FATHERLY STRESSORS

“Stress” is the body’s automatic reaction to a challenge or demand. Stress serves a purpose. It’s a natural thing. Everyone experiences it uniquely and it’s good to have some. The challenge is when the body frequently encounters stressors that we don’t manage well. When this happens regularly – the body focuses on surviving. Thinking gets impaired, the immune system and nervous system take a hit, motivation to connect with others drops – it’s not great. Most people can relate to levels of this at times – that’s life. Having ways to deal with or use stress effectively puts the body and mind in a better zone, more often.

Adding to the information to date.

NOTICE

Building a sense of what is happening in you and around you is a Dad super power. This includes noticing what’s going on in the body and the mind – the good and the challenging. This is everything from heart rate, blood pressure, posture, muscle tension and breathing – to thoughts, emotions, feelings, and communication. Noticing and acknowledging is key to embracing the ups and navigating the downs – at home, at work, wherever. This shapes a better understanding of sources of stressors and how you, uniquely, experience stress.

Over time this builds communication within the body. Built up stress, pain, and behavior that isn’t right for the situation – these are simply signals, or communications, from the body that it needs some help with skill building. That’s all… it’s simply a request for attention and action. Note: This is also a critical component to toddler tantrums (a future topic).

Here are a few new ways to learn to notice and listen.

Noticing the ebbs and flows of life are what many call mindfulness. Mindfulness is just noticing things in the present, with focus and attention. Regardless of what it’s called – you gotta notice it before you can manage it. This goes for things in your mind and body, as well as things in the world around you (like a grumpy baby).

For those who have interest in meditation/mindfulness practices, HERE is a 20-minute audio guide that encourages bringing the attention back to the body whenever it wanders. Doing this over time has been shown to help build and maintain the concentration muscle.

MANAGE

FD03 covered breathing more through the nose, emphasizing the exhale, and some specific techniques such as the double inhale with sigh-like exhale. Why? Stress increases heart rate, which changes breath rate (faster, shallower). Adjusting the breath adjusts the stress signal. Breath control is stress control.

Stress reactions happen in the body. Managing it with the mind can take a lot of effort, energy, practice, and nuance. Managing the body by using the body is often the fastest way to manage stress in a pinch. It’s going to be slightly different for everyone, but growing research continues to support that slow breathing changes the physiological (body) and psychological (mind) response. And this isn’t some “just breathe man” advice – science is researching the specifics with greater detail.

Here’s another area to explore – slowing down the breath.

It’s thought that the average adult breathes between 12 to 20 breaths a minute during the day. Breathing is an automatic function, like digestion or the heart beating, but unlike those we can directly control it when we want. We control breathing when we speak or sing, but we can also control it’s patterns.

BUILD

Noticing and managing in the moment are great, but the true power comes in building more resilience in how we manage stress in the first place. This is done by having better starting places in the body and mind before the stressors hit. Having good sleep can help the body carry more load at any given time, while building mental capabilities can set us up to use that body energy.

Stress is an interesting topic. There’s been great debate about what it is and how to define it. Stress is used more as a buzzword in the “stressed out” sense. Digging a little deeper into the foundational concept of stress can help demystify it for ourselves and our children.

Robert Sapolsky – neuroscientist, biologist, author, and professor at Stanford University – has a compelling way to explain stress that helps make the concept a little more approachable and actionable.

First, you have the body and all of its processes, in a normal state of operating – just humming along. This is called homeostasis – or a state of equilibrium, with the physiology functioning in an optimal or expected range.

Next there is a stressor. This is something that changes or challenges the homeostasis. It can be physical, it can be biological, it can be internal, it can be external. It can be psychological – such as the anticipation of something happening or a thought. This is an event, or stimulus, or trigger.

Finally there is the stress-response, or the response to the stressor. In Sapolky’s words this is “the array of hormonal and neural adaptations in the body meant to reestablish homeostasis” – or simply, this is how the body responds (via physiological processes) to deal with the change and restore homeostasis. The stress response is an automatic physical response. It’s something that happens in the body, regardless of what the stressor is.

The stressor itself is neither good or bad – it just is. The stress response is how the body reacts and recovers.

* If you see a bear coming at you – your body ramps up to help you escape, you learn and adapt, and the body recovers (hopefully no nightmares = lingering stress response after a stressor).

* If you lift weights to fatigue the body physically (disrupt homeostasis), the weights (and gravity) are a stressor on your biology. The stress response is a cascade of processes in the body, that if given the right environment, creates an adaptation to that new weight, you get stronger, and now have a new baseline homeostasis.

* If you have less experience in public speaking and have a presentation – the thought of presentation is the stressor, and your body over ramps for the situation causing anxiety, which makes it hard to present. If the mind continues to revisit this then there is a stressor of the mind creating a stress response in the body that can have a lasting negative impact – disrupting homeostasis and blocking it from returning to a more optimal range of functioning.

The stress response is what makes the outcome good or bad. How do we use this?

Event + Response = Outcome can be rewritten as
Stressor + Stress Response = Outcome

This framework can then point to what tools and techniques can help manage it and build resilience over time. Another perspective below….

Every stress response creates a change in the biology, in the physiology of the body and mind. Emotions may feel like thoughts, but they are a physiological process. The stress response is always physiological. We can only change the stress response through physiology or psychology. Changing the physiology, like changing the breathing pattern or relaxing the vision, is the quickest way to change a stress response. Over time we can build more mental strength and resilience such that the mind can be more effective at slowing or redirecting the response. Over time, the brain and body build skills and capabilities and adapt to a new homeostasis that can better manage or regulate the next stressor.

Noticing builds awareness. Knowledge shines the light on the most effective tools for the now and for the future. Over time we build better capabilities to be more resilient to various stressors.

Stress. The Good. The Bad.

Of course, this also requires exploring where stress is good and where becomes bad. This is what often separates the most elite athletes in the world from the next best. It’s about how you mobilize energy when it matters, but it applies to regulation of stress at any time.

Regulation or stress management describes the strategy used to control the level of arousal or energy in the body. Physiological arousal (not that arousal…) ranges from low energy to high energy. This energy or arousal shapes the physiological states which shape the performance or behavior, which influences the outcome. This relationship is called the Hebbian Yerkes-Dodson Law (shown below).

Having tools and strategies that can help regulate where we are on the curve is what stress management is all about. What do we do in the moment and over time to be able to better use the physiological (body) response, and enable us to attend to what matters and tune out the rest.

Bringing it back to co-regulation…

We only have two options at any given time. Regulate from the top down (mind) or from the bottom up (body). We can only take on the stress response with a psychological approach (thinking) or a physiological approach (biology). That’s it. We practice in the moment, and build a stronger baseline for the next time. Physiology is the first line of defense, but over time, improvements to our psychology and physiology bring the overall strength.

Until we have those built, co-regulation can often bring down the arousal level more rapidly than self-regulation (which we often make a more psychological process). Being there with someone else, to find calm in togetherness through social connection – this bypasses the thinking brain and gets right to the physiology to the bottom-up regulation. Sometimes we just need a hug.

Kids don’t self-regulate because they don’t have the thinky bits yet. Co-regulation cuts right to it. But co-regulation is only as good as the co-regulator. Wherever you are, everyone has room for improvement, at the very least in how to help others. This is WHY stress management is important for fatherhood.

This section has tidbits from around the web that are typically on Dads minds.

Book: The Upside of Stress

Interested in capitalizing on stress – Kelly McGonigal, PhD psychologist, researcher, and teacher reveals the upside of stress, and shows several ways of getting better at winning with stress. [TedTalk, 14min 17sec]

Book: Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers

Robert Sapolsky provides a comprehensive and engaging deep dive into the topic of stress and provides an essential guide to controlling the stress response. [Lecture, YouTube, 1hr 27min]

Postpartum Depression in Men

Studies indicate that somewhere between 10% to 25% of new dads go through some form of depressive episode in the first year of having kids. It’s more common yet discussed less. If feeling more irritable or anxious – Postpartum Men is one of the better online resources, as a place to start. Feeling overwhelmed happens. There is no harm in asking for help from a health professional.

Resource: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Exercises

Everyone has room to improve when it comes to stress management. This is a resource for mindfulness-based stress reduction, or MBSR. These are all no-cost tools that can be used anytime anyplace. Free, High Quality 8-week MBSR HERE.