5 Tools for Reducing Chronic Stress in Your Body | Dr. Andy Galpin & Jill Miller

Chronic Stress and Connective Tissue Changes00:00

Exposing yourself to stresses is very important for adaptation and for health. But the chronic soaking in a stress response will change the nature of your connective tissue and you will have tissue thickening and this can lead to pain problems. Exposing oneself to parasympathetic practices as a way to offset and refill your cup is a really great way to consciously balance our life because there is never not going to be enormous amounts of stress showing up in our life.

Having this as a respite that's within you like this is your own internal medicine chest. In Body by Breath, the five Ps of the parasympathetic nervous system are presented as a self-produced recipe that will change state guaranteed every time.

The Five Ps Framework01:00

Perspective

The first P is perspective. This is the mindset piece. There is a top-down appreciation that you are willing to create conscious change or conscious awareness. The top-down is a host for the experience. If you just go into rolling willy-nilly, it will do something. But if you're really trying to improve your parasympathetic tolerance, you want to be there to receive the information that your body is going to start to share with you.

One of the things that happens when you turn on your off switch is quite frequently in the off switch, your emotions arise. And those emotions can be pretty unpleasant and intolerable. But it's very important because that's what's in the way of for many of us of communication of growth of relational safety all those things.

An example of perspective used when releasing the book was "all of me is welcome here." Releasing a book means the entire brain, everything felt, thought, and perceived is in that book and it's really scary to consider what if this word is wrong, what if the theory is incorrect, what if something is misappropriated. Something more simple that anybody can do is "I embody my body." That allows you to be a student of this internal process. Parasympathetic dominant state is not a loud state. It's very quiet. So you really have to put yourself into a state of deep listening and sensing in order to have it manifest.

Place

The second P is place. Ideally, for true quietude, for true parasympathetic arousal, you need to have a place where you feel safe and that could be indoors or outdoors, but it should be relatively quiet. Ideally, for the relaxation response to occur, it should be on the darker side. Not in the presence of bright lights, not in the presence of a lot of noise like clanging, kettle bells, and things being slammed here and there.

When working with teachers, parameters are set up where students are able to establish place so that students feel like they can let their guard down. You can do this stuff in a gym. You can also do it in a war zone. People work in refugee camps doing this type of work. It's just about setting up parameters of like here's our space to let go to be able to be vulnerable.

Position

The third P is position. Position can change your physiology immediately as soon as you recline. There's just no more postural stress on your heart and your diaphragm and you're able to not have as much sympathetic tone in your body. People are encouraged to typically recline or to even boost that by going into a gentle slope position which takes advantage of the barrel receptor reflex.

If people can be put in a position where their pelvis is just a little bit higher than their heart, higher than their head, right in a little bit of a gentle slope, that will really enhance a vagal dominant state. Getting on the ground feels so good. There is research about earthing. Go with gravity.

Pace of Breath

Four, pace of breath or pneumatic pacing. Breath pacing exercises can alter your state. Slow deep breathing is primal. The HHP Foundation is a great amalgamator of all breath research and it's free and available online. Tanya Bentley is their founder and Ryan McKenzie is also one of the co-founders. They recently put out a systematic review on all the breath research that was targeted towards anxiety reduction.

What they found running all the numbers on the different papers is that slow deep breathing for five minutes daily is really the sweet spot. You can do a mix of fast-paced breathing with slow breathing but you mustn't only do fast breathing. Fast breathing alone is not going to alter your stress response. You must include the slow pace breathing. Extended exhales tend to be really beneficial, but you can also do extended inhales. Just make your breathing slow paced. Also do not use zone 3 muscles for that breathing. Slow breathing is going to be involving zone one, zone two.

Palpation

The fifth P is palpation. This has been discussed via self-myofascia release as a way to dampen sympathetic outflow and to enhance sensory feedback both proprioceptive and subtle sensing interoceptive feedback into the body and this all enhancing the relaxation response or this parasympathetic dominant state.

Five-Minute Implementation07:32

The recipe of the five Ps is something that's very doable and can happen in a very cohesive time frame of this five minute time frame. The simplest suggestion is to get down on the ground and put your pelvis up on something like a corgi ball. That's going to give you traction. So there's the palpation piece. You're already positioned in the recline and you do very, very slow breathing there. You're hopefully in a safe place where you're doing this. Then say to yourself "my breath is home" or "I embody my body."