Dr. Nicole Cain presents a short talk on stress management, arguing that stress is an inevitable part of being human but that people can learn to control their autonomic arousal through repeated, safe practice. She introduces systematic desensitization and the idea of expanding one’s "window of tolerance," and gives practical exercises (e.g., high ropes course, holding a difficult yoga pose such as proud warrior) to deliberately activate and then down-regulate stress responses until the response becomes habitual.
Chapters
In life, we will experience stress. Stress is what it means to be human. But the practicing and learning how to go into autonomic arousal, that fight, flight, freeze, etc. Knowing how to go into that and then how to reliably bring yourself out of that creates, number one, a sense of personal power, which is the antidote to anxiety, is having power and anger agency and knowing what to do if stress strikes, no matter where you are. And that comes from practicing it again and again and again. But we want to do it in a way that is objectively safe and where you're in control. We call it systematic desensitization. And so what that means for the non clinicians listening to this conversation is we want to gently expand your window of tolerance, gently expand your ability to feel activated and able to come down. So what does this mean practically? So number one is you want to do things that feel a little bit stressful, a little bit activating. So I use the example of a high ropes course quite often where you go up on the high ropes course. It's high, it's objectively kind of freaky, depending on if you have a penchant for fear of heights. And then you have the control to be like, I'm going to stand here in my power for 30 seconds and then I'm going to get down and then I'm going to breathe, get back to my body, and then you're going to do it again. Other people may practice this process with yoga where they go into a difficult pose, difficult for them, which we all have our varying levels of skill. So I'll give one example. It could be different for anybody, but maybe you're going into like a proud warrior pose and you're holding your arms out and your heart is beating faster, you feel it in your chest, your body temperature is rising, you're sweating all over the the place, and your brain is like, I can't do this anymore. And then the teacher says, just one more breath, and then you come out of it. You can come out of it before that breath or whenever you choose to, or you can do that breath, or maybe you hold it just a little longer after they say you can come out of it. It's about I go into it and in my own personal control, I come out of it. And so you practice that so that when stress strikes that you have, you've been practicing this, you know how to do it, because your prefrontal cortex, until you online it, it's not going to remind you, oh, yeah, you got to breathe you got to do this thing. It's got to be habit. It's got to be ingrained.
