To avoid needing to ask for help, consistently engage in conversations with people about how you’re truly doing, both giving and seeking honest answers, so your life is “seen and known” in real time. This practice helps prevent the accumulation of unaddressed needs that later require explicit requests for help.
Actively seek out groups and communities (e.g., poetry readings, art groups, meditation, group exercise, volunteering, dog walking groups, or even micro-interactions) to train your nervous system to be around others and foster connection. This combats the “terminal aloneness” that prolonged stress can create and is a precursor to depression.
Engage in three minutes of high-intensity, full-body exercise (e.g., pushups, jumping jacks, burpees, squat jumps, shoveling snow, lifting sandbags) multiple times a day. This metabolizes stress hormones and completes the body’s natural fight/flight response cycle, preventing stress from getting stuck in the body.
Immediately after waking, lie back down, feel the bed’s support, orient your eyes to the space (far distance, peripheral vision), feel your breath from toes to fingertips, and carry that sense of expansion and support as you slowly transition to seated and then into your day. This practice anchors you to the “backside of the body” and peripheral vision, counteracting the “go mode” front-body focus.
When experiencing tunnel vision, a clenched jaw, or tension in your neck/shoulders, orient your eyes to the horizon and gently turn your head slowly from side to side. This releases tension, broadens your focus, and can naturally induce a deeper breath by stimulating the diaphragm via the phrenic nerve.
When feeling small or immobilized, squeeze your body inwards, making yourself as small as possible with pent-up energy, then push outwards against imaginary walls (sides, ceiling, front) with all your strength, potentially making sounds like a growl. This completes the freeze response, re-establishes personal space, and reconnects you to your innate strength.
When stress hijacks your system, remind yourself that “this isn’t life or death” (even if it feels that way) and reconnect to a larger sense of self, nature, ancestors, or a lineage of teachers. Remember your personal resources, such as people you can ask for help or places to find answers, to combat feelings of isolation and overwhelm.
Shift your perspective from viewing nervous system responses (like fight, flight, freeze, or rest and digest) as “good” or “bad” to understanding them as appropriate reactions to your environment. This reframing helps reduce self-blame and fosters a more compassionate understanding of your body’s protective mechanisms.
Understand that under prolonged stress, your innate strengths (e.g., being good at finding answers, confidence, caring) can become weaknesses, leading to isolation, controlling behaviors, or neglecting your own needs. This insight promotes self-awareness regarding how stress can distort positive traits and impact relationships.
Utilize home-based biometric devices (wearables) to track physiological indicators like heart rate variability, heart rate, blood pressure, and sleep quantity/quality. Focus on identifying “patterns rather than static moments in time” and “overall trends” within context, rather than obsessing over daily numbers, to gain insight into your nervous system’s state.
Seek feedback from people in your life about how they perceive your stress, including specific phrases you use, activities you avoid, or coping mechanisms you employ. This external perspective can provide valuable insights into your stress indicators that you might not notice yourself.
Pay attention to physical symptoms such as teeth grinding, elevated cholesterol, pre-diabetes, changes in digestion (constipation or diarrhea), and unexplained weight gain (especially around the midsection) or loss. These physiological conditions can serve as indicators that your body is overriding its natural state due to prolonged stress.
Try Dr. Andrew Weill’s 4-7-8 breathing technique: inhale for a count of four, hold your breath for a count of seven, and exhale slowly out the mouth for a count of eight, repeating four to six times. Be mindful that the breath-holding phase may increase anxiety for some individuals, so assess its suitability for your own nervous system.
During meditation or moments throughout the day, soften your eyes and bring your awareness to the area behind the back of your eyes and then to the area behind the back of your head. This technique serves as a doorway to shift from a “doing mode” to a “being mode” by connecting to a central axis and peripheral vision.
Prioritize reading information on physical paper (books, newspapers, printouts) over screens, as this naturally encourages looking up and around, engaging the full body and brain. This method can lead to deeper encoding of information and more effective learning, countering the tunnel vision often induced by screen reading.
If you experience a strong “fight part” or primal urge to lash out, find safe ways to complete this defensive response, such as using a mouth guard to grind your teeth and flare your nostrils, or shouting into a pillow. This allows your body to process the urge without inappropriate external expression.
Reframe the concept of “worker burnout” as “institutional exploitation,” recognizing that systems often take advantage of individuals’ desire to care and contribute. This perspective shifts the blame from personal failing to systemic issues, which can inform advocacy or personal boundaries within work environments.
Understand trauma holistically as “too much or too little of something for too long or not for long enough,” occurring without adequate time, space, permission, protection, or resources for the nervous system to return to homeostasis. This broader definition can help in self-understanding and approaching healing.