5 Practical Ways to Bring Down Stress in Your Body
The mind and body are mysteriously linked. We’ve all experienced how the mind affects the body, as stressful situations can cause your heart to pound or your stomach to turn. But the reverse is also true: the body can impact the mind. You can use your body’s intrinsic ability to calm itself to bring stress down. In an advice column for The Washington Post, a clinical psychologist who works with patients struggling with panic attacks suggests five concrete things to try to reduce stress in your body.
Jenny Taitz, PsyD, ABPP, is an assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles. She offers her patients five exercises to try to physiologically bring stress down:
Relax your face with a half-smile
Ever felt tension in a clenched jaw? Research has shown that your facial expression can also influence your emotional experience. A study involving nearly 4,000 people in 19 countries found that adopting a happy instead of a neutral expression could both “amplify and initiate feelings of happiness. In other words, smiling made people feel happier.
Instead of clenching your jaw when you feel stressed, Taitz suggests trying a technique called “half-smiling.’ It is used in dialectical behavioral therapy to help people cope with difficulty and distress. When you raise the outer corners of your mouth, it automatically relaxes your brow muscles. “Mindfully relaxing your face and adopting a serene expression brings on calm from the outside in, paving the way for accepting what you are facing,” explains Taitz.
Comfort yourself with touch
It’s a human reality that touch is comforting. Parents naturally pick up and hold their babies to soothe them when they cry. We often reach for a loved one’s hand in a scary situation.
When you are feeling stressed, you can soothe and comfort yourself “by placing your right hand above your heart and your left hand on your belly, which reduces levels of cortisol, your body’s main stress hormone,” says Taitz.
When participants in one study were asked to engage in a stressful situation – such as giving a short speech or counting backwards by 17 starting from 2,043 – those who used the hand-on-heart technique reduced cortisol in their bodies faster than those who did not.
Not only that, says Taitz, but “psychologically, this subtle self-compassionate gesture is also a nice reminder to bring kindness to yourself in hard moments.”
Expand your gaze
When adrenaline courses through your body and your natural fight-or-flight stress response takes over, your pupils dilate as well, “narrowing your field of vision and making it hard to find perspective, literally and figuratively,” says Taitz. You can widen your perspective by literally choosing a more expansive, panoramic view. Take time to notice three things in the distance. Expanding your point of view of one of many reasons why brief walks in nature can elevate your mood. Engaging your senses can also provoke a sense of gratitude in place of the stress you were feeling.
One study found that brief visual distractions – like looking at colorful slides – helped people break free from distressing mental loops.
Breathe through your nose
It’s amazing what physiological benefits come from closing your lips and breathing through your nose. Nasal breathing lowers blood pressure, combatting the high blood pressure that accompanies stress.
Breathing through your nose rather than your mouth enables your lungs to extract more oxygen from each breath, so you can breathe more deeply. Need help remembering to nose-breathe? James Nestor, author of Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, suggests placing a small square of surgical tape over your lips when you’re sitting at your desk or going to sleep at night.
Practice welcoming panic
Taitz, who works with patients suffering from panic attacks, recommends practicing bringing on feelings of panic when you are actually in a safe space to learn how to respond to them when they arise.
Think about the physiological responses you experience when you are stressed. Do you get butterflies in your stomach before giving a presentation? Do you experience breathlessness when you have to fly on a plane? Then try to recreate those sensations. For example, “you might bring on sensations of breathlessness and panic by slowly spinning in a circle for a minute, then intentionally hyperventilating, rapidly inhaling and exhaling for a minute,” she explains. Sit with the sensation. Repeat the exercise for several days.
By intentionally bringing on those panicky feelings, you come to recognize that they are simply fleeting, temporary sensations, which robs them of their power to make you feel overwhelmed. The next time those feelings arise in a real-life situation, you can recognize them for what they are – feelings and physical sensations that come and go – rather than assigning them outsize importance.
It’s a technique called interoceptive exposure, and you can practice it with an expert in cognitive behavioral therapy if it feels overwhelming to try by yourself.
Taitz shares that in her clinical work, many patients “who have struggled with stressful sensations have found that, with the right strategies and some practice, they can approach their life with more courage than they imagined.”
“If you know how to lean on it,” she adds, “your body can be your best pharmacy.”
Read the full advice article here.
Or check out Taitz’ book Stress Resets: How to Soothe Your Body and Mind in Minutes.
Taitz, Jenny. “5 ways to reduce stress in your body: By tapping into your body’s innate ability to calm itself, you can ward off stress symptoms before they strike.” The Washington Post, 23 Feb 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2024/02/23/reduce-stress-body-strategies-for-calm/.
Photo by Eli DeFaria on Unsplash