Rewire Your Stressed Brain

When does stress go from being helpful to a hindrance? Today, you will learn about what happens in your nervous system when you are under stress, and what the difference is between transient stress and chronic stress. You’ll get a feel for when stress becomes a problem and you’ll also learn about some of the basic physical and psychological effects of stress. All of this will help you to understand and use the tools that you learn throughout this course more effectively.

Today, we’ll talk about why we get stuck in cycles of chronic stress and how you can start breaking these. We’ll also practice a simple meditation technique with powerful benefits, that you can start applying from today to create a little distance between you and the experience of stress.

There’s growing evidence that signals sent from our internal organs to the brain play a major role in regulating emotions and supporting mental health. Today, you will learn about interoception: our important sixth sense that can help you understand yourself and others better, allowing you to be more adaptive and resilient. You'll also learn a practice you can apply to improve your interoceptive ability.

Although it might sound counterintuitive, research shows that accepting difficulties has positive mental health benefits. Acceptance of stress might sound simple but it isn't always easy; allowing stress without getting lost in it. During today's practice, we'll learn that your mind and thoughts will not stop moving just because we want them to. The goal is not to push away thoughts or stress. The point is to develop a new relationship with our thoughts and feelings that allows positive feelings to unfold.

A big obstacle for a lot of us is putting in too much effort, both in meditation and in life. We have been told to believe that we’ll get there if we just try a little harder, but actually applying too much effort is counterproductive. This is particularly true when it comes to dealing with stress: the feeling that we have to make an effort to reduce stress can actually lead to even more stress. Today, we’ll practice an exercise that teaches you how to tell when your effort might be getting in the way. Once you are able to notice yourself putting in too much effort, you then can let go of excess effort and free up cognitive capacity for planning, prioritizing, and problem-solving.

A wealth of research into self-compassion over the last decade has shown its benefits for wellbeing. Individuals who are more self-compassionate tend to have greater happiness, life satisfaction and motivation, better relationships, and physical health. They also have the resilience needed to cope with stressful life events such as divorce, health crises, academic failure, and even combat trauma. Today, we'll go through a simple self-compassion practice you can apply anytime.

Now that you've learned how to rewire your brain to protect yourself from stress, we'll turn to some very practical tools you can apply in particularly stressful moments. Today, we'll unpack the science of the breath and learn how it gets impacted when we're stuck in chronic stress. We'll learn how most of us are breathing in a way that actually keeps us stuck in stress in a vicious cycle. Thankfully, there are simple and powerful practices we can apply to get us out of this cycle, which we'll learn over the coming days.

Today, I'll be sharing a breathing practice that research is now showing to be the most important breathing practice if you experience stress. Yesterday we learned about over-breathing, and how it is a common feature of not only stress, but also anxiety and PTSD. Today, you'll learn a practice that, in time, can help you step out of the cycle of stress and over-breathing, giving you access to a tool that you can apply no matter where you are.

In this lesson, you will learn about the vast potential of protecting yourself against stress through the vagus nerve. You will learn how to communicate with the vagus nerve, and thereby with our whole body, through our breath. The practice I share with you today is grounded in ancient tradition and backed up by modern neuroscience. It has been shown not only to reduce stress but also to make us more resilient to future stress. Once you've learned this technique, you can practice it daily and then apply it as an emergency tool: after a difficult conversation, stuck in a traffic jam, or in a meeting.

Well done on making it to the final day of this course. Today, we will bring it all together in a way that helps you take everything we've learned and apply it to your everyday life. We will discuss how you can turn what you've learned here into life-long habits, to help you make this the first day of the rest of your life. A life that is free from chronic, harmful stress, and where you can step into your full potential.