How I stop myself “turning red”!

One of my top priorities at the moment is to make sure I minimise feeling stressed. This isn’t easy in this modern-day world, with three young kids, unwell parents, building a business, and finishing a PhD and I’m pretty sure that most people will be in similarly stressful situations albeit with potentially different stressors.

Minimising stress has been a priority of mine for a while and has certainly influenced some of my life choices over the last few years such as to leave consulting and train as a coach. The reason that maintaining my stress levels is so important to me, (and this is relevant this month as it's menopause awareness month) is the effect that stress has on our body. What I only learnt recently was the effect of cortisol production, the stress hormone. Now I’m not an expert here so I might have simplified things but I did validate this with a friend of mine who is a nutritional therapist cortisol is produced in the adrenal gland which is the same place in the body that produces other hormones, so if my body is producing cortisol it is unable to produce oestrogen. Oestrogen is important to me at the moment because I am 44 and I am building my awareness that in a few years, I may become peri-menopausal and then go through menopause I want to be able to have some control of my journey and my body through this part of my life. The other thing that drives me to reduce stress is the effect it has on inflammation in the cells in the body and increased blood pressure which can put you at greater risk of illness and also weight gain. I also did not know that when you were stressed you released glucose into your body, but I guess it makes sense, back to when early man developed and we needed to be able to flee from danger. This release of glucose into your body, if persistent can lead to further symptoms and damage to your body. I am also deaf in one ear, following sudden hearing loss in early 2020 just before COVID. This, unbeknown to me caused by a virus attacking the hairs in my inner ear. I learned afterwards that often stress can cause this sudden hearing loss and now the tinnitus I suffer is triggered when I am stressed. So for me, the bottom line is that stress can have such a huge impact on your health that we want to avoid it as much as possible.

How can you become less stressed? Of course, there are things that you can’t control or have minimal influence over but there are absolutely things that you can control. For me, I’ve got two approaches to stress reduction. On the one hand, it’s the big life decisions that I make where my goal is to lessen stress. The other thing that I try to do is manage it on a day-to-day basis. One thing I find is a really effective guide for me is visualisation. For some reason, my visualisation is the Red Panda in Turning Red. The significance of the red panda is actually claimed to be a metaphor for puberty but for me its symbolises my stress. When I start to feel myself getting stressed, I visualise myself turning red, from the feet up. The more stressed I get, the more I turn red. My goal at this moment in time is to reduce the redness; I do this using breathing, imaging each breath coming in from the soles of my feet, with the exhalation pushing the redness down by body until it finally leaves and I am no longer panda! The other thing I try to focus on is ‘topping myself up’ this is like a daily injection of something that stops me turning red or makes it much difficult. That’s practices like yoga or going for a walk….I look at it as building up my defenses.

• What do you visualise when you start to get stressed?

• What can you put in place to act as a barrier to minimise this?

• What can you do when it starts to rise to push it away?

You’ve got this, you can stop stress from taking over you, you can control it.