Managing Stress and Increasing Resilience and Coherence

The Gallup poll results for the Workplace Report 2026 for Australia https://www.gallup.com/workplace/704474/state-global-workplace-australia-country-level-data.aspx  revealed a worrying 50% of respondents had experienced stress for a lot of the previous day. Are you one of them? Prolonged low-grade stress is not only damaging to physical, emotional and mental health, but is directly reducing your performance both at work and in your personal life.

Long term chronic stress is incredibly damaging to physical health, energy levels, cognitive functioning & effective emotional regulation. It stops proper digestion, the majority of cellular “repair & regeneration” functions, dysregulates hormonal balance, & blood glucose, activates the “reptilian brain” instead of higher executive cognitive functioning, dysregulates the immune system and promotes inflammation, weight gain, premature aging, cardiovascular disease, cancer & autoimmune conditions….. In short a lot of things you don’t want in your life, and a large part of the reason so many people are unwell.

Your Autonomic nervous system consists of 2 parts - Sympathetic (Flight or Fight) and Parasympathetic (rest, digest, reproduce, repair, regenerate, i.e. optimal functioning)

Our physiology has not changed with the advent of our modern lifestyle, and is still designed to managed sympathetic stress activation for a maximum of 20 mins – long enough to be eaten or escape from prey😊. If you’ve ever watched a nature channel, an antelope for instance, if successful in evading a lion, will shake violently for a bit to literally shake it off and reset their nervous system, and then lie down and eat to switch over to the normal parasympathetic mode

In the simplest of terms your body’s 2 “emergency vehicles” (which get the full use of the physiological “highway” at the expense of everything else under conditions of SNS activation are 1) Cortisol and 2) Insulin.

If you are operating under conditions of regular low grade chronic stress the exquisitely co-ordinated actions of these 2 master regulating hormones are continually dysregulated….Your body doesn’t make any distinctions between “perceived stress” (your mental /emotional assessment of events, especially worrying about future events which haven’t happened) and actual physiological states of stress such as the highs and lows of blood sugar imbalance or poor sleep. It’s all STRESS & leads to your body doing whatever it takes to keep you alive for another 20 mins, at the expense of long-term repair & thriving

Stress also disrupts sleep, creates difficult to control emotions, causes poor food choices, burns a lot of your available energy, makes bad decisions, blocks cognitive flow states of creativity, enthusiasm, & inspiration, as well as desirable emotional states of love, gratitude, contentment, peace, harmony etc

So what can you do about it?

Manage your emotional state by learning how to come back into Coherence – the optimal mental / emotional state in which your heart, mind and emotions are operating in sync and balance. According to decades long scientific based research undertaken by the HeartMath Institute - https://www.heartmath.org/ - Coherence is our prime enabler of behaviour change and our ability to respond with our high functioning Executive Cortex. Unmanaged stress and the associated emotional re-activeness (as opposed to the ability to respond), is the prime dis-abler.

Aids and Blocks to Coherence-

o   According to the Institute of HeartMath, Coherence is present in all “flow” states, when we are purely in the moment absorbed in something we are enjoying doing.

o   It is essential for creative original thought which leads to increased innovation and problem-solving capacity

o   It also greatly increases our emotional EQ is any situation, and allows us to respond rather than react

o   Coherence naturally occurs when feeling positive emotional states such as gratitude, love, appreciation, caring, curiosity, harmony, when in nature and when doing things we love

o   Coherence is blocked by stress, anger, frustration, fear & worry, anxiety, sleep deprivation, disrupted blood sugar levels, and dehydration

Teaching individuals and teams how to come regularly into coherent states to better manage stress is a part of what I do in all my work with people. As you can appreciate from the above it has a huge impact on actual and perceived quality of life as well as health and energy levels, and personal effectiveness

If you would like to learn more please contact me today