Improving Tolerance to Stress
Welcome back!
This week, I’d love to cover something that I’ve been working with personally over the past few years that I believe could be really helpful for some of you out there that live particularly stressed out lives. And these days, that’s more than likely all of you.
Feeling stressed is one of the most common feelings on this earth these days, not that it hasn’t been an intimate part of our entire history, but with the recent shift in day-to-day life, we can’t ignore the general uptrend in agitation and unkempt arousal. So before you leave here today, I’m going to give you a simple practice you can introduce into your day so that you can become more tolerant of your own stress, and with enough practice, to learn how to use your stress to your advantage.
We’ve talked a bit about the role of our physiology and how it plays into our perception of stress in past articles and today I’d like to expand a bit more. But before I get too ahead of myself here, I need to clarify; the type of stress I’m referring to is distress, not eustress. The meaningful difference between distress and eustress is that distress typically leads to continuous suffering that rarely translates to positive changes in one’s life, like ruminating on negative thoughts or stress derived from a bad diet, whereas eustress, like exercise or sauna, can be uncomfortable in the moment but can lend to some form of positive adaptation in the long run.
Our physiology can be thought of a playground for where our stress goes to hang out and let us know of its presence. If left to its own devices, stress wreaks havoc on our physiology, starting with feelings of agitation, irritability, and/or exhaustion that can eventually lead to things like cardio, vascular, immune, hormonal, neural, and psychological diseases. So if agitation and constant exhaustion aren’t enough of an incentive to read on, let the effects of chronic stress motivate you.
So in spite of these recognized threats to our health and well being, I believe a brief daily investment into cultivating tolerance to stress is a very worthwhile thing to do.
And that investment is aimed at improving CO2 tolerance.
CO2 tolerance is our bodies ability to… well, tolerate CO2.
As we go on about our day, we breathe in O2, oxygen, and breathe out CO2, carbon dioxide. Our body has a pretty good idea of the balance it wants to achieve and maintain between these 2 molecules, and many of our biological processes are aimed at maintaining this balance. If you’d like some direct experience with this fact, you can do a little experiment with your body right now.
At the end of your next exhale, hold you breath. If you want, time it, and see how long you can go. Don’t push it, just stop the timer when you start to feel that air hunger start to creep up.
Drop your time in the comments! How’d it feel?
Some people will get to 5 seconds and gasp for air, others might go for 30 seconds. And that difference between 5 seconds, 30 seconds, or 45 seconds can be a clue into your own CO2 tolerance. Alternatively, and more to the point, it can also be a rough proxy for your ability to buffer physiological stress.
So as we hold our breath, CO2 begins to accumulate in the blood, and once that level of CO2 gets to certain level, our brain says “okay time to take a breath…no, really, take a breath”. The reason some of you can hold your breath longer than others is because your brain is less sensitive, or more tolerant, to those increasing levels of CO2 (try your best here to not make any value judgements, everyone is on their own journey). So why does this matter?
When our body reacts to a stressor, our brain initiates a number of biological processes that increases our bodies ability to either fight, or run (whether or not those two things are ideal for the situation). And the by product of all those processes is CO2. So what do we do in response to the increasing levels of CO2 when we get stressed? Our deep brain structures want us to start blowing it off. So our mouth opens to exhale quickly and over a few rapid and shallow breath cycles (and once the stressor goes away) we return to base line.
Great. What’s the real utility in knowing this?
If you live a particularly stressed out life, you very well might always be trying to blow off quickly accumulating CO2 due to some perception of threat; rumination of that one time at your cousins 21st birthday, someone cutting you off in traffic, presenting in front of a crowd of people, or getting into a nasty altercation with a friend or stranger. And as this cycle of accumulating CO2 and blowing it off continues, your bodies tolerance of CO2 drops. That window of time where you can hold your breath gets tighter and tighter, and as a result, you become more sensitive to stressors.
“Oh man, I only got 7 seconds, I’d definitely pass out if I went for longer, I must be a stressed out mess” or “Pfft, 30 seconds easy peasy, I must be the most resilient person on the planet”; If you said anything like one of these sentences, don’t get too far ahead of yourself. There isn’t a perfect 1-to-1 relationship here. Lots of other factors can play into this so just keep that in mind. But one fact remains; it’s very possible to improve your time, and as a result, improve your ability to buffer stress and stay calmer than otherwise during stressful events.
How to improve your CO2 tolerance:
2 minutes of nasal breathing into your belly to a tempo of 4 seconds in, 6 seconds out, 5 seconds hold.
You want the speed of your breathing to be so slow that the little hairs in your nose don’t move. If you can hear yourself inhaling or exhaling, slow down a bit. You’ll know when you’ve hit the right cadence and intensity when you start to feel that air hunger creep in and you’ll want to start breathing faster and harder. Try your best to relax into it and maintain that pattern, its only 2 minutes. Worst case scenario, it gets to be too much and you start breathing normally – that’s completely okay. You want to go easy on yourself when you’re just starting.
That’s it! Next week I’ll roll out a more structured program for those of you who are interested in this. If you simply can’t wait, just shoot me an email and I’ll send it to you! I just wanted to give you a week or so to start introducing your body to voluntarily increasing levels of CO2. For bonus points, you can put this small breathing exercise at the start of your meditation sessions as a great way to increase blood flow to the brain, improve oxygenation, and counting/tracking time can help boost your focus and attention for a clearer meditation session.
Have a great week everyone
