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What do we mean by recovery?

It is helpful to understand how we respond to stimuli in our environment or in our lives. It’s something that has a lot of research and was pioneered by Hans Selye. His research on how veterans experience trauma from war showed how our bodies respond to stressful events.

Stress is when we perceive something to be threatening then we decide how to respond to that stimuli. 

What happens if we remain stressed? 

We are designed to deal with stress. When we deal with stress, it causes a cascade of physiological responses to happen in our body, and then we recover from it.

In today’s life, with everything being so busy, it means we are moving from one stressful event to another, mostly because we are managing so many conflicting demands. 

If that stress remains, we enter the resistance stage, which is when we do not acknowledge our stress, our bodies start to feel the downside. Our blood pressure and heart rate begin to increase, and our cortisol starts to go up. 

When there is no longer stress in your life, your body only returns to normal. However, if you deal with high stress on a daily basis, even if you don’t feel it, your body becomes so indexed that it appears like you are living with high stress. This is where people are tired for no known reason.

areas of focus for recovery

The first step is to eliminate the cause of stress. Use the resources of your mind to detach from the outcome. Seeing things as they are and not worse than they are.

It’s about seeking to rebalance the detachment from the outcome. One way to do this is to practice The White Mist Exercise.

The second step is to change your emotional state. You can move from noticing that awareness to noticing the emotional state that you’re in and then choosing to bring another emotional state into your body. 

The third step is to build recovery periods in your routine. Athletes know how powerful it is to have recovery periods in training. Structure your recovery periods so that they create distance physically and psychologically from the thing that you’re recovering from. If you want to recover from work, then turn off anything that’s going to remind you of work.

Give your body the gift of recovery by setting yourself up for a great night’s sleep to boost your productivity the next day.