3 STEP Stress Relief Plan

You are going to be working every muscle in your body, nice and easily, in a very specific order. The goal is to alternate between agonists and antagonists from toe to head, allowing the concept of reciprocal inhibition to take place. This phenomenon allows you to actually turn off every one of your muscles, one by one, and decrease overall sympathetic nervous system stimulation.

Your sympathetic nervous system is your ‘Fight or Flight’ nervous system, and it controls your bodies release of adrenaline. By calming this system, you are controlling the prolonged state of being ‘hyper-alert.’

In order to do perform this exercise, alternate isometric contractions, as follows, for 10 seconds each:

In this step, we are going to focus on activating our parasympathetic nervous system, or our ‘rest and digest’ nervous system. By engaging our diaphragm with each and every breath, we are automatically doing so.

Diaphragmatic breathing is ‘belly breathing,’ so it’s easy to know if you are doing this right by making sure your shoulders are not rising up and your stomach is expanding with each breath as much as possible.

When you take a sniff breath, you’ll automatically use your diaphragm, so a strong sniff breath is a great way to guarantee you’re recruiting the right muscles. Just be sure you’re not raising up your shoulders.

The goal is to breathe in for 2 seconds, hold for 1 second, and purse your lips (like blowing into a thin coffee straw) as you exhale for 4 seconds. This will bias you towards activating your parasympathetic nervous system to a greater extent that your sympathetic, and your body will naturally relax.

Make sure to take 15 breaths and count this as one rep.

In step 3, we are focused on making better use of our subconscious minds through conscious to subconscious influence. The idea here is that your subconscious mind is much more powerful than your conscious mind, so filling your subconscious with thoughts of relaxation and peace is like a shortcut to happiness and lower stress levels.

Here’s how I recommend you do this:

First, think of a time when you were completely relaxed and loving life. This may be your childhood at some point, out by the swing set, or on your honeymoon walking by the beach. Once you have this idea in mind, it’s time to find something in your immediate environment that reminds you of this specific experience.

For example, I like to use my honeymoon as the example, when I was in Thailand with Karen, sitting by the pool and enjoying the sun. We were sipping on a cocktail and dipping our feet in the water as we gazed over the ocean and enjoyed the warm breeze pass over our skin.

In order to replicate this feeling of complete peace and happiness in my mind, all I have to do is think about all 5 senses and find one thing that is around me to describe in full detail. This one thing only needs to share one common characteristic with my honeymoon.

In this example, I might walk outside and sit on a bench while I dangle my feet, feel the breeze, and describe out loud the feeling of the wind on my skin. I’ll notice the lightness in my legs, the smile on my face, and the horizon in the distance. Verbally, I’ll explain those common characteristics in as vivid of detail as possible, creating a link between this and my honeymoon subconsciously at the same time.

Because the vision and experience of my honeymoon is so clear in my mind, I will be able to associate ‘physical’ things with a feeling. This feeling will trigger subconscious thought process and, theoretically, allow my brain to take over and do the rest.

The goal here is to just ‘hint at your subconscious’ about your fondest memory, as it goes to work making you happy and fulfilled. Your body will feel an immediate sense of relaxation and your worries will somehow seem less important.

Repeat this process for 15 reps, 3x per day. This is an endurance exercise, so it’s best to train for long-term stress relief. The most important piece is repetition.