How to Kill Your Stress

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you have a cell phone and you wanna get some motivational, inspirational mindset tips and tricks delivered to your cell phone, text me right now, 512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305. If you clicked on this episode today, you need help with your stress. And if you're like most people, it's probably everywhere and it's bleeding into everything in your life, your work, your workouts, the people that you love, your relationships, everything.

0:47And if you want a better quality of life, you have to learn to get rid of your stress. And so today I'm gonna show you the hidden sources of stress that live inside of your life, the quick body switch to shut down your stress, and then the simple life audit to cut stress out of your life. And if you stick with me to the end, you're gonna leave with basically a three-step plan that you can run today to reduce all of the stress in your life by at least 50%. So let's dive into it. The first thing that I want to talk about with stress is this, is stress itself lives in all of our lives. And stress itself is not really a bad thing.

1:27But if it is chronic stress and it is living everywhere, what we need to do is figure out how to lower the stress in our body before we do anything else. We need to learn how to reset our nervous system because if your emotions are high, your logic is low. If you're stressed out, you're not making good decisions. And so I want to share a real quick reset with you of what you want to do in the moment when you realize that you're stressed. You can do this 10 times a day if you want to. It takes like three minutes, okay? The first thing you're going to want to try to do is do something that's called a progressive unclench.

2:03One thing that happens is when you become stressed out, your muscles actually start to tense. You're actually waiting for something to attack you is basically the position that you're in. So what you want to do with this progressive unclench is to relax your jaw, take your tongue off your top of your mouth, relax it for a second, let your shoulders fall, let your hands unclench, let your face unclench. A lot of times people really hold a lot of tension in their face as well. Let your every part of you just start to relax. And you start at the top of your head and you just slowly work your way down to your abs, to your legs.

2:41You start noticing that your breath wants to calm down a little bit more. So the first thing you want to do takes maybe 30 seconds as a progressive unclench. OK, and what we're trying to do really is is is our body is in threat mode and our prefrontal cortex, which is our planning, impulse control, all of that goes offline. online and so you're not in a state where you're actually thinking well and so we're doing this to bring the body down so that the brain can come back online and you can think well okay the next thing that you're going to want to make sure that you do is breathing okay you want to set your timer for at least three minutes if you've got nothing else you have three minutes in your life right set your timer for three minutes and what you want to do is breathe in i'm just going to give you a simple one some people like do this and this amount of seconds and those amount of seconds.

3:27You want to do it this way. Let's keep it as simple as possible because you're stressed out. Okay. You don't want to have to think. Breathe in as deep as you possibly can through your nose and then keep your mouth shut. And you want to breathe out and hum all of the air out of your lungs. And the reason why you want to do this is, and this is what's really interesting. I didn't realize this about humming until my wife actually started going through and learning about giving birth when she was pregnant with our son. And the natural thing that she would do is she just naturally started humming more.

4:00And she started realizing that humming made her really relaxed. So I started doing all this research on humming and what it does for us. And so you breathe into the nose, you breathe out all the way, and you hum as you breathe out. And so humming on the exhale actually slows and lengthens your breath so that it's longer exhale while vibrating your vagus nerve and your vocal cords and your sinuses. And what this does when you do this is it boosts your parasympathetic nervous system. It's the part of your nervous system that is rest and digest. And it signals to your body to tell it that it's safe.

4:39And so the deep breath in and the humming out as long as you possibly can for three minutes will kind of reset your entire system. Another thing you can do if you want to, just to do a full-on reset, is to get a big bowl of water at your house, you know, like a big one that you would create, you know, put your salad in, you put cold water in it, you put a whole bunch of ice into it, and you dip, you know, you hold your breath, and you dip your face in there, and you just hold your breath softly. This triggers something that's called your diving reflex, and this also activates your vagus nerve, and your heart rate will drop by doing it.

5:14There's studies that show that facial cold exposure plus apnea, and apnea is just stopping breathing, produce a calming effect for your parasympathetic nervous system. And so basically these are just ways to reset yourself in the moment so that you can then start to move into your life and become better by doing it. And so you don't need less stress in your life sometimes. You sometimes just need a better switch. Sometimes you just need a better way of dealing with the stress. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. All right, now let's talk about how to stress proof your life. Stress is basically like death by a thousand cuts.

5:53It's usually not that there's one or two really big things in your life that are stressing you out. What you usually don't realize is that you have been adding small things that stress you out over the past three years or five years or 10 years. And now you're, and it's just kind of, it's kind of slowly building up. And now your day is just filled with small stressors and all of that really, really add up. And so stress is cumulative. You have work, you have relationships, you have your home life, you have screens you're in front of, you have other people, you have people that you have to hang out with.

6:30There are people that are old friends that are stressing you out. You have money, you have clutter, you have all of these things. And we have all these little teeny tiny things that are stressing us out. And they might be only like half of a percent of stress and half of a percent of stress, but you have 200 of those things that adds up to a hundred percent stressed out throughout the day. And so what we want to do is lower the total load by doing three things. Number one, we delete what doesn't matter. I promise you this, you have a lot of things in your life and your schedule that don't matter.

7:01Moving, so we delete, we move things that matter to better windows of time based off of how much energy we have throughout the day, based off of how we feel throughout the day, based off of, you know, this day has a whole lot of stuff going on. Maybe I can move a couple of these things to another day so I'm not so stressed out. So we delete, we move, or we soften. Softening the rest of it is so your nervous system can actually win. And so what that might look like is say you have a 60 minute office meeting that's just like you look at it in your schedule and you're like, fuck this meeting. I don't want to do it.

7:36Right. That thing right there is a 60 minute. You're like these people show up late. They show up not prepared. We've got to wait an extra three or four minutes for each person to be able to find their statistics and what's going on and for them to present to us. And so what you could do to soften something like that is to go, okay, everybody who's going to be showing up to this call, this is not a 60 minute call anymore. It's a 30 minute call and give them a very detailed plan of exactly what time you need them to show up and exactly what you need them to show up with. And if they do not show up with everything that's needed, tell them you just kick them out of the meeting or whatever it is that you want to do.

8:14Right. And therefore what you do is you take a 60 minute meeting that stresses you out because a lot of different things and you find out what It stresses you out. Now it's a 30-minute meeting and it gets done exactly which you want it to. Boom. You just soften that meeting in your schedule. So you delete, you move, or you soften. Okay? And so what you want to do is you want to take out a piece of paper and you want to have five, you actually want to take out five pieces of paper or take your journal out. On one piece of paper, you're going to put home. On the next piece of paper, you're going to put digital.

8:44On the next piece of paper, you're going to put people. On the next piece of paper, you're going to put money. and on the next piece of paper, you're gonna put body or space. And what you wanna do is you want to go through and write out as many stressors that you can possibly think about in each of these categories, okay? As many as you could possibly think about. And so what you wanna do is this. So I'll give you an example of what it will look like, right? So your house. I want you to find as many things that stress you out around the house. It could be piles of stuff that are on the counters.

9:16Maybe it's the mail that's sitting in the corner. And then you have the kids' papers in one corner. And then you have random gear and Amazon boxes that need to be opened and stuff like that. The piles it could be, right? So you could clean all of that in one session or something. You might have the laundry that's, you know, starting to have a huge backlog. And even though you know it's there, it's like slowly occupying and it's, you know, it's rent-free in your mind all day long. You might have all of the, and you could just crank that out in one laundry night session with the entire family, right?

9:50You might have dishes that are almost done, right? Like you put them in the sink, you put some soap on them, you turn the hot water on and you left it. And you've been soaking that pan forever. You might have like last minute where you're like, oh my God, I got to create dinner. What's for dinner every single night? And you might go, what could make that better? Well, meal prep for the entire week. 90 minutes every single Sunday. Free up so much mental space so you don't have to think about and make decisions and then cook every single day. You might have broken or unfinished like home tasks or fixes that are staring at you like, you know, a wobbly shelf or like this drawer's not going in all the way, the light that's kind of flickering sometimes.

10:32You could go on Thumbtack and you can hire a person to fix it and get it all done this weekend, right? So all of the things that are going on around your house, you want that are stressing you out, even a little tiny stressors to the big stressors, make sure you write them all down. Okay. The second thing you're going to do is figure out all the stuff digitally that's starting to stress you out. The notification storms, the badges, the pings, the banners that are literally everywhere. You might have Slack and you're like always on and you feel like you're getting messages every single moment, 11 o 'clock at night from people, right?

11:04How can you deal with that? You might have an inbox overflow. You might have newsletters and emails from companies that you've never signed up for that you need to unsubscribe with. Like you can go to something like unroll.me and they'll pull up all of your subscriptions and you can just literally with a click of a button, just get rid of 75%, 80 % of your subscriptions. You might have the typical app hopping that all of us do. You go from your email to Instagram to news to email to Instagram to news and there's like no purpose. You're just kind of going from one app to another. Oh, I'm gonna go to Slack now.

11:37I'm gonna go to email. I'm gonna Slack now. I'm gonna go to email, right? There might be like late night doom scrolling that you do. There might be too many. Some of you guys have way too many group chats with friends. And it's like, you just need to turn those things on silent. You might have like calendars, meeting links, all of that scattered across all these different tools. So you're gonna go through all of the stuff digitally that stress you out. Then you're gonna go through all of the people and things that happen with people that stress you out. So number one, who are the people that stress you out the most?

12:07And then how can you spend less time with them? Like, let's get rid of that stress. There might be like different like obligations where you feel like you have to hang out with certain people. There's, you know, like one-sided friendships where you chase them and then they cancel on you and they cancel on you, cancel over and over again. You might have like ambiguous roles at work is like a really big thing with a lot of people. Like nobody really owns that thing, but we all kind of own it. It's like, who can own that thing? You have topics with your family that always escalate. You might say, I'm done.

12:40I'm not talking about this. Don't ever talk about this again around me. I don't want to talk about politics or religion or whatever it might be. You probably have unclear boundaries with a lot of people in your life. It might be co-workers. It might be clients. It might be your children. It might be your spouse. You might have last minute requests that people frame as emergencies because they waited too long, right? So like figure out all of the stressors that you have with other people, figure out all of the stressors next with money, subscriptions that you forgot about these like tiny little leaks that turn into guilt.

13:12And then they turn into, you know, 300 bucks over the course of the year. You might have bills that are just kind of scattered and you're not really, you don't want to look at them, but they're sitting there, but you know, they're there and you know that you owe, but you don't want to look at it. Like, you know, like credit card statements that you're avoiding opening. You might have like, if you have a roommate or a partner that you now live with, you might have like shared expenses that are like, but you have like fuzzy rules on like, do we pay 50-50? Do I pay all of this? Do I pay 75? Do you need to get really clear on what that is?

13:43And so those are the money stresses. Go through all of them and see what you have. And the last one is like your body, what lives in your body, but also the space that you live in, right? So like you might not be getting enough sleep. You might have really inconsistent bedtime. Like you sit in front of your computer for, you know, late nights or in front of your phone for late nights. You might have like blood sugar swings because you have coffee and a pastry and then you have this huge crash or something like that. You have like no movement breaks because you're just sitting at your computer working all day, just stuck in your chair.

14:13You might have like really harsh lighting and you need more natural light. You need to go outside more, you know? So you got to start thinking about all of these things. And then what you do is you do after this full life audit, what you need to do, and sure, this is going to take time. It's maybe going to take like an hour, two hours, but you're going to delete and then you're going to move and you're going to soften. But if you do this, you can remove like 50 % of the stress in your life and it might take an hour, two hours, but it will make your life so much better by doing this. So that's the audit that you want to do.

14:45And then the last piece that I want to cover, because obviously I love mindset, is some people listening just need to rewrite your story around stress, right? Like everything that, not everything that stresses you out is actually bad. It might just be your thoughts around that thing. And sometimes the things that stress us out are things that get us out of our comfort zone, like things that we know we need to do. So in those cases, we need to reframe our mindset around those things. A lot of time, our brain is just defaulting to our old self, like our old fixed mindset, the way we were conditioned by other people, not the person that we want to be.

15:23And we just need to take a step back and look at this thing and be like, okay, going to the gym doesn't actually stress me out. I do want to do it. But every time I think about it, I think about how much energy it's going to take, the fact that I got a drive there, the things, you know, I've got other stuff going on in my life. Do I have time for it? and it's like, no, I want to do this. So I need to reframe the way that I think about this thing. I want to go to the gym, not I have to go to the gym. So sometimes you just need to take a step back and see this thing and be like, no, I actually want this.

15:57This thing is stressing me out, but it's stressing me out because of the way that I'm thinking about it. So what you want to do is you want to write it down and then you ask yourself like, what's stressing me out? You write the thing that's stressing you out and then ask yourself, because most people don't go this far, which is just one level deeper, what about it is stressing me out? Like what about this thing is stressing me out? What future am I implying is going to happen with this thing? Then you ask yourself the question, is there a possibility that I can look at this from a different angle?

16:28Like I know I want to get out of my comfort zone to grow. And so yeah, I actually do want to do this thing. And so I want to do it and I choose to do it versus I have to do it. And sometimes the thing that's stressing you out is that you're making yourself a victim of things that you actually want to do, but you're defaulting into your old version of yourself that's like, no, I wanna stay the same. I don't wanna get out of my comfort zone. And you just need to reframe your story about some of the things that are stressing you out. And so that's a three-step process to removing massive amounts of stress in your life.

17:01If you love it, that's what I got for you for today's episode. Share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me in it, Rob Dial, Jr., R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And if you love this podcast and you wanna learn more about coaching with me, I have programs that go from 12 weeks all the way to 12 months. You can learn more about it if you go to coachwithrob.com. Once again, coachwithrob.com. And with that, I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.