GETGoing: Moving from "Fight or Flight" back to "Rest and Digest"
I’ve been receiving a lot of great feedback from friends and colleagues who have read my new book, GetReal, GetGOING: The Definitive Roadmap to Starting the Private Practice of Your Dreams. Just this morning a colleague sent me a text saying how much they appreciated the advice in Chapter 6, which focuses on staying strong through the years preceding one’s jump into private practice. For my non-therapist readers, these are the years when you’re paying your dues — finishing your thesis or dissertation before completing your degree or hustling in an assistant role at a high-performance business.
I am talking about the years that are heavy on both pressure (situations that require you to perform well) and stress (situations with too many demands and too few resources such as time, money or energy.) If you’re interested in learning more, there’s an article in Forbes about differentiating between the two, here.
Both situations place your sympathetic nervous system into a fight-or-flight response. Your heart pounds, your cortisol surges and your adrenaline flows. And each time this happens, you need to restore a state of balance by intentionally activating your parasympathetic nervous system, which slows your heart rate, relaxes you, and aids digestion. One thing you’ll read about a lot — including here! — is the importance of developing mindfulness practices that activate the parasympathetic nervous system, training your body to go from “fight or flight” back to “rest and digest.”
But let’s face it, in real life we don’t always get the chance to make that shift in real time. When we live with chronic stress for extended periods of time, our bodies can’t keep up with the constant “fight or flight” stimulation and become depleted.
When this happens, we can experience a range of physical symptoms, which some doctors describe as “adrenal fatigue.” Although this isn’t a formal medical diagnosis, it makes sense that when our adrenal glands constantly have to pump out cortisol, that it will tax those adrenals and affect our hormone levels overall. Even if this is not enough of a chemical shift to stand out with a blood test, we might experience chronic stress and depletion as:
Difficulty getting up in the morning
Only feeling refreshed from the sleep you get between 7 and 9 a.m.
Not feeling refreshed after a full night of uninterrupted sleep
Craving salty foods
Fatigue, lethargy, and ennui Dizziness or lightheadedness, especially upon standing quickly (due to low blood pressure)
Feeling mentally cloudy or foggy
Getting a second wind after the evening meal or after 10 p.m.
You might even experience other symptoms that you wouldn’t immediately think were a result of chronic stress. For years, I was plagued by migraines that no one could remedy until finally I was referred to a nutritionist who suggested lifestyle changes that went beyond mindfulness practices and recreation. She also laid out a plan for renewing my health through improved sleep habits, nutrition and nutritional supplements, and encouraged me to eradicate energy-draining elements from your life (if you don’t know who or what these are for you, you might need to discover them through therapy). Following my nutritionist’s guidelines, I finally met success in vanquishing the migraines, and I learned the importance of leading a healthy lifestyle as well as finding ways to relax and release tension.
Sometimes, after a prolonged period of stress, you need to do a bigger “reset” and to do that, you need to seek out a professional who can help guide you back to the path of peace, calm and good health that will leave you refreshed so that you can help others!
