Ep. 045 - How to 'Unpack' Your Stress During This Festive Time of Year

SHOW NOTES

This episode promises to arm you with practical strategies to manage stress and maintain optimal health during the busiest time of the year.

Today I'm 'unpacking'  the different types of stress - emotional and physical - and their potential impact on our health.

We delve into the importance of finding the right balance between too little and too much stress, the destructive effects of chronic stress on our bodies, and the health issues that can spring from unmanaged stress.

This episode is your toolkit!

I share effective strategies to reduce daily stress, guiding you on how to filter your inputs to prioritize positive ones, and impress upon you the significance of self-care through sleep, exercise, and healthy eating.

To cap it off, we'll explore the physiological sigh breathing technique, a simple and accessible way to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and reduce stress in real-time. 

Plus, we'll discuss how to build self-trust and find your inner peace amidst the hustle and bustle of the holiday season. Tune in and learn how to thrive, not just survive, during the festive season!

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to man in the Arena, your go-to podcast for all things related to health and weight loss for men over 40. Here we discuss strategies that will get you off the sidelines and into the game so you can achieve your optimal health. It's time to lead a legacy of longevity.

Hello and welcome to man in the Arena. My name is Craig Spear, I'm the host and I'm also a men's health expert and coach. This has been a wild ride, to say the least. I've been recording this episode I think 45 and started this earlier in 2023. So it's been a wild ride. If you're listening to this and you've been listening for quite a while I want to thank you so much for just being part of this journey that I'm on and providing as much value and content as I can for the audience out there, for the guys who are over 40, who want to take steps to change their health. I'm just really grateful for all of the listeners and for this opportunity. So, yeah, I just wanted to thank you.

Today, like the last two episodes, I'm going to offer up some tips and ideas on how to thrive in the holidays, and so if you haven't listened in the last two episodes, go back and check out how to manage the holidays and scramble rules which I recorded earlier and they're now live. But today I want to offer my take on how you can practically manage stress better. Just, I said the word practically, because a lot of different methods give great ideas and they are great ideas and they're really helpful, but oftentimes these are strategies that can take too long to integrate and they don't have an immediate impact on the stress that you're feeling. So listen into this episode, because I'm going to give you some really practical ways on how you can manage your stress.

As I'm sure a lot of you are aware, this is perhaps one of the most stressful times of year. It can be a powder keg ready to blow, with all of the travel that we have, the family get-togethers. It's year end for some of you and in fact, according to the American Psychological Association, one in four of us actually worries about spending time with our family. So there's also this internal dialogue that comes into our brains that it's the end of the year and so a lot of times we're feeling shameful or regretful that we haven't quite achieved the goals that we set out to achieve at the beginning of the year. So, as I mentioned today, I want to offer some practical ways for you to better manage your stress, because we know that stress has such a huge impact on our health. It's hard to eat better and eat right when we're stressed. It's hard to get in our exercise or sleep well when we're stressed and of course, stress is going to impact the way that we see the world, the way the outlook that we have on the world.

Of course, that messes with our mindset a little bit. So before I dive into some of the strategies, I want to talk about stress just a little bit. Stress can be emotional and or it can be physical. As an emotion, we feel stress in our body. We get tightness in our chest, our heart rate increases, we get headaches, we feel off, and this is often preceded by a thought or a belief that we have. For example, it's coming up to Christmas, coming up to the holidays, and you might have a thought that looks like this we're going to have a lot of people over for Christmas, and just having that thought may induce this emotional stress response. Physically, we can feel the physical stress in our bodies of overtraining, of overworking, and our bodies actually get physically stressed. So it's not unlike bending a piece of plastic back and forth, back and forth, until it gets fatigued and then it eventually breaks.

Okay, so I want you to look at stresses either being physical and or emotional. But stress can also be acute or it can be chronic. Now, acute stress is short in duration. It's more intense and it's triggered by a specific event. Chronic stress, on the other hand, tends to be longer in duration. It's usually less intense but persistent, and it persists over time, and it's due to ongoing issues like financial trouble or relationship trouble, or even our health related issues. Now, on the flip side, stress isn't always a bad thing. In fact, we want some level of stress in our lives. Perhaps you've heard the term U-stress, e-u-s-t-r-e-s-s U-stress, which is the positive form of stress that motivates us and helps us take action and focus, and U-stress enhances our performance and it's associated with joy, satisfaction and enthusiasm. But when stress becomes too much, too intense or persists for too long, that's when it becomes toxic, and this is often associated with emotions like anxiety, worry, anger, fear. You get the idea. So imagine plotting stress out on a graph.

We'd see this bell curve right, where there's not enough stress, and that leads to poor performance on the left side and we have U-stress, so peak performance at the top and then too much stress on the opposite side, again leading to poor performance. Now the list of reasons why stress is bad for your health is endless, and I'm not going to list them all here, but since you're a man over 40 listening to this, I want you to consider the ramifications of stress on your health. So, from a cardiovascular perspective, chronic stress leads to high blood pressure, heart disease and increased risk of heart attacks. Right, that alone is enough to work on your stress and reduce your stress, but it goes beyond that. We have a weakened immune system, so we're more susceptible to illness and infections. Digestive problems it increases your bowel syndrome and GERD.

There's also weight gain, so stress leads to overeating and overdrinking. And of course, we have sleep problems related to stress as well, like insomnia, which of course compounds into further health issues. From a mental health standpoint, there's anxiety and depression. We see limited cognitive function, including reduced memory and concentration. We make poorer decisions. It affects our emotional well-being, which leads to mood swings and irritability and reduced ability to cope with everyday challenges. And then, lastly, there's the behavioral effect as well. So we have high stress. It leads to unhealthy coping mechanisms like smoking, excessive drinking, drug use, reduced quality of life, so we stress too much, our quality of living goes down. It impacts our relationships. And then there's, of course, the long-term consequences of chronic stress, which leads to increased aging and then a reduced overall life expectancy. Now, like anything I teach on this podcast, reducing stress whether it's acute or chronic, or physical or emotional starts with awareness. As you know, I believe that our thoughts influence how we feel. So if you're stressed, I want you to look to how you're thinking and what your triggers are. First, right, for the longest time I would be stressed and grumpy and my wife would say, okay, something's off with you, and I would totally gaslight her and I'd get defensive and I'd say I was fine, nothing was wrong with me. Now I was completely unaware of this until I smartened up and I started to see what she saw and I became more aware and I started to trace it back to a few triggers and in this particular instance, it was a few things that led me to being more stressed and more grumpy.

So I was watching the news, I was binge watching social media or YouTube and I wasn't getting enough sleep. So all of these things kind of compounded into my me seeing the world in a more stressful way. So awareness and understanding your thoughts and triggers is key. That's kind of the first step. You can't take different action or you can't implement these following strategies without having awareness around the way that you're thinking and then what is triggering you in the first place. Okay, once you know your triggers, then you can start to implement these strategies. Now I've organized these strategies in a way that kind of are dependent on the immediacy, so meaning the first few strategies are great, but they might not have the immediate impact on your stress levels that the final strategy is going to have. We'll get there in a minute. So, number one filter your inputs. Now our brains are constantly being bombarded by information and stimuli from all different sensory inputs.

Right Now, most of it is neutral, but our brain has a job, and that is to make things mean something. So information comes into your brain and your brain is either going to make it mean that it's a threat or a non threat. It's going to make it mean it's something positive or something negative. Now, oftentimes we don't consciously decide on the quality of the inputs coming our way, but we should. And whether it's watching the news, scrolling social media or interacting with the negative people, all of these things are going to impact our stress levels. If you get triggered or stressed easily, I want you to start to take an audit of what your inputs are and do your best to remove them from your day to day. So watch that. You know, stop watching the news. There's people in your workplace or people who you hang out with, who just constantly negative. You might want to find people who are more positive and uplifting Right.

An exercise I teach in my coaching is learning to look for the good. So this is a journal practice that I recently introduced into the arena, which is my online community, and the premise is this you complete a daily journal entry where you identify three things you're great before, three things that would make today great. You rehearse three thoughts that you want to think, three positive thoughts. You identify three highlights from the previous day, and then you identify three things that you've learned either this day or the previous day. This might sound like it's a lot. Believe me, it only takes five minutes and the more you do it it's amazing. You start to see more and more good in your life and in the things that you are inputting Right. So, essentially, the quality of your inputs

Changes dramatically and you feel less stressed overall. So that's the first strategy and, again, it's not going to have an immediate impact. It takes practice, but it's something that has a dramatic effect long-term. Second strategy you can implement is actually a number of strategies. They all center around self-care, and it's sleep, exercise and eating healthy or eating clean. I've talked about all of these strategies separately on other episodes, so I'm not going to go into a lot of detail here, but I do want to mention that each of these has the strategic byproduct of reducing your stress, and what I find fascinating is we know that these things reduce our stress levels, but when we're stressed, we often stop doing the things that are really helpful and will help us get out of stress in the first place, and then, of course, this just compounds more and more. So this brings me to the last strategy, which is by far the most immediate in terms of its impact. It's going to help get you to a place where you will want to exercise and sleep better and eat cleaner, and then, of course, this becomes a positive, virtuous cycle.

And the last strategy Centres around breathing and mindfulness. Now, there's a ton of research that shows the value of meditating, even just for five minutes a day in terms of reducing our stress. Same with different breath techniques, the same goes for different breathing practices, and there's so many great apps out there that will take you through different breathing techniques, from boxed breathing To coherent breathing, to four, seven, eight breathing, all of which are highly effective in reducing your stress. But, on that same note, these take time.

They take practice to integrate. So I Want to introduce you to the research that's being done by guys like Andrew Huberman out of the Stanford lab and Jack Feldman out of UCLA, where they've studied ways to provide more immediate relief for stress. And, as I mentioned, one of the downsides of these previous strategies is they don't provide immediate relief. They require some learning and some integration. They need to be practiced regularly for you to receive the benefit. In other words, if you're stressed and you want to see real-time relief, then you want to use a different tool, and the tool that I'm speaking about is called the physiological sigh. So a little bit of a backstory here. There's a connection between our brain, our heart and our body. So when you inhale, have this organ called the diaphragm and it goes down, and when it goes down it increases the volume in your chest, the heart gets a little bit bigger, blood moves more slowly and the heart will then send a signal to the brain that there's less volume of blood and, as a result, the brain signals back to the heart telling it to increase its heart rate, increase the amount of times that it's beating and of course, this stimulates your sympathetic nervous system and then this increases your stress response.

So if you want more heightened arousal, you actually want to Sort of stress a little bit more. Get into that you stress. For example, let's say you're gonna do a tough lifting set, then you want to take longer inhales and this is gonna increase your lifting performance. But when you're stressed, you want to do the opposite. We actually want to slow the heart rate down and we want to activate our parasympathetic nervous system. So that means longer exhales, more vigorous exhales. This raises the diaphragm, which then in turn increases the blood volume and say sends a signal to our brain, which the brain sends back to the heart to say slow down the heart rate. Now why is this such a great tool?

Because this is something that leads to real-time results, leads to real-time reduction in your stress. There's no learning. It's easy to integrate. You don't have to build a practice around it. It's something that you know. You can literally do it anytime, in any place. So here's what I want you to do. Here's how the practice looks. Okay, I want you to take two quick inhales, followed by an audible exhale, and and it should be through your mouth. So the inhales are through your nose and then the exhale is through your mouth. So this is what it looks, sounds like. All right, all right, notice that the inhales are rather short and, of course, the exhale is through my mouth and it's a little bit longer. This is the physio, physiological sigh and, believe it or not, you already do this involuntarily when you're stressed or even when you're sleeping. Now you just have to consciously do it and when you do that, watch what happens. As I mentioned earlier, these strategies, they're all well and good, they're helpful, but also realize that when you're under stress, these kinds of behaviors can feel way too distant. They kind of feel outside of possibility and effectiveness. So it's akin to being in immense physical pain and someone offering you a solution to treat the pain. But you're in so much pain all you can do is focus in on that physical pain.

So I get it. Here's what I want to offer to you. If you are in a place where you're just feeling so overwhelmed, so stressed and almost hopeless, you have to be a disruptor in that moment. In the moments of high stress. Your primal brain is active, you're not in your cognitive prefrontal brain. So what you have to do is you have to disrupt things a little bit. I want you to try the physiological sigh for as little as one minute, and the goal here, the hope here, is that it shifts things just a little bit. And is this going to make all of your stress go away? No, but it's going to disrupt the pattern. It's going to allow a few cracks of daylight in and perhaps this is enough for you to then take further action. Okay, plus, it builds this self-trust. You're taking small actions and that shows that you're capable of doing things a little bit differently. Okay, guys, so there you have it. You have three strategies to better manage stress. Right, in order of immediacy or effectiveness, manage your inputs self-care through exercise, clean eating and sleep, and then, of course, for immediate impact, breathing and mindfulness.

Most importantly, that physiological sigh is really going to help you shift things if you're feeling overly stress. I hope this episode brings you a lot more inner peace and way more enjoyable holiday season. I'll see you guys later next week where I'm going to be talking about building greater self-trust. Thank you again for stopping by and keep leading a legacy of good health and longevity.