Why You're Always Half-Stressed — and How to Chill | Christiane Wolf

0:04This is the 10 % Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

0:18Happy Sunday, everybody. Hope you're having a great weekend. Today, we're talking about something that most of us feel but rarely are able to put a name on. It's that subtle background static of tension that just kind of courses through your life. It's not full-blown panic, but it's just this kind of slightly on edge, always behind, never enough, that general sense of dis-ease. Our guest today, who's a mindfulness teacher and a physician and an ultramarathoner, Dr. Christiana Wolfe, has a beautiful way of describing this phenomenon. She calls it being in yellow. You're not on red alert, you're not green, you're not grounded, but you're in that middle zone where we spend most of our lives, vigilant, hyperproductive, or feeling guilty about not being productive enough, like basically a little fried.

1:08So what you're about to hear is a conversation with DJ Kashmir, who's the executive producer of this show, in which Christiana unpacks why so many of us live in this yellow zone, why it's not really our fault, and how we can train our nervous systems to spend more time in green, that state of openness, ease, being in the present moment, all the cliches, all the good stuff. Just to say, Christiana is the Teacher of the Month over at danharris.com. That means she's producing all of our guided meditations that go along with our Monday, Wednesday episodes here on the pod. She's also doing live meditation and Q &A sessions.

1:44As you know, we do these every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. The next one is coming up on November 18th at 4 Eastern. Christiana is doing that one solo. Quickly, if you want to meditate with me in person. I've got two events coming up. I'm doing a live taping of this podcast on November 18th in New York City. My guest will be the comedian Pete Holmes. It is a benefit for the New York Insight Meditation Center. Then coming up on November 23rd, I'll be doing an intimate Sunday afternoon meditation and Q &A sesh at a lovely hotel in the Hudson Valley in New York called Troutbeck. I've put links to both events in the show notes if you want to get tickets.

2:23We'll get started with Christiana Wolfe and DJ Kashmir right after this. Christiana Wolfe, welcome back. Thank you. Thanks for having me back. The question I have for you today is about how we move through the day. Something you talked about on the show a while back and that others have talked about on the show also is this idea that we have a sort of red, yellow, and green mode. If red is a very intense sort of fight or flight, meeting some kind of chaos or intense challenge. And if green is more grounded, more present, some ease, and yellow is somewhere in the middle. It's on edge, it's vigilant, it's a little bit stressed.

3:09And you've said, and others have said, that in your work, when you talk to people about this, you find that most of us spend most of our and yellow most of the day. That's true. It's definitely true for me. And I'm just curious if you can tell us a bit about why is that? What do you make of that? What can we do about it? Yeah. Thank you for that question. So I think we just live pretty crazy lives, first of all. And then we have not really learned how to drop back into green. if we think like back to how we used to live we used to live like in smaller groups in a village or something and we would be out in nature yes so there might be like intense work periods or intense family periods but then you had a chance to maybe walk to another house and you would be in nature and it would be calm and you look at green and you're out in daylight so all the things that we know now are really healthy and help us to regulate we're not doing that like we're in like buildings all day long.

4:16We don't get out so much. And also, I think part of it, we have not learned, but also we have kind of forgotten how valuable that is to rest and to take breaks and to allow ourselves to take breaks. And it's very interesting. So I'm thinking about, I remember a student told me once that she, I think, went to New Zealand for a year to work there. So she worked at a company there and she said the weirdest thing was that they had like a long tea break in the afternoon. So they would just go out at three or four for an hour and have a break. And when she said like, oh, let me just finish. I'm working on this project.

4:57She would be looked at weirdly, just like, no, we're taking a break. For her, that was such an amazing reminder of we don't have to work 12 hours a day. That's not natural. Not everybody does that. Not every culture does that. And so just to look at the bigger picture a little bit more, so what culture am I living in? And then how can I reclaim for myself? And of course, that is this kind of unfair thing that we see that it is kind of put on us as individuals to regulate, to be in green, to not be so crazy, to turn our phones off. Can we all turn our phones off? Yes, we can, right? But then we have this whole army of psychologists and everybody who actually made the phone in a way that we do not want to take it or turn it off.

5:51So it's kind of not fair. So I just want to keep that in mind. There's also really the bigger society level of like, what society do we live in? How would we like to live? And I know some people are doing that, and I know my friend Cara Jewell, she talks about that recently on the show here, about the intentional communities. We have to decide for ourselves and then to find like-minded people, which in our practice we call a sangha. So I want to encourage everybody who is listening to this is to don't just do it by yourself. Find community, find a sangha, intentional community around that. Especially when you're raising children and you look at like, what do you want them to learn?

6:38But again, like for me, it is so what we're learning is we have to know that the more in red our nervous system is, the less flexibility is actually there. So we have to remember the fight, flight or freeze modes. They come from the brainstem. They're very primitive in a way. There's not a lot of flexibility because the role of fight, flight, or freeze is just to get us survived through the next few minutes. So very rigid. And what we want actually and what feels good is to be actually mostly in green, be relaxed, be open, open vision, visual field. We talked about on the show here, right, the peripheral vision.

7:25And we want to be able to then engage in what we feel passionate about, right? In our work, we're in communication. So we're moving from green to yellow and then back. And there's a lot of flexibility there because when we're in that part of the nervous system, we're not locked in the rigidity of fight, flight, or freeze, right? And then we have to all individually get to know our own nervous system. Our nervous system is just uniquely shaped by what happened to me, what happened to my ancestors, what made me be here in this moment. And so to really be curious and learn tools, what does actually work for me, which might not work for you?

8:09So it's a lot, and mindfulness is so fantastic for that because we're bringing this open-minded curiosity to exactly that. So what is helpful for me? How can I, what we call down-regulate? How can I open up again and become more flexible again? You talked last time you were here on the show, you and I, a couple weeks ago, about the Buddha as the first physician and the first noble truth as a kind of prescription. And I was just struck listening to you, the way in which you sort of used that structure. If I'm hearing you right, it's sort of like, first noble truth, we're in yellow. second noble truth there are reasons why we're in yellow right we have these ancient brains they're completely mismatched with modern times there's no personal level of responsibility that we can or should really take for the fact that that is happening it just is happening right it's like we have the right brain but it's in the wrong century and then third noble truth there's a way of yellow, that path, the fourth noble truth, like, is highly idiosyncratic.

9:19And it's a little unfair that it's so idiosyncratic and that we are so, that we have all these structures that we're up against. But there are actually ways to spend more time in green. And it has to do with getting to know our nervous system. That's correct. Yes. And then, of course, and if we're looking at what the Buddha actually prescribed, he said, so the fourth noble chooses the noble eightfold path, where he just said, you have to look at every aspect of your life. So if you want to be more in green, if we use that as like, that's where we want to be, is we have to look at how do we work?

9:56What do we earn our money with? How do we act? How are we speaking? And do we make time for meditation? Yeah. And so meditation, not just time where I just sit there with my eyes closed and go over my to-do list. That's not meditation. Were you in my head this morning? I know, yes. The problem is not the to-do list, yeah? But the problem is actually, and that's something I'm actually very curious about, is the amount of intention that we bring to meditation. Yeah, so sometimes we can just be like, yeah, meditate, and I just sit down, but I'm not really present. I'm not really engaged. It's just like, just the thing I need to check off my to-do list before I get on with the other stuff.

10:40And right, so we can be totally meditating on autopilot, which is like one of the reasons why people start meditating, because they want to get out of autopilot. And then they find themselves a year later, and they're sitting on their cushion exactly just going, what do I have to do?

10:57Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate you pointing us to the Noble Eightfold Path and how holistic it is, right? And also earlier referencing seeking out sangha and seeking out community, practicing together as a part of the sort of prescription here. What else do you recommend to folks who feel like they are just always in yellow? Yeah, again, like sometimes doing some more healing work, honestly. It can be tricky because sometimes also actually engaging more in healing work is a privilege, a privilege of time and of resources, and not everybody has that. But if we do have that, to just see there's so many different healing modalities out there.

11:48And so to see, like, really experiment with yourself. Like, after you've done something, do you feel more in green? Yeah, and then, of course, sometimes I don't always have time to take a yoga class, obviously, right? Or to take a dance class or whatever that is that might regulate me more. But first to know, like, these things help me. That's great to have something that you know is helpful. And then to really, I'm really, like over this last year, I have gotten, fallen really in love with like really brief practices. Like brief, what we call nervous system regulation tools, like have been made very popular by like healing modalities like SE, somatic experiencing or EMDR or sensory motor.

12:33So there are a lot of really body-based practices to work with, let's just put it, nervous system activation or hyperactivation. And some of them are surprisingly effective. I teach a weekly in-person class here in LA. And we will often really start with something like, people love that one. So that's why I'm mentioning it's called the butterfly hug. So for the butterfly hug, we cross our hands and hook our thumbs and then place the hands on the collarbones. Okay, yeah. So you've got your right hand up real high on the left side of your chest and then your left hand up real high on the right side of your chest.

13:14Palms sort of touching your body and then your thumbs are hooked. You know, it looks almost like you're making a butterfly shadow puppet. A little bit higher, yeah. And then we just tap left, right. So bilateral stimulation. We can flutter the fingers a little bit, and that is very soothing. Okay, and now you're just sort of tapping your fingertips on your collarbones. This is nice. And then we can add a little bit of swaying. A lot of bodies like swaying. Okay, so now you and I are swaying a little bit, side to side. And then we can add a little bit of longer exhalations. Right? Exhalations, longer exhalations.

13:55they activate the parasympathetic nervous system, or really also like Ben favorite is humming. Think about like how many spiritual traditions they hum, they sing, they dance, yeah? And it all helps us to just go, oh, I have a body, I'm here right now, I'm okay. I can feel that just doing this a little bit with you. My body goes like, oh, thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So something like that. And to know and to feel it is like, oh, my body likes that or my brain likes that. So awesome. Write that down. Do that during the day when you feel really stressed. Do that before a meeting. I did something actually before we started recording.

14:42Just as a way I want to be as present and as flexible, as much in green as possible. And I'll do it also after we're done. Yeah, because of course, like recording is stressful for my nervous system. What did you do right before we recorded? Was it the butterfly hug or something else? Actually, no. What I did is something I love that it's called air hunger. Really important. I'm thinking like, has this still to do with mindfulness and meditation? It has. So air hunger. So what our brain needs to fully function is two things. It needs oxygen and it needs glucose. So I made sure I ate something before we came on.

15:24And the other thing is air hunger. And air hunger is a way to get a little bit more oxygen into your brain. And what I did, I won't demonstrate that because otherwise my whole setup like here will topple over. Like this microphone is like very precarious. Right, right. It will crash loudly, yes. Yeah, but I can describe that. Or what I did is exhale completely. Then you take a deep inhale. You hold your breath. And then you start doing a movement. So I did some squats. People can march in place or just like do something with their arms. Basically, you burn oxygen. And the point is not how long can you hold your breath.

16:05But the point is can you notice that moment when your brain goes like, oh, it would be nice to get some air. That's air hunger. And then we stop. And then we take a deep breath in, deep breath out. And then what I feel is I feel more brighter in my brain. So the mechanism behind that is, so we're basically the carbon dioxide level in our blood rises because we're not exhaling it. And that actually allows the vessels to dilate. So when I then take air in, there is actually a bigger intake of oxygen. People will often say it's almost like the light has turned on a little bit. You feel like brighter, more sparkly, more alive.

16:48So that's what I did before. So you said it's an exhale, inhale, hold breath, do a movement, and watch for that moment where your brain's like, okay, no, it's time now. And then when that happens, take the breath and notice what happens when you take the breath. Deep breath in, deep breath out. Give your nervous system a moment to integrate that. Got it. And what's really, really beautiful, and I just want to say that because this is so important, is our nervous system responds instantaneously. Right? So when we're thinking like, I need to do a yoga class or a dance class, which again, like it's nice, I'm not saying that.

17:27But if I just need a quick kind of change and I just feel really stressed, right? Or a little bit, I want to be more present. I want to be a little bit more in green. Your nervous system responds instantaneously in both directions, of course. Yeah. So if we feel threatened, we feel that immediately. but we can also really learn some tools that we can just sprinkle throughout our day. Basically, we want to keep our overall stress load more down. There are always things coming in, stress load goes up. Yeah, and at some point the stress load is so high that I will have like what we call some outputs.

18:06Outputs could be like, oh, I really need some sweets. I get cranky or, I mean, whatever our outputs are, I need a glass of wine, right? Or like it's just something that sometimes is okay, sometimes it's not so okay. But what we want is to be basically over the course of the day or over the course of life, just keep an eye on our stress levels. So I think you've offered us a pretty wide-ranging menu here on a more zoomed-out level. there's things like really taking a look at the whole breadth of the eightfold path and thinking about things like right livelihood you know essentially am i structuring my life in such a way that's likely to lead to happiness in the first place seeking out community meditating with a group and then on the slightly more individual level although this could still be done collectively things like dance classes, yoga classes, other kinds of healing modality.

19:09I imagine that could range from therapy to massage and beyond. And then in kind of micro moments, there are all these little exercises, many of them somatic exercises. You named two really helpful ones where we can just take 5, 10, 30 seconds and get an immediate sort of nervous system reset or nervous system move from yellow down to green, or at least from yellow towards green. Really, really helpful. As you were talking, I was thinking about a conversation I had the other day with some teachers that I thought might be useful to share. We were going through kind of a similar exercise, like a kind of somatic reset exercise, and it was about grounding and being present.

19:53And they were sort of walking me through, what does it feel like for you when your presence is at like a 10, right? And then what are the cues that you can just turn on when you need to, to help get yourself there? And we were practicing that. And I was feeling myself move. I was like, oh, I was at a six. Like now I'm at an eight. Like I'm a little more present. I'm a little more chill. I'm a little more grounded. But then they said this thing I didn't expect them to say, which was really helpful, which was like, the goal isn't always just to move towards a 10. Like sometimes you don't need to be completely regulated and completely chill and completely present sometimes you might want to move from a nine to a seven and that's okay too and i just i found that really there's like a spaciousness in that so yeah beautiful yeah and again it speaks to the like what we want and this is really important because sometimes people think like oh the goal is to be chill all the time right to me that sounds like i'm flatlining it's just like i don't want to flatline life yes so what we're actually after is that we have an appropriate response to what is happening right now.

20:58That's flexibility. Yes. Yeah. And sometimes we need more energy and sometimes we don't. Again, like mindfulness really helps us with that. Just like, so what's going on right now? Am I here with too much engagement, too little? Which is like actually one of the meditations that I recorded about like what's the right amount of effort that's needed for what I'm doing right now, which might be different again like even like in five minutes or definitely tomorrow just want to highlight one last thing before i let you go you were talking us through these exercises the was it called the butterfly hug the first one butterfly hug and then air hunger that was the one where we're exhaling inhaling holding the breath moving around waiting for that moment and then deep breath in deep breath out and you said something over the course of that where you a couple of times where you were like don't just try these things see which ones work and don't just see which ones work but like write down the ones that do and there's something again very very sort of md about this but i really appreciated it because this is your prescription right but just this idea that like you actually there is some work necessary to find out what works for you and then it is helpful to like to write it down to have a reminder i actually have it's funny in my line of sight right now I have a little post-it.

22:16Literally, it's just a list of things to do if a meeting runs short. And it's things like stretch, take a short walk, water the plants. Because sometimes when a meeting runs short, I'm just like, okay, got to get back on Slack immediately, you know? And I literally can't remember what a better idea would be. So I write it down, you know? Yeah, I love that. I love that. Yes. Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Still got to get better at actually doing what's on the note, but one step at a time. Awesome. Anything else to say here before we wrap up around this idea of spending less time in yellow?

22:54Yeah, and again, it's just something like, don't blame yourself for that. I mean, that's not your fault. We like to say it's not your fault, but it's your responsibility. Yeah, because nobody will get you out of it except for yourself. Yeah, so don't drop the blame game and do something about it. And then I also want to say, and sometimes actually not being able to do something about it, that can be a sign of trauma. Because also what we have to remember is that for some nervous systems, actually going into green is threatening. Because their associations with like being in green, being relaxed is not safe.

23:41and so when people find a lot of resistance against like being more relaxed or doing things that are good for you or that actually make you feel better to again like not blaming but saying like there's probably a good reason for that right so always assume what your brain is doing what your nervous system is doing makes sense to your nervous system when its main job was and is to keep you safe and instead asking yourself from the perspective of my nervous system could what i'm doing be a way for it to try to keep me safe maybe in an outdated way but the way when i what i know about myself growing up maybe would that make sense yeah and again and then with mindfulness we can get really curious and say like wow that is really interesting let me dig a little bit deeper into that at some point when I'm ready.

24:39So if maybe there were times as a kid when I did have my guard down and bad stuff happened, there might be a reason that I'm a little reluctant to let it down now, right? Oh my God, are you kidding me? Yes. Yeah. I've heard that so many times from people saying like, oh, just lounging around, that was punished in our house. Yeah. Or doing something for myself was punished that was seen as selfish. So now I try to do something for myself and it's just like my nervous system goes, oh, oh, oh, oh, no, no, no, no, no, not safe, not safe. If there is some block there, that's yet another opportunity to, instead of blaming ourselves or beating ourselves up, or this is a failure, another opportunity to get curious.

25:24And in some cases, maybe another opportunity to seek out other resources and other support. We don't have to do it alone. Yes. And then just the last thing, and in those moments when you notice that and you feel like I would like to go to yoga class, I'm not going to yoga class because I have so much resistance against it. I'm procrastinating until the yoga class is over. I mean, all the things that we do or the snacking, right? I mean, like just overeating things that we do. So see what happens if you can make yourself do one of those tools that I suggested. So you could say to yourself, okay i'll get that bag of chips where i get the ice cream from the freezer whatever but first i do this for 30 seconds and then i see and it's like from my own experience in working with people it's like often just just getting your nervous system a little bit more regulated loosens that grip of like oh actually i maybe don't need that right now yeah i love that yeah in those moments where we're going to the thing that's going to, essentially the self-medicating thing.

26:31Just don't deny yourself just one small intervention first, just to see. One small thing. And remember, so, right, because if we're saying, like, the urge to do that is an output, that means your stress level has just reached a certain threshold. And if you're inserting a tool here that helps to lower the threshold, does that change the urge? Totally fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's almost like that reaching for the bag of chips when you just ate and you're not hungry or something. Like sort of making that into a mindfulness bell moment. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Incredibly helpful.

27:15I'm going to go back and listen to this for myself at the very least. I think it'll be helpful to many beings. Yeah. Thanks again for doing this. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Thanks again to DJ and Christiana Wolfe. Christiana will be leading the next live meditation and Q &A session over on danharris.com on November 18th. We do these every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. She'll be doing the next one solo. If you sign up over at danharris.com, you get these live meditation sessions. You get access to them, and you also get the companion meditations for all of our Monday-Wednesday episodes.

27:51So that's cool. Sign up, danharris.com. And as I mentioned, I've got a couple of live events coming up. I'm doing a live taping of this podcast on the 18th of November with Pete Holmes, the comedian and spiritual seeker. There's a link in the show note if you want to sign up. I'm also doing an event at a lovely little hotel in the Hudson Valley called Troutbeck on November 23rd. That's a Sunday afternoon thing. There's also a link in the show notes for that. Finally, thanks so much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

28:26Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.