Welcome back!
I noticed something recently on a usual workday that had nothing dramatic about it. No fires to put out, no hard conversation, just a few meetings. By the time I sat down for dinner, I realized I had eaten half of it without tasting any of it. Logically, nothing was wrong, but my body seemed to notice otherwise. My shoulders were somewhere up around my ears, I finally noticed I was not present, and my head was already in ruminating thoughts about the next thing to come, without my realizing it.
That is the version of stress I want to talk about this issue, the kind that has become so familiar it stops registering as stress at all.
What chronic stress is actually doing.
Your body is built for acute stress. Something happens, your nervous system activates, you respond, and then it resolves and your body returns to baseline. That system works well. The problem is not stress itself, it is stress that never fully resolves, the kind that comes from an always-on inbox, a calendar with no white space, and a nervous system that stays mildly activated from the moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep, if you fall asleep at all.
Neuroscientist Bruce McEwen described this using the concept of allostatic load, the cumulative wear on the body that builds when stress systems are activated repeatedly or never given the chance to fully power down. Instead of one clear event followed by recovery, the body ends up managing a constant low-grade signal, and over time that shows up as measurable strain on the cardiovascular, metabolic, and immune systems.
Source: McEwen, B.S. (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. New England Journal of Medicine, 338(3), 171-179.
If that sounds familiar, it should. It connects directly to something I shared in an earlier issue, the finding that chronic psychological stress is associated with shorter telomeres, the protective caps on our chromosomes. Different researchers, different measurement, the same underlying story: stress that never resolves leaves a mark, whether we notice it or not.
Here is the part I find most useful. Allostatic load is as much about how much recovery shows up in between as it is about the stress itself. That is where the rest of this issue lives.
Hello moments and a picture of the day, two techniques I learned from Alla Klymenko and Mo Gawdat.
In moments of stress, when I am trying to slow my days down, I keep coming back to two techniques I want to share with you. I learned both from wonderful teachers whom I consider my mentors, truly incredible people.
The first is called a Hello Moment, a practice from Alla Klymenko. It is the art of noticing something and labeling it, quite literally, with the words “hello moment.” You meet the moment the way you would meet someone wonderful. You are awestruck by a rainbow after summer rain, or by a beam of sun finding its way into your bedroom in the morning, and you savor it and express gratitude for it, silently or out loud, it does not really matter which.
The other technique is called Picture of the Day, from Mo Gawdat. It is what happens when you go for a walk, itself a great way to work off accumulated stress, and look for the one image you want to take to capture and remember that day by. A butterfly mid-flight, a bird resting on a branch, a beautiful sunset, there are countless options, and the only rule is that you get to decide what counts.
The pause at the table.
One of the simplest places to practice this kind of pause is also one of the most overlooked, the meal you are already eating anyway. Researchers Jean Kristeller and Ruth Wolever, who developed mindfulness-based eating awareness training, found that slowing down and paying attention while eating, noticing texture, flavor, and the body’s own hunger and fullness signals, changes a person’s relationship to food in a way that willpower alone does not.
Source: Kristeller, J.L., & Wolever, R.Q. (2011). Mindfulness-based eating awareness training for treating binge eating disorder: The conceptual foundation. Eating Disorders, 19(1), 49-61.
This is also where savoring comes back in. Psychologist Fred Bryant, one of the researchers who has spent the most time studying this, describes savoring as the deliberate effort to notice and stay with something good instead of letting it pass by unnoticed. Eating slowly is one of the most accessible ways to practice it, because it does not require extra time in your day, only a different quality of attention during time you were already spending.
Source: Bryant, F.B., & Veroff, J. (2007). Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
This works with the time you already have. It asks for something smaller and, in some ways, harder, actually being present for the parts of your day you are already living through.
Your experiment. Your data. Your call.
I do not want this newsletter to just be ideas without action, so here is one small thing to try before the next issue. Pick one meal a day, just one, and eat it without your phone or a screen in front of you. Chew slower than feels natural. Notice three actual bites, the texture, the temperature, the flavor. You do not need to do this at every meal, and you do not need to get it perfect. You are simply gathering your own data on what happens when you give one part of your day your full attention instead of your divided attention.
A quick note before you go further.
I am not a doctor, and this is shared for educational purposes only, based on my own experience and training in functional medicine health coaching, not as medical advice.
What is coming next.
This is exactly the kind of practice I bring into coaching sessions, not as one more thing to add to your day, but as a different way of moving through the day you already have. Coaching opens again this fall, and the interest form is open for anyone who wants to be first in line.
Before you go.
Your nervous system is asking for a pause small enough to actually fit inside the life you already have.
More soon, Oksi