Stress is a necessary part of life. Muscles grow stronger after micro tears, relationships consolidate after rupture and repair cycles and, according to Stephen Kotler, attempting challenges that are just outside your skill level (104%) are triggers to enter flow states.

However, too much stress leads to physical and emotional problems.

Your capacity to access the benefits of stress is proportionate to the capacity of your nervous system to return to its homeostatic set point. (It's a whole other problem of reseting a set point that requires a lot of energy, which we unpack in our course).

The process of returning to your homeostatic state is called 'allostasis' which means 'achieving stability through change'. Being stressed out, overwhelmed, triggered and traumatised is called 'allostatic overload'.

Here is a tool to help reduce the allostatic load caused by stress that takes pretty much no effort since it takes just four breaths, and you have to breathe anyway. It was developed by Thich Nhat Hanh.

It goes like this. There is one word to speak internally on each inhalation and each exhalation for four breaths. When you speak each word, really try to feel the meaning of each of them.

In, Out

Deep, Slow

Calm, Ease

Smile, Release

There are two things I love about it, the first is that it works. The second is that I find it pretty hard to argue that I am too busy to do it.

I really hope it works for you as well as it does for me.

We begin the first course of Life Reference: McEwen BS. "Stressed or stressed out: what is the difference?" J Psychiatry Neurosci. 2005 Sep;30(5):315-8. PMID: 16151535; PMCID: PMC1197275.

Image: Lee, Do & Kim, Eosu & Choi, Man-Ho. (2014). Technical and clinical aspects of cortisol as a biochemical marker of chronic stress. BMB reports. 48. 10.5483/BMBRep.2015.48.4.275.