33. How to Complete a Stress Response
Stress is part of life. Even with all the coaching tools I have at my disposal, I still experience stress sometimes, and so do my clients. It does not mean that anything has gone wrong.
But one of the most important things to know when it comes to stress is how to complete the stress response in the physical body.
Most of us respond to our stress by addressing the things we’re stressed about (or, ahem, avoiding them completely and having a glass of wine instead). But the stress response itself is a process that exists in the body, so it needs to be completed there as well.
A great resource to learn more about this (and gain lots of other useful insights) is Emily and Amelia Nagoski’s book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle.
I love this book because it focuses specifically on women. So much of the health data out there is based on the experiences and physiology of men. This book is written by women for women and it addresses the ways that institutionalized patriarchy and social conditioning impact women within the context of stress and burnout.
That being said, the time to start completing all your unfinished stress responses is now! So check out this week’s podcast and learn some science-based methodologies you can put to use immediately, even if you plan to check out the full book.
If you love the podcast and want to take this work deeper, I have great news! I have space for new one-to-one coaching clients starting this month, so click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to teach and talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
How we tend to process stressors in our brains.
The biological process that makes up a stress response.
Why there is more to completing a stress response than simply dealing with the stressor in a situation.
Where our stress responses come from and why they look so different for different people.
What I teach my clients specifically about stressors, where they come from, and how we unconsciously exacerbate them.
6 evidence-based strategies that you can use to fully complete your stress responses.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
If you’re enjoying the show, please leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily & Amelia Nagoski
Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski
Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about how to complete a stress response.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, this week, we are talking about stress responses and how to complete them. And speaking of stress responses, when this comes out, I will be in Sacramento, in my new home. But when I'm recording this podcast, I am still in Seattle. We're going to be leaving pretty soon.
I think we're moving next Saturday as of when I'm recording this. And a lot of our belongings are in boxes. And when I was preparing for this podcast, I went to go grab a book, the book that I'm going to be referencing in this podcast. And I realized it's packed in a box, and I don't know which box or where that box is.
I labeled all of my boxes with things like office bookshelf, office this, office that, but now they're all sort of stacked on top of each other in a big pile in the back room. Which is great because they're all out of the way. But that means that locating the book I'm looking for was going to take probably a long time. And so I didn't find it.
So, not the most stressful thing but I definitely think the moving experience on the whole is something that most people find pretty stressful. Packing up your whole life, and we also, of course, have our wonderful pets whom we love. But moving pets is kind of an adventure, right?
Like we have an 18 year old diabetic cat who doesn't do well in cat carriers, so I actually am going to be driving with him outside the carrier and hoping, you know, that goes okay. And I got like a little cat harness and a little cat leash so I can like kind of let him out of the car when we stop, but hopefully not have him escape and run away. So I'll report back on how that goes.
Lots of things my brain could feel stressed about though. And like as many of y'all know, I do have a brain that offers me anxiety thoughts sometimes. And so I've been having a fair amount of them. Mostly worrying about like the cat to be honest. Because he's my baby and I love him so much. And I know that since he doesn't have language, he's not going to understand what the fuck we're doing when we get in the car and drive for approximately 1 million hours.
And yeah, so I've been having to like manage my own mind, manage my own feelings, and manage my own stress responses. Which leads us to this week's topic.
So, I want to tell y'all about this book that I read. I think I read it maybe like last year, it's called Burnout and it's by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. I like wrote a little note about how to pronounce their names to help me not say their names the wrong way. And Emily and Amelia Nagoski are twin sisters and co-authors of this book. It's called, again, Burnout. But here's the subtitle too, which is important, The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle.
And it's a really wonderful book. And it's especially wonderful because it focuses specifically on how women experience stress, how we experience stress differently than men. The structural misogyny that is part of the specific stress that women experience and what we can do about it. And so I highly recommend the book itself. Emily Nagoski also has a great book about sex called Come as You Are, if that's something you're interested in as well.
She talks about health stuff in a way that makes it very palatable and easy to understand. And, yeah, so you may want to check out some of her books. I'm also going to do a little kind of synopsis here, but it's going to be pretty brief. So if you want more details check out the full book, I do recommend.
Okay, so basically, there are a couple things that they talk about in the burnout book. I'm not going to get into all of them, like I said though it does address the specific things women face. The part that I want to get into today is the stress response itself.
So the thing about the stress response is it's a biological process. It has a beginning, it has a middle, it has an end, as the sisters said in a talk that I was watching to refresh myself since I couldn't find the book itself. And for most of us, like we're pretty smart, we have these like big sexy brains with prefrontal cortexes, cortices? Whatever.
As humans like we can think about our problems. And so when something happens that we find stressful we tend to think about solving the thing itself, right? We're like, “Oh, if commuting during the time when it's trafficky, I know that's like not a relevant example for most of us since most of us are not commuting anywhere right now. But I used to commute, and I still think about it all the time.
So it's like, if commuting during a time when it's trafficky feels stressful you may decide to like change what time you commute. Or maybe you decide to ride a bus instead of driving and then you can like watch YouTube videos or like be into an audio book and not notice the traffic, things like that.
So we tend to think about what in the book they call the stressor, right? I think it's actually probably just pronounced stresser, but I always call it stressor because I read books y'all, and my brain sometimes really struggles to pronounce words. This actually happened to me a lot in my childhood, I would say words wrong because I was always saying them based on how they looked to my brain. Anyways, we deal with the thing that the stress is about, dealing with the stress response is actually different.
So, like I said, the stress response is a biological process, we have to complete that process biologically. If you, you know, deal with the traffic by like, let's just say extreme example, you're having like a lot of stress about the traffic, and you decide to like get off the interstate and pull the car over and take a few minutes to cool down. Removing yourself from the traffic won't necessarily complete the actual stress response in your body.
So if dealing with the stressor, the stressor, doesn't complete the stress response, what does? In the book they present several different evidence-based strategies you can use for completing the stress response.
Now, on this podcast I teach that circumstances don't create our feelings, circumstances don't create our stress responses. I teach that thoughts create our feelings, that thoughts are in between us and the circumstances and that they are the perspective through which we see the world, right? So, we can call them thoughts, we can call it mindset, we can call it perspective, but even so, once the stress response is happening, it's biological. Once a feeling is happening, it's also biological.
So whether you go with the way that most of the world thinks about things, which is that circumstances can cause your feelings, or if you're in my methodology, where I teach that thoughts cause feelings. Either way everyone agrees that once a feeling is happening or a stress response is happening, it's biological. And the biological level is where you need to address it.
So for instance, I teach my clients how to think about their work lives differently. And when they think about their work lives differently, they feel differently, they show up to their work lives differently. But I also teach my clients, “Hey, once a feeling exists in your body, we're going to deal with that at the feeling level. And then we'll go back and deal with that thought.” Right? So this is just like that.
One more thing I want to say about the stress response too, before I get to these strategies is I was reading this other book that was so interesting. And it talked about the different ways the stress response can look, right? So I've talked about the stress response on the podcast before and I've talked about fight, and I've talked about flight.
This other book that I was reading talks about freeze, which I did know about, it's like sort of a paralysis. But it also talked about this other fourth one called fawn, which I had only heard of like once. I had heard of it in someone else's marketing campaign, I think it was Simone Seoul, who is one of my coaches and an amazing coach to follow. She's a marketing coach.
Anyways, she had talked about fawn, and then I picked up this book and the book also talked about fawn. I think the book is called Complex PTSD by Pete Walker; we can link it in the show notes.
Anyways, I thought this was so fascinating because what fawn looks like is people pleasing. Fawn is a stress response where the way we deal with the stress instead of trying to fight it, like trying to punch it in the face. Instead of trying to flee, like running away. Instead of freezing where we just freeze or dissociate depending on what's going on. Fawn is a way that we're actually engaging with the other person or other party, whatever it may be, in a way where we're trying to please or placate or like emotionally massage the situation.
And I thought that was super interesting because I've talked on the podcast about people pleasing before, right, and the way that we do it to like kind of avoid our own discomfort. And the way that we do it, like when we lie to ourselves and say it's about pleasing the other person versus like it's, again, about avoiding our own discomfort. And to me people pleasing is a form of lying.
But I think so much more nuance comes in when you consider this idea of the fawn response. So many of us people please because as children that was a coping mechanism, a stress response that we learned. And I think this is an important thing to add to the conversation because sometimes when I teach about people pleasing, then people want to like beat themselves up for doing it.
That's never the goal. With what we're teaching and talking about on the podcast it's always to help you understand yourself. Understand what you're actually doing. And then decide if you want to keep doing it or if you want to do something.
So I think seeing that people pleasing is a form of dishonesty can be really powerful for helping us see that it's not necessarily like the “nice” thing that we've been taught to believe. But I also think seeing that it's a form of a stress response can be really powerful too, for understanding if we care about honesty so much, why are we doing this thing where we're, you know, not telling other people the truth, and where we're trying to control their emotions with our behavior?
It makes so much more sense if you can see that maybe this was a behavior you learned, that as a child maybe felt really important or felt necessary, even lifesaving. It might make more sense about why you're doing it now especially in times when you feel unsafe or stressed out.
It's like when we feel stressed out or unsafe our brain is like, “Oh, remember, here are the things that we do.” These are the stress responses, right? So it's like the stress response is like the biological process but there's the other component of like how we respond to that stress response, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
So that's just a little extra aside, I guess I'm talking about two books actually on this episode. So that's fun. Anyways, all of that just to say stress responses can look really different for different people. And even when we have addressed the thing that created the stress, whether we believe that thing is a thought like I teach, or we believe that thing is a circumstance outside of ourselves, then we still are left with the stress in the body.
So what are the evidence-based strategies we can use for that? Okay, there are several. Number one is physical movement. Okay, so the stress response evolved for things like physical predators. If a big animal was trying to eat you, you would run away from it. So running, or other kinds of movement, it doesn't have to be running.
But movement of your body is a way to indicate to your body that like you are responding to the threat and then you move. And then when you stop moving and you haven't, you know, died and been eaten your brain is like “Cool, cool, cool, we can complete the stress response, we've escaped.” Right?
In the book, Emily and Amelia Nagoski, in that book, the Burnout book, they also talk about not everyone likes movement, right? Like as women especially were served up that we should like exercise and so that can be kind of a fraught topic for some people. If that's not your thing you can still tap into this by like tensing and then releasing all your muscles. That's like another way to tap into this same science-based methodology, strategy for completing the stress response.
Again, any kind of movement. Like it can be running, but it could be dancing, it could be jumping up and down. Anything you do where you move the body can count. And again, even like clenching and releasing your muscles.
Okay, what other strategies? If you don't want to move, there are plenty of other strategies. One of the ones I personally am the most excited about is creativity. Making something that is creative, whether it's knitting, whether it's singing, whether it's doing a collage with like little pictures you cut out of like old magazines. Tapping into your creativity is one of the ways that you can complete the stress response.
I think this makes a lot of sense. Because in my childhood, this is a way that I dealt with stress, though I don't know that I would have known that's what I was doing at the time. I was like really into art class and I was really into drawing, and I would just spend a lot of time drawing. I would draw like anything.
I remember I made this like super weird collage for my best friend, Monet, one time when I was living with my parents for the summer, and I like wasn't working. And it just had all kinds of stuff. I remember it had like a hanger, like a clothing hanger. I don't know, why did I draw that on there?
But it didn't even matter because the act of creation, the act of just doing something artistic. Even if you're just sitting in a room drawing the shit you see around you, that does something within you that helps you complete that stress response and move to the other side of it.
Okay, another thing that works is physical affection. And it doesn't have to be like a romantic thing. In the book, they talk about, I think, a 20 second hug. I read somewhere else, and I apologize but I cannot remember where I read this, that the brain is so powerful in its ability to imagine that even imagining hugging someone can release chemicals in the brain.
So I love to think like if you have another person that you want to hug and you can happily hug for 20 seconds, hug them. If you can't or you don't, or like they're living somewhere else, or hey, it's like not really quarantine anymore but we did all just go through that for a year, imagine hugging them. 20 seconds of imagining can, according that thing I read that I can no longer find, which embarrassing, but go with me. Imagining can create a difference and a change in your brain chemicals. Right?
And just to give like another aside on that, I think about this all the time, about like the power of the brain even when things aren't real because like this happened in movies, right? Like in movies when we get scared, we know we're not really in danger, but we still have biological, physiological responses. So I think it works like that. But if you can find a real person to hug, go with that.
Hugging releases hormones like oxytocin and those can help your brain move out of the stress response and back into like the normal homeostasis of the body. Homeostasis might not be the right word. Listen, I'm a work coach, not a science coach. I try hard with the science but I'm really here to talk to you about work.
Okay, what else can complete the stress response? Laughing. I love this one so much because laughter is super fun, and it feels amazing. And you don't really need anyone else. Like you can put on a funny movie. You can watch some funny clips on the internet. Like personally, my girlfriend and I have really been enjoying TikTok.
When like people were first doing TikTok we were both kind of like, “I don't know about that.” And then Alex downloaded TikTok before me and she started watching it. She was just like, laughing all the time. And I was like, “I'm jealous.” I'm a Taurus, we get jealous sometimes, okay? And she would like show me all the funny ones and I was like this is so fun. So I was like, “Okay, fine.”
So I like downloaded it and we watch it all the time now, and we laugh so much. And honestly, I have noticed I feel so much happier. And I'm sure some of that is just like, it's enjoyable. But I wonder too, if like that's just kind of cleaning up some little stress responses that I maybe wasn't aware of, right? Either way it's super delightful, more laughing all the time no matter what. I mean, as long as you want it, there's no should here, right? It's just one option.
Okay, what else? Crying. I am such a fucking fan of crying. As a kid I got just scorched for crying by all kinds of fucking people, adults, and children alike, all of the time. And I feel vindicated because crying is a very effective way to complete a stress response. And it's one of our body's built-in mechanisms to move through an emotion and get to the other side of it.
And I see so many people shut down their ability to cry because of what they think it means about them or whether or not they're allowed to cry. Like, I mean, culturally we definitely have a narrative that boys and men aren’t allowed to cry. But I've also met plenty of women who also believe that they're not allowed to cry, or that it's especially bad if they cry because they are a woman, that they're going to be judged.
And like, I get it, you might not want to cry in a meeting. Although I think actually, I would love to work to normalize that. Because crying, again, one of the fastest ways to move through emotion. So when we can move through emotion faster, we can complete our stress response. But we can also get back to an even keel and being able to use the full power of our prefrontal cortex.
Like when we're in a stress response it kind of like takes part of our thinking brain offline and it's not useful. So if you're at work and something happens and you really want to cry and you don't, and you don't complete that stress response in a different way, it can kind of block you from being able to then show up with the full power of your brain to whatever is going on.
So, again, I realize you might not want to do it in a meeting, but like definitely, for sure when I was in corporate, I would sometimes go cry in a conference room or in a bathroom. And like sometimes it's just an important thing to be able to do, I think.
I get it if you might not want to cry, or want to cry at work, but I am so here to destigmatize it because it's a totally normal bodily process and it's incredibly useful. So there's that. Again, though, there's plenty of other evidence-based strategies here if that is not the one that you want to use.
And then finally, deep breathing, right? We all have seen the data about meditation, that shit is super powerful. And even like not even meditation but just deep breathing can be a way to complete the stress response.
I think it's like if you were being attacked by a physical predator you wouldn't necessarily be able to just sit around and deep breath, right? You have to fight it or run away from it or like do something or hide. Whereas if you take some moments to breathe deeply, that can help your body understand that you're not actually in danger.
Now, I want to give this a caveat because somewhere else I read that with deep breathing in particular you want to make sure you're doing not just deep, but slow breathing. Because if you breathe deeply but quickly, that actually can tell your body, “We are in a stress response, keep being in a stress response, keep going.”
So the breath needs to be slow, as well as deep. I actually have read that the slow is even more important. And how slow? You want to be breathing in, I would say for like 5 to 5.5 seconds. And then, if you can, exhale even longer. And if you can't exhale even longer, just at least exhale the same amount of time. So when we have a longer inhale that's supposed to, I think, like invigorates us. And when we have a longer exhale that is supposed to calm us down.
Okay, so there you have it, this podcast episode has gone a little bit all over the place. But I think it's all really useful information that's going to give you a much more holistic vision of like what's happening for you when you experience stress and how you can move through it, get to the other side, and keep going about your day.
Working in a corporate office involves a lot of stress. I know that was my experience of it. Even when we're doing amazing work, even when we're working with people we love, stress is going to come up. And that's just part of the human life.
But when we have a toolkit for how to handle it, we can feel so much more resilient to the stress and so much more capable to handle it and then keep going about our business. We don't have to get derailed by it, it doesn't have to ruin our productivity, it doesn't have to ruin our day. Like I said, it's going to happen so we may as well know how to deal with it and then be able to get back on track.
So to review, when we have a stress response there are four ways it can go: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. And there are six things you can do to move through that stress response and allow it to complete so that you can get back to a normal state of mind and your prefrontal cortex can come back online. And those things are movement, creativity, physical affection, laughing, crying, and deep breathing.
Hit me up on Instagram and let me know which strategy you're going to be using.
And if you love what I teach, and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I've got good news for you. I've got space for a few new one on one coaching clients starting this month. So let's hop on a call. I'll give you some coaching right away to help you get going. And if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the work with me button and get started there.
Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience. And yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we've had great success doing that. There's even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category. So you can check that out on the testimonials page.
All right y'all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, this week, we are talking about stress responses and how to complete them. And speaking of stress responses, when this comes out, I will be in Sacramento, in my new home. But when I'm recording this podcast, I am still in Seattle. We're going to be leaving pretty soon.
I think we're moving next Saturday as of when I'm recording this. And a lot of our belongings are in boxes. And when I was preparing for this podcast, I went to go grab a book, the book that I'm going to be referencing in this podcast. And I realized it's packed in a box, and I don't know which box or where that box is.
I labeled all of my boxes with things like office bookshelf, office this, office that, but now they're all sort of stacked on top of each other in a big pile in the back room. Which is great because they're all out of the way. But that means that locating the book I'm looking for was going to take probably a long time. And so I didn't find it.
So, not the most stressful thing but I definitely think the moving experience on the whole is something that most people find pretty stressful. Packing up your whole life, and we also, of course, have our wonderful pets whom we love. But moving pets is kind of an adventure, right?
Like we have an 18 year old diabetic cat who doesn't do well in cat carriers, so I actually am going to be driving with him outside the carrier and hoping, you know, that goes okay. And I got like a little cat harness and a little cat leash so I can like kind of let him out of the car when we stop, but hopefully not have him escape and run away. So I'll report back on how that goes.
Lots of things my brain could feel stressed about though. And like as many of y'all know, I do have a brain that offers me anxiety thoughts sometimes. And so I've been having a fair amount of them. Mostly worrying about like the cat to be honest. Because he's my baby and I love him so much. And I know that since he doesn't have language, he's not going to understand what the fuck we're doing when we get in the car and drive for approximately 1 million hours.
And yeah, so I've been having to like manage my own mind, manage my own feelings, and manage my own stress responses. Which leads us to this week's topic.
So, I want to tell y'all about this book that I read. I think I read it maybe like last year, it's called Burnout and it's by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. I like wrote a little note about how to pronounce their names to help me not say their names the wrong way. And Emily and Amelia Nagoski are twin sisters and co-authors of this book. It's called, again, Burnout. But here's the subtitle too, which is important, The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle.
And it's a really wonderful book. And it's especially wonderful because it focuses specifically on how women experience stress, how we experience stress differently than men. The structural misogyny that is part of the specific stress that women experience and what we can do about it. And so I highly recommend the book itself. Emily Nagoski also has a great book about sex called Come as You Are, if that's something you're interested in as well.
She talks about health stuff in a way that makes it very palatable and easy to understand. And, yeah, so you may want to check out some of her books. I'm also going to do a little kind of synopsis here, but it's going to be pretty brief. So if you want more details check out the full book, I do recommend.
Okay, so basically, there are a couple things that they talk about in the burnout book. I'm not going to get into all of them, like I said though it does address the specific things women face. The part that I want to get into today is the stress response itself.
So the thing about the stress response is it's a biological process. It has a beginning, it has a middle, it has an end, as the sisters said in a talk that I was watching to refresh myself since I couldn't find the book itself. And for most of us, like we're pretty smart, we have these like big sexy brains with prefrontal cortexes, cortices? Whatever.
As humans like we can think about our problems. And so when something happens that we find stressful we tend to think about solving the thing itself, right? We're like, “Oh, if commuting during the time when it's trafficky, I know that's like not a relevant example for most of us since most of us are not commuting anywhere right now. But I used to commute, and I still think about it all the time.
So it's like, if commuting during a time when it's trafficky feels stressful you may decide to like change what time you commute. Or maybe you decide to ride a bus instead of driving and then you can like watch YouTube videos or like be into an audio book and not notice the traffic, things like that.
So we tend to think about what in the book they call the stressor, right? I think it's actually probably just pronounced stresser, but I always call it stressor because I read books y'all, and my brain sometimes really struggles to pronounce words. This actually happened to me a lot in my childhood, I would say words wrong because I was always saying them based on how they looked to my brain. Anyways, we deal with the thing that the stress is about, dealing with the stress response is actually different.
So, like I said, the stress response is a biological process, we have to complete that process biologically. If you, you know, deal with the traffic by like, let's just say extreme example, you're having like a lot of stress about the traffic, and you decide to like get off the interstate and pull the car over and take a few minutes to cool down. Removing yourself from the traffic won't necessarily complete the actual stress response in your body.
So if dealing with the stressor, the stressor, doesn't complete the stress response, what does? In the book they present several different evidence-based strategies you can use for completing the stress response.
Now, on this podcast I teach that circumstances don't create our feelings, circumstances don't create our stress responses. I teach that thoughts create our feelings, that thoughts are in between us and the circumstances and that they are the perspective through which we see the world, right? So, we can call them thoughts, we can call it mindset, we can call it perspective, but even so, once the stress response is happening, it's biological. Once a feeling is happening, it's also biological.
So whether you go with the way that most of the world thinks about things, which is that circumstances can cause your feelings, or if you're in my methodology, where I teach that thoughts cause feelings. Either way everyone agrees that once a feeling is happening or a stress response is happening, it's biological. And the biological level is where you need to address it.
So for instance, I teach my clients how to think about their work lives differently. And when they think about their work lives differently, they feel differently, they show up to their work lives differently. But I also teach my clients, “Hey, once a feeling exists in your body, we're going to deal with that at the feeling level. And then we'll go back and deal with that thought.” Right? So this is just like that.
One more thing I want to say about the stress response too, before I get to these strategies is I was reading this other book that was so interesting. And it talked about the different ways the stress response can look, right? So I've talked about the stress response on the podcast before and I've talked about fight, and I've talked about flight.
This other book that I was reading talks about freeze, which I did know about, it's like sort of a paralysis. But it also talked about this other fourth one called fawn, which I had only heard of like once. I had heard of it in someone else's marketing campaign, I think it was Simone Seoul, who is one of my coaches and an amazing coach to follow. She's a marketing coach.
Anyways, she had talked about fawn, and then I picked up this book and the book also talked about fawn. I think the book is called Complex PTSD by Pete Walker; we can link it in the show notes.
Anyways, I thought this was so fascinating because what fawn looks like is people pleasing. Fawn is a stress response where the way we deal with the stress instead of trying to fight it, like trying to punch it in the face. Instead of trying to flee, like running away. Instead of freezing where we just freeze or dissociate depending on what's going on. Fawn is a way that we're actually engaging with the other person or other party, whatever it may be, in a way where we're trying to please or placate or like emotionally massage the situation.
And I thought that was super interesting because I've talked on the podcast about people pleasing before, right, and the way that we do it to like kind of avoid our own discomfort. And the way that we do it, like when we lie to ourselves and say it's about pleasing the other person versus like it's, again, about avoiding our own discomfort. And to me people pleasing is a form of lying.
But I think so much more nuance comes in when you consider this idea of the fawn response. So many of us people please because as children that was a coping mechanism, a stress response that we learned. And I think this is an important thing to add to the conversation because sometimes when I teach about people pleasing, then people want to like beat themselves up for doing it.
That's never the goal. With what we're teaching and talking about on the podcast it's always to help you understand yourself. Understand what you're actually doing. And then decide if you want to keep doing it or if you want to do something.
So I think seeing that people pleasing is a form of dishonesty can be really powerful for helping us see that it's not necessarily like the “nice” thing that we've been taught to believe. But I also think seeing that it's a form of a stress response can be really powerful too, for understanding if we care about honesty so much, why are we doing this thing where we're, you know, not telling other people the truth, and where we're trying to control their emotions with our behavior?
It makes so much more sense if you can see that maybe this was a behavior you learned, that as a child maybe felt really important or felt necessary, even lifesaving. It might make more sense about why you're doing it now especially in times when you feel unsafe or stressed out.
It's like when we feel stressed out or unsafe our brain is like, “Oh, remember, here are the things that we do.” These are the stress responses, right? So it's like the stress response is like the biological process but there's the other component of like how we respond to that stress response, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
So that's just a little extra aside, I guess I'm talking about two books actually on this episode. So that's fun. Anyways, all of that just to say stress responses can look really different for different people. And even when we have addressed the thing that created the stress, whether we believe that thing is a thought like I teach, or we believe that thing is a circumstance outside of ourselves, then we still are left with the stress in the body.
So what are the evidence-based strategies we can use for that? Okay, there are several. Number one is physical movement. Okay, so the stress response evolved for things like physical predators. If a big animal was trying to eat you, you would run away from it. So running, or other kinds of movement, it doesn't have to be running.
But movement of your body is a way to indicate to your body that like you are responding to the threat and then you move. And then when you stop moving and you haven't, you know, died and been eaten your brain is like “Cool, cool, cool, we can complete the stress response, we've escaped.” Right?
In the book, Emily and Amelia Nagoski, in that book, the Burnout book, they also talk about not everyone likes movement, right? Like as women especially were served up that we should like exercise and so that can be kind of a fraught topic for some people. If that's not your thing you can still tap into this by like tensing and then releasing all your muscles. That's like another way to tap into this same science-based methodology, strategy for completing the stress response.
Again, any kind of movement. Like it can be running, but it could be dancing, it could be jumping up and down. Anything you do where you move the body can count. And again, even like clenching and releasing your muscles.
Okay, what other strategies? If you don't want to move, there are plenty of other strategies. One of the ones I personally am the most excited about is creativity. Making something that is creative, whether it's knitting, whether it's singing, whether it's doing a collage with like little pictures you cut out of like old magazines. Tapping into your creativity is one of the ways that you can complete the stress response.
I think this makes a lot of sense. Because in my childhood, this is a way that I dealt with stress, though I don't know that I would have known that's what I was doing at the time. I was like really into art class and I was really into drawing, and I would just spend a lot of time drawing. I would draw like anything.
I remember I made this like super weird collage for my best friend, Monet, one time when I was living with my parents for the summer, and I like wasn't working. And it just had all kinds of stuff. I remember it had like a hanger, like a clothing hanger. I don't know, why did I draw that on there?
But it didn't even matter because the act of creation, the act of just doing something artistic. Even if you're just sitting in a room drawing the shit you see around you, that does something within you that helps you complete that stress response and move to the other side of it.
Okay, another thing that works is physical affection. And it doesn't have to be like a romantic thing. In the book, they talk about, I think, a 20 second hug. I read somewhere else, and I apologize but I cannot remember where I read this, that the brain is so powerful in its ability to imagine that even imagining hugging someone can release chemicals in the brain.
So I love to think like if you have another person that you want to hug and you can happily hug for 20 seconds, hug them. If you can't or you don't, or like they're living somewhere else, or hey, it's like not really quarantine anymore but we did all just go through that for a year, imagine hugging them. 20 seconds of imagining can, according that thing I read that I can no longer find, which embarrassing, but go with me. Imagining can create a difference and a change in your brain chemicals. Right?
And just to give like another aside on that, I think about this all the time, about like the power of the brain even when things aren't real because like this happened in movies, right? Like in movies when we get scared, we know we're not really in danger, but we still have biological, physiological responses. So I think it works like that. But if you can find a real person to hug, go with that.
Hugging releases hormones like oxytocin and those can help your brain move out of the stress response and back into like the normal homeostasis of the body. Homeostasis might not be the right word. Listen, I'm a work coach, not a science coach. I try hard with the science but I'm really here to talk to you about work.
Okay, what else can complete the stress response? Laughing. I love this one so much because laughter is super fun, and it feels amazing. And you don't really need anyone else. Like you can put on a funny movie. You can watch some funny clips on the internet. Like personally, my girlfriend and I have really been enjoying TikTok.
When like people were first doing TikTok we were both kind of like, “I don't know about that.” And then Alex downloaded TikTok before me and she started watching it. She was just like, laughing all the time. And I was like, “I'm jealous.” I'm a Taurus, we get jealous sometimes, okay? And she would like show me all the funny ones and I was like this is so fun. So I was like, “Okay, fine.”
So I like downloaded it and we watch it all the time now, and we laugh so much. And honestly, I have noticed I feel so much happier. And I'm sure some of that is just like, it's enjoyable. But I wonder too, if like that's just kind of cleaning up some little stress responses that I maybe wasn't aware of, right? Either way it's super delightful, more laughing all the time no matter what. I mean, as long as you want it, there's no should here, right? It's just one option.
Okay, what else? Crying. I am such a fucking fan of crying. As a kid I got just scorched for crying by all kinds of fucking people, adults, and children alike, all of the time. And I feel vindicated because crying is a very effective way to complete a stress response. And it's one of our body's built-in mechanisms to move through an emotion and get to the other side of it.
And I see so many people shut down their ability to cry because of what they think it means about them or whether or not they're allowed to cry. Like, I mean, culturally we definitely have a narrative that boys and men aren’t allowed to cry. But I've also met plenty of women who also believe that they're not allowed to cry, or that it's especially bad if they cry because they are a woman, that they're going to be judged.
And like, I get it, you might not want to cry in a meeting. Although I think actually, I would love to work to normalize that. Because crying, again, one of the fastest ways to move through emotion. So when we can move through emotion faster, we can complete our stress response. But we can also get back to an even keel and being able to use the full power of our prefrontal cortex.
Like when we're in a stress response it kind of like takes part of our thinking brain offline and it's not useful. So if you're at work and something happens and you really want to cry and you don't, and you don't complete that stress response in a different way, it can kind of block you from being able to then show up with the full power of your brain to whatever is going on.
So, again, I realize you might not want to do it in a meeting, but like definitely, for sure when I was in corporate, I would sometimes go cry in a conference room or in a bathroom. And like sometimes it's just an important thing to be able to do, I think.
I get it if you might not want to cry, or want to cry at work, but I am so here to destigmatize it because it's a totally normal bodily process and it's incredibly useful. So there's that. Again, though, there's plenty of other evidence-based strategies here if that is not the one that you want to use.
And then finally, deep breathing, right? We all have seen the data about meditation, that shit is super powerful. And even like not even meditation but just deep breathing can be a way to complete the stress response.
I think it's like if you were being attacked by a physical predator you wouldn't necessarily be able to just sit around and deep breath, right? You have to fight it or run away from it or like do something or hide. Whereas if you take some moments to breathe deeply, that can help your body understand that you're not actually in danger.
Now, I want to give this a caveat because somewhere else I read that with deep breathing in particular you want to make sure you're doing not just deep, but slow breathing. Because if you breathe deeply but quickly, that actually can tell your body, “We are in a stress response, keep being in a stress response, keep going.”
So the breath needs to be slow, as well as deep. I actually have read that the slow is even more important. And how slow? You want to be breathing in, I would say for like 5 to 5.5 seconds. And then, if you can, exhale even longer. And if you can't exhale even longer, just at least exhale the same amount of time. So when we have a longer inhale that's supposed to, I think, like invigorates us. And when we have a longer exhale that is supposed to calm us down.
Okay, so there you have it, this podcast episode has gone a little bit all over the place. But I think it's all really useful information that's going to give you a much more holistic vision of like what's happening for you when you experience stress and how you can move through it, get to the other side, and keep going about your day.
Working in a corporate office involves a lot of stress. I know that was my experience of it. Even when we're doing amazing work, even when we're working with people we love, stress is going to come up. And that's just part of the human life.
But when we have a toolkit for how to handle it, we can feel so much more resilient to the stress and so much more capable to handle it and then keep going about our business. We don't have to get derailed by it, it doesn't have to ruin our productivity, it doesn't have to ruin our day. Like I said, it's going to happen so we may as well know how to deal with it and then be able to get back on track.
So to review, when we have a stress response there are four ways it can go: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. And there are six things you can do to move through that stress response and allow it to complete so that you can get back to a normal state of mind and your prefrontal cortex can come back online. And those things are movement, creativity, physical affection, laughing, crying, and deep breathing.
Hit me up on Instagram and let me know which strategy you're going to be using.
And if you love what I teach, and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I've got good news for you. I've got space for a few new one on one coaching clients starting this month. So let's hop on a call. I'll give you some coaching right away to help you get going. And if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the work with me button and get started there.
Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience. And yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we've had great success doing that. There's even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category. So you can check that out on the testimonials page.
All right y'all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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