is all about the ability to manage the stress state. Many of the hacks that people will offer you, I see lots of them on social media, to overcome a craving instantly, will involve self-regulatory exercises. That is, actions that change your state from one of stress to one of calm. These techniques are also ways to manage how you feel without using the substance. Once you've learned that your eating is caused by the desire to squash difficult feelings, at least in part, and emotional experiences, you really need to know how to manage or tolerate that feeling, even if it's just a physical discomfort, differently. The easiest one to start with is focusing on your breath. I know everybody tells you to do this. And I know that it's difficult to make yourself stop and to breathe. But the reason why people advocate this one so often is because it works really quickly. Often I've had clients who can't believe that they've never tried this because of how quickly it works. Often just focusing on your breath will calm your nervous system down from an activated emotional state or a flat state. The brain waves literally change when you do this. If you want to get a bit more sophisticated about it, you can breathe in through your nose. This tells your system that there is no threat and that you can relax. The next stage of sophistication is breathing out more slowly than you breathed in. To that end, in the next part I'll lead you through a breathing exercise. The more you practice these things, the more you practice this simple thing, the less reactive you will be in everyday life. This has an accumulative effect. So let's just take a breath together, first of all. And keep breathing as I explain the instructions. So as you're breathing, notice whether your breathing is high up in your chest or low down in your belly or somewhere in between. Maybe you have a full lungs capacity, or maybe you're breathing quite shallowly. Noticing that, next time you breathe in, allow yourself to breathe in for three counts. So one, two, three. And then hold it a little bit without forcing it. And then when you breathe out, breathe out for the count of six. Or breathe in for double the amount that you breathed in, however many that is. I'll lead you through three and six, but you may have your own count. So let's breathe in for three counts. One, two, three. Hold. Breathe out. Two, three, four, five, six. Keep breathing in this way. It's recommended that you do this five times. Breathe in. One, two, three. Breathe out. One, two, three, four, five, six. Hold on. Breathe in not quite done here, pause the recording. After having done that, did you notice any changes? Can you identify that you moved more or less into your window of tolerance? Did your window of tolerance expand at all? In the next part I'll give you more ways to expand your window of tolerance and to get back in it. As well as becoming aware of and manipulating your breath, becoming aware of your body sensations and functions can also be incredibly calming. Body practices like yoga, exercise, going out for a walk may all help to calm your nervous system down. Yawning, laughing, humming, singing, doing something creative, going out into nature or dancing are also great ways to change your state. The good news is that you can access tons of these exercises online, mine included. The most popular and better known exercise is mindfulness. Meditation or mindfulness is a pause or a timeout during which you simply observe your experience in some way. Contrary to popular belief, this does not have to be long or difficult. You can shift rapidly with a soothing voice and by focusing a little tiny bit at a time. In mindfulness, it's normal to not be able to concentrate for long, so it's the milliseconds or moments when you come back to yourself in the present moment that really count and that will accumulate. I'm going to leave it there for now because next week I'm going to show you many more ways how to destress. This week I've talked more about what's happening in our nervous systems when we are in distress and when we come out of a stressful state. I showed you your normal human window of tolerance. In order to come back into your best state, where you can make good decisions about your eating as well as anything else in your life, I introduced you to a few ways that you can regulate your physiology to feel calmer and more adult or mindful. I showed you ways that we can get triggered out of our window of tolerance into feeling stressed or collapsed. I then talked generally about self-regulation and self-soothing. Then I gave you a breathing exercise to try. And finally, I introduced you to your body sensations and how that can help you to de-stress. Next week I'll show you more ways that you can de-stress and I'll talk about what compassion is. If you're ready to go further than this and want to go further than my podcast can offer you, my group starts next week. I have a six-week comfort eating recovery group starting on Tuesday evenings at six o'clock. We are full enough to run the course, so there are six people ready to go, but I limit it to eight people, so there are two more spaces if you want to grab one of those. In all honesty, I don't know when I'll be running this group again as it is, because my work is changing so much at the moment. So this may be your last chance for a while. If you have been thinking about it, now's your moment. I've got a lovely bunch of ladies who I'm really looking forward to working with. Thank you so much for listening today. This has been Underground Confidence with Shelly Treacher. I'll see you next week.