I’m going to talk about my experience in lowering my stress levels. This is ongoing work for me. However, I’ve had measurable success, and I wanted to share my progress so far.

I read the book The Stress Prescription by Dr. Elissa Epel. (https://amzn.to/3GB49sb) I discovered her on the Huberman podcast.

She begins with the theory that there are different base line stress levels, going from blue, to green, to yellow, to red.

Blue is only achievable via meditation or sleep, when you’re actually recovering from stress. Green is the level where you want to live in. Yellow is chronic stress, which is where I’ve been for a long while. Red is when the kitchen is actually on fire.

The premise is that if you can move your baseline from yellow to green, when something stressful happens (because it always will) you won’t rise up into red as easily, and you’ll drop back down more quickly. If you’re living in yellow, everything becomes an emergency.

The seven day approach gives you something new or different to work on every day. I’ve managed to incorporate several of the things she suggested into my everyday life, and they’ve made a measurable difference for me. Remember, YMMV.

Day one is setting a reminder three times a day to sit, close your eyes, take three deep breaths, then do a quick full body scan, relaxing the places where you’re holding stress. She has a lot of data as to the effectiveness of this (lots of studies) and all I can say is that it’s working for me. When I do a check in, I’m not completely tense everywhere in my body. Heck, there are even times now when I’m barely tense.

Day two is letting go of the stressors that you don’t need to hold onto. I actually didn’t have a lot of those. I’m pretty good at saying, “Fuck off” to the things I don’t need to do.

Day three is changing your attitude. Instead of thinking about stressful situations and getting anxious and scared, go into them thinking that they’re challenges. This is going to take a lifetime of work for me. It’s helped some, but it isn’t something I can turn around in a day. Or a week. Or even a month.

Day four is exposing yourself to minute amounts of stress regularly, while keeping your mind calm. I’ve been using a breathing practice session from Wim Hof on a daily basis.

This one has been really interesting for me. The first six-eight times, I struggled. I did not feel calm afterwards.

Abruptly, between one session and the next, this changed. A couple minutes after I finished a session, a tremendous sense of calm washed over me. It was AMAZING.

I’ve now gotten to the point where sometimes I think these sessions are fun. Very strange. But pretty cool, too. And the relaxation I feel afterwards it awesome.

Day five is about getting yourself into nature, as well as seeking a sense of feeling awe. I’m out in nature all the damned time. I live in nature. That sense of awe is really difficult for me because I have to DEAL with nature, with trees falling and critters and ants, etc. I’m still working on it.

Day six is a meditation getting you to achieve that blue state of deep relaxation. It’s a five minute meditation that quite frankly, hasn’t really worked for me yet. I haven’t been doing it every day, either. I’ve tried it a couple of times but so far, it feels as though it’s doing the opposite for me. Instead of relaxing me, I’m getting tense. I can watch my resting heart rate increase. So I’ll keep trying it, keep trying to find a way to make it work.

Day seven is bracketing your day with joy. Waking up in the morning and asking yourself these three things:

• What am I looking forward to?
• What am I grateful for?
• What social interaction am I having today?

Then, before you go to bed, asking yourself these three things:

• What brought me joy today?
• What am I grateful for?
• What positive social interaction did I have? Did I make someone smile?

I’ve tried doing just a gratitude practice before, but it’s never really worked for me. However, asking these three questions morning and night has made a difference. Particularly on the mornings when my mind has gone straight into worry as soon as I’ve woken up. I’ve had to reel back my thoughts, redirect them. It’s made waking up better, more calm. I had never before realized how tense I made myself every morning.

How do I know that doing these things is working? That my baseline stress level is actually going down?

Pretty easy, actually. I had a stressful week last week, going to visit my niece.

One of the signs that I’m in chronic stress has been that I’m hungry all the damned time (because I’ve been stressed all the damned time).

Yet, this last week, I wasn’t hungry all the time. I was able to eat a reasonable amount of food, and not overeat. I can’t tell you how NICE it is to not always feel as though I’m starving and I always have to eat.

Was last week stressful? Yes. The Wim Hof breathing sessions took a lot more effort. It was a challenge to redirect my thoughts into positive things every morning, finding something that I was actually looking forward to. I was more tense when I did my check ins. I also did a lot of check ins, releasing the stress and tension I was holding in my body.

However, before sleep, I could pretty easily find something that had brought me joy. I was in nature every day (walking the dog) and that was something I enjoyed. I wrote every day, which was both a little stressful as well as joyful.

Will these practices work for you? I can’t guarantee that. I just know that this work has been invaluable for me, and I plan on continuing to lower my baseline stress level, and to keep it low, so that I don’t completely fall apart (again) the next time my life is turned upside down.

So how about you? How is your stress level? Do you think these sorts of things would help you decrease your stress?