What helps with stress?
Many people wonder about this. In this article, you'll gain insight into how stress relates to your nervous system, and how you can use biofeedback to find stress relief that actually works.
Modern humans take in far more impressions in the course of a day than our ancestors did. Back then, there was no such thing as the infamous "time crunch", or the career drive that makes many people feel stressed at work.
But no matter how society changes around us, humans have exactly the same nervous system. And for the nervous system, it may one day be too much.
At the same time, many people wonder how they can cope with stress. But stress is not just another thing to manage. It's something to listen to.
No lion in the workplace
If you experience a lot of stress at work, it can actually trigger the same response in your nervous system that our ancestors had when faced with a dangerous lion. The big difference is that there are rarely any dangerous animals in modern offices. But the response is real, nonetheless.
Prolonged stress and stress-related ailments can be a sign that your nervous system is telling you that the limit has been reached.
The good news is that your nervous system can be trained to become more robust. And you can learn to respond more appropriately to the stress signals your nervous system sends you.
The nervous system's two settings: Fight or flight and Rest and digest.
When you relax, your nervous system is in what we call Rest and digest mode. As the term implies, this is where you relax, the body digests, restores and repairs.
However, when you experience stress or danger, the sympathetic nervous system is activated and you experience the fight or flight response.
If you experience stress-related symptoms over a long period of time, it may be a sign that the fight or flight response has become too dominant and that your nervous system needs help to regulate.
So the question is, how do you do it in practice?
Our nervous system speaks through breathing, temperature and muscle tension
How you breathe affects how you feel. When you're stressed, your breathing becomes faster and more shallow.
The good news is that you can help your body go into Rest and Digest through conscious breathing. By breathing deeply and slowly with your stomach, you're letting your body know that there's no danger.
Two other signals from the body that you may notice are:
- Hot or cold hands and feet: When you're relaxed, the blood vessels in your skin dilate and provide better blood circulation to your hands and feet. Therefore, both hands and feet are warmer when you are relaxed than when you are stressed.
- "High shoulders": The term high shoulders is something we can all associate with stress. Are you aware of how often you experience muscle tension or tightness in your everyday life?
How to reduce stress: Become aware of your body's signals and take them seriously
Biofeedback is a method that both doctors and therapists have used to treat stress and an overactive nervous system for a long time. It's a method that doctors support precisely because its effects have been so well documented through decades of research.
In practice, biofeedback means that, with the help of technology like Cenli, you are guided to a breathing rhythm that directly responds to your body's signals. That's why Cenli comes with two sensors that measure your heart rate, muscle tension and temperature in real time at the tip of your finger.
In other words, the feedback part of biofeedback means that you see the signals your body is giving in real time and are guided to a personalized breathing rhythm that relieves stress and calms the nervous system.
In addition to calming your nervous system there and then, over time you will also build a more resilient nervous system that is better equipped to deal with everyday stress.
Hear what neurologist Einar Kinge thinks about biofeedback here.
With Cenli, you can get biofeedback at home for the first time
There are many tools that measure stress signals, but having access to biofeedback at home, which has long been earmarked for the doctor's office with expensive machines, is something completely new and unique.
Here you can read more about exactly how a session with Cenli works.
We are incredibly proud of our product, which makes it possible for more people to use this well-documented method to relieve stress. And with equipment that takes up no more space than an iPhone!
Want to know more? This is what Cenli looks like!
