Alice Law & Mo Gawdat - Unstressable as Your Guide to Wellness and Stress Mastery

32:54The listening bit is the other backbone of the model and the and the listening bit is that we are made as humans from four elementary components if you want what what did we call them for modularities yeah did we say manifestations before i can't remember but yeah so basically you're you are a mental you have a mental side to you you have a i don't mean mental you know you you basically have your your your mind, your heart or emotions, your body, your physical form and your soul or spirit, which, you know, you don't have to be a spiritual person to understand that there is a side to you that is non-physical, you know, your intuition, your consciousness, whatever that is.

33:36And unless you understand the language of each and every one of those and how they speak to you and how you can speak to them back, you basically are completely in the dark. You're unable to recognize your stress, let alone deal with it. I want to come back to the four modalities in a bit. But before we go there, I want to also talk about another part of the book that I believe is one of my absolute favorites. So when we started to write Unstressable, we spoke about burnout and trauma and so on, the broken under stress, if you want. And it hit me before we submitted the first edit that the other big pandemic, if you want, is anxiety, right?

34:20And anxiety is not because there is a challenge that you're facing right now. It's about a challenge that you haven't faced yet. It's about something that's happening in the future. And so, you know, as I said, we break down under three circumstances. One is trauma, the other is burnout. And the third is what I call anticipation of a threat. Okay. So all of that thoughts, that mental work that we do, mental as in absolutely crazy. Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely crazy, which brings us down to fear and all of its derivatives, as I always say. And it's quite interesting when you understand the difference between them, that they're not all the same.

34:58So it's worry, fear, anxiety, and panic, right? And we sort of deal with all of them as if, okay, something, a challenge is about to face me, I need to start to deal with it. Actually not true at all. So they come from the same main fabric, but they're very different in their nature. Worry at the very bottom is it happens when you suspect that there is a challenge coming, but you don't actually know if it will be, right? It's like, you know, your company is, there are rumors that the company is not doing very well financially. And now you're telling yourself in your mind, oh, I'm worried that they may lay me off, right?

35:40You don't have information about that. You don't know if the threat is actually about to happen or not. You don't know if it's going to hit you or not. You know, are you one of the people that may have to go or not or whatever? You're just worried. And worry means I'm not sure yet. I haven't verified if the fear, if the threat is actually going to happen, right? When you verify that, you suddenly move from worry to fear, right? And fear is I know for a fact that I'm going to be laid off, right? That's a very different one. panic is not even related to what you're afraid of it's related to time oh my god hr and my manager are in the room they're gonna lay me off you know today or next week or whatever when when the threat is imminent that's when we start to panic anxiety very different fabric anxiety is something you know a threat or a pressure or a challenge is about to happen okay and i've looked at it and i I now analyzed my abilities to deal with it.

36:42And I actually don't think I can. That's where anxiety happened. It's not a form of fear. It's a form of doubt of your own capability to deal with something you're afraid of, right? And so when you look at those four, problem is every time we feel any of them, we try to remove the threat or minimize it or avoid it or find a way to deal with it. But that doesn't work. that only works when you're afraid, okay? When you're worried, your task is not to actually deal with what you're afraid of at all. Your task is to verify if there is actually a reason to be afraid or there is no reason to be worried.

37:19So you're verifying if what you're worried about is actually true. If it isn't, drop it. If it is, then move into fear and let's deal with it as fear. And within fear, that basically means you need to either remove the, do your best to remove the threat or to minimize its impact or to be ready for it, okay? When you panic, you don't want to deal with the threat at all. When you panic, you wanna deal with the concept of time. So you need to tell yourself, if you feel panicked, okay, what can I do to give myself more time? Do I, you know, if I have a presentation on Thursday and I'm not prepared, you know, can I call the person and say, let's do it Monday?

37:55Can I, you know, drop a few things that I'm working on and make up enough time for me to get prepared? Or can I actually even verify if I'm not prepared, if I need more time to be prepared, right? Right, that's basically it's a question of time. And once you manage time, the panic goes away, right? And then anxiety, which I think is the modern world's biggest pandemic, if you ask me, is concerned with your own abilities. So when you feel anxiety, don't work on the threat. Don't try to avoid the threat. Don't try to solve the problem. Try to increase your abilities. Try to increase your skills.

38:30Try to invest in yourself. Try to bring a team player that can play with you to help you overcome the challenge. Anxiety is not about the threat, it's about you, okay? And I think the problem that, the reason why anxiety keeps coming back is because as we keep focusing on the threat, we don't actually think about our abilities, so we constantly fail in facing the threat because we have not developed the abilities, right? And so if you start looking at it and say, okay, I don't seem to be, to have the skills for that presentation on Thursday, I'm going to have to read that bit and then study that online course and then do this so that I'm prepared for Thursday, the anxiety will go away.

39:12And so this to me was one of my favorite discoveries in the processes, is how to handle your mind when you're one of those four quadrants, when in reality, for most of us, we deal with them as a threat is coming, I'm afraid I want to deal with the threat. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? Because anxiety is an emotion, right? So if Stress is, you know, what people think of as like, you know, stress is, you know, you can feel stressed, but the emotions that come from stress is, you know, things like overwhelm and feeling irritated and feeling anxious. Those are a whole other language in itself, which has been, you know, what obviously for me is one of my favorite things in the book, obviously, because I'm Mrs.

39:55Emotion, was looking at that, you know, that emotive side of stress. the emotional language and I think that's why I've really enjoyed doing this work and looking at all as a whole with emotional men you know mental emotional physical spiritual because so many so many things and so much work on stress in the past has just been looking at the biological and the logical and the you know mental or whatever it is and not taking into account how we actually feel and how yeah you know that actually changes and how we can manage that because that's one of those parts of the book where I start to read and go like where is she going with it and then half and half a page and I actually feel something that's yeah yeah sorry to interrupt but it's crazy because for me feeling as you know as we say in the book as a modern society we've been taught how to think and not how to feel yeah and that's one of the biggest damages we've given ourselves because we are totally sensory feeling creatures um you know know if you weren't meant to feel quite simply you wouldn't and we have this capacity to be able to feel an array of emotions you know in total Brene Brown's research shows 87 different human emotions and experiences I mean that's incredible and crazy but the reality is is that we are so uneducated to manage our own emotions because we've been taught like logical think you do you do you do instead of you know inwardly actually assessing how we feel and understanding how to like move that negative feeling through us and not be overwhelmed by feeling bad because we're human and of course we can't feel good all the time that's impossible and equally you know an emotion is only ever I always said like an emotion is only a negative emotion is only ever trying to make you you know help you with one or two things it's trying to show you something outside of yourself that you need to change or something inside of yourself that you need to heal that's it you know it's alerting you to something.

41:54And so we actually understanding, you know, the emotional language. This is so interesting, because you say something inside yourself that makes you heal. My very logical brain has always mentioned this statement as something inside yourself that you need to learn. That's so interesting. You know, I look at it always as a cerebral thing. It's like you need to learn something. This is why life is challenging you. You're saying you need to heal something so this is oh so it's like you know if you get triggered by something anything in the outside world we all have our you know subconscious traumas from little things that have happened in the past that make you triggered by things whether that's big or small if you're triggered by something and it upsets you and alerts you to feeling a certain negative emotion what that negative emotion is trying to show you is okay i either need to change something in my outside world like i need to ask mo to do something that will change the outcome of something so that will make me feel better and we can move forwards with this or if that's not possible then I need to look at why I'm being triggered and heal that within myself so that I don't continually get triggered by something outside of myself that I cannot change so it looks at that like like you say for me it is it is healing it is understanding that you can use your negative emotions to heal what you need to within yourself so that you can then use them as your greatest ally like emotions are for me.

43:20Literally like the compass that we all don't know we have. Absolutely. I mean, it's quite interesting because I have to say one of my favorite experiences of writing this with you is that you have something that you used to be the only person I know that had other than now my wonderful wife, Hannah, where you remember those, you did that three times when you would burst at me at something and then around 14 seconds and you go like, like, oh, why did I do that? First of all, I'm sorry I shouted at you. Literally it takes you 14 seconds and then you say, and why did I feel this, right? And it's, you know, again, Hannah's amazing at this, you know, Hannah being a therapist herself, you know, goes like suddenly she goes like, hmm, because you said this and my dad said it when I was 12 and then my boss said it when I was 16 and whatever, right?

44:08And she can actually trace where that emotion came from, how it was triggered. But that's not a typical thing for everyone. You know, as you said, emotions are very subtle, they're very blended, and we're taught not to, to listen to them, not to even acknowledge them. So what would your advice be for someone who's unable to feel that chapter was called feel to heal? Yeah, but most of us are not allowing ourselves or maybe forgot how to. I think the first point, if someone is in that stage of where they've really shut down, you know how to how to feel and they're like i don't even know you know how to feel what my feelings are and the average and by the way you're not alone if you're listening to this and that's who you are the average human can only name out of those 87 emotional experiences and emotions the average human can only name three is that true yeah happy sad and mad oh it's not think think thing no no one but isn't that crazy that's what brenne brown's research said happy sad and mad so like and and that's the for me and this will sound awful i'm like how because you feel like 700 i feel like things all the time and i'm like you know i can know you know it's like we were in the audio studio yesterday and the audio studio guy safe was saying alice how do you feel today And I was like, I had to pause.

45:31I paused. Yes. Because I was like, I'm not going to just say I feel good because I didn't feel perfect yesterday morning. So I was like, you know what, say if I'm feeling a bit apprehensive, we're not going to finish in time, but I'm also excited to do the book. And those are my two emotions that I was feeling that day. And I actually, I always really pause to actually answer that properly. Unlike the typical human, which will say, oh, I'm just fine. I'm fine. but you know that's why you know we have trouble with you know relationships it's like talking about like emotional stress if i can't explain to someone i love how i feel how can i possibly expect them to understand how i feel and that's that's a massive massive issue for emotional stress but if people don't you know how to access their emotions going back to your point and they think i just don't even know how to start my feelings start it from a logical standpoint before you go into the feeling.

46:22Oh, don't take me there. That emotions chapter had quite a few equations itself. So not the equation, they're talking about the technique, about start to write. So like, you know, therapeutic writing, and writing simply on the prompt of and I actually found this interesting, I was talking to a friend about this the other day, because I do morning pages, you know, I free flow, I can write, just letting out every single emotion goes from left to write upside down and I'll go to all sorts of places uncensored in my journal and it's an emotional process for me it's a great way to start for people that logical you know pen to paper therapeutic writing um has been you know a huge thing since god you know the 60s and in therapy is a recognized therapy because it gets you to access that stream of emotional consciousness uncensored and you don't think anyone's going to judge you because they're not it's just you do I feel?

47:16Yeah. You know, how do I feel? And then how do I want to feel? Yes. And just start to like open it up that way and look at how, how you feel and how you want to feel if that's aligned, or if it's really far apart, if it's really far apart, then I just say like, okay, if it's your little exercise that day, just think of one tiny micro action you can take to help you move towards the feeling you want to feel. But equally, just keep writing out the to process the feelings that you're uncomfortable with and I found that you know like you talking about logic then it's true and I had a friend who was saying to me the other day they'd looked at the journal prompts we put on our unstressable Instagram would come up as a post and they're like oh my god I found that so useful because I really struggle to just write my feelings and I really need those prompts and it's such a good reminder that people do you know it's it needs some guidance but yeah just start to ask yourself you know as you know there's many feeling techniques that I could go into, but I won't, because that's really accessing the feeling.

48:12But to start with the logic, get your pen and paper out and just ask yourself, how do I feel? And how do I want to feel? I have to say, I was amazed. On our membership, we have a consumer side, but we also have quite a few corporates. And, you know, the serious corporate members who come to the membership webinars, and how absorbed they got into that emotional side of things. And the idea of actually thinking about the fact that they have the right to feel, let alone, you know, need to learn the skill to enable that. Again, I think that was extremely eye-opening for me. I was reading the audiobook a couple of days ago, the chapter of, my bit of the chapter of emotions, and there are very prominent four equations there.

48:57Of course. Yeah. In my mind, I think, of course, that emotions are, they appear erratic, but they have a logic behind them, right? So like I described panic, Panic is a question of time. The threat is imminent. So, you know, you can actually mathematically describe that it's related to time. And yeah, one of the four equations is wrong. So I'm going to ask you as our listeners to find out which one it is. It's wrong. It's not perfectly written mathematically. See, I wouldn't be able to tell because I can't do math. Yeah, and I had to say, I stopped while reading the audiobook saying, oh my God, yes, that's actually not right.

49:36I mean, it's a tiny mistake, but yeah, it's missing one symbol. No, no, no. So we will not remove it because the book is out for print already. So maybe in the next edition. But if you pre-order the book, which would really help us, by the way, with our mission. So if you plan to buy the book, pre-order it. If you pre-order the book, when you get it, find out which of the four equations is not accurate and send it to me. If you discover that more than one is not accurate, then I'm not going to write math again. One other thing I should probably have said is that inside the book, you'll have a$15 discount code for unstressable membership.

50:19So if you plan to use the membership at any point in time, that will basically mean that you got the book for free. Okay, so can I say one of my favorites? Of course, please. One of my absolute favorites in this book was how Alice wrote about physical stress for the simple reason that I was about to edit the physical stress chapter. As I said, we edited each other's work. So I was about to edit your work a month before I went on my 2022 retreat. And if you recall, I texted you. Oh, I recall. I read the chapter and I actually realized that I was everything you wrote in that chapter applied to me.

51:09Like I was so physically stressed. And I think that's probably because of a, I mean, of course, because of the number of things that I do in passion to achieve my mission, but also because I'm getting older. I'm not old. I actually feel quite young, but I'm getting older. So the idea of traveling 16 hours somewhere, then landing and sleeping for two hours and then waking up to do a talk. Is absurd. Yes, carry on. Yes, it is. But I have to admit, so I read that chapter and I made a commitment that I will actually take care of my physical form in that retreat, the 40 days retreat I did in 2022. And I felt amazing.

51:52It completely changed me. You focused specifically on inflammation. And of course, because I have access to the author, I asked for a quick summary around what I need to do and how I change my diet and how I change my rest and recovery and so on and so forth. And I applied that during the, which is all advice in the book, but I got sort of a private consultation and I applied that and came out of that retreat never, ever feeling better. And I mean never since I started working, right, since my mid-20s. So tell us about physical stress. Tell us why. Why do we feel physical aches and pains when we are stressed?

52:32For me, I always look at the body as it's like an extension of the mind, right? You know, Dr. Bruce Lipton talks about that in his work. It's like the subconscious, you know, the body is an extension of always knowing. It's always hearing what you're thinking all the time. And it's always getting everything that you're doing. So it's like whether you're eating badly, whether you're not sleeping, it's being stressed out, whether you're thinking, you know, negative thoughts, you know, the body is constantly absorbing all this. And the body is super resilient. Like, don't get me wrong, like the body, you know, we really, really push our bodies to the limit and it doesn't break until a certain point.

53:07But that does not mean that we should let it get to that point. Absolutely. So, you know, the body is far wiser than the mind in that sense. So if your body is screaming at you with aches and pains and digestive issues, which we'll talk about like why this happens, it's really time to pay attention. Don't let yourself get to the point of, you know, like my wonderful dad of actually, you know, dying from a stressful stomach ulcers are a huge factor of stress because when we, you know, stomach issues in general, when we're stressed and our fight and flight goes on, it pushes away all the resources.

53:39Our body needs to thrive and just concentrates on what we need to survive. So, you know, and that's funny little phrase we always say, if I'm running away from a tiger, I don't need to digest my steak and chips. My body's like, no, no, more importantly, it's like you have blood in your muscles, you know, all these things and you're on alert. And I, your heart rate increases, all that kind of stuff. If you're constantly in the state of stress, which like we talked about earlier, a lot of people are simmering in the background from the nuisances building up, just simmering away in stress. our body never has the chance to go back into parasympathetic state into rest and digest and recover and recovery is when our body is actually thriving it's when it's digesting our food it's when it's replenishing ourselves it's when we're actually getting recovered sleep and you know able to actually you know just process all the things that our body needs to do to be really well and when we're in this stress state and inflammation occurs it's because cortisol short term you know is great like when cortisol goes into your system from fight or flight it alerts your body and it allows you like we say to run away to fight but also to you know heal a wound that say if we were going into battle which is like what our strides in fight and flight originally was for and these kind of life threats you'll be able to you know heal the wound quickly that kind of thing cortisol long term which is what we're all dealing with just simmering in the background really increases inflammation and inflammation is just a breeding ground for disease and illness and you know like we talked about with you know you said like when you did your retreat it was like looking at those how you can make your body less inflamed from stress because your body sees things that aren't healthy as well as a stressor so what we don't really what we don't realize is like how we treat our body can put it into fight or flight without us even realize so you get stressed yeah right you you your body responds by feeling inflamed and aches and pains that stresses you yeah right so you eat uh junk food and that stresses your body so it stresses you and that's you know and then you you don't sleep enough and it stresses you you know and so on it's a vicious cycle like you know sleep there's a reason why sleep for example is used as an active torture method in certain prisons because lack of sleep is so stressful for the human and the body that your stress response will literally go off continually if you don't get enough sleep.

56:03It's like, oh, survival, what's happening? And so all these little things like sugar, it turns your stress response on. Sugar, oh my God. So that actually, I think, I mean, one of the advices that Alice gave me from the book was I needed to take sugar, gluten, dairy, and any allergens. Just inflammation, inflammatory foods. Yeah, yeah. Oh my God, that actually didn't take very long. I very quickly felt better. Well, it's just that inflammation because when you are inflamed and when your body's full of cortisol, your body can't rest and it can't bring itself down. So you have to support it. Like you have to do anti-inflammatory exercise as well.

56:44Even like we have this thing of, everyone's like, okay, well, if I go and do loads of cardio when I'm really stressed, yeah, okay, that will help if you're at a certain level of stress. You know, that exercise gives you endorphins, it helps burn off cortisol, it helps do all those things. If you're over the point of like you are really, really stressed, doing a cardio HIIT class is one of the worst things you can do for a system that's in hypervigilance because it's literally just giving you more cortisol, even more. And it's like da-da-da. So instead, you know, do a nice long, low inflammation walk.

57:14You know, do some restorative yoga. Just bring your body back down to ease before you can go back into doing things like that. I apologize, my wonderful body. I mean, everything in that chapter I did. And I think many of our listeners do. It's, you know, it's, we're so high paced, highly engaged. You know, that's what the modern world does to you. So that one, that one really made a big difference for me. So, okay. What's another one of your favorites though? Okay. I love the stress quiz. Oh, yeah. I actually, I really do. So Alice and I worked on a very long list, I think 40 questions or something like that.

57:57Yeah, they're quick. Don't scare people. Multiple choice. We worked on a very long list and then we ended up with 40 questions that you can do in like four minutes or something like that. Multiple choice that will give you not only your stress score, so how stressed you actually are, but it will also give you which of the four modalities of who you are, mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual, which of those is causing your highest amount of stress or highest contribution to your stress. And we did that. We used it first time on our retreat last year. We had a wonderful retreat with 150 people that basically took the quiz.

58:40And Alice and I both did the quiz and it actually was quite a an accurate description and i love that i think it's so good though because it was accurate actually when we did that i was like yes it really works exactly the mathematics behind it is accurate because yeah my biggest challenge is you know in managing stress has always been my mind and so my mental stress will always be the one that i have to work on most and although i will say all my scores were green thank you so much oh yeah my mental uh percentage even though it was green was the highest percentage out of the four yeah and then you had obviously my physical was totally red yeah it was orange it was orange it was orange but it was your highest your overall score was still in green but your physical was your highest and that's always your biggest challenge like we just discussed so 100 and for those of you listening it you don't have to buy the book to get the stress surveys just go to unstressable.com and slash quiz slash quiz.

59:39Yeah. Unstressable.com slash quiz. And you'll find it there. You can do it now. You don't have to wait for the book to come out. And it's really very useful. It highlights to you which part of you that you need to work on most. I think that was a very effective, a very effective way. Okay. Do we have time for maybe one or two more? Yeah. One more. One more. I mean, I have to say, obviously um spiritual stress is i was hoping you'd say that spiritual stress is definitely what is spiritual stress so spiritual stress i mean i remember i first talked about this on your podcast when we first met i define spiritual stress it's nothing to do with religion it's to do with you know spirituality for me my own definition of spirituality is a greater connection to myself and a greater connection to something outside of myself for me it's what i believe to to be God, universal power, but for anyone that can be, you know, nature, it can be community, if you're not, you know, if you're an atheist, whatever it is, you know, it's your own sense of connection, both inwardly and outwardly to something greater.

1:00:44Greater than yourself. Yeah. Okay, so I have a different definition maybe. I mean, let's align on this. So I'm a very serious scientist in my approach to everything, but the big lie I would say about science is that we, you know, the scientific method basically says, or at least is claimed to say that if something is not measurable by accurate observations in the physical world, it doesn't exist. Or at least that's what scientists would want to tell you, right? And so accordingly, anything non-physical doesn't exist in the form of science. But that's wrong. The accurate description of the scientific method should be if something is not measurable with repeated observations in the physical world, it's not part of the domain of science.

1:01:31We are not concerned with it because we can't apply the scientific method to it. But a lot of scientists feel love and love doesn't exist in a physical form and it's not measurable with accurate physical measurements and observations. And yet love exists. And so my attempt at the beginning of that chapter, my contribution was to try to explain that you know there is another side to us that is non-physical and even though it cannot be measured through the scientific method it does exist and that other side of you is talking to you it has it uses the language again the four modalities are all about a language course so it uses a language to communicate to you that what's non-physical whether it's part of you or part of the bigger non-physical oneness of all of us if you want is talking to you all the time and and if you ignore it you you know it's you're you're stressed in your physical form because you're not getting those messages and it is it you know your non-physical side is also stressed because you're not listening to it yeah exactly so it's physical spiritual stress has two sides one is we become spiritually stressed when we're totally out of alignment with our authentic self our soul self and what that self is trying to guide us to so the soul is always speaking to us through the sensory through our intuition, through these whispers and emotions and intuitive hits.

1:02:56And when we are out of alignment with who our true self is, and that goes beyond the labels. So if you can't answer the question, who am I without saying, I'm a doctor, I'm a dad, I'm a lawyer, you know, I'm a mother as a label, that's not who you are. That's not your essence. That's what society has told you you are as a label. So the essence of the soul is totally unique. You know, everyone has their own soul essence, soul gifts, soul traits, soul energy. And when we are out of alignment with who we truly are, the kind of energy we're here to uniquely bring to the world, we become stressed because we are totally out of alignment with our authentic selves.

1:03:34And we feel like something's wrong because it is wrong. You know, you're not going with who you are. And then you're half of yourself. Exactly. And then the other side is, so it's that, you know, that side when you're disconnected from your soul self, your authenticity and your intuition. The other side is spiritual stress is when you've connected to your intuition you've heard the whispers you've heard the messages and then you just totally ignore everything it says yes and I love that bit because it's so true so how many times have we had those moments where you've said yes but you felt no and that's that that's that thing right you're ignoring completely what your intuition is telling you and then life will decide to wake you up so it's like you know the soul will keep trying to get your attention it'll feel stressed because you're going against what it knows is for your best.

1:04:19And then sometimes life just sends you what I call in the book a soul slap, you know, that sideswipe, bam, no redundancy, here we are, because you haven't been brave enough to, you know, this job's been making you miserable for 10 years, you hate it, it's crushing your spirit, but you're still there. And so then sometimes, you know, you get made redundant, for example, because life is trying to show you a different path, the soul is like, wake up, wake up, wake up. You know, that's just an example. But that's the essence of spiritual You were quite playful with that chapter. So there was soul slap and there was solrenity.

1:04:52Oh, solrenity. What was that? Well, solrenity is just, yeah, understanding when you are actually feeling what I call spiritually calm. So we feel spiritually calm when our heart aligns with our choices. You know, we truly feel that we're in the right place in the flow of life, accepting even the bad of it, because we know that we can handle it and that life will eventually show us something that we hadn't seen at the time of stress. You know, sometimes we're so stressed when we're in something and we're trying to control the outside world, desperately trying to change stuff that is not ours to change.

1:05:27It's like me with my dad, trying to get him to get treatment for cancer. That wasn't my choice. And I was so stressed. That's when I realized, as you know, in the book I write this, that's when I realized I was spiritually stressed for the first time because I was trying to look to the outside world only for answers. I was trying to change the unchangeable I was trying to get my dad to see a treatment I was trying to just fix something it wasn't mine to fix and I wasn't looking inwardly at my soul for what my intuition was trying to tell me at the time which eventually what I did was let go this is not your fight and I'm so grateful that I did and this is why I wrote about it is because had I not you know listened to my intuition then I would have spent the last what I didn't know was two years with my dad arguing in stress control and stress instead of just being with him in what was and because we didn't lose him to cancer we lost him to stress you know um stress ulcer as I said stomach ulcer I would have been so regretful had I not listened to the guidance of my soul because I would have been arguing with him about something that I didn't even need to argue with him about and wasting that time I had left with him so yeah spiritual stress for me is it's a real fun one I have to say yeah um okay so I'll I'll I'll say my one more one more yeah okay because we're running out of time and and the book is just like I think I must have 200 more but uh my my very one of my my my favorite as well was the mind gym so so we we uh after I wrote the mentally stressed chapter I I sort of uh you know So unstressable is not an attempt to de-stress you.

1:07:07It is an attempt to de-stress you and keep you out of stress, right? So being unstressable so that the next time life throws challenges at you, you don't feel the stress. And so the first bit of the mental stress chapter, which is a bit of a long chapter, was talking about how to de-stress, how to remove mental stress. And then through neuroplasticity, we developed this concept that's called the mind gym, which are seven, seven or eight practices that will keep you unstressable, unmentally stressable if you want. And those were Jim, G-Y-M-M-M-M-M-M. So being grateful, yielding, meditating, and being mindful.

1:07:51Meet your brain. One of my favorites, I call it Meet Becky. Make believe, which really is sort of visualization if you want, how you can train your brain to visualize. mind your own business, a very big rant from me about all of this stuff. Yeah, it really, it actually, when I was reading the audio, I was almost angry about how media and social media and mainstream media are hijacking our lives and getting us to worry about things we shouldn't even worry about. I mean, as if life is not stressful enough, we now have to worry about, you know, a child that fell in a well in Morocco or whatever, which of course you have the compassion and the empathy to feel about, but without the ability to react to it.

1:08:33Yeah, we're an information overload. Yeah, it is definitely a very stressful part of our life. And my whole rant was driving at the idea of champion something. Don't just flood yourself with information that stresses you, but you can't react to. If you're really passionate about one cause or one topic, or champion it and really know enough about it and start to act and be an activist and do something rather than just stress yourself. And then finally, the last M was connect to Mother Nature, which I have to say was one of my favorite conversations here on Slo-Mo with Craig Foster, the Oscar winner with My Octopus Teacher.

1:09:16I love that documentary. And he was incredible. I mean, he, first of all, he was very, very generous and very honorable because he was supposed to be on my podcast literally four days before he was informed that he won the Oscar. Yeah. And so he so nicely sent a message saying, I'm really sorry. I may not be able to be available at that time. Can we do it later? And then I forgot about it. And he came back and said, okay, all of the rush is now done. I promise that I will be on your podcast. It was season one or season two, 2018, 2021, 2020, right? So, so, so I don't remember, but anyway, it was, you know, I wasn't that big yet.

1:09:58And he still came and said, I promised that I will be on the podcast. Can I be on the podcast now? And I said, absolutely. I loved the documentary. And the first question I asked him was, you used to dive every day in 12 degrees Celsius. I mean, imagine what it's like in 12 degrees. You normally wear a jacket even outside, right? If you're in water, that's literally like freezing yourself without oxygen for eight hours a day. Isn't that very stressful? And he almost got angry at me and he said, what? Being photographed by paparazzis all the time and having to do press interviews and having like coming out of that Oscar experience.

1:10:40I thought he was talking about your life. You know, he went from that deep connection with nature into winning the Oscar and feeling so stressed by it, right? And he said, this is stressful. Being in 12 degrees water, this is what we're made for. And his statement was, we are of mother nature. We're not just visiting. And that's one of the biggest reasons for our stress is that we disconnect from our mother, right? And it was so beautiful. And I have to say one of the eight practices that I started to include a lot more often in my life. And even here, you know, in my home down in Dubai, you've seen it.

1:11:19It's entirely, you feel like you're in a jungle, all of those plants and fishes and so on. But the mind gym in general, I think is one of my favorite bits of the book. Eight practices, very accurate. And if you align to them, you end up without mental stress or at least with less mental stress because of neuroplasticity. Yeah, it's a great model, it really is. And like looking at the mother nature part, I mean, I know myself because, you know, living in a city, living in London, currently, that's like, it's your, your nervous system is on the entire time, whether you want it to be or not, right.

1:11:54And so when I, Christmas this last year, I was going up to Yorkshire to the countryside to see my mum. And we'd had loads of work before then. I was like really, really sort of pushed to my limit in that classic lead up to Christmas festivities period of like socialising and working and trying to get stuff done. And then I got to Yorkshire thinking, ah, my mum will be cooking and looking after me. And my poor mum was really ill with the flu. So I was then looking after her. And so I was sort of like really, really, you know, didn't have that time to recover. so I thought to myself I was like right okay my meditation is working to a certain level what does my body actually need and I went to go and walk in the forest by myself um drove you know 15 minutes away to go and walk by myself away from everyone in the forest in the trees for like an hour and a half and I felt completely different by the time I came back because my body my nervous system just needed that space that nature allows us to actually put it back into parasympathetic state and I just think it's so important for people to realize how much that works yeah you're always tell me that when I text you and say I'm stressed and you say barefoot on grass or on sand, put your feet in the ocean's water, which again is sinful if you think about it to live in Dubai where, you know, the water is so nearby, but then, you know, I don't go that frequently, but it does work.

1:13:10It does make a difference. The sea is my happy place. I know. I know you're a dolphin. Okay. So let's do a bit of rapid fire. As I said, you know, the book is like 385 pages or whatever. So there are quite a few, it's a very comprehensive handbook as I like my books to be. So quite a few tips, quite a few favorites. Let's do a bit of rapid fire. Any other favorites? Just one sentence. Okay. I love the 90 seconds rule. Okay. The work of Jill Balty-Taylor and the idea that even from a biological point of view, what's breaking about our stress is the negative feedback loop. So, you know, you get stressed very quickly.

1:13:49You're supposed to actually de-stress within 90 seconds, like most animals, as soon as the stressor goes away. But we don't, we keep re-stressing ourselves. That to me is one of my favorites. Yeah, yeah. One of my favorites is, you know, that our intuition is the language of our soul. So just, you know, when we can connect to our intuition, we can connect to our soul, to our self. And we teach you in the book how to actually connect your intuition, which I love. Yeah, I love the limit in the digital world. bit that was something you need to practice today i'd say it's something i need to practice actively every day but remember i dropped my devices hours from seven hours when i started my practice to around two and a half hours now which includes all of my connection with devices including answering all of those whatsapps and you know i i still try as much as i can to answer every single message i get on social media failing failing failing failing failing failing love you all who are listening but the amount of micro stress i'll openly say look connecting with humans which part of of the mind gym is really the biggest de-stressor in the world and and i don't go to social media to post or whatever but you know that whole idea of connecting to a human even if so slightly i really actually uplift and uplifts me all right uh your your turn My turn.

1:15:13Didn't I just say one? Okay, wait, no, I didn't. Another one of mine would be actually, you know, just the TUN model. You know, I love the TUN model. I've always looked at macro, micro and internal and external stress for clients. And then, you know, you using the TUN acronym and us creating actual model for those things. That was great. I love that for people to really understand what their stress is coming from first. Yeah, I love the two models, the deal, and the three anchors of sanity, I call them. So these are very, very, very down to earth practical tools and agreements you have with your brain to avoid mental stress, I found.

1:15:53The deal and the three anchors of sanity, very useful. You can flip through the book and find one more. I have one more. A bit of energetic intelligence, obviously, because I love Reiki and all things energy. So for me, that was our energetic CPR. and actually how you can cleanse, protect and reground and just how those simple energetic practices, how we need to look after our energy, you know, how our energy body actually affects our stress too. It's a lot of information here though. Yeah, I think we're good with that. So it is one of my favorite works. Normally when I write books, I write them with the intention of learning first.

1:16:37So, you know, when I write a book, It is a topic that I want to nail down. You know, it's a topic where I have so much information in my head about. And the process of writing is healing and reaffirming for me. This time I had a wonderful co-author, thank you, Alice, who also taught me things that I wouldn't normally accept as part of the process. There was a moment in our writing process where I used to call them what? Magic something? Magic tricks. Magic tricks, yeah. So some of the stuff that Alice talks about that is so unscientific to my mind, and I used to want to, I wanted to label them as magic tricks so that...

1:17:18Now they're called stress hacks, but they have a magic wand. Yeah, exactly. So now we replace that. Again, one of my favorite bits of the book is that idea of stress hacks and reflection time. So lots of parts of the book are marked with either a stress hack logo or a reflection time logo, which are basically the yin and yang. Again, you know, reflection time is sort of the feminine side, if you want, of being. So you tend to sit with yourself in those exercises and learn something about yourself that you didn't know before. And the stress hacks are practice exercises, things that you can actually do.

1:17:59So it's on the side of doing so that you enable yourself to become better. Yeah, I mean, I just, you know, when you said like researching and stuff, it's like, I'm so grateful for you to allow me to write this book with you and do it together because for me it's really funny because the research for this has been 10 years so I probably did such I did such little research when I was writing it because I've been doing it for 10 years you were writing quite a bit that I was just like and I it was so wonderful to be able to put it all down and put it into like a concise thing to be able to help people because one of my biggest you know people always ask me this it's like you know how did you start to learn this and at the time you know the reason we do the membership the reason we did this book for me it's like putting it all together the stuff that i could not find when i needed it most when i was 25 24 it was all over the place in different places there was nothing that held all the teachings and learnings we put together in one place which is what our mission has really been about to not make you stressed by having to find out how to make you unstressed but putting it all together for you so you don't have to.

1:19:00100%. One of the beautiful outcomes of this book is that the first version of it was 600 pages. More? 640 or something. Yeah. And there was a bit in it, 70 pages about stress at work. There was 90 pages around what we call the nine beasts of grief. So my expectation is that we will hopefully bring those out as well. I think the nine beasts of grief should probably be a project we work on as soon as we finish this yeah it's been wonderful big topic it's been wonderful alice uh and and our friendship and yeah i i sometimes somehow feel you're always been you've always been family and you will always be family so i'm very grateful that you pushed me to write this and uh yeah i'm very happy with what came out no i'm very very grateful for us writing together it's been uh it is it continues to be like the best like you say it's so cool to work with someone who you think of as family, as a friend, but who's also like taught me so much and who really is completely different to what I do.

1:20:04And it's, yeah, it's really, it's been so, so wonderful. And hopefully like, you know, our mission continues to make, you know, take a million people a year out of stress. It's not like a blanket comment for us. It really means something to both of us for the reasons we told you. And it actually looks possible. Yeah. With all of the pipeline we have on our membership and on, you know, book sales and all of the talking engagements and speaking engagements. You know, I think the one thing that happened differently with this book is that we've been testing it for a year and a half before we finally gave the final text to our publishers because of the membership, because of the retreats we did, because of the speaking engagements and so on.

1:20:44Any final words? Well, I think it's just funny to add to that. It's like that I was really upset, as you know, multiple times, being like, the book's delayed, the book's delayed, and I just wanted it to come out. But it goes back to that spiritual stress side of like the universe always knows what's best for you. If it hadn't been delayed, we wouldn't have created the mission and the membership and the corporate side and actually what can then be taken from the book and implemented into the world for people. So yeah, and it wouldn't have come out in 2024, the most stressful year in history. So for that, I'll, yeah, I'm very proud of this.

1:21:19I ask all of you to give it a chance. As I said, a few things to understand happening here. One is you can pre-order already. If you pre-order, when you get the book, you'll get a$15 discount on the membership, unstressable.com, which basically makes the book free. But you can also keep your pre-order receipt. Come and register already on unstressable.com. And so that you get invited to our launch webinar, a very special event only for pre-orders to take you through details of unstressable and how to become unstressable. Look out for other fun activities that we will do around the book launch date.

1:21:56Part of our mission on stress is this mini series on stress. I plan to have at least eight episodes on stress. This is the first of them, part of slow-mo here. My mini series will start around the second half of March and go until mid-May, hopefully. And Alice on Unstressable will have a few as well in the current season together and a few that are separate. But yes, together we are tackling stress as a top priority this year. A million people out of stress is the target. Do help us out, as I said. If you intend to be part of this, pre-ordering makes it a lot more successful for us, not because of book sales, but because if you pre-order and we hit a certain number in the first week of the book release, it gets on the top seller list.

1:22:46And then if it's on the top seller list, a lot of people get informed of it and the movement begins. So help us out with that. Yeah, it's that tagline of the book, isn't it? Because it's not the events of your life that stress you, it's the way you deal with them that does. It's not the events of your life that stress you, it's the way you deal with them that does. I think that truly summarizes our approach to unstressable. And as I always say, I am very, very grateful that you give me this platform to discuss such important topics, to have such wonderful guests and to give you something to think about differently every week.

1:23:22There's definitely a lot of the stress that comes in life that is part of the pace of life. So whatever it is that you're doing this week, please find a tiny bit of time to slow down. I love you all for listening and I will see you next time.