How One Veteran Teaches Other Vets to Reset Stress

[An excerpt from The Kindness Cure in honor of Veteran’s Day and World Kindness Day.]

“When we come back from the war zone and get out of the military,” explains veteran Justin Blaze, “we immediately lose camaraderie, we lose our community, we lose our family. Nobody understands us. That’s why veterans become so isolated and there are so many suicides in the United States.” And that’s why Blaze created a yoga curriculum used nationally for veterans (VEToga) and their families. “A free community class essentially opens a door to being with others like us. Veterans see that there’s no judgment, that other people who are like them are doing yoga, so something must be working. That’s the only reason they come.” And along the way, they get the same results Blaze did.

“Usually a soldier does one, two, or three tours, and that’s more than enough. I did more than forty trips to Iraq and Afghanistan in ten years” says Blaze in a mild-mannered way. “The stress added up. In the military, you are trained to operate above the normal optimal zone for stress. When everything in your body is telling you to run away, you are trained to stop and turn and go toward it. It’s hard to turn that off.” Over time, Blaze accumulated many injuries and a lot of battle stress. He was irritable, mean, and just didn’t feel like himself.

Then Blaze’s roommate invited him to try a yoga class. “It was very challenging physically. That hooked me. Because it was low-impact, given my injuries, I could do it. Then at the end of class, when I was just laying in Savasana, corpse pose, I felt a sense of rest and relaxation I hadn’t felt in years. I got a little taste of it and I wanted more.” For Blaze, learning how to “reset” himself physically and mentally was exactly what he needed after years of being on a high-adrenaline rush. He began to improve in both body and mind, and he found himself being kinder and gentler with himself and with others. He became a certified yoga instructor. “I felt obligated to give back to people. If there are other people who are even barely dealing with the things I was dealing with, I have a need to help them.” That’s why he started his nonprofit outreach program, VEToga, which provides yoga classes and teacher trainings for veterans and their families.

Your Internal Alarm System

Chronic states of stress lead to wear and tear in the body, and possibly to more serious illness. The mental and emotional effects of chronic stress can be painful too. It’s hard to focus and concentrate, and you might even get mad at yourself about not feeling quite up for life’s demands. Moreover, it is harder to feel kind or compassionate.

This is because when your internal alarm system is in survival mode and the switch is stuck so that the system’s always on, you’re too busy reacting to stress to respond with balanced perspectives. You can’t call on the higher regions in the neocortex of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which enables you to be aware of your own thinking, keep perspective, plan, make sense of your social world, and feel compassion.

Here’s what happens. The earliest living creatures relied on quick, short-term stress responses to predators—otherwise, the consequence was death. This survival instinct is found in the limbic system—which includes the amygdala, hypothalamus, basal ganglia, and hippocampus. Your limbic system is always on, alert and scanning the environment, whether you know it or not. When you encounter something that feels threatening, the limbic system trips the alarm system switch, and you manage stress as quickly as possible by fighting or fleeing—or even fainting. Once the alarm is triggered, the hippocampus sears your reactions into memories and auto- biographical stories, lest you forget the danger. But this can also scar you, which is why you vividly remember the most traumatic things that happened in child- hood and why experiences like Blaze’s remain so potent even after they end. As he said, “I was stuck in fight or flight, there’s no question.”

You may be struggling with some of these experiences yourself just navigating a stressful and busy world. Or you may be struggling with inner threats or negative habits of mind. We all cycle through unhelpful or critical thoughts, which also cause distress—whether we are aware of them or not. That’s because our limbic brain also interprets harmful inner conditions as threatening. You may be flooded by negative world news, worry about paying college tuition for your children, have a work deadline you don’t know how you’ll make, or harbor persistent self-doubt about your body, love life, or career. The way the limbic system encourages you to respond to stress is adaptive in the short term, but when you’re constantly on high alert, there’s no chance to recover from one stressful experience before engaging another. High levels of stress hormones have serious physical and mental health repercussions. You simply aren’t built for prolonged stress.

Retrain Your Brain

Blaze points out that “When you’re in fight or flight, you’re in a desperate state. I saw myself being irritable, being reactive to people, being mean. That wasn’t who I was, and it was upsetting.” He needed to learn how to rest and restore his equilibrium. He had to retrain his brain.

For the most part, most of us do not face extreme stress or battlefields but rather the daily hassles of living. We can learn to balance out the typical stress response by intentionally engaging our internal calm and connect system. It soothes you, and it aids resting, processing experience, and refreshing—physically, mentally, and emotionally. You can encourage it. As Blaze points out, “Coping mechanisms like yoga, meditation, mind- fulness, walking in nature, spending time with your dog, and spending time with loved ones all engage your parasympathetic nervous system. It offers a sweetness that you can’t ignore. You don’t know what it is, but it tastes good in every way, it makes you feel good in every way, and you feel calmer because of it.”

When your bodily systems are in rhythm, and you’ve cared for yourself by attending to both of these basic states, you become more capable of being readily available for others, to “tend and befriend” them. Tending and befriending is also an adaptive response of the calm and connect system, whereby we instinctually protect, care for, or quiet children and loved ones in the face of threatening situations, or seek the safety of others in our social group. We can also intentionally befriend ourselves through self-compassion. Being aware and skillful about managing your own stress breaks the SPEL and naturally makes you a kinder person.