Stress Is Killing You & This Is What You Can Do | Elissa Epel

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

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0:50How should we train so we don't overstress? It's partly preparing for the hot moments, reminding ourselves of our inherent self-worth besides how we do in this. keeping perspective of that whatever happens is not going to be determining my future in five years. The answer to that's usually no. So there's those pump me up challenge statements. Those are powerful. There's lots of those. You develop those. You carry them around in your wallet or post-it or phone and use those as needed beforehand. But there's also building stress resilience when we think we're relaxed and nothing's happening. Because often, like you said, we have these, we may have negative self-critical thoughts, so we don't even notice because they're habitual or stored up stress in our body from trauma.

1:39And we can work with those and reduce the level of stress that we're carrying around at our baseline on a daily basis down. How can we do that. So we talked about stress fitness, so like hot, cold, extreme breathing, exercise. So like we work out our nervous system. And then there's also low arousal or relaxation strategies. And so we need both. I think we can do better than relaxation. I think we think about leisure activities and like, okay, I relaxed. But how deep was it? Like have you really had deep? Restorative. What is the difference between relaxing and restoring? Relaxing is nothing's being demanded of us.

2:19We might be watching a game, doing something enjoyable, and we're probably multitasking. We're probably tense. Like right now, yeah, my shoulders are tensed and I don't have to be. I can actually notice and release tension in my body. And so we can do those check-ins. So relaxing is important and we probably don't get enough of that, but we really don't get much of the restorative breaks. And those tend to be the privilege of doing mind-body exercises, retreats, yoga, meditation, massage. Those are like incredible for turning off our stress responses and our immune system fighting, turning on the cleanup crew in our cells and really restoring our cell age.

3:07So I've been studying retreats. When we look at like what happens in the cell during retreats, The amount of activity towards stress and fighting things with our immune system goes way down, like dramatically down after, let's say, five days. And that also means we're also increasing our ability to restore and clean ourselves. So we're getting rid of junk. Our mitochondria are able to regenerate. So that's, you know, that's the battery. That's energy. And so we've done that with retreat studies. we found whether you meditated or not, you're still having this beautiful change in increase in restoration.

3:48No work, no phones, no computers. So just being able to self-impose the small breaks is a big deal for us in our modern stressful day. Restoring is inwardly focused. We have to feel safe. We can engage in something, moving meditation, yoga, an audio, a nature walk. What's happening, regardless of what we're doing, is that our breathing is slowing and our parasympathetic nervous system turns on. So it's that kind of triad of you have to feel like you can, your body can turn off its defenses. You have to feel safe. So probably not in the middle of the city. Your breathing naturally slows. And then our physiology has its turn to switch gears toward restoration.

4:30I think that we underutilize breathing, slow breathing, And it's like within minutes, we can actually reduce some of the vigilance we carry in our body. What is this concept of starting full and ending full? There is this whole other world of research that has focused on aspects of emotional well-being. And that is the things we were talking about, like purpose and gratitude and positive emotion and just feeling satisfied with life. Like those are all important psychological constructs that we study and have a really a lot of data behind them showing like, ooh, these are promoting longevity. These are protecting us from depression.

5:14And these may be reducing inflammation and slowing aging. So rather than just focusing on stress, can we amp up the amount of joy that we have? We're not even going to feel as much stress if we're focusing on the positive. If you fill yourself with joy, you'll feel a lot less stress. yes you're full of joy right enthusiasm excitement passion often instead of like waiting for like okay once i get that promotion or i'm able to buy this or i'm able to go there i'm going to be happy it's really like what's actually in front of us in our day what are we grateful for we don't really spend much time as a society doing that it's very easy to complain about you know ask someone how they are and they you know we tend to talk about what's stressful but what if we just shifted and you know asked like what what are you excited about or what what are you grateful for that ability to be so in touch with joyful things and to feel like stress is not dominating your life and your day is precious and that is really how I think about stress management it is really this daily nudges and balance.

6:26So like waking up and asking, what am I looking forward to today? What am I grateful for today? Having some, you know, that body stress, having some spaciousness, it's that balance. Like we need that so much. If we're not actively doing a few of those nudges, we are going to be compressed and shaped by daily stress. We're going to be living with too much daily stress. We just don't need to be. So we're rushing and we're not connecting with people and really stepping back and reflecting on what is my purpose here.

7:02Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description that will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on the school of greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple podcast and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple podcast right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel on Apple podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

7:59Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.