HEALTH AND WELLBEING.

Healing After Acute Stress.

Despite our best intentions, care and all the practices- life can sometimes demand too much of us. Our bodies are more than the machines that they have become analogous too. We, like the natural world we are a part of, are cyclical and rhythmical, with times that demand rest and times that demand intensity. Yet sometimes the times of stressful intensity where the demands of life feel too much for us to meet them can overtake the times of rest and restoration. And as a culture we have valued productivity and doing over being.

Stress can become a part of the fabric of daily life, and part of our daily challenge is to identify if the cause of our stress, exists in actuality in that moment, or as a figment of the past or future that the body and mind can cleverly and subconsciously take us to. The body having a way of using elements of our daily life as subconscious reminders of events that have stressed us in the past or our perceived future.

We all have a unique relationship to stress what causes it, it’s bodily experience, and how we cope with it. It is fickle relationship that can change overtime. Carl Rogers writes “what is most personal is most universal’- although our stress may feel related only to ourselves, it is an experience we all share. How do we find salvage, when the demands of life threaten to overcome us into melancholy or lethargy. How do we maintain esteem amidst the responsibilities that can wear us. Sometimes we can't. The reality of life is that sometimes it is overwhelming.

One may find many a prescription for how to overcome stress, it’s uses, benefits and detriments, and there are many helpful and useful practices that can help us to feel more ourselves when our lives feel non-functional- that connect us back to our subsconscious, meditative practices, journalling, movement, joy, being with loved ones and immersing ourselves amongst nature, or the also more non prescriptive and perhaps sometimes more realistic ways and still nourishing ways we handle stress, eating crisps, an outburst, an afternoon on the sofa, what heals us is personal.

Stress is something that we may not need to pathologise or manage- although without care it can lead to pathology, but it is a wider and natural part of how the body responds to challenges and the ways we have individually adapted to respond to it exists for a reason and how we have developed overtime. Through observing and mirroring how our care figures in childhood dealt with challenges, the bodies natural and normal physiological responses of how we respond to demand, our cultural ways.

Thus how and why we feel stress is something to sympathise with and to notice, what may instigate my stress, where is it felt and how is it expressed? Where do I find joy, moments that calm or restore? To be intentional with observing and honouring when we need rest, and nourishment, and what it is that nourishes you. And to accept that sometimes life is overwhelming and fretful.

!7.July. 2025.

By H Coutts.

References and Resources.

Mayo Clinic, March 8 2021, The Four A’s of stress relief, Mayo Clinic.Accessed online 16. July 2017. https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/the-4-as-of-stress-relief

Tippet Krista with Sternberg Ester, September 4, 2008. Stress and the Balance within.Onbeing Podcast accessed online 16th July. 2025. https://onbeing.org/programs/esther-sternberg-stress-and-the-balance-within/