Takeaways

Mindfulness practice is an essential part of increasing your window of tolerance and helping you regulate your nervous system when you’ve moved into fight, flight or freeze.
Fight and flight are overactive, sympathetic nervous system responses that require less activation - think calm, grounding practices like longer exhales, facial tension release and gentle or slower movement.
Freeze is an underactive parasympathetic response that requires more activation - breathing with a 1:1 inhale to exhale, shaking your arms and legs, more active or intense movement.
When the stress and tension is coming from your mind, the tendency is to want to work it out mentally but most often taking a bottom-up or body-entered approach is more effective.
Understanding your nervous system and increasing your window of tolerance decreases work-stress. But most importantly it leaves you happier and more satisfied with your work and your environment.

Practices

Sound,Ground, Breath

Click here for an audio meditation

Once you’ve listened to the audio once or twice, you’ll be able to do this on your own, anywhere, anytime. This practice will help you:

Calm your mind and ground yourself.
Strengthen the attention networks in your brain.
Help regulate your nervous system and lower your stress levels.
Be more present and able to attend to the work at hand.

Breathing Exercise for fight, flight or freeze

You can do this breathing exercise anywhere. Feel free to stand, lay down or sit. If you’re in a chair, make sure you are sitting up straight. Set a timer for 3 - 5 minutes (depending on how much time you have).

Start by noticing how you are breathing. Don’t worry about taking a huge inhale, just let the breath move a little lower in the body until you feel your belly moving more than your chest.
If you are stressed, notice if your state of being has the flavor of fight, flight or freeze.
Take 5 - 10 rounds of breath and count the length of your inhale and your exhale with an intension to start slowing things down.
If you are feeling shut down or frozen (freeze mode), count a 4 second inhale and a 4 second exhale with a focus on bringing more energy into your body as you breathe in and releasing tension as you breathe out.
If you are feeling anxious, reactive or overwhelmed (fight or flight mode), bring your focus to a long, smooth exhale. Try to make your exhale longer than your inhale - up to twice as long. Keep your focus on slowing things down and releasing the tension in your body.
Stay with this until you feel a shift or as long as it feels helpful.

If you’d like more guidance, join me for this box breathing exercise. This is a 12 minute meditation but only the first 5 minutes is consistently guided and after that, it is mostly in silence. Feel free to set your own timer and take as much time with this as you like.

Move Your Body

One of the most effective ways to decrease mental and physical tension is to move!

When you move you release neurochemicals that reduce stress and make you feel happier.

Try moving for 5 minutes every hour. Whether that’s a quick walk through the office, a few gentle stretches, or a minute shake-your-body moment. It doesn’t matter what it is - just move!

And remember that if you are on the fight/flight spectrum, you’ll want slow, gentle movement. If you are on the freeze spectrum, you’ll want more intense, active movement.

Join My Newsletter

You’ll receive a free 6 minute video to help you relax the tension in your face, and regulate your nervous system, along with lots of other helpful resources.

Feel free to reach out with any questions at rachel@rachelposner.com