How to Deal with Stress When You're Alone

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We all have a calming system. It is called the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). To activate it, some advise us to use breathing exercises. But breathing exercises activate the PNS only when breathing out. Breathing in deactivates the PNS. In a calm environment, this doesn't matter, as the calming achieved when breathing out can continue undisturbed when breathing in. But in a stressful situation, the relaxation produced when breathing out disappears when breathing in.

I've seen this first hand. An airline I worked at had a fear of flying program. Course participants were taught a breathing exercise and were told it would take care of their feelings on the "graduation flight." It didn't. Time and time again, I saw course participants doing the breathing exercise - just as they were taught to - in a state of full-blown panic. It was not a pretty sight. Worse, it was a betrayal. No one — then or now — should be told breathing exercises will reliably control panic. In a calm environment where anxiety is due to thoughts, distraction coupled with PNS activation may prevent anxiety build-up. But in a high-stress situation, breathing exercises are not reliable. In panic, a person is overwhelmed. Attempting to end overwhelm prolongs it. It's like that old joke: when you see someone loaded up carrying things, you say, "Got a match?"

Panic is no joke. Yet, panic sufferers are often not taken seriously and may be told that panic is harmless, they should learn to tolerate the feelings. This advice seems unreasonable when measures that control the feelings exist.

Instead of activating the PNS half the time (only when breathing out), the PNS can be activated constantly. This more effective way to activate the PNS - and to more thoroughly neutralize stress - is based on research by Stephen Porges. He discovered that when we are with another person, we constantly send and receive signals that tell us how safe we are. If the person we are with is no threat to us in any way, their signals fully activate our PNS. It then neutralizes whatever stress hormones are present. The result is calming. Porges calls his discovery the social engagement system because he believes unconsciously exchanged signals make cooperative social interaction possible.

Think of being in an elevator with people you don’t know. Your amygdala reacts and releases stress hormones. The stress hormones activate the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). It increases your heart rate and breathing rate to get you ready to run or fight, it diverts much of the blood being supplied to the digestive system to the muscles. Since you have no way to stop the elevator and escape, the physical sensations are likely to be interpreted as threat signals.

Here is where the social engagement system can step in and make the elevator ride comfortable. You see a friend in the elevator. You make eye contact and say hello. You unconsciously pick up signals of safety from your friend's face and voice quality. Your social engagement system kicks in. Signals of safety activate your PNS. Your PNS overrules your SNS, slows your heart rate, your breathing rate, and relaxes your gut.

But what if stress hits and you are alone? If memory of your friend has been pre-linked to feelings of increased stress, increased stress elicits the memory which, in turn, activates the PNS and causes calming. Research from the University of Arizona shows that the memory of a friend is as protective against stress as the friend's presence.

The research involved 102 participants who were in a committed romantic relationship. Participants were split into three groups. Members of each group were exposed individually to a stressful situation. Those in the first group were asked to distract themselves by thinking about their day. Those in the second group were asked to think about their romantic partner. Those in the third group had their partner present. Those assigned to the second and third groups had lower blood pressure during stress than those in the first group. There was no difference in the blood pressures of those in the second and third groups. One of the researchers, Kyle Bourassa, said, “It appears that thinking of your partner as a source of support can be just as powerful as actually having them present.”

Another person — whether physically present or psychologically present — can provide powerful calming. Experience treating fear of flying has shown it is very simple to use the memory of a friend to control stress. The client identifies what he or she feels when stress begins to develop and links those feelings to a memory of their friend's face, the voice quality, and the touch/body-language.

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