Based on your answers to the quiz questions, your best path through work stress is the:
Based on your answers to the quiz questions, your best path through work stress is the Body Path.
Women walking the Body Path benefit from stress relief approaches that calm the negative impact stress is having on one’s body.
When it comes to how work stress might show up for you, no body part is off limits from its terrible effects. Muscle tension is a sign of stress frequently felt in the neck and shoulders. While long hours at a computer screen may be partially responsible for this type of tension, many women carry work stress in the neck and shoulder area. Just the thought of work can trigger problems for those parts of your body most vulnerable to carrying tension. Many women experience headaches or even migraines with their work stress.
Work stress also leaves you feeling restless. It’s like the stress gets under your skin and you just can’t sit still. You’re constantly on edge at work. During your time off, reminders of work can bring on that all too familiar and edgy feeling.
Women on the Body Path are prone to disruptions to their usual healthy routines when stressed out from work. Stress can actually make us lose our appetites. Many of us are familiar with “stress eating” as well. Other times we’re just too tired to work out. You know exercise would help you let off steam, but your exhaustion from work stress is too high to even think about showing up at the gym. It really gets a vicious cycle going.
It also doesn’t help having work cultures that glamorize stress. We have to wear stress like a badge of honor or our coworkers think we’re just not dedicated to the job. A great deal of suffering comes with that sign of prestige you’re wearing though.
Women on the Body Path deeply feel the negative impact of work stress. It seems impossible to experience the peace you truly desire when you can literally feel work stress hurting your body.
Here’s some good news: there are lots of ways to use the power of your body to comfort and soothe the enormous toll that stress has been taking. Women on the Body Path benefit from stress relief techniques like deep calm breathing and progressive muscle relaxation.
Many of the ways stress shows up in our bodies – whether that’s muscle tension, feeling on edge, or an upset stomach – can be understood as automatic responses of our threat defense system. This happens because your body is perceiving work stress as a threat from which you need to protect yourself and automatically kicks into fight or flight mode. The opposite of the fight or flight response is the relaxation response. Deep calm breathing helps us make the shift from the fight or flight response to the relaxation response.
Progressive muscle relaxation is a stress relief technique that directly targets those tense muscles. Women using this approach learn to tense and then release different muscle groups in a step-by-step fashion. Some women describe feeling like they’ve just had a massage after trying this stress relief tool.
