Do you feel stressed a lot of the time?
Find it difficult to feel a connection with your partner?
We can only open ourselves up to connect with our partner when we feel calm and peaceful in our bodies and with ourselves.
I get it, every relationship goes through its ups and downs, rather like a roller coaster.
Is this you?
- Feel unsafe, on edge, overwhelmed out of control
- Not able to make clear decisions
- You don’t feel able to manage your life
- Often you don’t even feel safe in your body
- Beliefs that the world is dangerous threatening to harm you
- In your relationship, you feel defensive
- You don’t feel like you can connect with other people
Fight, flight, or freeze is a state of activation or when you’re in survival mode. In your stress, you feel threatened resulting in the fight or flight response. Many people live in this state for a prolonged period.
In the shutdown, your body looks/feels like this:
- Feel uninterested tired and exhausted, disconnected, and hopeless
- Feel uninspired
- Don’t even feel emotion at all
- You might feel hopeless you might just feel flat and nothing
- In your relationships, you might not even feel like you want to connect
- You might not share your feelings at all
- Might avoid relationships entirely
- Beliefs that the world is hopelessly pointless.
- Unfair, not even worth investing myself into it at all
When we are calm and our nervous system is calm which is the Parasympathetic or rest and digest, this state is peaceful and has a calm energy which is grounded and present. This is the ideal to live in if you’re in a relationship.
Being in your body looks like this:
- Attentive to the current moment, peaceful, relaxed, curious, and feel open for connection.
- Able to think to make clear decisions and manage your life.
- Spontaneous to be creative
- Beliefs in this state are that the world is safe and that is not out to harm me
- Relationships you feel safe around others, and able to make eye contact.
- Can be vulnerable and trust those around you
So how do we begin to do the work, cultivate awareness and go from stress to love?
- Learn how to be a witness to ourselves
- Be curious and slow down enough to notice
When your body is in those different states of nervous system activation it affects everything:
- From the way we think and believe about the world
- How we operate in it
- In our relationships
So, as we develop this awareness we can begin to extend compassion to ourselves.
Being able to return to a peaceful baseline where our nervous system is no longer activated.
So, the health of our nervous system really:
- Does contribute to our health
- Our ability to tolerate those stresses that we’re going to meet day in and day out.
The 6 Ways from Stress to Love
- Need to feed the body the nutrients it needs, making sure that we’re eating when our bodies are hungry and we’re eating nutrients that our body needs.
- Sleep, when we sleep is when our body and our brains and our nervous system repairs itself so to keep our nervous system healthy we have to make sure we’re getting the amount of sleep that our body needs.
- Movement and moving our bodies are so incredibly important because movement actually stimulates our nervous system in a healthy way.
- Stillness and then ideally, we’re allowing our body to calm we’re not moving anymore we’re allowing our heart rate to go down after that walk, after that run.
- Healthy flexibility deals with the stress in our life so movement and again this can be gentle moving of our bodies is incredibly, important for the health of our nervous system.
- Pattern of our breathing the flow of our breath actually can help our nervous system. Are we breathing, a lot of us constrict our breath hold, our breath we don’t allow our breath to flow evenly deeply and calmly through our bodies. A simple nervous system readjust is our breath, it’s a great indicator of the state of activation of our nervous system.
To go from stress to love takes practice and grounded balance, practicing this consistently, can help you each time you feel your body shift into that stressed-out state. This practice is vital in creating a balance in your body and then allowing the flow of love.
I support people to CHANGE, to design their best lives and relationships.
Providing Counselling, Coaching and online programs – https://powerofchange.com.au
Check out IGNITE an online program for couples to ignite their spark in their relationship. Download the Power of Change directly from your App Store or one of the links below
Listen to the podcast – Podcast 119 From Stress to Love
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