(Blog) Surprising Benefits from Stress

Stress can come in many forms, from an overload of small everyday things, through to intense life-threatening situations. Today I’m looking at the intense types of stress – and interestingly, how one of these can actually be good for us…  

Surprising Benefits from Stress
As you may feel every day, ours is a stressed society, and it seems to be getting more stressful all the time. An underlying tension in many things so that we can feel constantly on edge, and trying to relax so we can handle it all.
Since most of the time we are trying to minimise stress, you may not realise that if we can relax with one type of stress it can actually even benefit us.
I too have had to remind myself sometimes to just go with the waves of intensity rather than labelling them as stress and thinking they are ‘bad’, and when I do, my body’s reaction to them alters.

Could thinking of stress a little differently, so you weren’t stressed about feeling it even help you to relax and make the most of these moments? Or even enjoy them?

When I was in my early 20’s I understood this for the first time when I went through a very intensely stressful situation, and what I learnt from it changed my view of myself and of stress for ever.
It happened when a yacht I was crewing on was in the path of a super typhoon and I’ll share more on this below.

Interesting even just shifting our view of stress can make a world of difference. For when we try and stop ourselves feeling something it often becomes even more intense, yet if we relax as much as we can, the intensity can change.

When is Stress good?
Wondering when you would ever want to think of stress as good?
It is surprising, but in certain circumstance it can have many benefits…
Once you understand the difference, you may even go looking for situations that trigger this feeling so you can enjoy the benefits of it. There are many people who do this.

This is only for a particular type of stressful situation, short term ones, and below I explore the affect of long-term and extreme stresses that do harm us, and how to reduce past stress from affecting you now.

So, what are the possible benefits of stress?

It needs to be short lived. Stress that is beneficial only lasts for minutes or hours, and where we have a feeling of being in control so still have some authority in our life.

At these times we may see the situation as a challenge, maybe one we have chosen or not, but at least one where we can look at it as something that we can weather and maybe even grow from. We may even feel inspired by what we are doing or the outcome, even though we also terrified of doing it.

Stress like this can happen in many situations – exams; public speaking; doing a high risk intense activity like mountain climbing, bungee jumping or parachuting; telling someone we really like how we feel about them; setting off on an adventure; leaving your job to start a business; changing jobs; moving house; booking in for a workshop or retreat to change your life even though your don’t know how you will feel after; facing a deep fear; new action.

Interestingly the stress from these types of activities, even though it can feel very intense at the time, is actually beneficial – it boosts our immune system, improves our memory, stimulates brain cell growth, increases our courage and our feeling of confidence in ourselves.

Many of our primal instincts thrive and expand under this type of stress. We were built to be able handle it, and grown from it, in small doses.

And remember, it is affected by how we look at it.

Adventurers, adrenaline junkies, entrepreneurs, and people who love risk in its many forms, know that excitement can be another face for fear.
So if an intense situation happens and we find our heart racing, feel tension in our body rising – then also notice one of the bonuses, you are becoming much more alert in the moment.
The symptoms we are feeling are our body preparing for action. To run or fight. We can then choose how we feel about these physical reactions – if we are able to see them as a natural response, one that can even help us, then they are much healthier for us.

Stress from challenges will make us stronger, better able to handle more intense situations in the future. It increases our confidence in ourselves, our knowledge that we did and can not only survive but even thrive in situations that before we may have thought would destroy us.

This is what I discovered when I was crewing on a wood yacht crossing across the Pacific and we survived a super typhoon.

There were three of us on our boat and it was my first ocean passage.
A few weeks into our three-month trip to Hawaii, just south of Japan, our weather-fax showed a typhoon had changed direction and was now heading our way, fast.
Our boat sailed at 3 mph and the typhoon was travelling at 100’s miles per hour. No way to avoid it.

So we battened down the hatches, made thermos’ of black coffee and waited. The storm built and built till it was battering us with screaming winds of over 150 mph, and throwing our boat up and down 50‘ waves.
At the top of each wave our boat was pushed almost on its side, and then would right herself as we slid down the steep edge into the trough, before the next wave lifted us up and smashed us over again.

It was the most terrifying thing I had been through. And we were lucky. Our captain was very experienced and kept his cool, and the boat was built to survive extreme weather.

During the 12 hours of the height of the storm my heart raced so fast that I thought I would have a heart attack.
But after some hours I realized that my heart was surviving, like our boat, and the fear wasn’t going to kill me.
Eventually we came through the eye of the storm, and out the other side with only the loss of our dingy.

The next day I discovered something I never expected…
The shift that can come after we pass through an intense challenge.

A grey day dawned after our sleepless night. I was on the helm and with the first light I could now see the waves had dropped to 30’, and the winds were down to 60 mph.
Still an big storm but so much less than the day before. And then an amazing thing happened.

Our heavy boat suddenly shook off her usual slow pace, seemed to find her natural element, and she sped up and began surfing the waves.
They were still very big waves, but now it was exciting.

Yet it was the change in me that really opened my eyes – all my fear of the day before was gone.
Waves and wind that would have terrified me before the typhoon were now just exciting.
I felt fearless and thrilled as I steered our boat surfing down those waves all day as we made our way out of the wake of the typhoon.

For very intense experiences can push us beyond our previous boundaries, and even when we aren’t seeking them, can transform our lives.
They give us a gift of increasing our courage, our belief in ourselves. Knowing we faced a terrifying situation and survived, we can find more belief in ourselves that we can do anything,

Now try looking back on one of these types of stressful times in your life.
An experience that was this type of beneficial type of stress. How did you feel about it at the time, and might you might look differently at it now?

This is the type of stress that can be good for us…

And then there is the other type of intense stress – long lasting and traumatic stresses, the ones that debilitate us, where the affects of them can stay with us for years. Can even lead to PTSD.
These are completely different and they are harmful to our health.

Below I’m sharing some techniques that you can use to help you become free from the lasting affects of these.

Stress that Harms us –
Harmful types of stress comes when it is long lasting or we are in extreme danger, where we have no control over the situation and feel powerless – this can have a lasting and detrimental affect on our health and lives.

If we feel we have some control in a situation, then we are less negatively affected by it, but if stressful situations happens in childhood, when our life and safety was in the hands of others, then the stress was more intense, and can stay locked in our body and so can be easily re-triggered by less threatening situations later in life.
Or as adults if we are in an intensely threatening situation that feels out of out control, especially if it is long lasting.

Research shows this type of stress affects the hippocampus in our brain, reducing the brain cells generated. This makes sense when you consider that energetically the base of our body, the perineum area, holds our survival and safety fears, and when stressed this area contracts, blocking flow of energy up our spine and into our brain. In my Healing the Deep – AcuEnergetics® treatments much of my work focuses on the lower body for we still all carry varying amounts of stress there from past situations.

Stress can even affect our DNA, so when people have been through extreme long-term stress (like famine, war and holocaust survivors) their body passes the memory of these onto future generations. The DNA are trying to prepare the next generation for a threat, but as it is usually no longer happening it just increases their everyday stress and hyper-alertness.

High level of chronic, long-lasting stress can be very harmful to our body and can lead to illness – it can suppress our immune system, cause feeling of brain fog, reduce memory, increase anxiety and worry, restrict blood vessels and increase risk of heart disease, reduce fertility, lower libido, lower the brain chemicals that helps us feel happy so leading to feeling down or depressed, and can even shrink our brain.

Stress may also disturb our sleep, or lead us to drink more alcohol, take more stimulants, eat more junk food, smoke, these add to the stress in our body.

So how to help reduce feelings of stress?
You can help reduce the affects of recent, and past, intense stress in a number of key ways;

•  Sleep – our body needs 7-8 hours of sleep to process all that happened to us the day before, consolidate memories, repair itself and grown new cells. Its best on most nights go to sleep by 23.00 at the latest, and wake when your body is ready. Sleep is a key medicine.

• Meditation – sitting and silently feeling your breath, or practicing other quiet meditations, for 5-15 min first thing in the morning will give you a break from your mind’s busy thoughts, and your whole day will feel easier.

• Breath – whenever you feel stress returning, pause and take a few deep slow breathes. Its seems so simple, and yet it can transform how you feel about a situation.

• Physical exercise is very important – daily walking, yoga, gym, swimming, team sport – all can help.

• And then consider what the spiritual teacher Ekhart Tolle said…

‘Stress can be defined as the ‘resistance to what is’ and the desire for life to be different’.

This is not say you shouldn’t wish things to shift, but before you focus on that, try dropping back into the moment you are in, the ‘present’, just be in it and feel what is happening around you now. Then you can take action if you wish but keep connected with the moment you are in, and this will reduce feelings of stress. For our body feels more stress when we leave the present moment, and focus on the future or past.

If you feel you may be carrying affects from long-term old stress in your body, maybe you had a stressful or abusive childhood, or went through an intense trauma as an adult, then the Healing the Deep work I do (with the accurate energy medicine of AcuEnergetics®) can free the affects of intense past stress at a deep energetic and cellular level.
These treatments can free you so your body no longer reacts to the world through its memory of the past, no longer viewing your life through a filter of extreme stress  – then you can really relax, can truly live in the present, and enjoy all opportunities that life gives you.

If you would like to find more about this, email me for more details.

Look out for any hidden ‘hungry ghosts’ from past stress that could still be affecting your life now, and try the steps above to start releasing them, so you can become free to enjoy living, loving and succeeding in your life.

And with the stress that can be good for you, the shorter challenges, don’t be too quick to label these.
Instead stay open, breath and focus on the courage and strength they could bring you as you pass through them.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. You can share them under this vlog, on FaceBook, or message me…

With love,

Cassandra Punita