Breathwork, physical training, movement practice, exercise, your nutrition, meditation, journaling, mindfulness….
What do these have in common?
While they all inhabit the health, fitness and wellness space to some degree, what they have in common is they are all tools affecting our state.
Your mind, your body, your emotions, your feelings… you at a cellular level. You, the organism. What you eat and drink, your training, your thoughts, your relationships, your conversations, your sleep, your perceptions, your beliefs… all impact your state in various ways.
You may train like a #beast, 7 days a week, 2 hours a day, hard and heavy, getting after it… you may think you’re doing what’s best for your health.
But, what impact is this having on your state?
Is it helping or actually harming?
Is training your stress management strategy? No problem. Millions of people use exercise as a stress management strategy. Some use food. Others use breathwork. Some use all those.
But, are these strategies helping or harming?
What if instead of stress management we reframed it as state management; how we manage the effects of stressors on our state?
Stress is what happens to us. It’s external. Stress management is trying to manage the external. When we flip the script and focus on state management, we’re focusing on the internal. How to manage our response to stress.
Does this help determine which of your stress management strategies help and what harms?
Our body is smart. It is always doing its best to keep us in homeostasis; a level of normality for the us, the organism.
It’s about survival. Our body does what it can to keep us alive.
When we exercise, this is a stressor. In response to this stressor, we adapt. This adaptation occurs so the next time we experience this same stress our body can choose a better response. It changes our normal so we can survive.
But, if we are not wise with our exercise prescription or training decisions, we may not be getting the adaptations we are looking for.
Doing more may seem like a good idea. But, what is the adaptation you’re getting? What is it doing to your body?
You could actually be a stimulating state of dis-ease.
Once upon a time we ate to fuel our body for survival. These days food has become more than survival. It is now a social thing, a celebratory thing, a cultural thing, an emotional thing.
However, the changing meaning of food is one factor contributing to our chronic over consumption and related obesity epidemic.
We evolved to place a high value on calorie dense; high sugar, high fat, salty foods, because they were essential for survival. The problem is we still have primitive needs, but our world has changed. We have evolutionary mismatches; where our current environment is at odds with our evolution as a species. We make poor decisions around food, we react, the things we consume cause our body stress and trigger adaptations which harm rather than help.
This can lead to what I refer to as state mismatches; our reactions or decisions to things in our environment impacting our state in ways we haven’t yet learned or evolved to manage… shift work, sitting for 8-hours a day in an artificially lit office, an abundance of calorie dense food, connecting via social media….
When we don’t know how to deal with something in our environment, we often react rather than choose our response. If we keep reacting to these primitive, habitual signals, we will find ourselves continuing to head down a slippery slope where our new normal is one of poor health and disease.
What if we changed the conversation around exercise, nutrition, sleep, stress management and even many of the things seen as mental health strategies to a conversation around state management?
When we develop an understanding of our state and the various tools we have at our disposal in managing it, we can evolve and learn how to choose a response more in line with our needs today rather than the needs of our primitive ancestors.
It really all comes down to your state. Reach out and I’ll teach you all about it.
