EFT Tap Along for Stress Awareness Month

Would you like to add to your self-care toolkit by managing life's stresses with more compassion for yourself and others? This new episode is for you.Full transcriptWe can internalise shame about not handling the situation with more grace, and even when it is extreme pressure. Stress can be a good thing. Think about a coal turning into a diamond, or think about a toddler, no one is yelling at that toddler, ‘Toddle! Walk!’ There's that inherent drive within all of us that we want to grow, we want to evolve, we want to learn, we want to develop. And when we're under a good stress, that eustress, that is what's happening, but where it's more distress, as in not de-stressing, but di-stress, it can be really damaging for not just the nervous system, but inflammation conditions and immunity.Welcome to episode 55 of The Feel Better Every Day Podcast.I'm your host and producer, Eve Menezes Cunningham, and every Tuesday there's a new episode to help with trauma-informed and VAST / ADHD-friendly Self and self-care ideas to help you connect with that highest, wisest, truest, wildest, most joyful, brilliant, and miraculous part of yourself, and to create a life you don't need to retreat from.This week we're looking at Stress Awareness Month. As I was reflecting on stress awareness (if you would like to, you can access loads of free resources at selfcarecoaching.net/home/ stress, and they'll support you with stress, helping you understand more about it. There's also a lot in the book, 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing, and of course other podcast episodes), I realised that while it's one of my areas of expertise for over two decades, it's especially important for sensitive nervous systems when we're dealing with VAST, also known as ADHD, and trauma recovery.And there's room for improvement in my own life, even now, and there's, I think we just live in stressful times, it's a completely normal thing.I realised a few days ago… I'm a BACP media spokesperson, and they'd asked me to contribute some self-care advice for young people navigating stress at work, and as I was writing my answers, advising young people, I was thinking, ‘49 Year Old Me is benefiting from this advice, too!’ Because one of the work projects I'm involved with has been very stressful for a very long time.As always, I am and remain my first client, and when I realised I was talking to myself as well, it's like, ‘Of course!’ And it makes sense when I think about the ADHD, when I think about the trauma history, when I think about being an immigrant myself, when I think about being the daughter of immigrants, being the granddaughter of immigrants: We can know in our bones that something is too much pressure for someone, anyone else, but somehow when it's us, we can internalise shame about not handling the situation with more grace, and even when it is extreme pressure.Stress can be a good thing. Think about a coal turning into a diamond, or think about a toddler, no one is yelling at that toddler, ‘Toddle! Walk!’ There's that inherent drive within all of us that we want to grow, we want to evolve, we want to learn, we want to develop. And when we're under a good stress, that eustress, that is what's happening, but where it's more distress, as in not de-stressing, but di-stress, it can be really damaging for not just the nervous system, but inflammation conditions and immunity.I've got the tail end of a cold, and it's like really funny, because I was thinking to myself, ‘My immunity is great! Because I'm taking really good care of myself!’ And then I came down with this bug. But it is another sign of stress. The body takes too much, and then it goes into needing that time for recovery.We know from Polyvagal Theory that we're wired to thrive when we feel safe, welcome, and loved. Asking yourself if there’s any situation in your life, or any relationship as it stands, where you don't feel safe, welcome, and loved. And ask yourself what might you do to improve things, or if you might need to exit the situation.It's also, as I just said, about remembering that stress itself is not bad, there are the different types of stress. We talked a bit about eustress. We talked about distress. With eustress, you think about going to the gym, you think about the muscles actually breaking down before they come back stronger. We grow through working out.And we sometimes forget that we always have a choice, but when we're in that kind of distress situation, we can feel powerless, we can feel helpless, we can feel burnt out, underappreciated, undervalued, and not good enough.One thing I'm doing, as part of on an ongoing basis to reduce stress in my life, while also attempting to follow Marie Forleo's advice about simplifying to amplify. I've changed up the membership a bit. So it's still the Feel Better Every Day Podcast, and I've changed the title of my Substack to Feel Better Every Day, more in line with my overall practice, which has been Feel Better Every Day with Eve Menezes Cunningham for years, and years, and years, and years.Feel Better Every Day with Eve Menezes. Also known as selfcarecoaching.net. But I've complicated things, because I've been working with the lunar phases and the Celtic Wheel of the Year for decades, I thought it would be really simple and easy to have things aligned for the different levels of membership.But thinking about it, that's been a bit complicated, so I'm simply going to have the podcast remaining Feel Better Every Day, and then free subscribers will get bonus content and special offers, sorry about this cold, I'm talking a bit strangely. And then the Sole to Soul Circle will be the third option which you can upgrade for so it will no longer be a Full Moon or Super Moon membership, it will be just the Sole to Soul Circle.With that, it's that Sole to Soul Circle, fully embodied from the soles of the feet, transpersonal approach, so it's to the soul, get it, soul, S-O-L-E to soul, S-O-U-L, and it's an approach to trauma-informed and VAST / ADHD-friendly, self and self-care.This week, the deeper dive content for Sole to Soul Circle members will include a video with some stress-reducing yoga poses and an energy technique that's hilariously simple but really effective. It really amps up that self-empathy and it really grounds and empowers the person.I’m looking forward to sharing that soon. And, of course, there's access to the exclusive membership benefits area, including the entire Love Your WHOLE Self chakra journey.We know that yoga is especially good for stress, and Dr Chris Streeter found many, many years ago in a study, that just attending a one-hour class creates GABA, which is a naturally occurring, it's mimicked in drugs like Xanax to help calm the system, but it occurs naturally in the body through yoga. It's one of those things that we know again through working with the vagus nerve, there are so many things we can do with our body, with our breaths, to change our physiology, change the way we feel.For example, Forward Folds help us come into deeper contact with our bodies in the present moment. We have that stretch reflex at the back of the legs which can help us, especially with ADHD, feel more stimulated in the pose. And there's more to focus the attention on, as well as connecting with the breath, having that deeper breath, that slightly longer exhalation or your Ujjayi breathing, whatever feels best for you.When we use the Forward Folds with the relaxation response, and you can listen to the podcast episode about that if you'd like, it can be especially helpful.Lion pose is one of the ones I'll be sharing in the Sole to Soul Circle. It's a great way to roar away any stresses and strains, and it's really about never underestimating the power of even acknowledging your current situation.Once you've acknowledged it, even to yourself, you can empower yourself to improve it. And that's one of the reasons EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques including tapping) can be especially helpful, because EFT can help us move from sympathetic activation of the autonomic nervous system, the ‘stress response’, to the parasympathetic activation, the ‘rest / digest response’.We're coming into our body, we're tapping on certain points around the face and upper body, and like yoga, like anything that grounds us, that feels soothing, there are so many things we can do and we forget.I'm hoping that this episode is going to remind you of things that are already in your toolkit as well. But today, or any time it's helpful for you to revisit this, think about any situation that's stressing you out, and as we do this EFT Tap Along, your words are going to resonate more than mine, so use mine as a guide, but trust yourself and trust your own inner wisdom.We're working with that stressed part of yourself, and that stressed part of you is really ready to be heard, because it's sick of you ignoring it, it's sick of you taking on more and more as if you're somehow to blame for the circumstances you found yourself in, and if you just somehow hustle harder, work harder, it will all be okay.It's like, ‘No, you need a break, you need, like the stress symptoms are trying to tell you something, we're not machines, we're not superhuman, really pay attention.’So start by asking yourself where you would rate your current feeling of stress.With EFT, (Emotional Freedom Techniques, including tapping) part of the reason they can be so effective is that we can release tension. If you think about a toddler who falls over, gets a hug from its carer, and is happily gurgling and laughing and playing again the next moment, babies are brilliant at moving emotions through the system, through the body, and not getting...