Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: It's the youe Life Lived well podcast with Dr. Kevin Payne. A better way of seeing the life that you want to live.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome, and welcome back.
[00:00:14] Speaker C: In this episode, I really want to.
[00:00:17] Speaker B: Help demystify stress just a little. So stop right now. Pause this episode for a minute if you need, and try to define stress yourself.
[00:00:27] Speaker C: Got it.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: The way we all think and talk about stress is a little squishy about the edges. That imprecision has real practical consequences in our lives. A definition will take a little work to unpack, but it has to begin with one key idea. Resistance, tension and reaction. That begins with physical resistance. But as we commonly use the term, your will is being resisted. Stress only exists in the context of your expectation, your intended desire, goal, being resisted. And as a consequence, it's important to note that if you never meet resistance, you never learn or grow. So stress is multi dimensional. Physical, cognitive, emotional, social, and stress is meta.
That means we can and do stress about our stress. We stress about how much stress we have. We stress about our inability to relieve our stress. We stress about not relaxing enough. We even stress about being too stressed or not stressed enough compared to our friends. So to begin with, stress is your response to any actual or perceived challenge. It is arousing your system for immediate action and preparing it for potential physical harm. If you are expending effort, you are experiencing some level of stress. There are many parts to that response, and there are many ways to feel challenged. But my crucial point is that our bodies only have one very ancient system for responding to very ancient kinds of challenge. That response begins before we are even consciously aware. And nature is lazy. It reuses and repurposes everything it can. Our stress response is no exception. This same ancient set of responses has been reused for every challenge we've encountered as a species in the millennia sense. Even when it's not a very useful set of tactics, it's what we've got. There are two technical terms I want to define now, because we'll keep coming back to them throughout the episode. First, the acute stress response, often called the fight or flight response, although we'll see there's much more to it than that. This is your body's immediate reaction to a perceived threat or challenge. It's an internal alarm system that gets triggered when your brain senses any form of danger. In that instant, our bodies release stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Speeds up our heart rate, sharpens our focus, and sends extra energy to our muscles. And that's only the beginning. This response evolved to help our Ancestors survive acute emergent, existential life or death circumstances. But in modern life, it kicks in during anything from a big presentation to a near miss in traffic. It's incredibly useful in short bursts, but it's not designed to stay switched on for long periods without consequences. It was identified by Walter Cannon in 1915. Second, the General Adaptation Syndrome, or GAS. This is a three stage process your body goes through when responding to prolonged stress. It starts with the alarm stage, where the acute stress response kicks in, flooding your system with energy and preparing you to face the challenge. If the stress doesn't go away, you move into the resistance stage, where your body works hard to adapt, staying on high alert and using up resources to cope. But if the stress continues for too long, your body reaches the exhaustion stage. It can no longer cope, leaving you depleted, vulnerable and drained. This idea was developed by Hans Snellier beginning in the 1930s. There are many, many misconceptions about stress, even among medical and therapeutic professionals. But if I do my job correctly, you'll come away from this episode in a little more than half an hour with a kinder and more nuanced attitude towards stress. So we'll jump into Unpacking Stress right after this quick break.
[00:04:35] Speaker C: I'm Dr. Kevin Payne. Just jump with me into your Life Lived well.
Half of us now live with chronic illness.
Mine is multiple sclerosis.
It's your life, Live it well. A chronic diagnosis doesn't mean goodbye to the good life you wanted. You don't have to feel overwhelmed or hopeless. I'll show you how to save yourself. Take your first step at justjump Life.
[00:05:08] Speaker A: It's the youe Life Lived well podcast.
Don't forget to, like, share and subscribe.
[00:05:17] Speaker C: I seem to live a life where I'm swimming in an ocean of perpetual stress. Most of you listening have some kind of chronic illness. Love someone with a chronic illness, work in a profession that cares for people with chronic illnesses, and you realize that distress is part of the deal. And when we're diagnosed, we're not really told that this constant source of distress is something that naturally follows. That fear response is something that often goes along with distress. So the fear response, the stress response, those are intimately tied to one another. Stress is massively important because we all realize we're living in a massively stressful age. And we're probably more stressed because our stress response doesn't fit our current environment. As we know that stress response, which is often interpreted as fear, was great for getting away from a saber toothed tiger, but not so Good for so many of the stressors that we face day in and day out. Since chronic illness is an inescapable part of our lives, this is a lasting and repeated source of stress and trauma. Now, bad stress makes everyone's life worse, but it is more so for for chronic illness, our systems are already distressed. As a baseline, remember the acute stress response. Now, this is what ramps up our bodies and our brains for this immediate reaction when we perceive fear. Now, these are autonomic. They're largely outside our conscious control. So they're deep old parts of our central nervous system that are adapted to those particular kinds of distresses. And this is our sympathetic nervous system preparing us for an acute response to an emergent threat. We can't necessarily control that initial reaction, but we can learn to influence and reframe how we deal with it. Now, as we do in this podcast, we're not going to focus on the biology of it. Instead, we're focusing on the experience of living with stress. Because experience is where we live. Experience is in what we think and feel and perceive and behave and how we relate to other people. So stress is how we are experiencing our reaction to a perceived stressor. And a stressor is just something in the world that you judge to be potentially challenging. It may be that your annoying co worker is not intrinsically stressful. He's just stressful for you. You're making a judgment about that particular person. We make judgments all the time. That's a little different than physical stressors. So if you're lifting a heavy weight, then those stressors are what we call pre potent. That is, there's a certain amount of resistance that's in inherent in it, and stress is just part of it. But again, there's still a judgment that we're making. If you don't exercise a lot, then you may judge the same weight as being very stressful. And then someone else comes along who's all pumped up and ripped, right, and they don't find it stressful. Stress is relative. Stress is a personal judgment. And a lot of these judgments are ones that we are making preconsciously. We don't even notice that we're making the judgment. So we tend to believe that the stressfulness of something is out there in the world inherent in that object. But it's not. Stress is about the demand that we're having to overcome to achieve whatever action stressors are out there in the world. Stress is your response. And of course, one of our major stressors is right there in our bodies with Us and we can't get away. It is there all the time. So it becomes really crucial that we learn to deal with negative stress because sometimes we can't get away from it. And I will say as an aside here that this is the second reason I went back to skydiving. I realized I'm living with a stressor and I have to get better at dealing with stress because I have all of the academic knowledge about it running around in my head. But the knowledge isn't the same as the understanding of living the experience and learning to cope with the experience.
[00:10:12] Speaker B: When it came back to skydiving, I purposefully set myself the goal of jumping out of a plane better than once a day on average. For, for a full year, I did a little better and logged 370 jumps that calendar year.
[00:10:27] Speaker C: Every time, that dials your stress response up to 11. And you have to deal with that successfully or you die. So this is maybe a little bit of an extreme approach to exposure therapy, but it worked for me. So now we have that acute stress response, and then we have the general adaptation syndrome. That acute stress response was that first part of it. We're having that pause. We're detecting a potential threat or challenge. There's a little pause where we're making some kind of judgment about it. Is this something I'm going to have to deal with or not? And if we do, then there's all those potential ways that we can deal with it. And then after we have that initial response, that pause to determine whether this is a real challenge or threat, then it's preparing our system for that immediate action. So it's that physiological psychological reaction that we often perceive as fear. And then we spring into action. We resist. We work against the challenge until we succeed, or we can no longer resist. It's one of the two. We're either going to succeed or fail. And we keep up that resistance as long as we can, as long as we feel that it's necessary. Now you're really seeing why this acute stress response and this general adaptation syndrome can be so problematic when we're dealing with chronic illness. Because we're probably not getting better. And if we keep fighting against it all the time. Now don't get me wrong, sometimes we've got to fight against it. But if we keep fighting against it all the time, rather than working with it, then we're increasing our stress and we're exhausting ourselves. So that's that phase three of that general adaptation syndrome. When we reach the limits of our capacity, we Fail, resistance fails, we're exhausted.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: Imagine that you're holding a little weight out to your side so that your arm is parallel to the floor. Maybe it's only £2, maybe it's just a pound. And you just hold it there without.
[00:12:39] Speaker C: Moving, and you just hold it there. And even if it's a tiny little weight, you will start feeling the effects of the stress, your resistance against that challenge, right? And no matter how strong you are, no matter how much power and endurance you have, eventually your arm will fall to your side. You can't hold it up any longer. Now, if that were a five pound weight, you wouldn't be able to resist it as long. If that were a 10 pound weight, it would be even quicker still. If it were half a pound, well, maybe you can hold it out for longer. Whether you succeed and how long you succeed depends on the capacity you can bring to the challenge in front of you. And if you can bring more capacity than challenge, you're going to succeed. But we need to learn to recognize what that general adaptation syndrome feels like when we experience it, because we know we're becoming fatigued and our performance is slipping. You can deliver far more capacity the first time you do it than the 20th in a row, and we all know that. But we forget it day to day. We forget it in the middle of that action. If you've never done that exercise with a weight, I would suggest you actually do it so that you can really focus on what the experience feels like as your resistance is ebbing. It's a really important signal that we give ourselves that often we ignore, and then we end up really failing. And we don't want to do that. If it's a real challenge that's in front of us, we're uncertain. Fundamentally, we don't know that we're going to succeed or fail. That's what a real challenge is. The outcome is ambiguous. We don't know how it will end, and that uncertainty is stressful. Surprise, then, is inherent in stress. If we don't know what the outcome is going to be, then there is a certain level of stress that's associated with it. We can also have stress when we are absolutely convinced that the outcome is going to be negative, that it's not going to be what we want. While some physical challenges are inherently stressful, most stressors that we face might be social or cognitive or cultural. And whether they are stressful or not often depends on how we frame them. So what do I mean by framing a stressor? So we can go the Negative route. If we are convinced or at least suspect that there's going to be a negative outcome, then we're into the realm.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Of fear and we're faced with the fight or flight response. But it's far more than just that. I call it the effort, cascade, freeze, front, flight, fight, fawn, flock, frame, fault, flight, flop, fright, faint, effort. Yeah, there's a lot more to fear than we're led to believe. And we've got a whole episode on it coming up next week.
[00:15:46] Speaker C: And we're in that realm of fear. And here we have negative stress. Fear, pain, grief, trauma, anxiety, all of those things being related to one another because they're all drawing on that same acute stress response. And they're all a result of a negative outcome potentially to that general adaptation syndrome as we're trying to overcome the challenge in front of us. And that negative stress is called distress. But there's also positive stress. Positive stress is called eustress. E U S T R E S S Eustress. Positive stress is related to surprise, joy, pleasure, triumph. We were really challenged and we overcame. Right. They're all good things. In fact, some of the best experiences that we have involve eustress good stress. And again, most of the time we don't know going into it whether it's going to be good stress or bad stress. We can't tell whether this experience is going to be fundamentally good or bad until we've had the experience. Positive stress is also associated with humor. So what I'm telling you here is some of the things that we value the most about being human have stress right in the heart of them. There is good stress and there is bad stress. And we can understand which is which through a little idea I call the capacity demand ratio. If there's more capacity than is demanded of you, then you're going to succeed. And even if it's very stressful, it's still going to end up being you stress because you succeeded. And on the other side, you're going to be grateful for the experience. You're going to be proud of yourself. This ratio is going to be really important to understanding how you're going to deal with stress. This idea of avoiding stress altogether is just silly. And we wouldn't want to live a life with no stress. So how are all of these related to one another? At any given time, you've got a certain amount of capacity to get things done. There's a certain demand in front of you. In other words, if your capacity is more than that demand, you're going to succeed, if it's less than the demand in front of you, you're, you're going to fail and your edges move. The demand around you is always changing because of whatever it is we're trying to do in the moment. Some parts of our day we're taking it easy and there's not a lot that we're trying to accomplish. Other parts of the day we are facing some more difficult task and our capacity that we can deliver changes throughout the day. If we're tired, if we're distracted, if, if we are a host of other things, then our capacity will lower and then maybe we've had a good lunch and a little nap and we've gotten through that little downtime when our biorhythms kind of crash in the middle of the afternoon and we got our second win for the day and our capacity is up again. Whatever you can deliver at this moment, if it is slightly better than the demand in front of you, that is your edge right now. And your edge is the best you can deliver in this moment. So what that means is it could be a task that you have succeeded at a thousand times in the past, but if for some reason your capacity isn't quite up to it in this moment, that thing that you've always succeeded at, you will fail at. This is why you can run a four minute mile. You don't do that all the time. You run your best on those occasions when you're competing and they're timing you and you may be able to set a record. There's this perverse notion in our culture that everybody has to give 110% all the time. If you can get away with 30% to something, if it only deserves that, do that. Do your best at the things that you need to do your best at, that you really want to do your best at. Because fundamentally you can't do your best everything all the time. So if you have a lot of capacity, so your capacity bar is really high and the demand in front of you is really low, and there's that big gap between them, that's boredom. When we are like that, that's what we experience as boredom. We've got a lot of capacity that's not being discharged and there's not much demand around us. And that can be stressful in and of itself. So when we've got this really big mismatch, that's a kind of stress, that's when we get into trouble, we come up with all kinds of interesting ideas to keep ourselves amused or entertained. Or engaged. When we're really bored, when the demand is a little higher, that's the area of habit. Those are our habituated actions. Those are things that are well practiced. We don't even really need to think about them to accomplish them. When the demand gets a little higher than that. Now this is in the area where we have to think about it, but we do it really well, and it's smooth. And you can call this area practiced. This part of the ratio is practiced. And then we have a little more demand. And now we're engaged. Now we're pretty much in the moment, and we're thinking it through. And it feels like work. It looks like work to us, but it's not distressing at all. Now, as the demand level gets close to what our capacity is and we're really in the zone and we're clicking along and everything seems to be working right, really proud of how we're operating. This is really cool. That's a flow experience.
So many of our best human experiences are flow experiences. They're. When we are stressed, we're challenged. We have a demand that we can just accomplish, and that's flow. Now we get to the point where the demand edges up just a little more, and it's more than we can deliver, and that's where we fail. And then the demand inches up even further, and that's where we're overwhelmed.
[00:22:21] Speaker B: Then the demand ratchets further up. There's a bigger gap between what we can handle and what successful action will require. But we try anyway, and we are injured, we're hurt, we're damaged a little. We don't just fail. We're worse for our failed attempt. And it takes a while to recover and rebuild. If we're not careful, we may not knit back together in the most healthful way.
[00:22:47] Speaker C: And the demand inches up further, and there's a big gap between your capacity and what the task in front of you demands of you. And that's where we become traumatized.
[00:23:00] Speaker B: Trauma is a physical, emotional, cognitive, or social injury so serious and pervasive that it needs special effort and attention, often by trained professionals and the help of others to support our successful recovery. We might even be permanently injured, so that we'll have to learn how to accommodate or work around the effects of that injury.
[00:23:26] Speaker C: One of the challenges of understanding this when we're faced with it in our real life is that we have a lot of different capacities and that every experience that we have has to pass through several gates. So we've got biological and physiological capacities We've got cognitive capacity, how much we can think about it. We. We've got an evaluative and emotional capacity because we're making judgments about everything like dislike, should, shouldn't, happy, sad, satisfying, unsatisfying, etc. And if we have to spend a lot of time near something that we're judging pretty negatively, that requires more of us to do it. They're cultural gates. So in order to get something done, maybe you have to transgress a cultural boundary and you know that there's going to be resistance there. There's a physical environment that may be more or less conducive to you getting done what you need to get done. It's always social. Even if you're doing something by yourself, it's always social. And it's social for two reasons. One, we have internalized what we call notional others. So we all are walking around with a sense of what they will think about it. We don't even know who they are, but they are judgmental. Even if it's something we do by ourselves, we wonder, well, what if somebody finds out about this? It's also social in another way, because each of us is a society of mind. Each of us has not a whole bunch of fully developed personalities, but we've got facets to our personality. We've got many sides, and they make different judgments, they have different goals, they don't necessarily agree with one another, they don't even necessarily like one another. Some parts of you don't like other parts of you, and we don't even want to claim all of them. So fundamentally, there's these social sides to getting anything done.
[00:25:24] Speaker B: Now here's the trick.
[00:25:25] Speaker C: Sometimes you have the cognitive ability to get this done, and we all know this. Living with chronic illness, your body fails you, and it's really frustrating because you know how to do this thing. You've done this thing a million times in the past. Maybe the environment is what's getting your way. We all know that there are different kinds of hard and there are different kinds of challenge. And those challenges happen at different points. You don't just have one edge that you're trying to get through. You have all these implicit edges. An activity can feel stressful, even if it's something you've done a thousand times before, because now maybe you're doing it with a big audience and you fuel that performance anxiety. So understand where the source of the stress is coming from. Understand that we can manipulate some of these conditions. We can reframe how we're Thinking about it, we can turn distress into eustress. But we all know that we want to have some stress in our lives because we don't want to be bored all the time. We want a feeling of accomplishment and meaning in our lives. We should now understand that avoiding stress is wrong too, because there are all these good, valuable, indispensable, fundamentally wonderfully human things about good stress. All that joy and all that learning and all that discovery and all that stuff where we find meaning and happiness and humor in our lives. The difference between joy and pain is right next to one another. The opposite of joy is not pain. The opposite of both of them is boredom and disengagement and feeling ineffective in the world. Success and failure are a hair's breadth apart. And if we don't understand that, if we use our chronic illnesses as an excuse to completely withdraw from the world, then we're taking ourselves away from all those potentially wonderful experiences as well. And that is why we should care about this. That's why we need to have a better understanding of stress and use stress and distress, its good and negative forms, so that we can better frame what's happening to us. How do we deal with this stress? First, we have the right expectations and assessment of what's going on. We need to have a real, honest assessment of what capacities we can deliver in this moment. And sometimes that's tough because sometimes we're not feeling well and we can't deliver what we would like to be able to deliver. But we have to have those expectations corrected because if we don't, we're going to unintentionally fail when we don't need to. We have to have the right assessment of the demand that's in front of us. If we overestimate the demand, then that's going to be a letdown, isn't it? If we underestimate the demand, then, wow, we're in for a surprise. We also have to know which stressors we must deal with and which we can avoid. Some of us, avoidance is our favorite strategy. It's really easy to get into that flight approach to potentially fearful, distressing things. Most of the time it's not as bad as you think it's going to be. We have overestimated the demand and we've not correctly understood what the consequences of avoiding this are going to really be. We can also reframe the stressor as a challenge. It's not something to fear. It's a challenge. Now. I don't fear the open door of an airplane three miles up and it's not a big deal. But that's something that you learn because it is a wholly unnatural activity. You have to learn it. You have to. You have to be exposed to it. You have to do it time and time again and succeed and realize that, oh, this seems to be a really big challenge in front of me, but I got this. So if we reframe the stressor and we practice good stress with positive results, then we're more likely to develop the habit of a positive response when the stressor is facing us. We also need to learn to time and space our stressors whenever possible. Remember that the last stage of that general adaptation syndrome is we want to be able to stop our reaction before we're exhausted. We're either going to succeed or we're going to back off because the challenge is too much and we're going to allow ourselves time to recover and recuperate. We got to reengage that parasympathetic nervous system that rest and digest part of our nervous system so that we can recover and face the next stressor successfully. This means that we need to be more conscious of the way we organize our lives whenever we can. In some cases, that means that we have to give up some spontaneity. Or, like me, I plan for spontaneity, which seems weird, but I really do. The reason is I know that there's going to be a certain amount of stress, even if it's good stress associated with some of those spontaneous, fun activities. So I need the time to recover. On the other side. That means that we have to monitor and understand ourselves. Many of us don't want to examine ourselves too closely. You have to, because your body and your mind are sending you signals all the time. They're sending you signals about, oh, this works, I like this, I don't like this, I want to get away from that, etc. And you have to learn to pick up on those signals so that you can make better decisions, not just in the moment, but for your future self, because your future self is the person who's going to have to deal with the consequences of the decisions you make right now. You don't have to live with those consequences. Your future self does. And this also explains why things like meditation, sleep, nutrition, exercise, recreation, why those work in the way that they do. When we meditate, we're lowering our demand and we're allowing ourselves to recover some of the cognitive and emotional resources that we need. When we sleep, we're combating fatigue and rebuilding all those systems in our body that need to recover from the wear and tear of the day. And that raises our capacity. When we have the right nutrition, we're increasing our capacity because we're giving our body the fuel that it needs to put forth these efforts. When we exercise, we're building capacity in our system. We're building building the strength and the endurance and the flexibility and the balance in our system so that our bodies don't become the bottleneck. Recreation works. Taking time off. We need to do that. It's not just having fun. This is self care. This is important because we're allowing ourselves to relax and recuperate and recover. When we understand the importance of this stress response in our lives and how it relates to those capacity demand gates a whole lot of why we succeed and fail and why things make us happy and others make us sad all starts making sense. So I encourage you to start looking at the world in this way and ignore that advice that says be fearless or avoid stress because it's just wrong. In fact, we can stress ourselves out by always trying to avoid stressful situations. We can create anxiety we don't need. We can overestimate the demand and underestimate our capacity by ruminating and catastrophizing and overthinking this too much. Some stress is inevitable and some stress is good. And some stress is always associated with some of the best things in life. So understanding stress and understanding how you react to it and how you accommodate it is a good and necessary part of living well. We can't control all the stressors that come our way, but we can influence and reframe our responses.
[00:34:34] Speaker B: And after this last quick break, we'll come back for some final thoughts on how we too easily get stress wrong in our own lives, as well as some easy to try tips to better handle our own distress.
[00:34:49] Speaker C: We all have challenges.
Mine is multiple sclerosis. We each have this one life and we didn't choose to be saddled with chronic illness. But there's a better way.
So I choose to just jump and you can too. It's your life. Live it well.
Justjump life.
[00:35:21] Speaker A: It's the your life lived well podcast.
Don't forget to like, share and subscribe.
[00:35:29] Speaker B: Welcome back. So stress is not bad. Stress is our body ramping itself up to do well at certain kinds of tasks. That's great, but it's also where the main problems from stress come in. One, it's trying to solve the wrong sort of challenge. Most of our modern challenges don't fit the mold that the Acute Stress Response was adapted to solve two. It gets framed as fear. It's always a challenge. Sometimes it's threatening. But while fear is a crucial signal that must be recognized and honored, it should not be making our decisions. 3. It's triggered for too long and too often. Stress is often like trying to swat a gnat with a howitzer. It's overkill and it's a costly tool for us to use again and again and again. 4. Stress is cumulative. We don't do work stress and personal stress and fun stress. We've got one stress level and everything in our life contributes to it. 5. We don't complete the cycle. We must have regular periods to rest, relax, rebuild and recover. So to wrap things up, I want to leave you with some practical science backed tips to help you better manage and reduce stress in your life. So let's rip through 10 quick practical tactics you can start today. 1. Learn to identify your stress signals early. Stress often sneaks up on us. Pay attention to how your body reacts. That tension in your shoulders, your jaw clenching or your mind racing. These signals are like a dashboard warning light. The earlier you catch them, the sooner you can respond. 2. Practice micro recoveries. You don't have to wait for a week long vacation to recover from stress. Build small amounts of recovery into your day, a deep breath, a short walk, or even just stepping outside for fresh air. Research shows these micro recoveries can help reset your nervous system and improve your focus. 3. Reframe stress as a challenge, not a threat. How we interpret stress matters. Instead of seeing it as something overwhelming, remind yourself that it's a signal you care about the outcome in front of you. Reframing stress this way activates a more adaptive response, boosting motivation and your performance. 4. Build a stress buffer or margin with habits that increase your capacity. Stress hits harder when your resources are low. Exercise, sleep, proper nutrition aren't just good for you. They're foundational to better health, outlook and resilience. Think of them as the base of your stress management protocol. 5. Accept that you have influence, not control. Stress thrives on uncertainty and the illusion of control. Be intentional about separating what's within your influence from what isn't. Focus your energy on actionable steps and let the rest go.
I know that's easier said than done, but it is life changing with practice. 6. Limit background stressors. Small nagging stressors like clutter, digital notifications or unmade decisions can drain your mental energy. Create systems to minimize these. Keep your space organized, set boundaries with your devices and make small decisions quickly to clear mental bandwidth. 7. Connect with others. Social support is one of the most powerful stress buffers we have. Whether it's talking to a trusted friend, hugging a loved one, or even sharing a laugh. Connection reminds you that you're not alone, and it lowers cortisol levels in the process. And those others don't even have to be humans. Pets are great connections, too. 8. Make time for flow Activities Flow, those moments when you're so immersed in an activity that time seems to disappear, is one of the best stress antidotes. Whether it's painting, cooking, writing, gardening, or, like me, jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, find something that engages you and make it a regular part of your life. 9. Give yourself permission to rest. This is really hard. For many of us, rest isn't laziness, it's maintenance. Treat downtime as essential, not optional. Rest isn't something you earn after burning out. It's what keeps you from getting there in the first place. And 10. Embrace intentional breathing. Deep, slow breathing isn't just relaxing. It activates your parasympathetic nervous system, calming your body. There are many breathing techniques. Pick one that works for you. It's like a reset button for your brain. The important points here are Breathe a bit more slowly than normal, but not unnaturally slow or unnaturally deep. Your exhale should be longer than your inhale. Breathe in and out through your nose. If possible, breathe from your belly. It should noticeably move. And four to six breaths lasting 30 seconds to a minute are enough. The breath is your foundation, and we've got a whole episode on the breath coming soon. Stress is part of being human, and it's not something we can or should eliminate, but we can change how we relate to it, how we think about it, and how we respond. These tips won't make stress disappear, but they will help you handle it with more intention and resilience. So pick one or two techniques that resonate with you and start small. Tiny changes build over time. Stress is a big, important topic. We've just scratched the surface, and we'll be coming back to stress again and again on our next episode. We're going to face our fears. The scariest thing in my life is multiple sclerosis. That's not unusual. Many of us with permanent health conditions are forced to carry the scariest thing in the world around with us in our own bodies. We don't have a choice. We can't get away, and that is the source of problems others can't see from the outside. But for now, thank you so much for your time and I would love to connect on social media. Go forth, be well, do well, and do good.
[00:41:45] Speaker A: If you've enjoyed today's topic and want to join the conversation with Dr. Kevin Payne, find your life lived well on all of your favorite social media sites, Patreon and of course, yourlifelivedwell co.
