TOP 5 ways to raise serotonin & DECREASE stress highs

for service-based entrepreneurial women.

We all want to wake up in the morning, refreshed, excited, and ready to play a big game joyfully and inspired, energized, and ready to take on the adventures of this week, but as most people know, life gets life-ing and between unexpected chores, kids having a bad night (uhh…that means you had a bad night), sales calls that went sideways and the overall discouragement and depressive state of our mental and emotional capacity, life has a way of bullying us back into smallness.

It is more important than EVER to keep our minds and emotions in line with our values, to do everything we can to get good sleep, and to lower our stress levels so we are calm, grounded confident YOU show up to life FIRST. 

*pst! Click here to grab your list of 5 WAYS TO INCREASE SEROTONIN AND DECREASE STRESS…this blog post is a deep dive into your list of 5 and if you want to continue reading, I’ll catch you at the end for an extra GIVE that goes with your downloadable.

To make sure this happens, I’ve created a list of the TOP 5 things I do and teach my clients to do to regulate our nervous system, regulate our stress, and increase serotonin levels - I have dubbed it your zen drug…hehehe…we’ll dive more into the details!  

First, why ME? Why would you get advice from ME about your stress levels and what to do to increase your overall calm, grounded mood levels and have increased energy for your day and week? That’s a fantastic question: As an old-soul gem-z entrepreneur of four years now, a chronic pain survivor, and a self-imprisoned adrenaline junkie, I used to be the most strung-up, angsty young woman you could have met. 

On top of my out-of-control stress, I suffered from insomnia and dealt with a congenital deformity that further exacerbated my hustle-oriented lifestyle.

Now, I run a successful online coaching business and work when I want, how long I want, take my weekends, sleep 8-10 hours every night, have energy in reserve every day and have learned how to masterfully decompress at the end of very exciting days filled with coaching calls, masterminds, training, team meetings, and brand collaboration sessions. 

I LOVE my life and never really thought I could get here. But when I learned the ONE THING, it all clicked and I was able to experiment my way past countless prescribed medications, useless medical advice, and fear and shame that my body would always be letting me down. 

STRESS IS GOOD? WAIT WHAT?

So first! Let’s talk about stress because this was the #1 mindset shift that changed the entire approach I was using which was getting me stuck.

Like most of us, there is a nasty tendency to cycle in and out of burnout. Become scared or anxious and drive our energy into action based on what we’re AFRAID will happen and then witness our entire body CRASH and BURN because we weren’t paying attention to the signals she was giving us. So, firstly understand that your stress isn’t BAD. Your body learns to utilize stress in incredible ways; to get you out of scary situations, to keep your body strong and your muscles working, your physique in form, your digestive system moving and your overall wellness working properly. Your brain also uses stress to enhance capacity, memory, and overall elasticity.

GOOD STRESS:

Here’s the CATCH.

If you’re OUT OF BALANCE, you’re going to slide right into burn-out, which happens when your whole human system cannot replenish the resources you’ve used quickly enough in relationship to your speed of use.

Let’s look at this situationally.

Let’s say you went to the gym and worked your legs, did exceptionally heavy weights your body wasn’t used to and now you’re running with a friend for another hour. In the afternoon, you want to take the kids to a trampoline park and suddenly your knee gives out.

So why? Well, you’ve now put an excessive amount of stress on one part of your body that now can’t replenish and renourish quickly enough to have your back for the next adventure.

This is why physical, mental, and emotional rest is critical. Each part of your human system works similarly when it comes to wind-up/wind-down, work-out, and rest. And yet, we often don’t relate to our mental or emotional systems with the same thoughtfulness as our physical body.

…Like toddlers bickering!

Your emotions get triggered whenever something comes into your space that is unexpected or reminds you of something you don’t want to feel. Someone asks a question about your food choices and suddenly your emotional body is feeling hurt, your brain kicks into gear and says “DANGER! We’ve felt this before!” Now your brain is working double-time, collecting past data to confirm we are in danger.

So, when you feel an emotion that isn’t so fun, what do you tend to do? Avoid, procrastinate, overwork, oversleep, undersleep, get stressed, anxious, short, bitter…the list goes on.

Our avoidance tendencies often come because we haven’t given ourselves the proper time to PAUSE and notice what is going on.

Instead, we have a different opportunity — to pause. To take a breath and ask ourselves: what are we feeling? What do our emotions need to come back to being ok? How can we create a different connection from sensation to emotion to thought so we don’t feel so automatically triggered by that question, comment, or experience again?

These are just some of the questions you can ask yourself to invite a space of calm instead of avoidance tendencies.

Avoidant behavior is often where we tend to chase dopamine the most.

As a human, you want to feel alive. And how better to feel alive than to kick your system into high levels of dopamine!

NOTE: did you know that oxygenated dopamine turns into adrenaline?

And this my friend, is how we get tendencies of misused pushing, hustling, forcing that turns into BAD STRESS.

So, now what about Serotonin? We can see what the negative patterns and relationship dopamine and stress have to our overall health and well-being. What about Serotonin?

Serotonin is a chemical in your body that supports sleep, rest, and overall nervous system regulation. The best way I’ve learned to describe the feeling of serotonin is like sitting cuddled up by a fireplace with a cup of hot herbal tea and feeling completely and whole. No needs, no wants. Just contentment.

Can you imagine feeling this all the time?!

There is absolutely a place for dopamine. There is absolutely a need for healthy stress levels and the building of muscle, mental capacity, and overall strength-building in all human systems. And, for healthy stress to be healthy, we must have rest.

If you don’t have rest (mentally, emotionally, physically), you end up in burnout and overwhelmed to the point of symptomatic breakdown. That was my story. Having begun my chronic pain journey at age seventeen for six years after that, I had no hope of ever being pain-free. But once I learned how to understand the balancing of my dopamine and stress levels, the things I could do to balance them out, and what I was avoiding, wow! It changed my life.

…and, it could change yours too.

Keeping track of your stress, and what good and bad stress looks like for you is essential! This is why I have designed a spreadsheet template you can use to keep track of your stress, what good/bad stress looks like to you, and your overall mood at different checkpoints during the day.

You can DOWNLOAD THE SPREADHSEET HERE.

I trust that this journey of stress, mood, and emotional regulation will support you in having a fuller, more vibrant, and restful life that is satisfying in all ways!

Drop a comment below and share your practices that support these areas and what most struck you from this post!