How to stay calm in chaos

Editor's note: This article is a reprint. It was originally published on June 15, 2017.

According to the American Psychological Association's annual Stress in America survey, 24 percent of American adults experienced extreme stress in 2015.^One Additionally, reported average stress levels have increased over the years, with money, work, family responsibilities and personal health issues being the top causes of significant stress.

Even if there is no major stressful event like a job loss, health issue, or death in the family, most people experience stress on a daily basis. It is a fact of life in the 21st century, and if you do, it can quickly derail your healthy habits and goals.

A reminder on why it's important to stay calm

Stress is often thought of as a psychological problem, but stress is certainly not just in your head. Whenever the chaos of life starts to bother you—whether you missed your train this morning or are worried about an unpaid bill—excessive stress hormones, including cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine, are released.

This is what should happen when your body is preparing to face a real or perceived threat. The problem is that in today's world, most of us face such “threats” 24 hours a day. That means the stress response is overheated and unbalanced. It basically won't turn off.

It doesn’t take long for this potentially beneficial system to backfire. As stress becomes chronic, the immune system becomes increasingly insensitive to cortisol, and since inflammation is partly regulated by this hormone, this decreased sensitivity heightens the inflammatory response and allows inflammation to spiral out of control.²

Chronic inflammation is a hallmark of many chronic diseases. During this time, almost every system in the body is not functioning properly. You may not be able to sleep, you may catch colds more often, your asthma or eczema may become worse. All of this is the price paid for ignoring the body's tranquility.

Relaxation techniques for structures

Almost everyone can benefit from an arsenal of relaxation techniques. There are many to choose from, and you can choose the one that works best for you, but the goal is the same: to help your body cope with stress by inducing the relaxation response in your body.

The relaxation response is the counterpart to the stress response. Specifically, it is a physical state of deep rest that changes our physical and emotional responses to stress, and can actually counteract the detrimental effects of stress.^three Triggering your body’s built-in relaxation response can actually change gene expression for the better, according to a study in PLOS ONE:⁴

“Induction of the relaxation response (RR) is an effective therapeutic intervention to counteract the negative clinical effects of stress in disorders including hypertension, anxiety, insomnia, and aging.

RR enhances the expression of genes involved in energy metabolism, mitochondrial function, insulin secretion, and telomere maintenance, and reduces the expression of genes involved in inflammatory responses and stress-related pathways.”

Health Benefits of Learning to Relax

Relaxation techniques can help you cope with the challenges of everyday life, as well as help you deal with certain health conditions or stressful situations. For example, these techniques can help lower blood pressure, relieve insomnia, and ease symptoms of depression.⁵ It also has the effect of reducing stress hormones, lowering heart rate, improving mood, and relieving muscle tension and pain.

Relaxation techniques can also be used to relieve symptoms such as nausea and reduce pain, including during labor and childbirth. In fact, the results are impressive when you enter a state of deep relaxation, where your body is free from tension and your mind is free from distracting or negative thoughts.

For example, participation in a stress management program has been shown to alter tumor-promoting processes at the molecular level in women with breast cancer.⁶ Genes responsible for cancer progression (such as inflammatory cytokines) were downregulated, while genes associated with a healthy immune response were upregulated. In other words, relaxation may help fight cancer.⁷ Additionally, relaxation can help:

• Boost your immune system — Meditation is known to have a significant impact on immune cells.⁸ Research has shown that relaxation exercises increase natural killer cells in older adults, boosting their resistance to tumors and viruses.
• Fertility – Studies have shown that women are more likely to get pregnant when they are relaxed than when they are stressed.⁹
• Heart Health – Relaxation through meditation (practiced once or twice a day for 3 months) significantly reduced blood pressure and psychological distress, and also improved coping skills in people at high risk for hypertension.¹⁰
• Mental Health – People who meditate experience reduced psychological distress, depression, and anxiety.¹¹
• Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) – When people with IBS practiced relaxation meditation twice a day, their symptoms (bloating, belching, diarrhea, constipation, etc.) significantly improved.^12,13

Examples of relaxation techniques

There are a number of ways to trigger your body’s relaxation response and help you cope with the effects of everyday stress, including:¹⁴

A study by Dr. Herbert Benson, a cardiologist and founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and colleagues found that people who practice relaxation techniques like yoga and meditation long-term have more disease-fighting genes “turned on,” including those that protect against pain, infertility, high blood pressure, and rheumatoid arthritis.¹⁵

Deep breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which induces the relaxation response, but even just 10 minutes of sitting quietly and blocking out the distractions around you can induce the relaxation response.¹⁶ You can use EFT (also called tapping). Studies have shown that EFT significantly increases positive emotions, such as hope and joy, and reduces negative emotional states, including anxiety.¹⁷

EFT is particularly effective in treating stress and anxiety because it specifically targets the amygdala and hippocampus, which are the parts of the brain that help us determine whether something is a threat or not. You can see a demonstration of how to use EFT in the video below.

Reframe your thoughts to cut through the confusion

Using relaxation techniques is something you should work on every day, whether it’s a yoga session, EFT, or meditation. The idea is to give your body time to relax and reset into a calm state on a regular basis.

You can also use these techniques in stressful situations, such as practicing breathing exercises or using EFT. In stressful moments, it can help you reframe your thoughts and regain control of the situation, at least on a personal, mental, and emotional level. Greatist Life Coach Columnist Susie Moore shares some helpful tips for doing this.¹⁸