In our often hectic everyday lives, it is crucial to know techniques that help us to deal with stress. Our brain and the autonomic nervous system play a central role in this, controlling every sensory experience and every action. Put simply, you can think of the sympathetic nervous system as your body's accelerator pedal, which steps on the gas when it senses an impending challenge or threat. The parasympathetic nervous system, on the other hand, is the brake pedal and brings you back to calm, ensuring inner balance and contentment.
If you are constantly exposed to stressors, your parasympathetic nervous system can no longer intervene to regulate and replenish your energy reserves. In the long term, this leads to tension, a feeling of being overwhelmed, loss of energy, nervousness, inability to concentrate and so on. In the long term, this can lead to exhaustion, sleep disorders, depression and burn-out.
However, if you can skilfully control these important functions, the "pedals" of your body, you will have learnt an important skill that can help you immensely in everyday life and with which you can control yourself well.
I am happy to share with you a few strategies from my day-to-day coaching that I have learnt to help you master stressful situations and even build resilience in the long term. Be it during an important financing round, a challenging meeting, tensions in your co-founder team or in your everyday life.
1st technique: panoramic view (also optical flow, from EMDR)
Our eyes are a direct part of the brain. They are part of the central nervous system and are therefore connected to the amygdala, our fear centre, via the retina. You can influence the amygdala via your field of vision: When you look into the distance or move your eyes back and forth on the horizon, you calm your fear centre.
When you move your eyes from right to left - the basis of the EMDR method - both hemispheres of the brain are stimulated to synchronise, which makes it easier to process stressful information and calms you down.
2nd technique: Physiological sighing
Breathing is one way for us to control the fear centre - in addition to the angle of vision. A super-fast method for calming down is the following: Double inhale through the nose, followed by a long exhale through the mouth (similar to how children sob). This breathing technique has been proven to effectively lower stress hormones. Just 2-3 times is enough to have a good effect. The great thing about it is that you always have your breath with you and can always use it consciously.
3rd technique: Express all your negative emotions.
Let out all the negative, demeaning, nasty things your brain has to say to you. You can do this right before an important event. Find a quiet place to do it. Do it until your brain has run out of nasty things to say - this can take up to 3-5 minutes. It's important that you don't censor yourself, but allow all your thoughts to flow. Advanced users can also try to be grateful to their mind for the thoughts, because it actually wants to protect us from worse things through these negative thoughts - even if that doesn't help us now.... Neurobiology shows that this exercise reduces blood flow to the limbic system - the emotional part of your brain that is responsible for all those doubts and negative thoughts.
