Rolling Into the New Year With Stress? Tips That can Help to Calm the Nervous System andCope With Stress

After the business of the holiday season, we can experience significant stress when facing the demands of daily life. Increased stress leads to negative health changes, such as increased heart rates, blood pressure, and cortisol levels, and affects the quality of our sleep (Chung et al., 2019). This can leave us feeling exhausted, immobilized, and stressed. The buildup of stress over time can become toxic, and lead to poorer immune system function and numerous negative mental and physical health outcomes, such as hypertension, diabetes, anxiety and depression, among others (Chung et al., 2019; Mariotti, 2016). Luckily, there are many different ways that we can help to calm and regulate our nervous system to help deal with stress and avoid the effects of toxic stress.

Here are some tips on ways to help calm your nervous system:

1. Engage in deep breathing:

I know this seems like a cheesy or overstated tip, but there’s a reason why so many

professionals recommend deep breathing – it works! When engaging in deep breathing, it

helps to activate your parasympathetic nervous system (Chung et al., 2019), which is the

part of the nervous system that helps to calm our bodies. Box breathing or 4 square

breathing is a common technique, where you breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds,

exhale for 4 seconds, then pause for 4 seconds. Simple, yet effective.

It can also be helpful to use a longer exhalation than inhalation when engaging in deep

breathing to really activate our parasympathetic nervous system. An example of this is

the 4-7-8 breathing technique, where you breathe in for 4 counts, hold for 7, then exhale

for 8. (If this seems like too long of a hold and exhalation, you can shorten it to 4-5-6 or

something similar). Deep breathing is a healthy habit we can easily integrate into our

daily lives – we can use deep breathing when we first wake up, before bed, or while

driving.

2. Identify your emotion:

Again, this may seem overly simple, but can truly work. By identifying the emotion we

are feeling, we are working to engage our prefrontal cortex (the part of our brain that is

responsible for judgment, critical thinking, problem solving, and many other higher level

tasks). Engaging our prefrontal cortex helps us to become back in control of our

emotions, instead of feeling controlled by them. The ‘name it to tame it’ (Siegel &

Bryson, 2012) is a great strategy to use to help identify and communicate what we are

feeling, then can help to problem solve or cope with the feeling. Identifying our emotions

is a key part of emotional regulation and emotional intelligence skills.

3. Get up and move:

Another great strategy to help our nervous system is to get active. This does not have to

be thought of as “exercise” or going to the gym. This could include hiking, yoga, walking

your dogs or with a friend, or putting on music and getting up and dancing. There are

numerous benefits to being active, such as movement helping to expel stress, reducing

anxiety, releasing endorphins, and improving our brain power (Elmagd, 2016). When

engaging in movement, we want to find something that is truly enjoyable, so we can

create a habit out of it to reap the health benefits.

4. Spend time with a pet:

Pets are wonderful support systems that can help to regulate our nervous system.

Spending time with a pet can lead to decreased heart rates, lowered blood pressure,

reduced fear, lowered stress hormones, and increased relaxation (Olmert, 2009; VanFleet

& Faa-Thompson, 2017). If you do not have your own pet, you could spend time with a

friend/neighbor/family member’s pet, or perhaps volunteer at a local animal shelter to

still reap the benefits of our engagement with animals.

While these are wonderful skills that help to regulate our nervous system, they are

certainly not the only skills that can help. A central part of working on our mental health

is finding the skills or tips that work for us, and the same applies when discussing coping

with stress. We need to find habits and skills that work for us and that we are committed

to – whether that is meditation, journaling, yoga, deep breathing, movement, or many

others. I hope your 2026 is filled with establishing skills and habits to lead to a happy,

healthy, wonderful year.

By: Jill Robinson, DSW, LCSW, LSCSW, RPT-S™, CAS, CAAPT-S

References

Chung, Y. M., Lou, S. L., Tsai, P. Z., & Wang, M. C. (2019). The efficacy of respiratory

regulation on parasympathetic nervous system appraised by heart rate variability. Journal of Medical and Biological Engineering, 39, 960–966. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40846-019-00472-z

Elmagd, M. A. (2016). Benefits, need and importance of daily exercise. International Journal of Physical Education, Sports and Health, 3(5), 22-27. https://www.kheljournal.com/

Mariotti, A. (2015). The Effects of Chronic Stress On Health: New Insights Into the Molecular

Mechanisms of Brain–Body Communication. Future Science OA, 1(3).

https://doi.org/10.4155/fso.15.21

Olmert, M. D. (2009). Made for each other: The biology of the human–animal bond. Da Capo

Press.

VanFleet, R., & Faa-Thompson, T. (2017). Animal Assisted Play Therapy. Professional Resource Exchange.

Siegel, D. J., Bryson, T. P. (2012). The whole-brain child: 12 revolutionary strategies to

nurture your childs developing mind. Bantam Books.