Micro-Stress, Burnout & Your Nervous System
If your life is anything like mine, it's filled with micro-stress.
A frustrating text from your spouse while you're in the middle of a project...
A co-worker who dropped the ball and left you with extra work...
Missing the train and being ten minutes late for a meeting...
While each incident may seem small and insignificant, collectively, they add up.
According to a recent article on micro-stress published in the Harvard Business Review:
"The long-term impact of this buildup is debilitating: It saps our energy, damages our physical and emotional health, and contributes to a decline in our overall well-being."
From my experience these constant, unaddressed micro-stressors are the #1 cause of most work related anxiety & burnout.
The fact that micro-stressors exist isn't the problem--life will always be messy. We only get in to trouble when we never calm our nervous systems back down to neutral between events and there is always low-grade stress running in the background.
And that's where our breath can do wonders.
1. How you are breathing (or not breathing!) can work like a real-time diagnostic tool and tell you whether you are currently experiencing micro-stress (and to what degree.)
Your breath will never lie to you. When you’re excited, nervous or scared your breathing will speed up. When you are at peace and feel safe your breathing will slow down. Checking in with your breathing throughout the day is one of the most accurate ways to know how you are really feeling and what portion of your nervous system you are currently engaging.
2. Functional Breathing & Breathwork techniques can down-regulate your nervous system and ensure you don't get stuck in low-grade micro-stress all day long.
Functional Breathing teaches you to keep your everyday breathing baseline calm, quiet, slow and consistent. This breathing pattern engages your vagus nerve and the parasympathetic (rest/digest) branch of your nervous system, which helps improve mental focus, blood pressure, circulation, heart rate variability and creates the feeling of calm. Unfortunately almost half of Americans have dysfunctional breathing paterns which interfere with our ability to stay calm under pressure and think clearly. That’s why Breathing Retraining can be such an effective tool for combatting micro-stress.
Calming Breathwork techniques are an excellent way to help us switch from one branch of our nervous system to the other. They give us a chance to return to neutral and recover from these micro-stressors so we don’t stay turned on until we burnout.
While I don't enjoy seeing so many people suffering, I'm happy to see micro-stress finally being discussed widely as it's such an important concept. It’s so important that Ii even devoted an entire section of my Resilient Living Program to the topic where I teach simple, actionable techniques to help you take control over the micro-stress in your life.
If you’re interested, reach out here and let’s chat further!
-Kevin