Navigating The Daily Stress Cycles (& Why It Will Make You A Less Anxious Rider)

Most of us arrive at our riding from 30 floors up and wonder why the whole experience feels a little left off centre.

What do I mean? Well, most of us either lack the tools to bring ourselves back to a regulated state or beyond that are “stuck” at a level of activation where we never truly come back to a balanced baseline. Over the course of any given day, we are riding waves of stimulation, and up-regulation in response to “little threats” or situations that require that little bit more of us that see a shot of cortisol and adrenaline being released into our system.

What constitutes a little threat? For the most part, we aren’t running from Sabre Tooth Tigers anymore. But opening the email you don’t really want to read at work, finding yourself forgetting something that was really important or mediating yet another argument between your young kids all send us into sympathetic activation.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this but it does become problematic when that spike of energy has no release and we don’t downregulate on the other side of it. Then we find ourselves in a situation where we have moving through a number of stress cycles over the course of the day, which independent of each other are relatively benign, but cumulatively add up to a volcano.

And then we go and catch our horse and wonder why we feel anxious.

You can’t think your way out of a stress cycle. It is a physical experience and must be processed as such. The key is to find ways to inject small pockets of regulating movement in your day in response to stressors so that we are continually emptying our cups and not leaving them full to overflowing.

Onwards.

❤️ Jane

www.confidentrider.online

Holding Your Centre In The Midst Of Hard Things

Like many of us, I’ve found the last few weeks to be a continual wave of constant and fairly intense experiences. The general atmosphere we are operating in is charged, and as a consequence, we are approaching everything in front of us from a place of heightened activation also.

Everywhere we go, there are hard conversations. Everywhere we look, there are polarising opinions and calls to ask us to take sides. It can be confusing, inflaming, overwhelming, and at its worst, destructive.

What I love is that everyone that follows along here, especially in my member’s group, JoyRide, is here with the central, unifying reason of horses. For many of us, the work on ourselves has begun with and for our horses. But what has become more and more obvious to me is the flow-on effects to other areas of our life; how we can also see that these skills- the ability to hold our centre; the ability to not shut down or run away; the ability to maintain a sense of self that we are all working on- allows us to have a social discourse and to talk about big issues BEYOND our horses in a way that is loving and mutually respectful, and for that, I am so, so grateful.

In this episode, I explore how it is that our horses provide us with a training ground for life, and how the skills that we develop are transferable to every other area that we involve ourselves in, whether we are aware of it or not.

I hope you enjoy it!

❤️Jane