Are You Recovering Enough? Stress,Sleep, and Daily Homeostasis Explained | Joana De Calheiros Velozo | Be Well Moments

0:00Welcome to Live Well Be Well, a show to help high performers improve their health and well-being.

0:10When it comes to recovery, how important is recovery? Because a lot of people talk about the stress bucket. It's a very famous analogy and that I always think about it with a bathtub that makes me find it somehow more attainable. and I can think about you know opening up the plug and allowing the water to drain when I want to top it up with some more hot water when the bath gets cold and I can kind of keep it at a level where I'm in control but if a phone rings or someone answers the door and I'm not keeping an eye on the bath and the plugs down then all the water overflows and that's how I try and think about stress.

0:48How important is recovery in relationship to our stress? I would say it's the most important actually in the sense that what we see is it's not so such a big problem it's normal that you experience stress right it's only human if you weren't experiencing stress i'd be worried but what matters is that you're able to effectively recover once the event has passed and that's really where we see the differences in people who develop health concerns over people who don't right so if you experience a stressor and immediately your body comes back to normal well that's a very healthy stress system, right?

1:23But if that stress event prolongs for hours, then you're really loading your body, right? That's very maladaptive. And that's what causes a lot of strain on your body and what leads you to develop all kinds of health concerns. It's interesting because I think about some people that I know that, there's two different types of people here. There's people that run very big companies that have very intense schedules and will reduce their sleep time to work out in the morning because they feel like they need that energy to get pumped up to go into work and have a big day and then I also flip it to a really busy mum who I think is like has exactly the same amount of stress as I'm running a big company because their sleep's disturbed and they have very little time for themselves but then they also are trying to keep themselves healthy and they're hearing all this overwhelming information so they're like I've got to try and get to a class or you know running with the buggy to get any kind of moment of exercise in.

2:19Kind of two very similar people, very different situations. For these people, how would you talk to them about recovery? Yeah, interesting. First, I want to maybe talk a little bit more about what we mean by recovery, because I hear you mentioned sleep, which is indeed really important for recovery. But actually, what we also look at in terms of recovery is how long it takes you to go back to homeostasis once you've responded to an event. So once your equilibrium has been disrupted, like how long does it take you to come back? And those are two different aspects of recovery that are important to consider.

2:53So one is indeed that bucket, I have a limited amount of resources. How much do I still have and how much can I still recover? But in your daily life, so when you're awake, you also should be mindful of the resources that you're wasting, right? So it's not just about resting, but also that you don't strain your system. during the day, right? So that you quickly come back down. So those two very different people, where sleep plays a really big role is that if you don't sleep enough, it also makes it harder for you to recover from stress. But the problem that people have is not so much what's in their bucket, but it's how are they handling the things that are in their bucket.

3:35So that soccer mom who's having 10 things to do at the same time, you might have one that has those things and is completely overwhelmed and her bucket is drowning and another one that's going through the exact same things and feels excited and joyful and energized right and situation is the same but how you're coping with those is very different and I would like to challenge people to not run away from things but rather handle them differently what tools can they use though to handle this what's person a doing that person b isn't doing in those moments to handle stress she's recovering she's able to to navigate the ebbs and fall of the demands that are put in front of her on a daily basis well the other one is finding everything more difficult everything's more negative everything's more against her i think the biggest thing would we talk about what about is this locus of control I don't know if you've ever heard about that.

4:38No, what's the locus of control? The locus of control is how much do you think that life happens to you or that you have control over what happens, right? And overwhelmed soccer mom probably has very external locus of control. All of these things are happening to me, right? And that can be really overwhelming. While the soccer mom who feels more energized, she feels more in control over the things that are happening. and that's I think the biggest difference and of course it's not that you shouldn't drop things when there are too many things but it's about knowing when to drop and what to drop not running away thanks so much for listening to hear the full episode there's a link in the description