Are you afraid of your adrenaline surges?
The Whitworth Stressometer can teach you how to be less afraid of your adrenaline stress reactions, the automatic changes in your thoughts, emotions, and body when your nervous system senses danger. It helps you recognize what’s happening, understand whether you’re responding to a real threat or a false alarm, and decide what you need in that moment.
There are no surge protectors to prevent adrenaline from spilling into your system even when your life isn’t truly at risk. That’s why it’s important to sort out false alarms from true ones so you know when to take your stress reactions seriously, and when it’s safe to help yourself calm down.
In this article, you’ll learn how stress and relaxation can feel at each level of the Whitworth Stressometer, so you can recognize your own patterns and respond to them more effectively.
What are the symptoms of an adrenaline surge?
An adrenaline surge can affect your thoughts, emotions, body, and behavior. Although everyone experiences stress differently, common symptoms can include:
Anger, anxiety, rage, depression, or paranoid anxiety
Self-downing self-talk, catastrophic thinking, trauma-memory flashbacks, obsessions, or perfectionism anxiety involving disapproval panic
Insomnia or hypersomnia: sleeping or staying in bed more
A racing heart or spikes in blood pressure
Autoimmune illness flares, skin rashes, irritable bowel syndrome, migraines, weight fluctuations, or chronic pain
Venting, binge-anxiety patterns, avoidance, self-sabotage, addictive behaviors, or exhaustion from rescuing and pleasing others
These reactions may also become more noticeable during periods of change or difficult transition, like if you’re trying to quit smoking, heal from illness or injury, or navigate a chronic illness flare.
Whatever your symptoms look like, making mindful, deliberate daily choices that align with your personal preferences can help you manage them more successfully.
Why adrenaline surges can keep you scared
Our adrenaline surge symptoms can be frightening because they’re supposed to scare us, in case our lives need saving. But we can stay scared for much longer than necessary, even if the adrenaline surge is the result of a false alarm in the nervous system (no real, immediate threat to your life).
Below I’ve created a guide to help you better understand and problem-solve through stressful moments one situation at a time.
How feeling safe changes your thinking and decision-making
Lots of things happen in our mental outlook and decision-making abilities that I think are really cool when we are feeling safe, calmer in our muscle tension, breathing pattern, and thinking style. First of all, we like ourselves a little more and are able to easily identify our personal preferences about problems.
We can naturally manage stress uniquely, individualistically, playfully, and meaningfully. Preferential and calmer decisions may not be immediately gratifying, but they will be gratifying later on.
On the other hand, impulsive acting out may gratify you in the moment but will translate into unhealthy self-criticism or self-sabotage later. Calmer decision-making moment by moment builds a momentum over time and adds to our overall self-respect and wellbeing.
True emergencies vs. false alarms in the nervous system
When you are in a true life-threatening emergency, rushed and suddenly reactive decisions are required and helpful. The sudden switch to fear-based, adrenaline-laced thinking and behavior styles of the mind and body systems is supposed to scare us a lot.
Stress hormones scare us because suddenly we are confused about our safety. If there is no danger immediately threatening us, our minds will scramble and fragment into all kinds of “what if” negative hypothetical possibilities, which we usually stay fixated on because there is not a real life threat emergency choice in that “what if” list, since our life isn’t truly in danger.
This negative experience is a false alarm in the nervous system. We can stay in this scrambled state of mind and body tension for days or longer. The longer we stay with our false alarm fear-based mindset and body tension, the more painful symptoms will continue to develop and worsen. That’s when we begin to get sick and even more scared.
There is a way out of this.
Why false alarms happen and how to calm them
False alarms in your nervous system are supposed to happen a lot, just in case it is an emergency. False alarms are not your fault and cannot be stopped. It is how we are wired to survive. Learning reassuring self-talk and bodily relaxation skills once the false alarm is identified is the solution to the stress puzzle.
Primary stressors that easily falsely alarm us include things like health worries, relationship problems, and financial woes. One solution to a false alarm is improving your awareness of your specific mind an body reactivity symptoms.
How the Whitworth Stressometer helps manage adrenaline surges
The Whitworth Stressometer can teach you to understand your way out of your false alarms and freak out moments, so that you aren’t captured and stuck there indefinitely. Practice is the key to meaningful life improvements.
It is important to learn how to direct your Adrenaline’s laser sharp focus to Personal Preference thinking and behaving in each false alarm. Knowing how to use your Adrenaline’s keen attentional focus to fixate on what you Prefer and want to see happen in your stressful situations and begin obsessively leaning into your Personal Preference thinking style and behavioral style will give you the Mental Edge during your stressful situations.
Learning how to do this ‘life hack’ is a real path to wellness, self- respect and is stress management that works for you personally.
How to use this Whitworth Stressometer guide
The Whitworth Stressometer can improve your awareness of your mind and body biofeedback messaging systems. I encourage you to think about the visceral and cerebral symptoms you experience at each level on the Stressometer.
We are all different and process stress mentally and physically by having varying symptoms. What are your Stress Reaction symptoms? What are your Relaxation Response thoughts and behaviors?
Stress reactivity levels: what levels 8–10 mean
Levels 8, 9 & 10 are helpful only in an immediate life-threatening emergency. Otherwise, you will want to deliberately and mindfully slow and calm down in your mind and body prior to problem solving the stressful situation, whether the situation involves intense positive or intense negative life events.
I want to take a minute here to advocate for the negative cascade of mind and body freak out symptoms.
We all have them to guide us to survive.
I think it’s helpful to appreciate these symptoms as the guides they are to encourage us to up our self-care routines in all non-immediate stressful times. If your stressor is going to be with you for longer than 3 days, it is a long term stressor and your relaxation hormones will help you daily problem solve your dilemma.
Below, I’ll ask you questions to help you become more aware of how your body and mind behave at each level on the Stressometer. This will help you sort of false alarms from true emergencies, so you can process your adrenaline and get back to calmer thoughts and feelings when you’re ready.
What level 10 stress looks like: intense thoughts, emotions and behaviors
What are your worst thoughts, emotions and behaviors?
What triggers your intense adrenaline surge symptoms (e.g., negative self-talk, high blood pressure, or other stress-related symptoms outlined earlier in this article)?
What do other people notice or complain about the most in your behaviors when you are stressed out?
What does it feel like inside your head and body when you’re stressed out?
What impulsive choices do you routinely make that piss you off, upset you later, and make you the most emotional?
Are you panicking; raging; binging; sobbing; throwing things; trembling, disconnecting from your reality; shutting down and shutting others out; blaming others, and/or exhausted from rescuing, helping and pleasing others?
Are you putting unrealistic perfectionistic expectations on yourself?
Make a list of your worst worst thoughts, emotions and behaviors.
What level 9 stress looks like: catastrophic and perfectionistic thinking
What are your worst negative thoughts about yourself, others, your life and your future?
How does this feel inside you to think this way?
Disapproval anxiety fear reactions, illness scares, and financial fears can be important triggers to identify.
These negative catastrophic thoughts are should/must thoughts like:
I don’t matter.
There is no way out.
I can’t stand this.
I am awful.
This is totally awful.
I’m no good.
This is always going to be this way and never change.
I should have known better.
I should be better.
I must fix this.
I should be able to figure this out right now.
The thinking style at Level 9 is binary. In other words, we think in perfectionistic absolutes that ask us to quickly judge ourselves and our life using shoulds, musts and have-to’s.
The binary nature of perfectionistic thinking involve making snap judgements like: this situation and myself are either good or bad; I will either live or die; I must do all I can or nothing else is good enough, I am either right or wrong, I should be successful or I have failed entirely at life.
What are your worst-feeling perfectionistic binary thoughts?
Make a list of them.
What level 8 stress looks like: physical stress symptoms
What parts of your body feel more tense or more pain due to rising stress hormones?
Are you short of breath?
Is your chest tightening?
Does your back hurt?
Are there muscle spasms or twitches in your shoulders or somewhere else?
How does this feel inside you?
Are you nauseated?
Where do you hurt?
Is your throat hurting?
Do you have a headache?
Are you feeling numbness or tingling in your finger tips or scalp?
Are your joints swelling?
Are you jumpy or fidgety?
Are you nail biting or hair twisting or pulling?
Allow each of your bodily symptoms to guide to self-care, because that is all they are for.
Make a list of your physical symptoms at Level 8.
Relaxation response levels: what levels 7–0 mean
Levels 7-0 are all felt in your mind and body since your relaxation hormones are being delivered to your muscles and mind by your deliberate willingness and desire to calm back down again once you decide you are safe. For all of your long term stressors, (i.e., any stressor lasting longer than 3 days) think of the children’s story, The Tortoise and the Hare. This Aesop fable teaches children about resting rather than racing through life stress events.
We all can benefit daily from learning to be more like a tortoise and less like a hare during long-term stress events.
What level 7 relaxation looks like: the first signs of relief
What is the first thing you feel in your mind or body as you begin to calm down?
Where does your relief first start?
Is it a first full deep breath or your neck muscles relaxing?
Do your shoulders feel lower and better?
Or is it your stomach that feels relieved, less nauseous?
Think about your mind, too; do you relax? Do you feel more tolerant and less judgmental of yourself or others?
Think about relief in your mind and body.
Write down how it feels to you.
What level 6 relaxation looks like: preference awareness and peak performance
Preference awareness comes online again at this level. Level 6 is the fix for all of your non-life threatening stressors.
How do you know you are in your preference zone?
What are your better-feeling preference thoughts?
Do you feel more disapproval/distress-tolerant of yourself, others and your life?
How does your body prefer to feel?
Does your breathing feel better to you?
Level 6 is when you are at your best and your peak performance is possible again. Perfectionism has dropped away and your best is once again good enough to you. You can sort out realistic from unrealistic expectations for yourself, life and others.
You feel okay.
Your thoughts come together with a balanced blend of positive and negative awarenesses of yourself and your life. Your memory is better again. Better-feeling preference thoughts allow you to see yourself and your life as normally being both: good and bad, right and wrong, happy and sad, winning and losing, succeeding and failing, etc.
The glass is simultaneously half empty and half full.
It is your relaxation hormones that give you back your broader and more accurate perspective.
You are only as upset as you are far away from what you want and prefer.
What do you want to see happen?
Remember, stress management is not about getting what you want right now, it is about moving towards it by knowing what you want and honoring your preferences with your behavior and thoughts.
Write down your personal preferences about your situation.
Write down your Broader more realistic expectations of yourself and your life.
What level 5 relaxation looks like: enjoyment and happy activities
How do you feel and behave when you are enjoying and liking being you?
Are you able to laugh at the silly things you do?
Are you playfully musical, athletic, creative or something else?
Are you drawn to nature or funny videos to watch?
Do you sing, do yoga, cook, write, work puzzles, play games, exercise, go to your happy place, do your happy dance, or something else?
Think about what you naturally prefer, are drawn to do, and think when you feel good enough, okay, and safe.
What seems fun to you?
Do more of your happy activities for short little 5 minute intervals several times a day.
Write down your happy activities.
What level 4 relaxation looks like: hope, humor and fun
What do you think and feel when you are encouraged, hopeful and prone to laughter?
How does it feel and what do you do when you are having fun your way?
Are you silly, goofy, a practical joker, affectionate, drawn to nature?
Do you feel your sense of humor coming back online?
What do you like about these feelings?
What kind of things make you laugh?
Write them down and try to notice them more.
What level 3 relaxation looks like: gratitude and self-reflection
At this level, you are feeling gratitude about life.
What little or big things do you appreciate about yourself and your life today?
Write down what you are most appreciative of and encouraged by in your moments of calm gratitude and self- reflection.
Notice little moments in your day that you like. What are they?
Practicing gratitude can calm you down.
What is happening that is good?
Can you see any silver linings about your situation?
Write these down.
What relaxation levels 2, 1 and 0 look like: meditation, sleepiness, and deep sleep
These are levels of restful meditation (level 2), sleepiness and trance- like dreaming (level 1), and deep restorative sleep (level 0). This is where your relaxation hormones are at their highest and your body is resetting, healing, and restoring your muscles and mind towards wellness. Your mind easily solves problems and often delivers insightful dreams.
What do these levels feel like to your mind and body?
How do you know when you feel restored or not from a night’s sleep?
How do you know when you do not feel rested after sleeping?
Evening relaxation practices will help improve your sleep.
Keeping a dream journal can help you understand yourself better.
Write down how you feel after sleeping.
How to manage adrenaline surges throughout the day
You can use my audio relaxation exercises to get into the relaxation hormone zone in each of your false alarms. Keep going.
Practicing relaxation exercises will allow you to be your own best friend in your hard times. It is good to learn to interrupt your stress reactive states of mind and body often each day.
I recommend preference relaxation activities for 5 minutes every hour during times of high stress reactivity. Don’t worry about your adrenaline surge symptoms. Don’t be scared. Reassure yourself you are okay right now. Just allow your unique stress reaction symptoms to guide you to interrupt them often each day for 5 minute calm down intervals for all non-immediate emergency events.
