Happy Monday people
I hope you all had a lovely weekend
In today’s newsletter I am going to talk about stress!
Stress
We humans have a blueprint for stress but it’s not set up for the kind of stress we have in our lives today. Acute stress or a short blast of stress to run from or fight sabre toothed tigers was and still is part of our genetic blueprint.
The problem we have today is that we are totally bombarded with stress which has flipped many of us from acute stress to chronic stress
Stress comes in all forms – physical, chemical, electromagnetic, mental, nutritional and thermal. More on this here
So a typical day for many may look something like this
- Wake up and eat breakfast – that is a breakfast full of sugar, colours, preservatives, and a whole bunch of other nutritional stresses
- Read the paper – crime, terrorism, political turmoil etc. Mental stress from worry
- Go to work and arrive to a number of emails that needed to be addressed weeks ago – work stress
- Remember that you hate your job and once upon a time you had a dream, a vision and purpose. Existential stress
- Eat a crappy lunch – more nutritional stress
- Check instagram – Not enough likes, this person is doing so much better than me – stress from comparison, stress from lowered self worth
- Finish work drink wine – environmental stress from all those sprays on your grapes
- Watch Netflix and expose yourself to bluelight stress for at least 2 hours
- Then there’s the stress from constant back pain, the niggle in the shoulder and the fact that your kids just want to play up and not listen to a word you have to say
You get the idea.
So what can we do about all of this…
Enter the Wim Hof Method
Dingo Dave my partner in crime
The Wim Hof Method is built upon 3 pillars – breathing, cold exposure and mind-set
With these pillars we can press reset on our chronic stress bringing us back to a state of wellness or health
Our autonomic nervous system is part of our nervous system that controls our bodily functions that are not consciously directed, such as breathing, heart rate, digestive functions etc
When stressed our bodies go into sympathetic overdrive aka fight, flight or freeze. As I mentioned earlier great if you’re about to flight a sabre toothed tiger but shit if your just checking instagram.
The key for us is to flip ourselves back to parasympathetic aka rest and digest or what I call feed and breed.
How do we do this?
Wim Hof discovered that by doing these 3 things you could profoundly affect your autonomic nervous system and down regulate stress
1 – Breathing
– Big diaphragmatic belly breathes
2 – Cold Exposure
– Eustress
3 – Mind-set
– Be present, be grateful, be kind, be in the moment.
If you want to find out more about these methods check out Nigel at Element Health who took us through this 4 hour workshop. https://www.facebook.com/ElementHealthNZ/
It was an awesome workshop and a great day. Thanks Nigel!!
That’s all for today
Paul ‘freezing’ & Krystie ‘being mindful’ Miller
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