How to Finally Shed Stress Without Meditating All Day: Empower the Heart as Conductor
Welcome back to this series on How to Shed Stress Without Meditating All Day, using the BALM approach to a body-based technique that gives our minds a break.
Last time we presented research on the heart as much more than a pump – it’s a master conductor of many systems in our body. We also learned that many mind-body techniques are effective at coping with stress, but those based on the heart have shown over twice as effective.
I’m hearing some interesting reactions from people to these insights. Many of us share the practical view that while there are many things we 'probably should' be doing to cope with stress, our minds need a break and not more to manage.
Fortunately the BALM technique activates the body to prompt a powerful reset, and can also contribute to valuable new insights, intuition, and wisdom.
The Hidden Dangers
Many times the first insights are the most critical hurdle, because of the way we tend to push chronic stress out of our awareness. One common reason for blocking our inner awareness is to limit pain.
One reason for this is the stress response is partly innate and partly learned in early childhood, and all these years of reinforcement get wired into your nervous system.
We can get so used to our amped-up state and repetitive thoughts, we can tend to think it’s normal to have this drain going in the background. Being relaxed feels boring, and we continually activate our cortisol and adrenaline just to feel normal. Until we ride the adrenaline a little too long and experience burnout, serious illness, or injury.
Meanwhile the hidden tragedy is the way our denial of stress creates a barrier that undermines our intuition, courage, and passion. So we may be reasonably healthy and happy, but unable to take the next critical steps in our life.
Read on for the fascinating story behind this smart body awareness, how you may have blocked yours, and why renewing it is critical for your energy, health, and potential.
The Known Dangers
The consequence of stress is, even though in our limited awareness we may feel fine, inside our bodies the impact can be considerable.
When we perceive stress, our body releases cortisol and other hormones that act on nearly every tissue in our body. Hundreds of studies show how stress alters immune function – that’s why we can come down with a cold after periods of high stress.
Research shows that even one 5-minute episode of anger is so stressful that it can impair your immune system for more than 6 hours! Prolonged bouts of anger can take a toll on the body in the form of high blood pressure, stress, anxiety, headaches, and poor circulation.
And although we may not realize it, this impaired immune function also impacts autoimmune disease, cancer prevention, depression, and inflammation in general.
The Shortfall of Mindfulness
In Step 3, we detailed how mindfulness practices like meditation have been found to produce significant stress benefits within 8 weeks’ time. Anxiety decreased significantly, and the perceived ability to handle stress or novel experiences, and to exercise self-care improved significantly.
And yet mind-body techniques based on the heart have been developed that improve the body’s response to stress by 240%. In addition to experiencing the focused state of caring, compassion, or appreciation, participants also reported a general state of well-being, relaxation, and increased energy which often lasted throughout the day.
The only problem is the first step is often described as essentially holding an intention for a positive or calm emotional state, to activate a shift to a more coherent heart pattern. And then ‘self-generate’ feelings and emotions.
While we value these results tremendously, we believe that it can be very hard to self-generate positive feelings and emotions. And if accomplished, requires a lot of prompting and oversight from our mental executive function. And so naturally these approaches can stall if the mind is already overloaded with things to remember and manage.
Our perspective is the mind can use a break. For some of us, it might be time for a different way.
And it turns out we can use body awareness and ‘felt sense’ as feedback, to build a powerful mind-body reset into muscle memory. This allows the body to monitor and shed stress proactively, letting the mind rest and get back to other (likely neglected) priorities.
But before we get too far ahead, first a little credit for this amazing research along with background on heart coherence and how the heart acts as the body’s master conductor.
First, we’re going a bit deeper into the science of the heart, including the paradigm-shifting research on why variability in heart rate is healthy.
Heart-Mind Circuitry
Some of the first researchers to examine the interactions between the heart and brain were John and Beatrice Lacey. During 20 years of research throughout the 1960s and ’70s, they observed that the heart communicates with the brain in ways that significantly affect our behavior and performance.
The Laceys identified a neural pathway and mechanism from the heart to the brain that controls the brain’s electrical activity. This was called the vagus nerve. Then in 1974, French researchers showed that stimulating this nerve reduced the brain’s electrical response to about half its normal rate.
This suggested that the communication between the heart and brain were much more complex, and the heart seemed to have its own type of logic and acted independently of the signals sent from the brain.
From Static View to Dynamic Reality
Back in physiologist and researcher Walter Bradford Cannon’s 1930’s view, when our nervous system is aroused, the mobilizing part (sympathetic) energizes us for fight or flight. This drives an increase in heart rate. And the opposite calming mode of the nervous system (parasympathetic) calms us down and slows the heart rate.
And plus, the theory goes, all of our inner systems are activated together when we are aroused and calm down together when we are at rest, and the brain is in control of the entire process. This was also the basis of the concept of homeostasis, and since then the entire study of physiology has revolved around the principle that all cells, tissues, and organs strive to maintain a static or constant steady-state condition.
However, with modern sensor technologies, it has become abundantly clear that life in reality is much more dynamic. It relies on continuous, bi-directional interaction among multiple neural, hormonal, and mechanical control systems. These dynamic and interconnected systems are never truly at rest and are certainly not static.
For example, we now know that the normal resting rhythm of the heart is highly variable rather than monotonously regular, which was the assumption for many years.
It turns out this surprising behavior is overlooked when a heart rate is averaged over time, but is readily apparent when is examined on a beat-to-beat basis.
This unexpected heart rate variability (HRV) leads to important implications as will be discussed later.
This fluctuation can be influenced to our benefit, even though we usually don’t feel it. How can this work? To understand this, we need to delve further into this fascinating science.
Heart Rate Variability: The Heart as Conductor
As human beings, we are not limited to fight, flight, or freeze responses. We can self-regulate and boost social behaviors when we encounter challenges, stressors, and disagreements. But this healthy function of our social engagement system depends upon the proper functioning of the vagus nerve and the ANS.
The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is the part of the nervous system that controls the body’s internal functions, including heart rate, gastrointestinal tract, and many endocrine glands. The ANS also controls many other vital functions such as respiration, interaction with immune and hormonal system functions, and mental and emotional states.
But the heart is a master conductor, and heart rate variability (HRV) is an indicator of self-regulatory capacity, autonomic function, and health as discussed next. That’s a lot of conducting!
Physical Roles
Research shows a certain amount of heart rate variability (HRV) indicates healthy heart function and inherent self-regulatory capacity, adaptability, and resilience. While too much instability such as arrhythmia is detrimental, too little variation indicates chronic stress, age-related depletion, or inadequate function and energy utilization.
As far back as 1965 HRV has been monitored in neonatal care after it was found that reductions in HRV indicated fetal distress before any changes occurred in heart rate.
Reduced HRV has been found to be a higher risk factor of fatal heart attack than other known risk factors.
Reduced HRV has also been shown to predict autonomic neuropathy in diabetic patients before the onset of symptoms.
HRV is known to decline with age, and low age-adjusted HRV has been confirmed as a strong, independent predictor of future health problems in both healthy people and in patients with known coronary artery disease.
Research & Training Results
In addition to clinical applications, HRV coherence feedback training often is used to support self-regulation skill acquisition in educational, corporate, law enforcement, and military settings. Several systems that assess coherence in the user’s heart rhythms are available.
These tools and techniques often facilitate profound shifts in perception, emotion, and awareness. For example:
A study of 41 fighter pilots found a significant correlation between heart-rhythm coherence and higher levels of performance and as well as lower levels of frustration in flight simulator tasks.
Studies with police officers and correctional officers have shown reductions in overall anger, stress, hostility, and fatigue.
Other studies have demonstrated significant improvements in the functional capacity of patients with congestive heart failure.
Emotional Conducting Roles
Much of the research on heart rate variability (HRV) has studied the influence of emotions on the nervous system (ANS).
They find having greater heart rate variability correlates with having greater emotional resiliency and behavioral flexibility, reflecting an individual’s capacity to self-regulate and effectively adapt to changing social or environmental demands.
And greater HRV has even been shown to help inhibit unwanted memories and intrusive thoughts!
Benefits of Coherence
Fairly recent findings on coherence show, that the state of our body determines the quality and stability of the feelings and emotions we experience. These body states are either coherent (positive) – meaning efficient, optimal, free-flowing, and easy, or not coherent (negative) – such as anger, anxiety, and frustration.
Of course, these findings reinforce what we already know intuitively – positive emotions feel better, increase synchronization of the body’s systems, and enhance energy efficiency and effectiveness.
Sustaining Coherence
Research shows that when people are able to self-activate a positive or calming feeling rather than just remain focused on their breathing, they enjoy the shift in feeling and are able to sustain high levels of coherence for much longer time periods.
However, we learned that while coherence is a natural human state that can occur spontaneously, sustained episodes are generally rare. Using the breathing methods alone may only induce coherence for brief periods.
And to extend periods of heart coherence may require that you actively self-generating positive emotions like heart-felt love, gratitude or compassion.
This can be hard because we first have to break the typical stress response that is a habit of the mind. Breath is a good beginning, but what comes next to sustain the process?
Goal: Deeper Body-Based Executive Function or Muscle Memory
Thus the BALM Technique was designed to create a ‘muscle memory’ of the positive feeling in the body, bringing a body-based prompt and enjoyment to sustain coherence for longer periods of time.
And turns out, this is how our body is supposed to work!
Use Your Whole Mind (Psst it’s Embedded in Your Body)
There is a substantial body of work showing that our thinking, decision making, and social interaction is largely embedded in neural systems in our body, and involves capabilities called neuroception and interoception.
Neuroception describes a sense of distinguishing whether situations or people are safe, dangerous, or life-threatening – needed to form positive attachments and social bonds.
Interoception refers to the awareness of body sensation and the ability to comfortably track sensation, and it’s a key component of the body’s calming mechanisms and our sense of well-being. Conditions of extreme stress can break down this highly sensitive mechanism. The loss of interoception, of the ability to correctly respond to “gut feelings” or correctly interpret social cues, results in a person no longer being able to manage the receiving of emotional or ‘gut-level’ feedback.
Research on PTSD
Pioneering PTSD researcher Bessel van der Kolk M.D., author of The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, explores “the extreme disconnection from the body that so many people with histories of trauma and neglect experience”. He draws on his own practice and on research across neuroscience, developmental psychopathology, and interpersonal neurobiology which examines how our own behavior affects the psychoemotional and neurobiological states of those close to us.
Van der Kolk illuminates one of the most insidious effects of trauma is it disrupts our ability to know what we really feel, to trust our gut feelings. This mistrust creates an antagonistic relationship with our own bodies. It also makes us hyperalert and likely to misperceive threats where there are none.
Van der Kolk clarifies how trauma makes us feel unsafe inside our bodies, lacking that comfortable connection with our inner sensations, that trust to give us accurate information to feel in charge of our body, feelings, and self.
As a result, we chronically suffer extreme inner discomfort, visceral flashback, and bewildering sensory shifts that can either shut us down or send us into a panic. Until we find a way to calm this overwhelming overload, we become masters at ignoring our gut feelings and numbing our inner awareness. We can learn to hide from ourselves.
When we’ve blocked our inner awareness, when we can’t comfortably notice what is going on inside us, we become vulnerable to fear and can develop a fear of fear itself.
Research on ‘Felt Sense’: a Key Tool
Another fascinating body of research describes ‘felt sense’ as a key ally.
In his research, Eugene Gendlin found that the single most essential driver of success in therapy was clients’ ability to access a nonverbal, intuitive body-feel for issues and shifts happening in their bodies, what he called ‘a felt sense’. This “felt sense” isn’t just thinking, nor is it emotion, but meanings felt in the body. He found this capability ranged from substantial awareness to very little.
In 1978 Gendlin published his best-selling book Focusing with a six-step method for discovering one’s felt sense, and in 1985 founded The (now International) Focusing Institute.
Gendlin’s approach advocates learning how to hold space for the ‘felt sense’ to remain fuzzy and allowing it to guide the process of self-exploration, of remaining open and aware of what the body is revealing as a source of wisdom.
They find that successful clients tend to speak from their present or even emerging experience. As they speak they slow down and search for how to express their felt sense through symbols such as words, images, gestures, and memories. In fact, they conclude that it’s this back and forth checking of their symbols against how the whole situation feels inside their body that essentially produces change!
Key takeaway #1: It’s important to develop at least an awareness of our ‘felt sense’, and strengthen it for purposes of greater intuition and unwinding trauma in ourselves, and for holding space for those around us.
Admittedly this can be extremely hard work and require that we marshal our inner resources. Fortunately, we often have underutilized resources, if we know how to access and use them.
Bonus of Entrainment
When functioning in a coherent mode, the heart entrains or pulls other biological oscillators into synchronization with its rhythms. This helps our body’s systems function with greater efficiency and effectiveness.
Heart entrainment of the gut-brain has been studied extensively. Yet little has been published about the reverse link from gut-brain back to heart-mind.
Mind Your Heart-Mind
When functioning in a coherent mode, the heart entrains or pulls other biological oscillators into synchronization with its rhythms. This helps our body’s systems function with greater efficiency and effectiveness.
Entrainment of the gut-brain by the heart has been studied extensively.
Coherence has been shown to be sustained by self-generating positive emotion like compassion and appreciation, but we find this difficult to initiate. Alternately, our ‘felt sense’ can act as a feedback mechanism that can help bridge from the breath reset into coherence, where we find more ease and rejuvenation.
The objective is to develop a prompt in the body (‘smart muscle memory’) to initiate heart-activation to establish coherence. Prime the pump, keep a pilot light burning. This heart pilot light can be established on the ‘felt sense’ platform in the body, giving the mind a break.
This Smart Muscle Memory tool develops key awareness, calming, and visualization skills you can cross-train in both the Standing and Lying Down positions (this one really helps you get back to sleep when you’re lying awake at 4 am!)
Quick Exercise:
Sit comfortably, close your eyes, and begin to slow and deepen your breath. Bring your awareness to your feet, ankles, or lower legs.
Once you feel any sensation whatsoever, hold gratitude and appreciation for the visceral sensation itself. For this new awareness flooding down into your lower body. Here you’re leveraging a combination of visualization (‘guided imagery’) and grounding (‘earthing’). Think ‘Peace’ as you exhale, and visualize the exhale as a light, starting in the heart area of your chest, and slowly gliding down through the middle of your body, to the soles of your feet. It’s not uncommon for your feet to get warmer.
Unmet Need
Next time we will layout the final piece of our technique, how the heart mind and gut-brain can work together on our inner awareness to support us better than we imagined possible.
We will show how this powerful ‘reset’ approach based on body awareness and ‘felt sense’ works as a feedback mechanism for visualization to powerfully shed stress out of our body and down into the ground.
This allows the body to monitor, prompt, and help manage the reset, giving the mind a much-needed break.
The goal is body-based awareness, a type of ‘smart muscle memory’ to help the mind reset and tap into a deep well of calm and peace, on-demand. And that also takes each bit of practice as well as the actual reset experience (on-demand) and builds it into muscle memory.
Suggestions for getting starting:
Don’t worry about commitment and consistency at first. Focus on observing your feelings and any physical sensations, which may be subtle at first. If you can sit for 10 minutes in the morning twice a week, you can develop the basics of inner awareness: feeling or sensation, and calming. At first, simply focus on developing an enjoyable experience.
In fact, you might be working too hard, trying to do everything yourself!
Because we tend to push chronic stress out of our awareness. We get so used to it we can’t see the impact on our energy, relationships, and health.
So we often overlook how our denial of stress wrecks our ‘felt sense’, which undermines our intuition, initiative, and courage.
Or we can’t see that we’re over-using exercise as a stress reliever, leaving us with cortisol buildup and burnout.
So we may be reasonably healthy but unable to take the next critical steps in our life – to renew our energy, process pain and limiting beliefs, and sustain healthy routines that we can actually enjoy.
Maybe it’s time to explore how an integrative approach can support you in 2021.
‘Creates an enjoyable body desire for – rather than having to rely solely on mental, executive function-based prompting’.
I’m beginning to see how each small bit of practice makes a ‘deposit’ into a deeper well of peace and calm.’
This BALM technique is one part of a simple but powerful mind-body practice incorporating grounding, breathing, and visualization that builds a body-based awareness, a type of ‘smart muscle memory’ to help the mind reset and tap into a deep well of calm and peace, on-demand.
This article was previously published on our blog at predict-health.com/blog/stress-108.
If you are serious about using mind-body practices to make life easier and better, explore these valuable resources, and go ahead and reach out to me.