Turn Stress Into Your Springboard to Success with Dr. Rebecca Heiss

0:03Thank you for joining us for episode 533 of Live Happy Now. We're living in a time when many of us are feeling the effects of stress, but today's guest is here to tell us how we can turn our anxiety into action. I'm your host Paula Phelps and this week I'm talking with Dr. Rebecca Heiss, a stress physiologist, consultant, keynote speaker, and author of the upcoming book Springboard, Transform Stress to Work for You. Rebecca is committed to helping people fear less and live more by learning how to rethink their life's stressors and leverage the energy of anxiety instead of being overwhelmed by it.

0:42She's here to tell us how we all can learn to flip the script on stress, so let's have a listen. Rebecca, welcome to Live Happy Now. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm so excited to be here, Paula. It is so great to have you on the show because you have written a book that really captures the value of stress, which is not something that we normally think about. So in a time when most people are trying to avoid it, you are actually encouraging us to embrace it. And so let's talk, first of all, about why trying to eliminate stress is actually counterproductive. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the advice that most of us are told, right?

1:18Get rid of it. Try and calm down. Take some deep breaths. And in fact, what you're doing there is you're fighting against your physiology. So first of all, you don't get to control your stressors. I mean, we were just joking. I had built in two hours of padding because we were about to record this podcast and I was on a flight and then my flight got delayed and delayed and I'm starting to panic and I'm going, wait a second. This is what I talk about, isn't it? We can't control. we don't get to control the stressors they're brought into our life so rather than fighting against the things that we can't control how can we use that energy and shift it to something that is useful well it's funny because as you mentioned we had just talked about this a little bit before we started recording but then earlier today i had a lot of things going on and then i made the mistake of looking at my news feed and and then i was i was like okay just calm down and your book started bouncing around in my head because it's like, okay, that you've already told me that doesn't work.

2:14So I thought there's a lot of lessons, you know, a lot of timely things, ways to practice this. Yeah. I mean, I don't know about you, but whenever I tell my adrenal glands not to release adrenaline, they don't listen, you know, they don't listen. And so I think it's one of the most unkind things that we've been sold is this idea of trying to calm down because the analogy that I often will make is, you know, imagine telling your best friends something that you're really stressed out about. And they look at you and they just say, oh, calm down. Right? Like, that's a horrible piece of advice. And yet we do that to ourselves all the time.

2:50So let's be a little kinder to ourselves and our approach to stress. Let's do that. And before we kind of get into how we do that, you have an amazing story about how you used a stressful situation as the motivation to change your life. And tell us about that. Yeah. So I'm hoping that I'm picking the right story because there's been a lot of them in my life. So I'll, I'll go with the one that I think you're talking about, which is that I was, I lived most of my life. Like I think most of us do making safe decisions and I was really good at science. So I just kept collecting degrees because it was something that was, I was good at, it felt safe.

3:29It was an easy path for me. And you know, I had a career that was safe, a good academic position. I had a home, I had a husband and all of those things were safe choices. And then unfortunately my sister was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And it's one of those moments that just, it pulls the rug out from underneath you. And I, I looked at my life and I recognize, you know, as I was contemplating my own mortality, every decision that I'd made, I'd made out of fear. And that month I quit my job, sold my house and divorced my husband. And that is not a pathway that I recommend anybody take. It's a bold one, though.

4:08Yeah, it was bold. I mean, it was really terrifying and anxiety-producing and stress-inducing and so important for me to actually practice all of the research that I'd done. It was really the thing that transformed me from somebody who was doing the research to actually applying it and using it to move through that time and then ever since. So, yeah. So is that the point at which you decided to make stress your ally? It is actually. So I've been doing the research. I've been looking at the research and I never actually applied it. I know that sounds ridiculous, right? But I think sometimes we can be a little too close to something and go, yeah, this would be really good for people to do.

4:48And it suddenly occurred to me that not only would it be good for people to do, but it would be really important for me to do. and also to become kind of, I call myself a PR person for stress. You know, stress needs a better PR agent. And I want to be that because I feel like people's lives can be changed by recognizing that this is something that can be empowering. Olympic athletes aren't breaking world records during practice. They're breaking them when the pressure and the stress is at its peak. So we all have that ability to shift our mindsets and use it differently. And one thing that I found interesting is that you don't categorize good stress and bad stress because we hear that so often.

5:27But instead, you just identify it as energy that's in our bodies. So how does that shift in our thinking change our relationship with stress and change the outcomes of how it affects us? Yeah, I think when we label it as good or bad, right? Actually, a couple of things happen. Our physiology actually changes. When we label stress as good, well, that's great. You know, it opens our blood vessels. like things actually shift in our body to provide different resources to us. If we label stress as bad, it has an opposite effect. But the reality is stress isn't good or bad. It just is what you make of it.

6:07Right. And so now I want to be careful here because stress soars the thing that is like causing your body to react. Sure. That can be good or bad. Right. Like I'm never going to tell somebody who just got a terminal diagnosis. Oh, that's good. You know, that's good stress. No, That's horrific. But the energy that your body produces as a result, that stress response, that is your body preparing you to perform. That is your body enabling you to overcome whatever challenges come your way. And I think that's the mindset shift that we all need. And it's interesting because we get that as performers.

6:45I did a lot of theater in high school and college and beyond that. And you would feel that before going on, you get that adrenaline and that anxiety and that propels you. So we learned to do it there. We learned to do it as athletes. Like when you get that adrenaline burst, we transform it into our performance, but we're not taught to do that in our day-to-day life. That's it. Yeah. You nailed it. How do we learn to do that though? Because it doesn't feel like that same kind of anxiety. It feels like an overwhelming trapping me into the corner kind of anxiety. And I think, first of all, let me just acknowledge what you just said there, because I think so many of us are feeling so overwhelmed by the amount of stress and anxiety and pressure we're feeling in our lives.

7:30And I think a lot of that is the result of us trying to get rid of stress. So, you know, our research found last year that people who try to get rid of stress actually end up stressing out more trying to get rid of it. Yeah, right. It's this awful, awful cycle. So like part of it is just thinking about it differently. And I don't want to dismiss people's massive amount of stress that we carry because it's real. I mean, the average American is carrying 2.7 major stressors at any one time. And 84 % of us, and this was research we did last year, 84 % of us equate the stress that we feel in our lives to trauma, to like the same experience as trauma.

8:13And so this is very real to a lot of people. And my hope is not that we can just say, oh, poof, it's all better, you know, but rather to say, great, what does this mean to us? And shift the conversation a bit because nobody gets stressed out over their shoe coming untied, right? So stress is in fact a barometer for how much we care. And when we look at the research, what the research says is that stress correlates very highly to a purposeful and meaningful life. And that is really beautiful to me. So despite the fact that we're all feeling incredibly overwhelmed and like, ah, when we sit in that for a second and we recognize, ah, this means that I care?

9:03How can we be kinder to ourselves and others as we're walking through all of these stress points in our life and going, yes, this matters to me. This is important to me. And then inviting that stressor in, I call it inviting the tiger in for tea. Rather than trying to avoid it, invite the tiger in for tea. Let the tiger, let the stressor come in. Sit down, name it. Oh, I'm feeling anxious because X, Y, and Z. Then we have an opportunity to transfer that energy and point it along a trajectory that serves us. Rather than running away from the stress, we run directly at it. And I think that actually begins to unwind this knot, this entanglement, this pressure that we feel that's so overwhelming.

9:45And I think the timing of this episode with you is so incredible because last week's guest was Dr. Alan Rosansky. And he was talking about, he's a cardiologist and a physical behaviorist. And he was talking about how mental stress affects your heart. And he was talking about, I actually talked with him about you because he was bringing up how when they would talk to someone about the stress that they were feeling in their life, it would have the same effect as physical stress had on them. So I love the fact that we're kind of piggybacking these two episodes where you're talking about like, okay, now here's how we take it and we do something about it.

10:24Yeah. Yeah. I mean, humans are weird. Like we're the only, we're so weird. We're the only animal that we're aware of anyway. We're the only animal that actually creates stress for ourselves. Like lions fail at hunting. They fail at the one thing they're supposed to do hunt, right? They fail 80 % of the time. Really? Yeah. 80%. Pretty good size number. Right? Yeah. If you failed 80 % of the time at something, I mean, most of us, I know, at least for me, I'd be beating myself up. I'd be like, man, you really suck at this back. You know, you're lousy. Golly, maybe you should just quit and give up.

10:58There's no lion that's doing that, right? The second they fail, they take a nap. You know, they're not laying there going, man, I'm a terrible lion. I just can't. No. So we actually create stress from our own thoughts. And when we recognize that and we can step back from that and go, oh, why am I doing this? What is the mechanism here that's happening? we have an opportunity then to shift and recognize how much stress is, now I'm going to label it, ready? Stress can be good or bad depending upon how we interpret it. We'll be right back with more of Live Happy Now. If you're looking for a little more joy in your week, we've got two ways to help you boost your mood right when you need it the most.

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12:23And let a happier week find you.

12:32And now let's hear more from Dr. Rebecca Heiss. Right. So, again, this is one of my favorite studies. And please stop me if I'm rambling too much. But I get really excited about this kind of stuff. The study that really transformed my stress mindset was one that scared the bajeebas out of me because it looked at 30 ,000 Americans across eight years. And the question that they asked these people was, do you believe stress is harmful to your health? And the punchline of the study was across those eight years, people that had very high levels of stress and believed that stress was bad for their health died at very high rates.

13:11like 43 % higher mortality rates. But that's the bad news. That's the bad news. And that's where a lot of us, I think, are sitting right now. And we're suddenly like panicking going, wait, I thought this episode was going to help me. Oh my God, you're telling me I'm going to die. So here's the good news. The good news is that people who had very high levels of stress, but simply believed that stress wasn't bad for them. So stress is either good or stress is just energy, however you want to interpret it. They had the lowest mortality rates of the entire study, lower in fact than people who had very low stress levels to begin with so the lowest mortality rates of the entire study what that means is that people are dying not because they have high levels of stress but because they believe that that stress is bad for them i thought that was so incredible wild yeah and and we do have a stress problem in our country maybe globally and to be able to reframe it and think like I actually have some control over what the outcome is, is absolutely incredible.

14:12And the centerpiece of your work, your research is this fearless stress formula. Yeah. So I find this fascinating. Will you explain to us what that is? Sure. Yeah. And I want to be really clear with your audience. It's not fearless, right? You don't have to be fearless. It is fearing less, like just a little bit less, just having the courage to go in with some fear. So it's broken down into three simple steps. And the first step is recognizing that it's not a tiger. So our stress response is really built for three minutes of screaming terror through the jungle, right? Getting chased by a lion, tiger, or bear, oh my.

14:49It's not built for this modern environment where we're constantly being bombarded with stressful things. I mean, you just said, you know, open your newsfeed and oh my gosh. And so the first step of the formula is really recognizing it's not a tiger. So we're going to invite the stressor in rather than try and avoid it. We're going to invite the tiger in for tea, sit it down with us and recognize that three minutes after that stressor hits, if we're still alive, it's not a tiger. This is actually life and death situations. And even if it is a terminal diagnosis, it's a tiger in weight, right? That's a scary, scary thing.

15:23But if we're not dead in three minutes, all the energy that we're getting from the stressor can still be utilized. So the second step then is to transfer that energy into useful energy. So again, physics will say energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but it can be transferred. And the way we can transfer that energy is through curiosity because curiosity and fear cannot coexist. There's literally no brain mechanism for it, right? For 200 ,000 plus years, nobody ever had a tiger charging them, Paula. And you went like, huh, I wonder how fast it's coming. You know, I wonder how many stripes I wonder what it's thinking right now.

15:59I wonder what that tiger is thinking. I wonder how I'm going to taste. Yeah, no, they died, right? So we didn't develop a brain mechanism that allows us to hold curiosity and fear together, which means if you're in fear and anxiety and stress and you get curious, you begin to flip this energy. I wonder how I can grow from this. I wonder what the smallest step forward I can take is. I wonder what agency I do have in this moment. I wonder what, right? So when we get curious, we begin to transfer this energy. And then the key here is to begin to act as if. So the key point in understanding our emotions is there's two kind of axes that emotions operate on.

16:37The first axis is the one we've talked about already. This is the high to low, right? The very low emotional states of like sleeping, napping, barely conscious, and then the very high arousal states of stress, anxiety, fear, excitement, anger, all of these emotions live in these very high arousal states. So we don't actually get to control that. What we do get to control is the emotional balance. So I think about this as like an X axis, right? Is it positive or is it negative? And while we don't, I'm not asking you to label it necessarily as positive or negative, we do get to choose what is happening in our bodies because our bodies are releasing the almost the exact same hormonal profiles for stress, fear, excitement, enthusiasm, anticipation.

17:25So we're having this bodily response and then it's up to our brain to interpret it. So what I ask people to do is act as if it's an adventure. When you're feeling the stress, get curious about it. How can I make this an adventure? right so what that means is throwing our shoulders back putting a smile on our face kind of faking it a little bit you know because because our brain is actually looking to our body to say hey what's going on here is this is this a scary thing do I need to be worried and if we're crossing our arms and looking down at the floor and scrunching our face and they're getting protective our brain goes oh this is bad we're scared right now that's it yeah but if if we open up and we have these really fearless states of our body, our brain reads that as, oh, good.

18:12We don't have to be afraid right now. Now, important point in this step, you're still going to feel anxious. You're still going to feel the stress. You're not going to fake yourself out, even as you're lying to yourself. But I don't want you to stop lying to yourself because as you do, as you begin to act as if it's an adventure, act as if you're excited, act as if you're going on this cool journey, your brain starts to believe it and other people will react to you as if you are excited. And then you start to believe that a little bit more. And this pathway forms easier and easier. So then the third step, you've got all this energy.

18:51Your butterflies are now in alignment. Where do you want to point them? And this is what I call the trajectory or springboarding forward. And the trick here is to actually turn into and run at the stress, run at the roar, as I say, run at that tiger rather than run away from it. And what most people will do is they try and run away from it by, and again, I'm not saying these are bad things, meditating, getting a massage, getting coaching, getting a good night's sleep, or some bad habits, right? Getting on your phone, watching Netflix, right? Drugs, alcohol, whatever it is to avoid the thing. And what we found is a study of 90 different workplace interventions of all these good things that people were trying to do to avoid the stress.

19:37None of them worked with the exception of one. And that was service to others. And so the trajectory where you're going to point all of this energy is how in this moment can I use this fear? Can I use this stress? Can I use this excitement and this energy to not only serve myself, but to serve someone else? And that is magic. And that's so fantastic to know, especially right now, because a lot of the stresses we feel involve empathy for what's happening to other people right now. So to be able to take that and transform it into good for them, and we're also benefiting ourselves. I mean, what an incredible upward spiral it creates.

20:26Right? I know. It's one of my favorite things about the stress response that nobody really thinks about is the stress response releases oxytocin, which is a love hormone or a cuddle hormone or like a seeking help from others and offering the courage to offer help to other people in stress. And I think that's a really beautiful, natural reaction that our body has to stress. That's incredible. With your book, like this isn't just a book to sit down and read. It really is a companion. It's a guidebook for your journey. So kind of talk about that a little bit, the way that you've created it and the way that we can use it as really a workbook to get through this stress response that we have.

21:07Yeah, thanks, Paula. I mean, I tried to make the book as actionable as possible. People that are stressed don't need another 400-page book that they have to read. Here's how to do it. Yeah. So it's interactive. There's QR codes in it to help you get some personalized stress resources. There are some interactive videos. It's meant to be fun and lighthearted and very actionable. So there's protocols in it that I've used for my own research that you can follow and journal along. There's quizzes that are personalized. and really, I mean, if you sit down and you really want to crank through it, you can be through that book in two hours and then immediately begin to take the learnings and use them.

21:48So that's kind of how it's set up. Yeah, I think I was not prepared for it to be this fun. Oh, good. And I would recommend everyone who picks it up to check out the QR code about your little race car driving situation. That's just something I'm going to throw out there for everyone to check out. Yeah. Yeah, but it does, this book just feels so heartfelt. It is like having a friend, a fun friend, who is walking you through stressful times and teaching you how to deal with it better. And every time someone releases a book, it's like having a child and sending it out into the world. So what is it that you hope this child accomplishes as it wanders out there among us?

22:31Oh, that's such a kind thing to say. Thank you. And what a generous question. my hope for this book is that it finds the people that it needs to find I genuinely I genuinely love this work and I know how much it's transformed my life and so my hope is that people will find it and be able to utilize it and reach out to me and I'll help them in any way shape or form that I can because it's it's such a meaningful body of work to me that yeah I I just hope people can can use their stress in new ways and really tamp down a bit on the anxiety that they feel and harness it, harness it for good. I love that answer.

23:08Yeah, I think we do. I think this is a fantastic book. The timing of its release is no accident. It's incredible. And I think it's a book we all need for 2025. And so I thank you for writing it. First of all, the videos are great. But beyond that, But there's just so much that we have that we can take away from this. Thank you. I just hope, you know, that's what it is. I hope it gives people hope. I hope it offers hope. That's really what I, all I needed to say. I love it. Rebecca, thank you for your time. I really appreciate you sitting down with us and let's talk again. It's been such a pleasure.

23:45Thank you, Paula.

23:49That was Dr. Rebecca Heiss talking about how to use our stress as a tool for transformation. If you'd like to learn more about Rebecca, follow her on social media or pre-order her book, Springboard, Transform Stress to Work for You. Just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all new episode. And until then, this is Paula Phelps reminding you to make every day a happy one.

24:25Thank you.