With my running and the cold showers - I'm deliberately bringing my nervous system into a state of arousal or a kind of stress. There are many reasons for doing this - boosting ones immune system being just one of those. So my body and my mind are quite used to being stressed in this controlled and practiced way.
However, the week in question started with many of my plans for re-opening my yoga classes after lockdown being scuppered by one of my venues being unable to open up after all. This was after I'd booked everyone in and checked everything was going to be ok. Very frustrating, but not the end of the world.
A few days later I was scheduled to have a heart monitor fitted for 3 days to keep a check on how things are with my ectopic beat, nothing majorly stressful but it's good to keep an eye on it, all fairly routine. Anyhow - the monitor was faulty and beeped an alarm every few minutes - even through the night, which led to no sleep. By this point - I'm feeling my cortisol level rising, feeling anxious, agitated and very grumpy. Plus so many messages and emails coming in from class members trying to book on classes, which is great, not complaining about that, but there were a lot in a short space of time. Then another of my venues sent an email of concern which I later found out had come to me in error!
Then there were all the other little day to day niggles on top of all of this - you know the ones, like the failure of the dog poo bag (there are two things in life that you do not want to fail on you, one is your heart and the other is a dog poo bag!!)
Add to this my old tinnitus problem rearing it's ugly head - (after many years of being at a low and manageable level) This made for one great big stress soup. Anyone who has tinnitus will know that stress can make it way worse and in my opinion, can actually bring it on.
I kept wondering how all my practices of stressing out body and mind in a controlled way, was different to this stress. This stress was out of my control, I had not instigated this stress so my narrative around it was very different. In my neuroscience study I have come across this idea from several professors of the subject, suggesting that it's not just the occurence of stress that is of note - it is HOW we got there and did WE have anything to do with it. Yes, it might seem obvious, but often we may think that stress is just a physiological response to some stimuli - but the narrative we have around that can have a massive impact on HOW we experience it.
Things calmed down a bit after that week and I got some decent nights sleep, my tinnitus faded back into the background again, so I'm thinking my cortisol levels balanced out to where they should be, higher in the mornings to get me going, but gradually reducing throughout the day - which is how things operate best for all of us.
If you feel you need some help with stress management, get in touch, I may be able to help you.
www.yogiclaire.com
