Let’s Talk About Stress: 5 Real Conversations from My Stress Awareness Month events

For Stress Awareness Month, I ran two workshops on stress management and release, at two different venues over two days. See me talk about the events and read more about how they went in my Instagram post.

So how can breathwork help with stress, I hear you cry? Because stress is more than a feeling or a mental state, it’s a physiological occurrence in the body. It’s usually a reaction to pressure; a nervous system response to overwhelm and unmet needs. Often, too much doing, not enough *being*.

Stress doesn’t just come from busyness or outer pressures. We also create so much tension simply by pushing down what we feel. Any practices that help us connect to our bodies and emotions are a surefire way to help us come back to ourselves and calm our nervous systems. Meditation and breathwork can be so powerful for this, as people found out at my workshops.

The first of my

Stress Awareness Month

workshops, at

Didsbury Parsonage

I love this gorgeous space — it’s where I run my regular breathwork classes, too.

Our bodies are amazing and hold all the answers we’ve been searching for, which often can’t be found by overthinking the mind further into overwhelm. We can only access inner calm, joy and our deepest intuition if we stop ignoring how we feel deep down, stop emotionally bypassing ourselves.

So let yourself be messy and fall apart as often as you need to. As a society, we’re not stressed because we need to ‘do better’. We’re stressed because we’re not encouraged to feel our real, raw, human emotions.

There’s nothing I love more than having honest, open conversations with people about real life, real feelings and what we’d like to change to be happier. In this article, I unpack the honest shares people brought up at my events, about what holds them back and causes them the most stress. Thank you to everyone who came along and allowed yourself to be seen.

Scroll to the bottom to read more about my next workshop, Time to Feel - inspired by these two events. 🥰

1. There’s no time to feel

People don’t feel there’s enough space in their daily life to give attention to their emotions. We’re conditioned to feel like everything but *feeling* is a bigger priority. Keeping emotions suppressed until a later date only perpetuates the cycle of stress, by increasing the tension we create from resisting our feelings. Making time to check in with ourselves, acknowledging the importance of our emotions, helps us feel more energised and engaged for the other 23 hours of the day. Remember, we have to empty our cup to fill it back up again.

2. Responsibility for others complicates things

When people care for others, whether that’s children, older dependents or people at work, it’s common to feel like you have to be strong for them, so you can’t let yourself ‘fall apart’. It might also be that you feel more helpless if your stress is attached to someone else, whose pain you want to solve. Yet when we tend to our own needs, we have more capacity for giving energy to those around us. Although the sources of our stress are often outside of us, we’re always in control of how we respond to them.

3. Doing it by ourselves can be the biggest hurdle

Many people feel they can ‘drop in’ deep when doing peaceful practices in group sessions, but find it harder to be in stillness with themselves when alone at home. Being able to sit with ourselves, and our emotions, is some of the most important work we can do. As a beautiful example, one attendee came to my event all the way from Dublin, as part of a solo day trip she’d planned to feel more connected to herself. As a gift to herself to try something new, she spent her birthday enjoying her own company, which she’d always been resistant to before 🥹 This moved me so much. So inspiring!

4. It feels scary to meet our emotions

It’s really common to feel like our hidden emotions are this deep, dark well of terrifying energy. This can create increasing stress from fearing the unknown of ‘what might happen’ if we’re emotional. It’s also a root cause of anxiety, when we ignore a part of ourselves that really needs compassion. When we allow ourselves to sit with our emotions and get curious about them, they never feel as bad as we imagine. Plus, by avoiding them, we’re holding onto emotions for longer than if we just processed and released them (according to *science*, this only takes 90 seconds). As Gabor Mate says, “The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.”

5. We don’t know why we’re emotional

We don’t have to have a reason for what we feel - if our body feels an emotion, it’s because it wants to let go of it. (I used to do this a lot; ‘Why do I want to cry? Not sure what’s going on there; I’ll just ignore it’.) When we busy ourselves trying to figure out the meaning of our emotions or to justify them with a good-enough reason, our mind takes over. It can also leave us feeling numb when we repeatedly ignore what we feel. If we just stop trying to control emotions or needing to know the answers, we can be more present to what we feel. Then the body can surrender, relax and release that stuck tension.

I took the learnings from all of this, so after listening to and supporting these attendees, my next offering has been informed by their experiences and wisdom . Read more or book on Eventbrite for my emotional processing event in Didsbury on Friday 6th June, Time to Feel.

The second of my Stress Awareness Month workshops took place in Cheadle