Ep 164. The 3 Rs of Stress: Recognize. Regulate. Recover.

Have you ever been under intense stress and thought:

"That wasn't me."

Maybe you said something completely out of character.

Reacted more strongly than you expected.

Became angry, frightened, defensive, withdrawn, or overwhelmed.

And when the moment passed, you were left wondering:

"Where did that come from?"

Stress, threat, surprise, fear, and pain can dramatically change our physiological state. As activation increases, attention, perception, emotion, and behavior can change with it.

Sometimes the person who emerges under intense pressure feels unfamiliar even to us.

And afterward can come another painful cascade:

Shame.

Guilt.

Blame.

Confusion.

Regret.

We may begin judging ourselves by behavior that occurred during an extraordinary physiological state.

But there is an important distinction:

A stress state can influence your behavior without defining your identity.

Current nervous-system discussions increasingly explore this relationship between survival states, behavior, and identity, including the experience of not feeling like oneself during prolonged or intense stress. 

The Running Man Human Stress Model offers a simple framework for navigating these moments.

I call it:

The Three Rs

1. RECOGNIZE the State

The first skill is recognition.

What is happening inside me?

Has my breathing changed?

Has my heart rate increased?

Am I physically bracing?

Has my attention narrowed?

Do I suddenly feel urgency?

Am I thinking in absolutes?

Am I preparing to fight, flee, freeze, submit, or otherwise protect myself?

Recognition creates awareness of something enormously important:

My state has changed.

And recognizing the state gives us a better opportunity to work with it before automatically identifying with everything it produces.

2. REGULATE the Physiology

Once activation is recognized, we work with the body.

This is where the Running Man model remains deliberately physiology first, psychology second.

Rather than immediately trying to reason our way out of an activated survival response, we begin by influencing the physiological conditions from which reasoning must operate.

Breathing.

Posture.

Grounding.

Visual awareness.

Muscular tension.

Orientation to the environment.

The objective is not to eliminate emotion.

It is to recover enough regulation to increase access to perception, judgment, and choice.

That matters because nervous-system regulation is increasingly being discussed not as permanent calm, but as greater flexibility and capacity to move through changing states. 

3. RECOVER the Self

This may be the most important—and most overlooked—step.

After significant stress, people sometimes confuse:

"How I behaved while highly activated"

with

"Who I am."

Those are not necessarily the same thing.

Recovering the self means allowing the survival response to recede sufficiently that we can again access the broader person underneath it.

Our values.

Perspective.

Judgment.

Compassion.

Responsibility.

Relationships.

Sense of humor.

Wisdom.

Choice.

And importantly, recovering the self does not mean avoiding accountability.

Quite the opposite.

Understanding the physiological conditions that influenced our behavior can help us examine what happened without collapsing into shame or defensiveness.

We can say:

That behavior occurred.

I am responsible for what I do.

And I can learn what state contributed to it so I can become more