With the world economy crashing yet again, it’s to all practical purposes not possible for most of us to avoid anxiety about the situation. Here Mental Health Expert Noel McDermott looks at how to manage the body’s response to stress and regulate our emotions through physical activities.
This is for a number of reasons:
The last few years our world has been going through a lot of significant shocks and whilst our threat systems are good at one off shocks, they’re not so good when several follow on from each other. This creates a multiplier effect.
The issues involved are beyond our capacity to effect in most situations and can leave us feeling powerless…powerlessness is a challenge for most of us.
Money and economics is directly linked to survival and threats to money are threats to life in a psychological sense and create actual rather than perceived threats.
Fight, flight or Freeze? Fight for sure.
So, feeling anxious about the current situation makes sense, it’s a sane response but unfortunately our threat mechanism (the bit of our brains that evaluates and develops strategies for dealing with threat, has responses that are limited to dealing with a predator in front of us. This is called fight, flight or freeze. Mother nature has found this is good for dealing with something trying to eat us, we can fight it off, we can run away or we can be really still so that it doesn’t notice us. However, global world order threats to our existence don’t immediately lend themselves to these in-built strategies, unless we get creative.
The Body’s Response To Stress
When threatened our bodies are flooded with two principle hormones/chemicals. One is adrenaline, which increases our heartbeat among other things, and another is cortisol, which goes into our major muscles to give us explosive energy bursts (the sort needed for hitting, kicking, sprinting etc). Have you noticed when you are anxious your muscles tense and then ache? That’s the cortisol in them. Cortisol also messes with our appetite and our immune systems. Hence the effects of stress or lots of colds, aches, other illnesses, inflammation, appetite problems and so on. Long term cortisol also messes with our moods, bringing on anxious and or depressive states of mind. Also, cortisol doesn’t burn itself out of our system in the same way that adrenaline does.
How to use cortisol positively
We need to use it so that we lose it because we don’t want to let it build up. So how can we do it?
Boxfit or kick-boxfit classes.
HIIT type classes that use both aerobic and anaerobic which simulate battle.
Mental health expert Noel McDermott comments: “We are using our muscles and our bodies in a way that they are designed for when dealing with threats and have the added benefit of helping us emotionally regulate, especially if we go to classes. This is not about venting, as evidence shows that venting actually increases aggression and stress, this is about communication with your threat system in a way that it understands, and you saying to it, ‘I’m dealing with this, step down’”.
Additionally, and this is the crucial difference to venting, this is a way of getting more exercise into your life. If there is any one health change you can manage then make it increasing your exercise, and getting active. The advantage of classes as opposed to just going to the gym is handing over motivation to the class leader and also socialising more. So get fighting folks and manage the stress better!
DOSE yourself up!
During the flight we want to have a pleasant time, and this is the second bit of your mental health needs, having enough leg room and entertainment available to make it fun. Here you have become the passenger not the pilot! From our perspective this involves a couple of tricks one of which is called DOSEing yourself up. Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins are reward hormones that promote health and wellbeing and engaging in activities that promote these will make life much more pleasant and rewarding. Some of these hormones you will get from the lifestyle medicine suggestions, endorphins come from exercise for example but using the DOSE mnemonic you can get more bang for your buck, for example, if you start running you will get plenty of endorphins, if you add running outside you will get extra serotonin hormones for free and if you add running as part of a group outside you will get all of this plus lots of dopamine and almost certainly oxytocin from being social! So, learning your DOSE activities really can pay off hugely.
Mental health expert Noel McDermott is a psychotherapist and dramatherapist with over 30 years’ work within the health, social care, education, and criminal justice fields. His company Mental Health Works provides unique mental health services for the public and other organisations. Mental Health Works offers in situ health care and will source, identify and coordinate personalised teams to meet your needs – https://www.mentalhealthworks.
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