Q&A: Using Exercise to Complete the Stress Response Cycle
How much activity is enough and when should you do it?
Confidence and Joy is a newsletter by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Subscribe here. You can also follow Emily on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook!
Welcome to Amelia Nagoski’s first post here on Confidence & Joy. She’ll be answering your questions on Burnout, the book she wrote with Emily. (They’re twins!)
Emily is blue, Amelia is purple, the trees are green.
So much of Emily’s writing on sex includes talking about stress (the “brakes” in the Dual Control Model.) that she and Amelia wound up writing a whole book on the subject after hearing from readers of Come As You Are. It's called Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle.
Amelia will be here 1-2 times a month with concrete, helpful advice for those of you who are dealing with your own stress and burnout… which is kind of all of us these days.
Let's kick it off!
Q: I was wondering if walking for like 20-30 mins is enough to complete the stress cycle? Or does it have to be more vigorous? I struggle to get daily workouts at the gym into my schedule but I tend to walk home every day, and it's nice, and I was wondering if this would be effective enough. I also do yoga in the morning, but I don't know if you can complete the stress cycle before you've faced stressors during the day? which I suppose is my follow-up question: Do your morning workouts count as a way to end stress cycles?
Reassuring answer: If you’re doing your best with the resources you have available, it’s enough.
Challenging answer: You will never be done completing old incomplete stress cycles in your body, so there will never be “enough”
Complicated answer: Each day will not bring on a single stress cycle – the stress cycle is initiated at a variety of intensities over and over every day. Rarely, that fight-or-flight preparation might be useful, and you’ll have a chance to use the stress cycle to eliminate the stressor. But mostly we have to ignore the stress in our body while we smile and nod and advocate for legislation, or stand in line to vote, or appease the creepy dude so you can get away from him without creating a dangerous situation.
So that’s a lot of stress juice built up over the course of a lifetime. You can use physical activity to tell your body that it has to capacity to move you from danger to safety, to let it experience complete stress response cycles. There are lots of other ways, too, but you asked about exercise, so let’s talk about that.
How much and what kind of activity are entirely individual. You may only need one bike ride per week, or you may need to run every day, or you may need to lay in bed and tense all your muscles for two minutes every morning. The time of day might matter for you, but generally, any physical activity will help move your body out of stress and into a state of calm.
Or... it might not.
Some of us just don’t have the experience of feeling soothed and safe after exercise. It’s probably helping down at the level of our nervous system, but we don’t experience the feeling of benefit.
Remember that exercise guidelines produced by the Bikini Industrial Complex (podcast link) are mostly based on lab research that’s trying to measure a variety of outcomes. They’ve measured indicators of stress and come up with suggestions, but science is complicated. It’s important to keep in mind that, if you don’t respond the way the research suggests you might, that doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you, or even that there’s anything wrong with the research. It just means the typical reaction they measure is different from your reaction. Which is normal. Humans vary so widely in their differences that it would be astonishing if all the best research matches up with any individual’s experiences.
Here’s the real answer: listen to your body.
Remember a time when you ran a race, or submitted a project, or performed after a long rehearsal period – something exhausting but satisfying. A lot of people experience a feeling of victory and lightness. The sun shines a little brighter, they feel an overwhelming love for friends and family. They feel excitement to share the experience with someone they love. For me, it feels like I’m powerful and ready for anything. Above all, you feel safe.
If you can find that sensation, you can rate how you feel on a scale from “that feeling when I accomplished the thing!” to “I’m climbing up the walls with frustrated rage.” Check in before you exercise (or do any of the many other cycle-completing activities), then check in again after. Is there any change? It’s rare for a single activity to suddenly get all the way to that “completely safe” feeling. But if you just move a little closer toward it, that’s excellent.
Questions or comments? Please email my very tiny team at unrulywellness@gmail.com
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Signed copies of Come As You Are can be obtained from my amazing local bookseller, Book Moon Books.
Stay safe and see you next time.