Exercise the Stress Away!

Once I started paying attention, I realized that I had gotten into my 60's without knowing that I needed to stop my body's stress cycle. I had strategies for survival. I learned how to distract when tensions rose, avoid groping hands without making a scene, navigate families fighting at funerals and more more more. These are excellent survival strategies but they do not deal with the stress itself.

Thanks to our body we have a source of intelligence that allows us access to knowledge about how to complete the stress cycle. When the pandemic hit, Pete and I were so anxious. We made a commitment to walk together every day. It was essential for us to be able to sleep at night and walking helped. Once the weather got nasty we were less willing to walk through rain, sleet or snow; we converted one of our bedrooms to a gym. We worked out religiously.

Little did we know that we were doing the single most effective strategy for completing the stress response cycle! Hurray for us! Here's the deal with exercise: We should complete between 20 and 60 minutes of exercise a day to discharge the daily stress that accumulates. I know we all want buns of steel and six-pack abs, but I am telling you, the most important part of exercise is this: it completes the stress response cycle.

So yes, I had a breakdown. But I also exercised every day and that kept me afloat. I was not myself, no where close to it, but I was able to do a few things that were also helpful in reclaiming my sanity because the exercise was mitigating the effects of stress.

Are you walking? Dancing? Playing pickle ball? Get moving friends!

Reawaken Your Life

I've been promising a series of posts about my breakdown and waking up experience, but I want to throw in a couple more pre-remarks. When we are exhausted, lose our compassion and feel hopeless, we acclimate to the climate of this dark and dreary existence. We may not realize that this is not "us." Maybe we think this is the way life works. I want you to hear me: this is NOT true. There may be many reasons we feel "off" or bad, and I'm not suggesting that my "off" is the same as yours. I do not know what your pathway through the tunnel and back into the light might look like or what you need.

I just want you to know that you may need to reawaken to your life and it may take a LOT more time, effort and exploration than feels reasonable to you. Also, I do not want you to look for the magic bullet because I do not think there is one. I suspect that it is more likely a series of small steps forward, backward, to the left, to the right, over and under and around.

When my mother died my body tried to tell me that this was not a normal grief process. My usually sturdy, healthy body got sick. I caught every virus that floated in the environment. My joints felt creaky, my workouts were half-hearted. My sleep was off. I asked my husband, "Do you think I will ever feel happy again?"

I started my road to recovery by finding a primary care physician who believed in wellness. This required spending money on myself, lots of bloodwork, a nutritionist, an exercise guru and more. It was a decent start but did not immediately come with a side order of joy. What it did accomplish was return my body to a baseline of wellness with a regular monitoring system to warn me if something physically was moving in an unhealthy direction. I also found encouragement. My physician, looking at my numbers, asked me if I practiced mindfulness and meditation and I said, "I do." She told me that my cortisol reflected my good work in that area.

I was practicing my self-care routine even though it did not FEEL like it was helpful. Hearing that my body was getting the message even if my emotions were not exactly falling into line was an encouragement. Who knows if I could have sustained the efforts around self-care without my physician's encouragement?

When you consider human giving and human being - obviously, balance is key. How is your balance? Does one need more attention than another right now in your life?