Hello!
Welcome to Monday.
This week we’re talking about why it’s important to regularly manage stress and I will give you some easy strategies to help you do this.
Importance
Stress is one of our biggest killers, leading to everything from mental health issues and fat gain to heart disease and obesity.
The main causes of these negative effects are the long-term activation of the fight-or-flight system, chronically elevated cortisol levels, and chronic inflammation in the body.
“It is a well-known and heavily researched fact that chronic stress leads to inflammation and serves as the foundation for nearly every age-related disease.” — Ben Greenfield
Chronic stress is literally killing us, so we need to learn to manage it effectively. Almost every modern disease has chronic stress as a factor in its development.
Unfortunately, we can’t avoid stress. And as we’ve learned before, a bit of stress is good - it increases our resiliency. But the problem arises when we are stressed out for long periods of time.
Kelly Starrett, bestselling author, and mobility expert explains,
“One of the biggest problems we have in society right now is that people aren’t very good at down-regulating. What we see is people getting into a constant parasympathetic nervous system vs sympathetic nervous system tug-of-war, and the sympathetic system is turned all the way up to 60. We know that we can power up by drinking some coffee or chugging an energy drink and be ready to go, but show me how you can go (in reverse) from 60 to 0.”
The issue is that we’re always “on” and we don’t know how to effectively switch “off”.
So let’s talk about some strategies you can use to mitigate chronic stress.
Implementation
There are myriad strategies we can use to combat chronic stress.
While it’s unlikely we’ll be able to rid our lives of chronic stress completely, we can definitely be proactive in handling it before it turns to more serious issues.
These are some of the most effective ways to deal with chronic stress:
1) Make regular time for stillness, solitude, or ‘me’ time
It’s important to regularly take time to decompress, unwind, and spend time with just yourself. This can take on many forms. Tim Ferriss explains in his book, Tools of Titans:
“I’ve scheduled deloading phases in a few ways: roughly 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. daily for journaling, tea routines, etc.; 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. every Wednesday for creative output (i.e., writing, interviewing for the podcast); and “screen-free Saturdays,” when I use no laptops.”
Create pockets of time in your schedule where you can just ‘be’.
2) Exercise
Exercise can become a stressor in itself, but approached in the right way, it can also be a tool for dealing with chronic stress.
For example, walking or cycling, or otherwise moving forwards can quieten the amygdala - the part of your brain associated with emotions. Therefore, simply going for a walk can reliably reduce stress and anxiety.
Try to exercise daily, even if it’s just a walk around the block. And make sure to take rest days and work on recovery.
3) Breathwork
Breathwork is something we covered in our last 3-part series.
If you’d like to revisit what breathwork is and how you can incorporate it into your routine, feel free to read Momentum Issue 30.
Breathwork can be a powerful tool for down-regulating our fight or flight nervous systems and upregulating our rest and digest nervous systems.
4) Meditation
Meditation is another powerful, science-backed tool for dealing with stress and downregulating the fight or flight nervous system.
Meditation also has the power to physically change your brain and increase density in areas associated with emotional regulation, which can help make you more resilient to stress in the future.
5) Elimination
“In the midst of overwhelm, is life not showing me exactly what I should subtract?” — Tim Ferriss
It’s so easy to look for things we can add when life feels overwhelming, but the key is to instead look for what we can subtract. Look for ways you can eliminate busyness from your life. What obligations or responsibilities can you drop, or hand over to someone else? Where can you eliminate or automate tasks? You can conduct an audit of your life to see areas you can reduce or eliminate.
This is the area I always find most effective in dealing with stress. A lot of the time, what I realize I need to eliminate is simply the expectations I hold of myself.
6) Create buffers
Simply allowing an extra 5 minutes in the morning, or leaving 5 minutes early for an appointment, or giving yourself an extra day for a project, can make a huge difference in your stress levels.
Rushing releases cortisol and gets your body in a fight or flight mode, which can contribute to chronic stress.
Identify when you find yourself rushing, and see if you can add just a few more minutes to mitigate some of that chaos.
7) Fight against the Scarcity Mindset
We live in a society of “never enough”.
We wake up and our first thought is usually, “I didn’t get enough sleep.” Then all day we’re thinking about how we don’t have enough time or enough money, and then we go to bed thinking we didn’t get enough done today.
Just being able to wake up and go to sleep knowing you have enough, you’ve done enough, and you are enough, will change everything.
“There is no amount of work you will do that will finally make the work go away, and definitely no amount of money you can make that will solve all your problems. And the sooner you realize that, the sooner you can look for happiness in places where it might actually be found.” — Aubrey Marcus
Before You Go
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