Destressify Your Holidays

This session will help you de-stress your holidays and every day in between.

Stress. It's the response you get when your needs go unmet. In this session you'll learn about the 5 basic types of stress and learn tools for living a destressified life during the holiday season and beyond.

5 basic types of stress:

• Good stress: a short term stress that occurs when we perceive a stress as a positive vs negative, such as striving to reach a goal. Examples include playing sports, working toward completion of a project, pursuing a dream.
• Routine stress: the pressures we experience every day at home, at work, at meals and in between. Related to the daily pressures of work, family & responsibilities.
• Acute stress/short term: an experience that delivers an unfavorable surprise that requires a quick response such a getting a flat tire, spilling coffee on a new shirt or missing a connecting flight. Can also be triggered by life’s major challenges such as losing a job, a loved one, a marriage, our youth, or receiving a negative medical diagnosis. How we receive this information and what we do with it in the short term is our acute stress response.
• Chronic stress/long term: this type seems relentless, never ending and unavoidable. This includes the longer-term realities of the life challenges of loss, death, career and love. Feeling trapped or imprisoned in the land of stress.
• Traumatic stress: the result of an accident, assault, attack or devastating event that embeds itself so deeply within that even after the threat has subsided, all the physiological pain and emotional damage continues to live on within us. 

Learn about the Fight-or-Flight Response and the physical or emotional stress responses from your body:

• You start to perspire
• You start to breathe more rapidly
• Your blood pressure and your pulse begin to stress your heart
• Blood rushes into the muscles of your arms & legs
• Your stress hormones ( adrenaline, cortisol& glucagon) surge
• Your blood sugar spikes
• Blood leaves your digestive tract, so you stop digesting
• Your growth hormone and sex hormones suppress
• Your immune system shuts down
• Your platelets become plump & sticky, thickening your blood

“ 90 % of our physical toxicity is emotionally derived”, David Simon, MD

In this class, you'll learn tools for living a destressified life:

• Think SODA: Stop, Observe, Detach, Awaken
• Story in the third person
• Squeeze & Release
• Pattern Interrupt… 16 seconds
• Meditation