You probably think your stress is coming from your calendar and the people around you.

The school pickup, the inbox, the in-laws, the thing your partner said that you’re still obsessing over three days later.

The impact of these constant demands on your nervous system is very real.

But while what’s happening outside of you might be the most obvious place to point your finger, when it comes to stress and your nervous system, it’s only one piece of a much bigger picture.

And if you’re only looking at that piece, you’ll spend years trying to fix what’s happening around you (and largely out of your control), wondering why your body still feels stuck in exhaustion and fight-or-flight.

Here’s where most stress management advice goes wrong: it treats stress like something you can just soothe your way out of.

A skincare routine.

A manicure.

A bubble bath.

10 minutes of deep breathing.

And before you think you need to give up the pleasure and pauses in your life, that’s definitely not what I’m saying. Your nervous system needs pleasure and pauses, too. Absolutely.

But that’s a conversation for another day.

Because unless a routine or practice is actually working with your body’s physiology — actually engaging your nervous system’s release mechanisms — it’s doing for your stress roughly what a pill does for a headache.

It helps you feel better in the moment, but it does not touch the root of the issue.

And the root of the issue is never in your self-care routine. It’s in your physiology.

There are three sources of stress.

Your demanding schedule and family drama are only part of the picture, and while you can make some changes there on the surface, they’re largely out of your control.

Life is always going to send you challenges.

That’s not going to change, no matter how many hours you meditate every day.

But once you understand stress holistically, you can support your nervous system at a deeper level, and from there, the challenges stop feeling overwhelming.

You start sleeping better and feeling more rested.

Your body hurts less.

You feel strong and clear both mentally and physically.

And you know that even when it’s hard, you can handle it.

Here are the sources of stress you want to work with:

 

1. Environmental Stress

The first type of environmental stress is the type of stress everyone thinks of first.

The schedule. Finances. The people around you.

But there are less obvious environmental stressors all over the place, and once you see them, you can start to make changes to reduce their impact on you.

Let’s start with the obvious ones.

If you’re reading this article, you probably feel like your schedule is too full.

You want to do all the things, but the truth is, inconvenient as it is, your physical form is limited.

Your body wasn’t built to be constantly busy, and you have to be intentional about counteracting all the activity with actual down time or you will never recover. And if you feel more depleted than excited, it’s a clear sign that you need more recovery.

There are some things you can do to reduce this, of course.

If you say yes to everything you’re asked to do, you can start to say “no” more, for example.

You can also prioritize and schedule down time so you don’t accidentally overbook yourself.

I was recently invited to an event with a friend and said I was busy.

Was I doing something? By other people’s standards, no.

In actuality? Yes.

Because I was letting my nervous system recover.

It’s undeniable that other people are a source of real environmental stress as well.

As Ram Dass famously put it: “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.”

And if you’re a mother, the isolated structure of modern parenthood taxes your nervous system in ways that are often impossible to manage.

(I don’t have a solution for this one beyond asking for help as much as you possibly can — with the knowledge that, as science writer Elena Bridgers has documented, babies in hunter-gatherer societies were held and cared for by anywhere from six to fourteen or more caregivers beyond their mothers. Your nervous system evolved expecting a village. It’s not weakness that you’re depleted without one.)

Another obvious, but perhaps more controllable form of stress is from tech overstimulation.

The mental noise we expose ourselves to with 80 swipes per minute on Instagram, doomscrolling, or even just listening to good old fashioned radio news leaves very little time for the nervous system to relax.

There are even bigger, very real, physiological problems in the world we’ve built for ourselves — the physical noises you’re exposed to and don’t even register anymore: the rumble of cars, the hum of appliances, the subtle buzz of your internet router sitting three feet from where you sleep.

Much of this — other people’s feelings, the relentless demands, the noise — is genuinely out of your control.

But not all environmental stress belongs in that category.

When you have the capacity and opportunity, there are hidden stressors affecting your nervous system that you actually have a lot more control over than you might think.

There’s artificial light.

The poor air quality most people are breathing every day because the windows stay closed year-round. (My house keeps them open unless it’s well below freezing, well above 90°F, or the air quality outside is worse than it would be inside with a filter.)

Then there’s the food (or “food”) most people are eating — a real lack of actual nourishment.

The chemicals in personal care products and cleaning products, absorbed and inhaled daily without a second thought.

And exercise, or really, lack thereof — not as a punishing addition to an already-full day, but woven into how you live.

Almost all of these can be modified or tweaked to a cumulative impact that is big.

Some are expensive, it’s true. But others are free, or even cheaper than the alternative (baking soda, white vinegar, salt, and lemon juice are my favorite cleaning allies, for example).

Building your life around the prioritization of environmental stress reduction, as best you can, in ways that don’t cause MORE stress, is a great starting point.

But then there’s the stress we do to ourselves.

 

2. The Second Arrow

This is the source of stress we work with most directly in Applied Somatic Medicine™ treatments.

It’s true, some things cannot change.

People don’t always act the way we want them to. Kids wake us up at night. We don’t always have the time or money to eat as well as we’d like. And sometimes, we’re going to feel angry, or sad, or overwhelmed.

But we make the negative impact on ourselves so much worse by fighting against our lives.

Better to accept our limitations, feel our feelings, and soften into what we do have available to us — as part of the life experience we’re having in this moment.

In Buddhism, they call this resistance to life as it is The Second Arrow.

The first arrow is what happens outside of your control, the challenges that life inevitably sends your way.

The second arrow is the stress you put on your system by resisting what you can’t change (and you can feel your body physically tighten when you notice yourself doing this).

As Eckhart Tolle puts it: if you can change your situation, change it.

But if you can’t, you don’t have to keep suffering on top of it. Pain might be present. Suffering is optional.

And as Pema Chödrön points out — the anger, the resentment, the jealousy, the fear — none of that is a sign something’s wrong with you.

Every “negative” emotion is information.

It’s showing you exactly where you still have work to do. Where there’s a second arrow you can soften around so it falls away.

Until you learn to work with and release the second arrow, your body is going to keep carrying more stress than you want, you’re going to keep reacting on autopilot, and over time, you’ll probably experience more uncomfortable physical symptoms as well, because stress directly affects your physiology.

I’m always amazed at how many symptoms are reduced or disappear entirely when women start coming in for a series of Applied Somatic Medicine™ treatments.

But for most women, consistency is key. Because stress patterns are habituated in the nervous system.

 

3. Stored Stress Patterns

This is what some people call trauma.

But stress patterns don’t have to be caused a single or even big traumatic event — they can just as easily be the result of a long stretch of stress with no real opportunity to recover.

These are automatic, habitual responses — patterns your nervous system picked up along the way, often because at some point, they served you.

This is what’s happening with the mother who still can’t sleep through the night even after her kids are teenagers, because her nervous system got so conditioned to staying on high alert that it never got the memo the danger passed.

Or someone who had a hard time socially in middle school, and is still — decades later — scanning every room for how people are reacting to them.

Here’s the hopeful part: from what I’ve seen in clinic and my own life, I believe most of these stored patterns can be released, unlearned, and repatterned.

Neurology changes with every lived experience.

And even in the cases where the automatic reaction doesn’t fully resolve, your relationship to it can still soften considerably.

You don’t have to stay at war with your own nervous system.

You can learn to love the life you’re living, in every moment.

The key is to support your nervous system so it’s not overloaded by stress, but fueled by it (the way it’s supposed to work).

You have some options when it comes to nourishment, boundaries, and creating a tox-free lifestyle — and as we covered, small changes can have a massive impact on how you feel and function.

But some environmental stress truly is out of your control, no matter what you do.

That second arrow, though?

That one’s available to you right now, in this exact moment, with whatever you’re dealing with in THIS moment.

You can either resist it and add more stress to your system, or you can soften, allow the experience to be what it is, and watch it change.

That’s usually where we start at The Embodied Wellness Studio.

Not by habit stacking 5 more routines in your already packed schedule. With your actual physiology.

Because once you learn how to soften into your experience and unwind the stress patterns that have habituated themselves into your nervous system, it becomes a lot easier to make the changes that will support both your mental and physical health in the long run.

You’re not stuck with the nervous system you have today.

You can change it, and one of the most powerful and effective places to start is by working with the second arrow. 

If this sounds like something you’d like to practice more in your life, check out our 14-day online somatic mindfulness course, The Practice, where you’ll learn a real framework to live inside your body with less resistance, so you stop overriding it by default and start responding to it on purpose.

And if you’d like to give your nervous system a deeper level of support, book an Applied Somatic Medicine™ treatment at our women’s health clinic in Tigard to start unwinding those stored stress patterns and get a personalized plan to reduce the overall stress load your body is carrying.

We can’t wait to see where this takes you.