Stress Management Expert: How To Deal With Stress & Burnout

0:00The average person will touch and tap, swipe their phone over two and a half thousand times a day. What? Yeah. And check it around 250 times a day. So that's ridiculous if you think about it, right? It is. If we put that same effort into anything that's a playing piano. Exactly. You could be an expert very quickly. They've shown that 80 to 90 % of all non-emergency related doctor's visits are somehow related to stress. True resilience and stress isn't about withstanding. It's about understanding. Alice Law is a world-renowned stress management expert and author of Time's bestseller, Unstressable.

0:41She is a transformational speaker and trained in multiple stress management disciplines, including Reiki, mindfulness, EFT, and Akashic healing. My job was to remember things, right? And I could barely remember my own name in the morning. I was so stressed. As a lot of people say, like, well, I'll deal with these things when I feel stressed. And it's like, no, you build resilience of how to deal with stress effectively in the easy times, right? Micro-stress is built up like building blocks. So it's like one alone does nothing. Together, they can make an army. Particularly with men, the amount of times they think a physical symptom is physical when it's actually emotional.

1:18And it's, you know, an unprocessed emotion that's turned into an ache and a pain. If you had to compress all your knowledge into one essential advice, just one, that we must implement in our daily lives, what would it be? it's a tough question for me it actually always comes back to

1:46Alice you're a stress management expert what is a stress management expert it's a very good question so I actually um I get asked this a lot like some people message me saying how do I become a stress management expert like I want to become a stress management consultant And so I basically created this for myself based on what I knew was working. So I essentially decided I wanted to work specifically with people in stress because I went through a very, very stressful period of life myself. And, you know, I can tell you about that, but it was essentially after that experience, I was like, I'm going to train in the different things that I know worked for me at that time that I was self-studying, just trying to pull myself through it.

2:27Because this was, I started looking at this when I was 23, I'm 35 now. And at that age, none of this was on in line. It wasn't on Instagram. You didn't have wellness people talking about like how to calm yourself down in the morning. So it was very much just me, myself and I being like, how on earth do I deal with what I'm dealing with at the time? So what were you dealing with at the time? So I had essentially, you know, people say like, what did you do for stress? And I originally what it was, was I went to what I call stress school by the world. It was like the universal stress school. I had loss in every aspect of my life, continually one thing after the other.

2:59So over a condensed sort of seven-year period, it was beginning with my dad, who was a wonderful, like successful self-made entrepreneur at the time. He had a lot of financial difficulty after the 2008 credit crisis. And we had to sell our home as a family. It was a lot of stress out of nowhere. And during that specific time, my wonderful eldest sister, Suzanne, was diagnosed with colon cancer completely out of the blue. And we had four years of her like, you know, struggling and she got better a couple of times. And, you know, anyone who's dealt with cancer in their family will know it's just such an exhausting, horrible thing to go through for the person and horrific stress for the family as you watch someone.

3:39And my dad, you know, really didn't cope well with that. Understandably, it was his eldest child. and he had this horrible image of essentially my his twin sister had died of cancer at the exact same age his daughter was with the exact same age children exact same gender and he was just like i cannot believe this is happening again so his business has been put into administration my sister was super ill she then got terminal and we very devastatingly lost her four years later my dad was depressed and he was so so stressed but at this point he turned to alcohol as his form of solace because how old were you i was 25 when my sister died and i was 21 when she got ill so and this all started to happen i was 20 actually 19 and it was kind of like that time of period as well i was at post-university all my friends were like going out having fun and i was just trying to survive daily you know i was doing all those things going to parties for completely the wrong reasons just to try and not feel and to just numb out and it was during that time that i was working for a financial services company for this wonderful Russian family office.

4:43And my job was to remember, I was like double assistant for the two MDs. My job was to remember things, right? And I could barely remember my own name in the morning. I was so stressed. And I got made redundant when they left the UK market because they moved to Monaco. And they were like, do you want to come with us? And I was like, okay, I've lost my job now. I don't want to go. I want to be here. I had a relationship at the time that was, he'd moved abroad. It was like a long-term relationship from a young age and he cheated on me three months after my sister died I just lost my job my dad was depressed my sister had died our finances had gone under I didn't have a home at the time I was just like I I'm so lost you know and it was four days after my sister's funeral my dad was actually rushed to hospital um for well he had a blood clot at the time because he was so depressed he just wasn't moving you know he was just like lying on his bed so they found a blood clot um Skander's body resolved that but they then found that he now had cancer and so he was like I'm refusing to treat this he just had kind of given up on life he had a lawsuit against him at the time from something that was very complicated that he only managed to prove you know later that was his innocence so it was just like in business and it was just so much stress and I was you know at this point so stressed I would wake up anxious scared to look at my phone in case there was another bad message from my family about something I would be arguing with my dad trying to get him to see like a specialist to try and, you know, deal with the cancer that I thought I was going to lose him to.

6:07And I was just miserable really at the time. And it was during that time that I started to self-study what I now teach. And I was like, okay, I need to understand why this is happening, but also like how to deal with it. So I started studying stress from, you know, the mind, the emotions, even energy, the body. And so I started looking at things like mindfulness and meditation, all these different things. And it really started to bring me back to who I was as a person. And then four years after my sister died, my dad was rushed to hospital again for a burst stomach ulcer that burst from severe stress.

6:41And we lost him three weeks later. And so it was, you know, at that time, I was already doing what I was doing. I'd started to like work with clients and corporations one on one and deal with, you know, work with them on their stress. But after my dad died, I really was like, okay, this is so important. You know, It's such a huge effect, not just on an individual, but on your family, on your own little mini world that you have. And it just shouldn't be this way. My dad was of that generation where he was of an older generation. It was very much like, I deal with stress alone. I'm a man. I can't even share what's going on.

7:17And I saw him internalize all of this. And it completely, you know, he, I always say to people, you know, they ask about, you know, loss and my sister and my dad. And I'm like, I lost my sister once, but I lost my dad twice because he was so stressed, so depressed for four or six years before we actually lost him physically. And I just don't want anyone to have to go through that as a person or as a family member. Well, thank you for sharing that. You've been through a very intense, traumatic and stressful period that I think very few people go through. But this was a waking moment for you, a pivoting moment in which you felt something very strong, but instead of giving into it, you just didn't want other people to feel that.

8:11And then you wanted to study how you can either prevent such a feeling, as in stress, or once you have it, how to calm it down. What did you study? So list me the credentials that right now make you an expert in this topic. Yeah, it's interesting because people always ask me if I studied psychology and I didn't study psychology. Like I've got a keen interest in it and I'm constantly learning about psychology. But what I actually studied was different modalities that I'll go through that are holistic together. Because I do believe hugely that for stress we actually over-intellectualize it. And we don't look at it enough from the different ways that stress actually comes into us from the mental, emotional, physical, spiritual.

8:57And so what I realized was... So you're referring to that we have a perspective of stress that is very logical and you're approaching it from an emotional angle. Yeah, exactly. So I agree with the logical 100%, you know, the science, the biology, but we have to look at it more emotionally as well, you know. And I looked at studying, so I became a mindfulness practitioner. I became a Reiki master because I loved like the energetics of stress. In simple terms, can you define mindfulness and Reiki? Yeah, so mindfulness for me, you know, mindfulness is essentially paying attention. It's the ability to pay attention to the present moment and be fully in the present moment.

9:34Because we spend so much time ruminating about the past, worrying about the future causes a lot of stress. But the reality is that you and I sat here right now. The only thing that's actually going on is this conversation, right? But a lot of stressed people would be maybe having a conversation with a loved one and thinking about all the million things they need to do later that day and not being present. So mindfulness is really the art of training your brain to be fully aware of the physical, you know, the senses around you. And it trains you to go into your senses to be able to notice that and come back to the present moment.

10:06but my most sort of important definition of that is to pay attention to the present moment with kind attention because there's no point being in the present moment and being mindful in inverted commas if you're berating what's around you or berating yourself you know it's really looking at the present for what it is and just you know having that sort of surrender to just allow what what is to be um reiki is essentially it's an energy healing modality so we have energy centers going through our body. There's different types in terms of, you know, the Chinese would call it ki, which is your free flow of energy that's working with like acupuncture, for example.

10:41And Reiki works off a chakra system. So essentially, you have energy centers that go down through your body. And as a Reiki master, I can actually, strange as it sounds to people who are logical, because I didn't actually, I will say this before, like, I had no idea what energy healing was before I got into this. The reason I found it was because I was seeing a therapist after my sister died for the first time. And she, you know, you have to have a good relationship, right? Chemistry with the therapist or whoever you're working with has to work like any relationship. And she just wasn't the right fit for me.

11:13She would kind of be that sort of old school style of sort of staring at you, waiting for something to come out of you. And I really was so, you know, stressed as I told you and young at the time that I needed someone to like coax the questions out of me. And so we were kind of did like eight weeks getting nowhere. And she was like, I think you you should see a Reiki healer that's also in my building. And I was like, on earth is Reiki? Like, what is she talking about? And she was like, well, you know, it's energy. And I think you've got a lot of blocked emotion. And so I was like, okay, I'll try it.

11:41You know, at this point, I was so, so, you know, desperate, I'd try anything. And I really felt that like compression of grief on my chest, like an elephant being sat on my chest for ages, because it was that buildup of knowing my sister was gonna, gonna leave. And so I did it, you know, first two times, I was like, I felt the sensations like around me and you just lie down and it's a hands-off healing modality. You know, you don't even get touched as crazy as that sounds. But I, after the third session, I realized, and I was very relaxed in the first two, but I realized that six months of that feeling of compression of an elephant being sat on my chest had disappeared.

12:15And I was like, what on earth is this? That's how I then went really into like looking at energy work as a big thing, because Reiki essentially allows you to, you know, move energetic blocks through you and emotional stress, not processing emotions can turn into physical stress and energetic blocks in the body. And I can't even tell you the reason I do it with the work I do and integrate it is because particularly, you know, it's a generalization, but particularly with men and logical men in business who've, you know, like don't look at emotions, the amount of times they think a physical symptom is physical when it's actually emotional.

12:51and it's, you know, an unprocessed emotion that's turned into an ache and a pain. And so Reiki allows you to sort of move that through and it just rebalances your energy system essentially. Interesting. I did Reiki twice. Okay. A friend of mine, his father is a Reiki master. When he explains me the process, I was very much skeptic about it because how are you going to heal something that first of all, it is very hard to define what energy is or isn't. and most importantly where it is within our body and then to top it all off how are you going to heal my negative energy without even touching me so i am i'd like to think i am emotional but i am also definitely quite a logical person so that was hard for me to digest but i went into the experience believing in it and i think that that is quite important like just yeah being it a proper go and it was it lasted about an hour and it really felt something it is hard it was very hard for me to describe what it was because it was a feeling a state of mind definitely i can say that i was far less stressed immediately after and that got me thinking and and then i started also to get into energy and and what it is and what it isn't and positive energy negative energy and the transfer of energies.

14:17And it is profoundly interesting. But also what I've seen is that it takes a lot of years to become an expert in these fields. How many years did it take you? I mean, I continually evolve with it, right? I want to keep going and keep going. I mean, for me, the sort of the starting point of starting it, self-studying it, doing it. So I trained, you know, mindfulness, emotional freedom technique, which again is another, you know, tapping modality, which is amazing for moving stress through the body, moving emotions, coaching and meditation and Reiki and even something called Akashic healing, which is very different kind of healing.

14:51But that was over sort of six years of kind of adding and adding and adding. But I want to keep adding stuff. You know, as crazy as it sounds, it's like any time I find something that I'm interested in, I'm like, OK, well, if that works on me particularly, I'm like, ooh, if that's, you know, you've had a physical or an actual experience yourself. That's why I think, you know, when you say about Reiki, it's amazing to just try those things, right? You don't have to believe something off the logical kind of paper of it, but have the experience and then see for yourself if it shifts anything.

15:27Your overall aim with all of these different studies is to reduce the level of stress of your clients, of people. I think at least myself prior to this conversation I didn't have a specific definition of stress what is stress so stress is really essentially you know on that textbook side it's the biological side of us so it's what your body will just perceive as a threat or a danger so your biological stress response will go off so in cave times for example it's there to keep you alive right it's there now to, well, we'll go into this. It goes off for a lot of different reasons, but in cave times, it was there for you to survive.

16:12So a tiger comes out of the bushes, your stress response goes off, your fight and flight response goes off, you know, your amygdala is essentially like this part of your brain that's your, I say your security guard, because it's not conscious. It's just constantly scanning for threats in the background. And it's not, you know, you don't logically say that's a threat. Your amygdala just goes, hello, that's a threat, panic. And we'll set off your hypothalamus, which sets off your pituitary gland, which sets off your adrenals. And essentially for simplicity, it's basically like that then sets off your stress response, your fight or flight stress response, your sympathetic nervous system, and tells your body to flood it with cortisol, adrenaline, noradrenaline.

16:49And essentially it reconfigures you into being superhuman, right, in that moment. So it's like, I will fight the tiger or run away and hopefully you'll survive. once the threat was over, your stress response would go back off and you go back into what we call parasympathetic state, which is your rest and digest. So when your stress response is on, it essentially your body will say, I don't need to do things unless it's like survival. So it's kind of like very wise, your body will go, why do I need to digest a steak if I'm about to become a steak myself? So it will shut down things like digestion, you know, and send stuff like blood to the muscles so you can fight and run away.

17:27But that was how it was meant to be, right? Designed to keep us safe, go on, come off. And yeah, it is your brain and your body's way of saying, this is a perceived threat. I'm going to make you deal with it. But now, very sadly, our system hasn't caught up, right, to the modern world we've created. So what used to set your stress response off for the tiger coming out of the bushes or the neighboring tribe coming to attack you. It now is being set off all the time from the modern world in different ways. And we're not putting it back on into parasympathetic states. So things like, you know, someone's boss sending them an aggressive email will set someone's stress response off.

18:05Are you going to die from that email? No, of course you're not. But your body, your system doesn't know the difference. It'll flood you with the same response. And it's things like adding tiny little stresses like, you know, traffic jam the news and all these things flood our system with stress and also are we can't tell the difference sadly emotionally our brain the response in stress is the same as if say i'm having an argument with someone in my head and i'm thinking about it and replaying that awful relationship argument you had or you're having it in front of you in real life so stress is very sadly you know what it's meant for that survival it's kind of been turned into this very big complex concoction because we don't know what we're doing with our own system today.

18:48It seems to me that there is a difference in the severity of the stress in caveman times to today. So, I mean, the threat of a tiger is considerably bigger. So that would maybe be a macro stress or a big stress in comparison to my boss texting me, you're late. So are there different levels of stress? Yeah, there definitely are. You have micro and macro, right? And so, So the micro stress is that one micro stress is not going to kill you. We know this, right? That one text is not going to be like the breakdown of you. But who gets one text, right? Today, micro stress is built up like building blocks.

19:28So it's like one alone does nothing. Together, they can make an army. Whereas the macro stress will come in. It's those huge things in life that are unexpected and expected to cause you stress at the same time. You know, like loss of a loved one, divorce, you know, a health crisis, end of a relationship, whatever it is. You know, those are huge events, like you say, and they are big in size. All the tiger coming out of the bushes. And then the micro ones are the tiny little things that just add up, add up, add up, add up, add up. And then eventually it's like the straw that breaks the camel's back is, you know, your partner saying to you, you've run out of coffee.

20:02And you're like, ah, you know, it's not about that. It's that one little thing that sends your system over the edge because it's been building. it seems to me that we're definitely going in the wrong direction because we're going to keep getting more notifications estimuli around us and that's not going down so we're going to keep getting these micro stressors and we need to find a coping mechanism with them because i think that a lot of them you just can't avoid them while you can avoid a tiger you know maybe back in the day like just maybe don't go to where the tiger resides you might not be able to avoid your boss or traffic or you just need maybe some of those whatsapp notifications and i think a lot of people when they feel stressed they have a hard time to differentiate it from anxiety what's the difference so i always love this question because i think it gets so confused and i look at it maybe in a slightly different way to people because of the emotional side but if you think of stress as like that biological threat perceived reaction anxiety is actually it's a product of stress but anxiety is also an emotion right so anxiety is mainly anxiety is an emotion but you feel like a visceral reaction to it so anxiety is usually defined as that obsessive excessive worry even in the absence of a threat around you in the physical world and you can feel nauseous and you can feel an increased heart rate and you can feel sick and shaky, but anxiety is an emotion, right?

21:33And so the emotions that stress can create are things like anxiety, overwhelm, irritation, and low mood. And so when people say like, you know, I have anxiety, I'm like, no, you don't. You feel anxiety. There's a difference, right? And I think we've kind of over-identified with this kind of like, I am an anxious person rather than accepting that anxiety is an emotion that you can deal with and move through you. And also that it is normal to feel anxious about things. I think that we've really gotten a bit too used to saying, like I said, identifying anxiety of being an anxious person when really everyone should have a bit of anxiety, a bit of stress in their life.

22:15It's just about being able to deal with it, move it through you, use it in the right way and then not let it linger. So it becomes chronic and breaks you down. That's the problem. So anxiety is a feeling and stress, is it an illness? No, stress is, you know, it's a biological, you know, it's a biological response to a threat that goes off in your system. You know, you have to think of it that way, but it's not, stress becomes an illness when it becomes chronic stress, right? So you have good and bad stress. We have what we call eustress, like EU stress, which is essentially the kind of stress that we all want.

22:48So it's what causes us to perform better. It's the kind of stress that goes on and then comes off over a very short period of time. So to relate it to the modern world, it's like, okay, if you're going to go and do a talk on a stage and you need to perform well, just before you go on stage, you'll have a bit of stress and a general and then you'll perform better or you're about to run a race or you need to get a deadline in over like a three-day period and you're working really hard and well. That's good stress, right? So it goes on, it comes back off, you go back into parasympathetic state. But chronic stress, which is what a lot of the majority of the modern world are dealing with today, is essentially stress that's just wearing down our system constantly over time because it's a buildup.

23:28So we're not actually allowing our system to go back into rest and digest and parasympathetic state, partly for two reasons, I believe. One is that we kind of have put ourselves in this overload of constantly being on the go. But two, it's because we don't actually understand how stress is affecting the different parts of us and how to calm them down. You know, so chronic stress builds up over time. It's essentially when cortisol, the stress hormone, you know, short term, it's great. It's like anti-inflammatory. And, you know, it will suppress your immune system for a little bit. What is cortisol?

24:01Cortisol is the infamous stress hormone. So when you are stressed, it gets produced in the adrenal glands, you have things like cortisol and adrenaline and neuroadrenaline, which will essentially boost your alertness and focus in that moment, which is what we all want, right? So like if I'm talking to you now and I'm about to like start talking, I want to have a bit of, you know, performance stress essentially. But cortisol long-term is actually extremely damaging. So when it's long-term, it actually increases inflammation in the body. And we know that inflammation is a breeding ground for all sorts of diseases right and when we are stressed so things like it'll actually shut down and inflame things like your your your digestive system which is why so many people have such trouble it's such a common thing for me to hear from clients like i've got digestive issues i've got ibs you know my own dad obviously had a huge stomach ulcer that was caused from extreme inflammation and excess cortisol um and so you know if you think about cortisol itself it's like you don't want to be someone who has a high level of cortisol you want to have your cortisol levels low and whilst obviously you also need cortisol it's a good thing it like regulates your metabolism it regulates you know your glucose levels in your blood when it's you know just doing its thing chronic stress like i said it wears down your body so it's just constantly creating inflammation it's constantly creating fatigue for you actually makes you have memory loss and focus and sleep issues.

25:28I mean, all sorts of, a host of issues of physical symptoms we can go into, but it's, you know, it's essentially something that a lot of people have very high levels of today and they don't realize. So chronic stress leads to high levels of cortisol for a prolonged period of time and then we don't go back to that baseline. and that has an array of different negative consequences. Now, I think sometimes we get hung up with life and we just, because we're so busy, we don't have time to slow down and think, how am I feeling? What's going on? Am I stressed? What are the symptoms of chronic stress that we should be looking for?

26:12Yeah. So, okay, can I break this down? Because I like looking at this in four parts because like I said, But I think today, as amazing as it is, we've kind of banded stress into this one huge topic, right? And it was good to get people's attention because before no one was talking about stress. It was like, oh, what's stress? I'm fine. I'm fine. You know, that classic, I'm fine. I think it's mainly, especially with men, at least I can relate with that. It's because it would make you look weaker. Exactly. And that's something that I hope is starting to shift now. And, you know, it's very much like you say, it was like my dad was guilty of that.

26:48It was like, no, stiff upper lip. I have to deal with this myself. I can't possibly be vulnerable to say that I could put my hands up. I'm stressed, you know, which obviously actually exasperates the situation and makes it even worse. But no, so stress, I look at stress always like we did in our book, Unstressable, is in four modalities. So whilst, of course, stress is that biological response we talked about, this blanket term, how I see it and how Mo, my co-author, saw it when we broke it down was that actually. a human being is made up of four parts right your mind your heart your body and your soul i believe as well and so every single part of you speaks a different language and every single part of you gets stressed in a different way and so i can break those down for the symptoms of each right and when you realize which part of you is actually stressed you can deal with it so much more effectively and so mental stress is very obvious right it shows up as you would think it's like Like you ruminate about the past, you're worrying about the future, you find it really hard to be fully present and in the moment and focus because you're constantly just in your mind stressing about things.

27:52You'll wake up at night with racing thoughts. You know, so many people who are stressed will be like, I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm thinking about everything I need to do. Such a common sign of mental stress. Then emotional stress I love because a lot of people will be like, I'm not emotionally stressed, I'm fine. But emotional stress will show up in one of two ways. So you'll either feel a certain way, like you'll feel lower mood, easily irritated, anxious, overwhelmed, or you will be like, well, I don't feel that way. I've managed to numb myself out. I don't feel that way. Your behavior will show you when you're emotionally stressed.

28:27So when we're emotionally stressed, we will try to suppress and numb and distract from our emotions as much as possible. So it shows up as things like, you know, comfort eating, overworking, binge watching Netflix, constantly on your phone, not able to be present and in your body because you don't want to feel, over socializing, trouble with memory, again, unable to sleep, a lower libido, also a loss in appetite. So any change in appetite can be a huge sign of emotional stress. You're either forgetting to eat or you're comfort eating because you want that kind of relief. Equally behavioral changes like looking for that sense of, okay, I'm just going to have a glass of alcohol to calm me down at the end of the day.

29:07Because I'd rather just have that instant sedative relief than actually deal with the feeling of what I'm actually feeling. So a lot of people will say like, oh no, I'm not emotionally stressed. And then they'll look at that list and be like, oh, well, I do a lot of those things. So maybe I am. So yeah, you'll either feel a certain way or you'll behave a certain way. And then physical stress shows up again. It's an interesting one because you think, okay, well, this must be very obvious, like physical symptoms. And I truly believe the body is far wiser than your mind. You know, if it's telling you something, it's not unresilient, the body, right, with stress.

29:44It's really a resilient thing. So if it's telling you a physical symptom, it's really time to start paying attention because you've been stressed for quite a while. So the minor things are things like, you know, aches and pains in your neck and your shoulders, tension, headaches. You know, a lot of people are like, I had a recurring headache for the last like year, but I'm not I'm not stressed. I'm not stressed at all. And you're like, when do you get that headache? You know, when does it come on after you've had stress or before? Things like digestive issues, like I talked about, because your stress response will shut off digesting your food because it thinks you don't need to do that right now when you're trying to survive.

30:18so things like ibs and stomach ulcers and then increased you know blood pressure higher cholesterol um again you know things like inflammatory things so like psoriasis eczema acne like inflammation of the skin can be a huge one equally loss of hair you know high levels of cortisol can cause you to lose your hair um and then obviously the more sinister things which actually go into it is, you know, heart disease. And even studies now show that chronic long-term stress has the ability to turn on cancer expressive genes and cause cancer. And of course, then there's things like stomach ulcers and type 2 diabetes can also be created from chronic stress because of the constant spike in glucose levels.

31:01So it's really, you know, it is a silent killer in that sense. And a lot of people let themselves, their body get to the point where it's breaking physically rather than deal with it. And then the final one I look at is spiritual stress. So this has nothing to do with religion in any way. It's about your own spirit, your own soul. And it's really fascinating to me because spiritual stress is actually something so common in very successful people who are on that kind of like rat race and just keep going, keep going, keep going, and haven't taken the time, like you say, to spend time to understand what's going on within them.

31:35And so spiritual stress will turn up in one of two ways. So you will either, you'll become spiritually stressed when you're totally out of alignment with the truest most authentic version of yourself your soul self so when you can't answer the question sort of who am i without answering a label like you know i'm a father i'm a doctor i'm a lawyer when that's not who you are it's what you are so it's really like knowing who you are what makes you up without labels and society telling you who you should be and where you should be going so we become spiritually stressed when we're unauthentic to the truest version of ourself and we're being pulled around by the outside world and when we're disconnected to our own intuition.

32:13But equally, we can, you know, maybe taking the time to know ourselves deeply and connect to our intuition, but we can become spiritually stressed then when we ignore the guidance our intuition gives us, because we've all been in that situation, right, where you go, oh, you know, I knew that I felt, yes, but I spoke no to that person. I knew that was wrong for me. I knew that was right for me. And then you find later down the line, you're in a stressful situation because you went against what your own intuition was telling you to do. Rather, you just went with the fears of your mind or what people around you were telling you to do.

32:45So I call that when you cause yourself a side of spiritual stress. So all these things, right, they speak to you in these different languages. And it's about understanding when which part of you is stressed, you can deal with that specific part more effectively and calm your system down. Perhaps an alternative way to identifying what type of stress do I have is by attributing it to a particular type of stressor. So can you give me stressors examples that affect our mental stress, emotional stress, physical stress? I think spiritual stress is more personal. I think maybe I'm wrong, but there are not general examples that might apply to everyone.

33:31But yeah. Yeah. So mental stress, for example, you know, a mental stressor can be the way you react to a mental stressor will be like overload, overload of work when you're kind of like you've got a huge, huge overwhelm of work and lots of different things to think about. Right. And you decide, OK, well, how do I sort of cope with this? And instead of being able to like really hone in, you're scattering your brain all over the place. and so mentally mental stressing for the mental stressing mental stress for that i you really have to start um taking control of your mind right so there's a rule with your mind that essentially your brain's answer for most things is yes to how you think and a lot of the time we actually identify ourselves as being our thoughts but the fact that you can recognize that you have another sort of internal thought voice inside you means you're not your thoughts right otherwise you wouldn't be able to observe it.

34:23So you're separating yourself from your mind. Exactly. So you can talk to it. Exactly. So separating yourself from your mind and then starting to actually direct your mind because you should be in control of your mind. You can't, you know, I had a teacher in America who said to me, she was like, your mind is like a Rottweiler. You have to learn to walk it or it's going to walk you. And so you have to say to your brain like what you want it to do. So for me, if I'm feeling, you know, stressed or anxious about something, I will like look at my thought patterns. You know, I'll start to like journal and write down like, what are all these stressful thoughts I'm having?

34:57And then actually say to my brain, like, you know, brain, bring me a calming thought about this or bring me an energizing thought, like decide what you want and tell it what to do and keep bringing yourself back to the thoughts that you want. So we actually have 80 % negativity bias in our brains as humans naturally, purely because your brain is there to keep you safe, right? So when back in the day in cave times, your brain's constantly scanning for threats. It needs to see these threats. Whereas today, we will pick up on that mental stress. It's like, okay, if you are in the office all day, and you had a great day in general, you had like an 85 % great day, or even 90 % great day.

35:36But one comment from someone really annoyed you really upset you, it was one thing that went wrong, your brain will come home at the end of the day and be like, it was a terrible day. Like that was the worst thing ever. Because the negativity bias of it will hold on to the one thing that went wrong rather than the 85 that went right right so you have to start to is it so that's for survival yeah is it not only maybe i'm brainstorming out loud um but is it also related to learning because we learn nothing from the things that go well so we tend to only learn from the things that went wrong so maybe unconsciously our brain is wired in that way so we evolve with progress yeah it's interesting actually i never thought of it that way I think I do believe that as well it's like the experience you have right you always gain more wisdom from experience of the wrong things rather than everything that went smooth sailing and became wonderful so yeah I'm sure it's like it's helpful as well don't get me wrong but it's like how you then use it because if you're someone who is constantly being stressed by their mind yeah you're not going to be having a good time at all so all right so if I'm having problems at work and that's keeping me awake at night and I'm stressed.

36:46So that's mental stress. And then what I should be doing is to tell my brain what to do. Yeah. So it's like looking at what you can logically deal with, right? So I always write everything down. Right, so that's more of a logical... Okay, what can I actually either limit, you know, like cut out and what can I actually, you know, physically do about that? Like take action. And then after you've actually done the outside actions that you know you can control, you know you can take, then it's about taking control of your own mind. actually saying to your brain like no I've taken the action so you don't need to then go off on a tangent and tell me all the things that might go wrong that you're you know hypothesizing about it it's like no no I want you to bring me a thought that's like this and keep bringing it back to that right I even have a method that says because you want to like cancel it out of your head I used to say to clients when I worked a lot with people one-to-one it was like pattern interrupt your brain right otherwise it'll be going on this spiral of just going like Alberto you know you need to do this still this is awful this is it can go anywhere so take a pause when you feel yourself in that mental spiral that stressful mental side take a pause take a deep breath and either say like brain bring me the thought that i want or say this in your head or out loud if you're by yourself but like internally just say cancel cancel and what that's doing is it's like pattern interrupting it's telling like you know your mind cancel it consciously cancel it subconsciously and then you give yourself that space to bring yourself choose a new thought that's actually helpful to you right instead of carrying on on that spiral again and again and like this isn't an easy thing right i'm not saying to people oh my god this is like tomorrow you'll be able to do that it's practice right it's like a muscle you have to keep rewiring it to do that make that the easy route we know that with neuroplasticity that the what you practice gets stronger so you have to look at that both good and bad if you're practicing negative thoughts all the time by just unconsciously allowing them, guess what?

38:39That's the pathway that's getting stronger. So you have to consciously practice the other side. And eventually, you'll start to realize that that space where you can choose your response in your head becomes more automatic for you. And what are some examples of stressors that are related to emotional stress? Are they like breakups? Yeah, so it's always like, it's a lot of relational things, right? So breakups and arguments with your partner or relationship that's tricky in work and you know emotional stress can also be created from how we perceive ourselves right you can create emotional stress from guess what your thoughts again your mental stress and that internal conversation of how you tell yourself you are every day right you're always having this internal conversation and we can cause emotional stress for ourselves from how we're perceiving ourselves internally like whether you've actually got because everything's linked right your mental stress can cause you emotional stress.

39:33Your unprocessed emotions can cause you physical stress. So emotional stress for me is one of my favorite things to look at because fascinatingly, we know now, so Professor Brené Brown, who's like, as far as I'm concerned, she's kind of the godmother of emotions of the modern day world of research. She's a professor at Stanford University and she's studied deeply emotions in research now with her team. And so their research is the most up to date. And she found that we have, as human beings, 87 different emotions and emotional experiences, but the average human can only name three and can only identify three within them, which is happy, angry, and sad.

40:18So if you think about that for a moment, that is crazy, right? Because we have 87, we're capable of feeling 87 different things. And I know I feel about 82 of them when I go to the list. I'm like, oh my God. And if the average human can only name three, think how much stress that causes. Not just internally, because you can't understand how you feel. But if you don't understand how you feel, how on earth do you expect other people to understand how you feel? So you'll be having a conversation with someone like saying to your partner or whatever. you don't understand me, you don't understand how I feel.

40:49And you're like, well, maybe, but have you even identified the right feeling and then told them how you feel? Or are they just going off something that you can't even explain yourself because you haven't actually become curious about your emotions and gone into that space, right? Of actually starting to feel, starting to understand, starting to get curious. And so emotional stress for me, it's really looking at starting to develop a good relationship of curiosity with your emotions, right? So So we tend to want to push away our emotions. You know, you touched upon earlier, it's like men, you know, want to push them down, can't feel, don't want to feel.

41:25Society has kind of programmed us to be logical, you know, go out, do, my God, emotions don't show vulnerability. That's weakness. I'm going to play devil's advocate here. So it is often said that the simplest person tends to be the happiest one because you don't see complexities. And I think that is very much related from an emotional point of view. Surely logical, but primarily from an emotional point of view. Do you think that someone that is empathic or overly empathic and has a high emotional intelligence might see emotional or might be more prone to see emotional problems than someone that just doesn't have the ability to identify them in the first place and therefore might not fall into emotional stress?

42:10Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I like you said this because I do believe that. I think like, you know, I know I'm a hugely sensitive and empathic person and I can feel like my friends' emotions. I can feel all sorts going on around me, right? And sometimes if, you know, if I didn't know how to process them and move them through me, I would find that extremely overwhelming. And I know that people can get very, you know, bogged down by the weight of like emotions. But what you have to kind of see it as if people are like, well, why would I honestly, why would I ever want to feel that?

42:37is that you can only have the height to the depth that you can have the level of the sadness, right? Yes, yes, yes. So like that ecstasy, that feeling of true, true joy, happiness, all those amazing heightened emotions, you can get to the height of that if you can feel the depth of that emotion. It's always kind of balanced, right? So you'll either be sort of numbing on that sort of like teetering, like, okay, I can get quite happy, but I feel a little bit sad and that's it. Or you can like feel ecstatic and joyful and truly deeply love. You know, I've seen that with some people, you know, in the past, it's like they can't even access deep love because they've never accessed their deepest, you know, sadness, their deepest depression even, you know, so I think it's very much on that balance, like the lower you go, the higher you can get as well.

43:25Interesting, I agree with you. And what about physical stress? So what are some stressors that lead to that? Yeah, physical stress, you know, know we can give us physical stress from what we do with our bodies as well right so lack of sleep gives you physical stress for example and a poor diet can give you physical stress so we know like excessive sugar will set off your stress response and huge spikes in blood sugar levels which we can get from you know refined carbs and processed foods and sugar when your blood sugar spikes it then drops very quickly that sets off your stress response and increases your cortisol levels and even dehydration itself because surprise surprise your body's like oh my god there's no water we need to go into survival mode that sets off your stress response right so we can stress our bodies from what we put into it and from lack of sleep and not treating it well um but equally we can also like i said really stress our bodies from that prolonged stress experience of chronic stress of cortisol being in it all the time will then create the physical stress symptoms that over time.

44:28It's like, please help me. Like you have to turn this off. Right. And also the unprocessed emotions. So when we, you know, an emotion doesn't disappear when we suppress it, it just lingers under the surface. But we think like, you know, numbing it out will, oh, it's gone now. It's like, no, no. Is that a trauma? So not a trauma, but essentially it can be trauma. Right. So I even had that experience myself when I wasn't dealing with the traumas that originally happened to me. I hadn't dealt with my sort of sister's death at that time. I had so much going on that when I had a breakup post that, everything I hadn't dealt with from that breakup then came up from like all the other things surface.

45:07Right. And it was like six years worth of stuff. And so that's why I kind of really encourage people to process as you go through things so that you don't have to have that moment like, you know, five years later, 10 years later, whatever it is, where you're having this sudden breakdown thinking, where is all of this coming from? Right. And it's just all stored. and so you know the stored emotion can turn into those physical tensions those physical aches physical pains you know i even actually had a i had a client who was um a very you know logical amazing ceo in the middle east and he had had this physical like physical tension physical aches and pains for months you know and he'd done a lot of physiotherapy and i was doing for this organization i do these things called like reiki visualizations where i basically created this process that i I guide people in meditation where I put, strange as it sounds, I put Reiki into it and I do a visualization and do a meditation in one.

46:00It helps people to relax more quickly, but it also allows, you know, blocks of emotions to move through. And he was like, after the session, you know, we did it in a group and he was like, Alice, I don't understand. Like I've had these physical symptoms for like six months and they're all gone. And he was like, can we do like a one-to-one session tomorrow and talk about stuff? I was like, yeah, of course. and I spoke to him about what he was going through which obviously I won't share but I was like oh god no wonder I was like none of this is physical this is like 10 years of emotional stress that's built up you're definitely incredible at your craft because to be able to do that with a Middle Eastern senior executive and do Reiki on them and for them to first of all accept you know accept it and do it and go for it I find much harder than doing it in Europe you know In Middle East, perhaps, you know, because of culture and religion, they might be less open to do these things.

46:53So if you've accomplished that, I think that's a great thing. I've seen in a few friends that they went through a breakup, but they didn't heal properly from it. So this means that they immediately jumped into another relationship and they didn't do the inner work to heal, to learn, and then move on. They immediately jumped into another relationship. I call this the Tarzan analogy. I like that. Because, you know, Tarzan has like a sort of like robe, you know, and then he will not leave this one until he has another one. So you never fall, right? So, and then I've seen with them that sometimes they're just unhappy with themselves for no reason.

47:37Work could be going well. Their family is healthy. Like there's nothing fundamental. There's not a macro stressor. I'm not too sure about the micro ones, but there's not a macro stressor that is visible from the outside. And they're just not happy. And you can also see that physically they look tired. And, you know, they get wrinkles or gray hair sooner than maybe the rest of our group of friends. So I think this is very much related to what you're saying. So this is physical stress appearing from an unclosed or unprocessed past feeling. Yeah, totally. I think it's like you say, you know, it's true.

48:13It's like if you think you've dealt with your emotions, like it's eventually going to turn up in your outer appearance. Like when you see that friend who looks like they've aged five years, you're like, what haven't you been dealing with? Because when someone is happy and calm, they do look younger. Right. I do believe that. It's like I essentially stress we know actually ages you prematurely anyway. You look 25, by the way. I need to say that on camera. You don't look 35. That's very kind. Thank you. But that's what I mean, though. So it's like, you know, I try to practice. So whatever you're doing, I'm going to be doing from today onwards.

48:45Calming down. I try to practice what I preach as much as possible, right? And I know that like when I was going through a stressful period of time, sometimes I look at photos then and I'm like, I think I looked older then than I do now, you know? And it really shows in your energy and it shows in your physical side. And I think it's so important. I love that you say the Tarzan effect because I think it's so funny. It's such a good way of looking at it. It's so important to take time and go back into yourself to be like, Like, okay, what's actually going on with me? What do I need to deal with right now?

49:15Also so that I don't then essentially like bleed on everyone else around me. Because, you know, if you haven't dealt with something that you need to do, you're going to take it into that next job, that next relationship, that next interaction. And I think we all have that personal responsibility. Also with our stress, right? You know, stress we know is actually contagious. okay so if i'm stressed and around someone a lot cortisol will seep through my skin and set off a chemical reaction in them to set their stress response off so we know it's contagious but we also feel it energetically it's like that feeling when you go into a room and someone is really calm and happy or like oh oh that was like contagious i love being around that person you go into a room and someone's like stressed and angry everyone immediately goes it's like you feel it and particularly in your workplaces.

49:59I have a way to have an analogy for this in the workplace. It's the culture of the company. Sometimes you walk into an office or into a workspace and there's just something that is telling you that things are harmonious. Everything is working. You can touch it. You can really define what it is, but you know it's there. And then sometimes you walk into a workplace and you just have this feeling. You can tell people are not happy here. Things are not going well. and it's not that you're seeing you know maybe a big screen with a bank account in red numbers from that company you just don't really know what it is but there is something there i think it's hugely as well partly to you know the leadership it's like if you have a ceo yes who is stressed and erratic guess what like everything filters for us it's a top-down approach in our company and that's that's something that i've been working on the last months very hard on how to shift the the work, the culture of our company, because it's one of those things that it is profoundly important because it has so many different impacts in different angles of and areas of the business.

51:04But at the same time, because you cannot tangibly touch it, it's very hard to convince people that this is a thing. Sometimes they think it's very juju and you're very energy based. And, you know, maybe my CEO, in this case, the founder has been, you know, smoking something wrong before coming to the meeting. But it is, and it's something that actually is very important, and I think people need to be more aware of it. So I've been actively, first of all, convincing my co-founder, who's my twin brother, and then our senior team and the rest of the company. So to summarize what you were saying, mental stress can come from work-related issues.

51:42So that's a clear example that I can relate to. Emotional stress, perhaps with complex relationships or problems within relationships, and then physical stress with unprocessed past emotions. What are daily stressors that we all face on a daily basis that we are unaware of? We're still going through them. We're still absorbing them. Yeah, I think it's interesting because those micro-stressors are the really daily stressors that we just don't think of. So it's things like watching the news, which obviously everyone wants to be aware and they want to be, you know, well-educated. So true, they're always negative.

52:19It's always negative. Always. Always negative. You know, and if you watch the news on a Tuesday, unless, you know, I have a rule actually I say to clients, I'm like, if you're super stressed, please don't watch the news because you actually need to tell your system, essentially, like I said, if your brain doesn't know the difference between the emotional response it's getting from you watching the news or you being there, you're just giving it more and more stress, more and more stress. And then it will also start to look for more stress in your day. Because if you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is like watch the stressful news, all you're doing is programming your mind for the rest of the day to be like, let's look for stress and threats instead of the good, right?

52:55So it's like limiting stuff like that. And the reality is as well, it's like, you know, if you need to, you know, de-stress and you want to cut out the news for a few weeks, it's like if something big happens in the world and it's big enough, guess what? someone you know is going to tell you and then you can look at it right and get informed so it's like watching the news 17 times a day which a lot of people get addicted to um is really something you really can need to start limiting right is it then better to watch them at night if you have to because i'm a person that i really want and need to stay informed i would actually say as strange as this is i'd say watch it in the middle of the day in the middle of the day because i know that's like not the news cycle but really it will be because you'll catch up with it because at nighttime if you're going to watch it again, you're going to have trouble switching your system off for evening for good sleep.

53:40And obviously sleep regulation is so important for stress, like getting good quality sleep or even dealing with emotional stress, stress in general. So yeah, I would say do it in the middle of the day, but I would also say actually have a defined time when you say, right, okay, these are my 15, 20 minutes, half an hour, I'm going to look at the news and then I'm not actually going to look at it for the rest of the day. I'm not going to have a notification on BBC telling me that someone's died in a tsunami me later that afternoon i'm not gonna you know all those different things you have to look at like a lot of things like you say you need to be informed for your work and you need to understand certain things there's a lot of news that is just stressing you that you can do nothing about i agree right three people have been stabbed in south london what am i gonna do with that i agree with you and i find that fascinating because i mean obviously the media industry is one of the largest one in the world and it's it's not a new industry so i'm assuming that all the news that they're putting out there they are selecting them with a very data-driven approach which means that this is what we want to consume we want to consume negative or dramatic things we're not um engaging with positive things like oh you know maybe a triplet was born in south london rather than And three people were killed in South London, which I find fascinating.

54:58But okay. See, things like the news. News in the middle of the day. What else is stressing us? Then it's looking at your digital devices, right? And the relationship we have with our phone and our digital devices is causing so much stress and overstimulation and also information overload, right? So today we have the average person will touch and tap, swipe their phone over two and a half thousand times a day. What? Yeah. I'm not saying like, you know, pick it up. I'm saying like over two and a half thousand times a day and check it around 250 times a day. So that's ridiculous if you think about it.

55:35It is. If we put that same effort into anything that's a playing piano, you would be an expert very quickly. 100%. And so it's like, okay, we have such a huge amount of attention manipulation from our devices, right? Because even if you have this experiment, right, of putting your phone on grayscale, you'll notice how much less interesting it is to you. So Instagram, social media is so much less interesting when everything's on grayscale. This kind of dopamine hit we get, it's like the colors, the visualizations, the stimulation. So what is a grayscale? So, you know, like black and white. Oh, really?

56:09So you can have in your phone, if you go into your iPhone, whatever phone you have, you can put it in the settings onto grayscale. if you do that for a couple of days you'll notice how much less you want to be on your phone because it's not interesting to you right it's so um should i keep should i always keep it like that or what am i losing with that if you're not you're not losing anything with it like the only reason people have it on color is like they want to check their sort of facial image on instagram to make sure their hair is the right color whatever it is you know it's like essentially if you're using it for information your messages your emails whatever it is and even instagram because you're just looking at other people's content, you're not going to be scrolling as long.

56:44It's not as exciting to you. And so we get that dopamine hit, right, from our digital devices, that quick dopamine hit. But it's not long-term reward. It's instant gratification. And then we have this anxious habit of looking at, you know, okay, well, I'm just not, I want to be distracted. I don't want to feel, I'm just going to touch my phone. The amount of times that people, if you think about it, how many times have you, I'm not saying you personally, but like all of us, right? How many times if you just checked your phone even though you haven't heard it was right yeah it's automatic now we've really wired our brains to become addicted to it so i say to people all the time i'm like working with people i've had so many instances where people will say like oh my god you know my partner is so annoyed with me because i'm not present in the evening i'm always on my phone and i you know that really i have a rule myself where i'm like i will never be in a meal out at dinner with someone with my phone on the table because what that says to you the person you're with is that they're less important than your phone and also it tells your brain it's there so you will automatically want to check it like so why make it harder for yourself right so every evening i say to people put your phone in a drawer for like one hour right i call it like a phone graveyard it's like a cemetery it's out of sight it's out of mind if you can't see it you won't reach for it.

58:01And equally, if you want to do really focused work for an hour or two hours, put your phone in a different room, put your phone in a drawer, don't have it next to you, because your brain will say to you, pick it up, touch it, let's try it, you know, I want that dopamine hit. And so the amount of stress we're creating from that side of things, but also what we're actually consuming in our phone, right, the social media side, the news, the emails, the notifications, the social media side is so, so damaging for us, because people are getting so much more stressed and anxious because of the comparison they see you know you go on social media and your brain is like well i should be doing that i why haven't i got to that level it's the highlight reel of everyone's life and you think you feel inadequate you're behind or you're stressed by even you know if you go into the comment sections of some very big profile social media accounts it is like the cesspit of humanity like it's awful like what people are saying to each other they would never say to their face but that somehow they feel like it's acceptable because they feel like they're more confident because they're hidden behind a screen and a fake name so the amount of stress all that causes and the amount of information overload from our digital devices I was looking I'm like okay you have to start to do things that limit that side into your life because your attention emotionally and your attention it's only going to get worse with AI right that's the truth it's like we need to start to get a grip of how we deal with our digital devices now you have to start to make it a practice it's like put it away in a drawer for an hour, don't have it in your bedroom, right?

59:28Don't be on it in your bed at night. Because, you know, if you think of it this way, it's like, would you, if you want to go to sleep, why would you have, first of all, something that has every single bit of information in the entire world in your face, stimulating you right before you go to sleep? That's just not going to be helpful for your brain. But also your device is giving off blue light, which all artificial light It does, but it keeps you awake at night, right? And so even things like, you know, red light glasses at night, I find those incredible because if you're someone who says like, okay, well, I need to be on my phone until a certain time, maybe only that last half an hour I can be off my phone.

1:00:05Get some red light glasses, you know, from different brands, Amazon, whatever it is, you'll notice how much sleepier you feel naturally. It's amazing. But grayscale is such a good hack for people because you will not be as interested in your phone. I've had this previous episode with an amazing psychologist. His name is Dr. Richard Graham, and he's specialized in technology addictions and its consequences. And the aftermath of this conversation led to me changing two things in the form of New Year resolutions. One is not using my phone in the room. so every time I'm in the room whether it's to go to bed or just going to the room to get changed my phone needs to be in a separate area of the house in a separate room and just by doing that I had profound benefits I found profound benefits so the first one my stress did reduce but I guess also another one very big one was that my attention spam and my ability to focus in one thing completely changed because i don't i'm not a firm believer of multitasking but i feel like one of the consequences of technology is that our brain automatically starts multitasking and we don't end up doing anything properly and just by not using my phone when i wake up or when i go to bed that changed that small change in my life had a drastic change in a bigger part of it and then the second one was to just look at the apps that are sending me notifications for example it It could be the BBC or WhatsApp, whatever it is.

1:01:43And just cutting them by half. Yeah. Do I really need these ones? No. So I not only cut them by half, I cut them by 99%. So I only left one. And that had, again, profound benefits. I love that you say that, though, because it's that quick flick, right? Particularly like TikTok, particularly social media. We're training our brains to not have the capacity to be able to have long-form content and to learn and to focus and to sit and be able to have a conversation like this, right? without being like, that's really scary. And you know where I also found that fascinating example that is basically a consequence of, in this case, myself, but I would assume other people using technology.

1:02:25When was the last time you went to the cinema? so i went to the cinema when did i go to the cinema i went to the cinema a while ago because i really don't go to the cinema anymore which is a bad thing but i find that i want to watch a full movie at home see but like when we're watching a full movie at home most of us we're double screening yeah totally and then we just we might not finish the movie we just maybe finish it over three days but when you go to the cinema you're not supposed to use your phone for an extended period of time inverted commas like extended period of time two hours but for us right now that seems like a very long time and we're just unable to sit still doing nothing just watching a movie and the last time that I was in the cinema I was just uncomfortable because I wanted to check my phone but there was nothing for me to check but I wanted to do it and then if the movie wasn't interesting enough I was like I just want to go this I've never had those feelings probably 10 years ago and I used to love the cinema it was one of those things that you know I did with my family and and it brings me back to this nostalgic great feeling of the unity of my family which they're now divorced so I should really like the cinema and I was sitting there and I'm like god damn it I don't like it how is this possible um and it's a hundred percent and I know it to my bones because of technology so I fundamentally echo what you're saying and I recommend everyone to be producing their how many hours they're averaging every day yeah if you go on like a long haul flight right it's really interesting to notice like but now they have wi-fi i know this is the thing right it's like are you could you actually like give yourself the task of the next like long-haul flight you go on to just say to people actually i'm on a flight then like why is that why do we have to be connected all the time on wi-fi and checking our phone i was on a flight coming back the other day and i could see this person near me and they were literally they were going from whatsapp to email to whatsapp to instagram to thing and i was just like they weren't even checking anything i was It's just like, God, it was so much anxiety I could see just from like scrolling around.

1:04:28And I was like, we just don't allow ourselves the ability to say, actually, you know what? I'm not available right now. Why is that such a hard thing for people to get, you know, to understand this constant kind of need for availability from everyone is causing so much stress. If you look at the backend of the reasoning of WhatsApp's functionalities, just to give a very simple and clear example, they are designed with the aim of keeping you always in the app so initially you just received the message and you didn't even have a notification so you have to access the app maybe that's not very engaging then the second step was you're going to get a notification so hey you're going to be accessing the app more because someone is telling you i want to talk to you then the third phase for them was the double ticks okay one tick um it's sent but didn't receive two ticks but i'm not getting an answer and then after that they went into the typing like this person is typing who gives a shit sorry but realistically speaking who gives a shit that you're typing but unconsciously from a psychological point of view that's incredibly powerful and then the latest one is the double blue tick which it it is the biggest um part of my french fucker of relationships right personal and professional not but again these are things that are not going away i've turned mine off because you know on whatsapp you can turn them off right you can turn off the typing turn off the blue ticks but ultimately that's just one example whatsapp right but how many other different apps are being developed almost i think on a daily basis that they're going to be used in our lives in one way or another like for example right now you can't bank unless you do it online i know so these things are there to stay and learning things on how to protect us and to prevent the stress or if we're under stress then learning the techniques on how to reduce it i think are fundamental for us to be able to leave not even be happy just to leave it is it's true it's like i think everyone needs to realize that if you're in the modern world today which everyone listening to this will be your system will be stressed whether you think you are stressed or not right so we all have this like personal responsibility to understand how to just do tiny five minute breaks every day to just bring our body and our mind into parasympathetic state you know there's now even a term coin called email apnea which is essentially how people don't even take a full deep breath when they're typing an email they'll go and all that does is tell your body like oh be stressed okay so it's like just having you know little labeled alarm on your phone on your calendar five times a day saying breathe and taking like three deep breaths where you extend your exhale because that puts you into parasympathetic state, that has an effect, right?

1:07:12You know, a lot of people think, I need to do five hours of stress management a day, so I don't have time for that. No, you don't. You need to incorporate tiny little things that make your system feel calm and like reset it so that you're not constantly in this overloaded state of stress. Does the weather affect our stress? I mean, UK weather definitely affects my stress. the weather affects um you know actually heat itself can you know extreme heat can raise cortisol and adrenaline levels we know that that's why like you can see sometimes you know when you get stuck in a very hot situation in a country and there's no air con you'll get like easily irritated with people around you that's kind of why but equally obviously with gray and you know winter no sunlight a lack of sunlight we don't produce as much serotonin which is one of the uh what's called seasonal affective disorder so the weather definitely can have an effect on you but i think more than anything it's like okay you get to decide what has an effect on you right you get to decide your response rather than your reaction to things and of course all these things have build-ups whether it's a relationship whether it's work stress whether it's the weather annoying you because england hasn't except this week been sunny for you know months but it's really deciding okay how do i take control of this within my own response and choose how i want to feel and choose what I want to think.

1:08:40What are the negative consequences of stress? Can people even die because of stress? Yeah, I mean, you know, like I said, my dad died completely from stress-related illness. Like, it wasn't cancer that took him, it was a birth stomach ulcer that caused internal convocations, like accumulated from six years of ongoing stress and the amount of people you know I was working with a company the other day and they said one of the this is you know pre obviously working with them one of their senior leadership had died of a heart attack and that's why they wanted to look at these kind of things because it is such a huge it's a huge life threat but we just assume like oh I'm a bit stressed it's fine but you know you can have a heart attack from stress from increased blood pressure higher cholesterol you can like I said you know you can I do believe personally that you know I looked at for example my sister I know she said that she used to store all her own stress emotionally in her stomach and I don't think personally that it's a coincidence that she got colon cancer as her initial and her initial cancer right you can have uh stress can be extremely extremely damaging for people and I think it's really about looking at the tiny little signs before we allow it to get to this extreme thing where we are either you know burnt out and in hospital or we're like having a heart attack that we're having to deal with later and looking at it as you know something that actually is the silent killer of both our happiness but also the real killer of our health.

1:10:08I'm going to read you a number of studies that I found very interesting. A pioneering U.S. research in 2022 found that high levels of stress can prematurely age our immune systems. While a 2021 study established a link between significant mental stress and reduced blood flow to the heart, making us more susceptible to heart attack or cardiovascular disease. In a 2024 study published in Cell Metabolism, researchers found that mice exposed to chronic stress for two weeks ended up with lower levels of cells that help protect the intestines from pathogens that cause chronic disease. adding to that dr lawson wilson professor of psychiatry and family medicine at the university of cincinnati and author of toxic stress believes it is as much as a priority as smoking now these are very big things um how big is this problem so how many people at the global scale are stressed are we talking about 10 of the population 20 so they haven't it's funny because they haven't looked at this one global scale yet, but in the modern world of, you know, developed world, when you look at countries, like individually, things like America, for example, they've shown that 80 to 90 % of all non-emergency related doctors visits are somehow related to stress, which is, that's just crazy.

1:11:40Again, how many, sorry? So 80 to 90, up to 80 to 90%. Wow. And that's insane. And then you look at the UK and they found that 74 % of people who are absent from work are now relating it to stress. Stress has overtaken for the first time ever musculoskeletal disorders, like backaches and reasons for people being off work from being sat at their desk as the primary reason. And, you know, the EU, it was the EU, like health and safety regulation the other day, they said that the primary reason for, you know, ill health is now stress. So it's really becoming, you know, I've seen it be also So like the fallout now from COVID and the pandemic, it's really kind of accelerated everything.

1:12:21You know, at the time, obviously, people were really stressed and anxious being dealing with this situation where we didn't know what was going on. We're locked in our homes, we're socially isolated. We had so much more screen time as well than ever before because of being only able to do Zoom. And everyone was like, OK, well, the pandemic's over. Surely everyone's fine now. And actually it's kind of, for me, what I've seen with people is it's accelerated it because we have either like not processed what's been going on and dealt with the things that come up. We've also allowed ourselves now to get into things like a lot of people got huge social anxiety posts that they still can't, they still struggle to be in an event with 100 people without feeling really uncomfortable for the first 45 minutes, which was just never a thing before.

1:13:05and we've kind of everything that we've put in you know obviously the world is a concoction of stress in the larger scale now right but we aren't really dealing with everything we know like I think about stress now and I'm like okay well if this is how much stress everyone's under from the daily pressures the concoction of what's going on in the outer world and what we're sort of allowing ourselves to have information about and of the digital devices like where is this going in five years time when everything is even more exasperated with things like AI and even more exasperated because if you think about how you were raised as a teenager how teenagers are raised now on their devices like that's already programming your brain to be stressed in a different way than we were like I actually had a childhood where I was outside present playing enjoying myself not comparing on social media because it wasn't a thing right it became a social social media became a thing when I was like 19, 18.

1:14:04And I feel so, so bad for, you know, Gen Z and, you know, lower ages, because how on earth, unless we start to actually teach kids, like how to sort of like digitally detox, how to deal with your emotions, how to regulate your system, it's just going to get worse and worse and worse, you know, and these old school systems of schools, I think people need to start taking responsibility that like, things are changing, you have to get people to understand how to calm their system down and how to deal with themselves. Otherwise, you're going to have a lot of nervous breakdowns as far as I can tell.

1:14:38But it does seem that that's what people want right now. Because according to Google, we research how to reduce stress every 10 minutes. Every 10 minutes. That's crazy. And the second most researched question related to stress is how is this interlinked or what's the relationship between stress and our libido followed by erectile dysfunction yeah what do you think well stress lowers our libido we know this is a form of like emotional stress will show up as a lower libido but equally because high levels of cortisol can actually dampen the production of testosterone which both men and women need for a libido that can cause you to have like less desire and less libido but equally if you're emotionally stressed you're not going to be present you're not going to be having a good sex life because how can you possibly you know when you're not in the room and you're not actually engaged with the person and you know connection so 100 i think you know the more stressed you are although some people you know particularly men might see it as like release it's like you're gonna have a worse libido worse sex life for sure some people they drink to reduce their stress what do you think again it's like it's an emotional stress thing right you know it's um and i saw that with my dad it was that was the the numbing it was the coping mechanism because it just gives you alcohol is a sedative like originally right so it'll calm your nervous system down sedate it for a little bit yeah and give you an initial hit of dopamine but then once that wears off you get a dopamine crash and that's why people have the next day what you know you call like anxiety because people are feeling anxious when they're hungover because they've had that crash that's come back down.

1:16:30Does it affect our cortisol levels while we're drinking? It can actually increase your cortisol levels as well. So it's kind of like that catch-22. It's like a false soother. You're like, oh, well, I feel really good right now. I feel so much less stressed. If you're chronically stressed and you're using alcohol as that relief, it's only going to get worse and worse your stress because, first of all, you haven't dealt with what the reason is you're actually feeling stressed and process whatever it is you needed to but equally because alcohol sedates you raises the cortisol and gives you that hit of dopamine that crashes afterwards you're going to feel more anxious and stressed the next day and so that's why the people get into this vicious cycle of being like well i need that another drink again to feel calm so i really encourage people to look at you know and i love a glass of wine as much as the next person but it's like when are you drinking are you drinking when you feel stressed and bad or are you drinking when you're in a happy mood and you're with friends and enjoying a nice meal.

1:17:26So like looking in that relationship with your stress and alcohol and dealing with the stress if it's the first one. You mentioned that we should avoid sugary foods and processed foods. I would assume it's because they're increasing in cortisol levels, right? Yeah, so I mean, it also affects your gut microbiome, right? And your gut microbiome has a huge relationship with stress because the gut-brain axis, which is essentially now we realize that your gut microbiome is speaking to your brain and your brain is speaking to your gut. Your gut is responsible for producing 90 % to 95 % of all the serotonin in your body.

1:18:05So serotonin is one of your feel-good neurotransmitters that regulates your mood. So it helps you deal with stress, for example. So if you've got an unbalanced gut microbiome, which can be caused from certain types of foods, so it's like overly processed food sugar over drinking alcohol processed meats all those different things you're going to offset your gut microbiome and actually you'll find that you know people who do that might have higher levels of anxiety because they don't have enough serotonin to regulate it so it's really interesting thing to look at so when you kind of look at food if you are super stressed i really encourage people to look at certain things it's like cut out sugar for now, like just refined sugar, you know, have honey, have, you know, your maple syrup, different things like that.

1:18:47But you want to try and bring inflammation down in your body, right? So an anti-inflammatory diet can be so, so good when you're under high stress. So looking at things like just having for a while, you know, if you eat meat and stuff, it's like meat, fish, protein, vegetables, cutting out starch for a bit, because that also is very inflammatory. And starch, even potatoes or brown rice? You have sweet potatoes. Okay. So like have that as your carb for a bit, right? And that's better for our stress than regular potato. Yeah, it's better if you're extremely inflamed. And we get really inflamed when we are stressed.

1:19:23And a lot of people might have that trouble of saying like, I can't lose weight because, you know, but I'm eating healthy. I'm doing this. And it's like, well, you're probably stressed and your body is like holding on, storing it as that protection. Particularly like around the middle, that's like such a huge sign of stress-related weight, of cortisol, like holding weight around the stomach. So you're doing an anti-inflammatory diet for a bit. Just to simplify what you're saying, if we're under stress, we tend not necessarily only to eat more, but we just retain more fat. Yeah, exactly. So it's like when we're like highly anxious, we can burn it.

1:19:53Like, you know, suddenly you'll see like women lose loads of weight because they've just been like overly anxious and burning it. But long-term chronic stress, a lot of people will put on weight. And that's partly a kind of like an emotional safety thing for your body. It's kind of like your body's like, I'm protecting you. you know it's almost like an emotional barrier but it's also that physical threat side of the body being like well if i'm under threat i might not be able to like find food for the next you know 10 months so let's just store let's store it away so when you are super inflamed from chronic stress um it's really helpful to shift weight by looking at anti-inflammatory diet just for like even you know i worked with someone who was on my podcast once called yalda who does something called eat burn sleep and she looks an anti-inflammatory lifestyle because she cured ulcerative colitis herself from anti-inflammatory lifestyle and she does something called like a six-week reset so it's just like six weeks of really doing like anti-inflammatory foods and the results you can get so no sugar no starches no processed sugar no dairy actually for that time which i mean i love cheese so i found that bit originally because i did this actually after my dad died because I was holding on to a lot of weight from grief and I was trying crazy things like you know keto and all these different things like I've been lucky like I grew up with a fast metabolism and my family like a slim and I never had to deal with that before and I didn't know what diet I was like wasn't working and it's because I was like in such grief stress that my body was just holding on to the inflammation and so I did this reset of anti-inflammatory and it just like fell off me and like reset my metabolism.

1:21:26I was like, wow, that's such an interesting example to me of how effective anti-inflammatory lifestyle can be when your body's feeling really stressed. Is that the diet that right now you follow every single day? No, not at all. Like I don't do it now, like because I don't need it, right? But it's, if you want to like start that point, just think of things like eat meat, eat vegetables, eat fish, cut out dairy, cut out processed sugar, and for the first week, cut out caffeine. and, you know, start to not, and don't have grains. So they say like not refined carbs. For how long should we be doing this until we feel the effects?

1:22:00So she says like six weeks is great. Six weeks. But like, that's when you really feel the effects. I felt the effects after four weeks. I was like, wow, this is, you know. And then you should come off the diet. Yeah. And then you can just like start to be balanced, you know, start to just think about like what works for you. It's like, everyone's different. I truly believe this, you know, we're all programmed so differently in our, you know, biology and our physical, what works for us. So it's like just having more of a balanced diet, I think, believe personally with stress is like getting, you know, the right protein, the right good fats, the right fibers, you're going to have a more balanced blood sugar level, and that's going to be less stressful for your body in general.

1:22:35It's not saying like, I can't eat this and I have to starve myself. And it's like, no, no, it's just like looking at just particularly cut out processed sugar, because all that does is put your body into stress. And fasting, is it good or bad for our stress? I find this one interesting because it's a complex thing, and I'm not a specialist in fasting, so I won't go into it in the way of that. But I looked at someone called Dr. Mindy Peltz, and she talks about how you have to fast differently for men and women. And I truly believe that because it's like you have to go back to that biology with stress.

1:23:07It's like a man will go out and do that hunter-gatherer and fast in a different way to a woman who would have to store fat while she's waiting for the food at home. And it's like I, with hormone levels and fluctuations that women have, you can really cause your body excess stress by fasting in the wrong way at the wrong time, right? So I really think for particularly women, it's a complicated topic that you should like look into. With like Dr. Mindy is amazing, talks about like how women should fast at different points. It's like, I really believe that because you can put undue stress on your body otherwise.

1:23:40What are the main different reasons why men and women get stressed? That's funny, actually. I think it's, okay, so I have a theory about this, which I'll tell you about something else. But men, today, we look at two sides, right? Men will get more stressed statistically in studies. It's like men get more stressed from career. and what we still see as societal pressures of providing and having to be at a certain stage of your career at a certain age and feeling that like you know that side of things also familial stress so stress with your family and relationships and balancing that um and also stress weirdly strangely men find stress from health statistically like their body aging and having health problems that they haven't dealt with and pushed aside and that's a common thing for men right how many men do you know that will say like oh i'm not going to i haven't been to the doctor you know they've pushed it to the last minute right so looking at stuff like that and then women have what we call i mean i i actually call this term i did a webinar on this once because i find it such an interesting topic of the stress of women i call it superwoman syndrome so essentially it is now that women have the option in the modern world to do and be everything they feel the pressure to have to do and be the perfect everything.

1:25:02So we have things like a lot of emotional stress from being like, okay, the perfect mother, perfect working career, the perfect wife, the perfect relationship, the perfect body. So the stress comes from the balance of life for women. So, you know, the reality is that the way we're programmed, it's like if a child is screaming at night, even if the dad wants to help, it's still going to be screaming for its mom if the mom has a good relationship with it. So it's like the balance of the career expectations of balancing home life, of being a mother, of beauty standards as well, are all shown for studies to really increase women's stress and also the over-emotional load.

1:25:38So usually in a family or in a friendship group, people, whether it's men or women, will naturally come to a woman to offload their emotional stress. And women are taking on a lot more emotional stress than they're able to deal with with these other factors. So that's kind of what it's shown. women are more prone to anxiety and depression than men and men are more prone to actually have physical symptoms from stress but again not actually deal with them. My personal view on this is that the difference in between what stresses a man and a woman is related to expectations and I think that these expectations are pretty much defined by what society is telling us and historically the self how a man would value himself would be mostly related by his financial status or professional status a woman was never labeled in that way i think for right but also wrong reasons and also for the men for right and wrong reasons i think the women probably 50, 60 years ago when my grandmother was in her 20s, they were valued more towards their beauty.

1:26:51Oh, she's a pretty woman or not, or she's a good housewife or not. So completely different. Now, the world has transformed and changed more on the women's side. So there are more things that the women has access to that the men used to have access but we don't have more doors as a man, right? In fact, perhaps even less doors because there's just a given number of doors. There's just more people entering now for both to all these doors. And this, I don't, I cannot relate to what are the consequences of how a woman feels about it on the good side and the negative side, but definitely I can see this with my friends in which they, if they are in a relationship in which they are contributing less financially than their partner, this is stressing them this is stressing them a lot and it is very hard to convince them that their self-worth it is absolutely unrelated to their professional career that's just one aspect of your life but there are so many others but no one teaches us that yeah as a man i can only speak as a man but no one is teaching us that um i am grateful and i'm blessed that to an extent i cannot relate to it because since i was relatively young since the age of 22 my career took off and I became what I'd like to think for my age, a successful entrepreneur.

1:28:12But I can see this in friends. I can see this in guys. And right now, a very shocking statistic in the UK tells us that the number one reason that kills men under 40 is themselves. So it's suicide. And this is because they are overly stressed. And this is probably one of the main reasons. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's really interesting you say that with that providing aspect, right? I personally feel like the modern world and people kill me for saying this, but I'm not a feminist. I don't believe in the way that toxic feminism has kind of taken over. I truly believe in equality and everyone has divine feminine and divine masculine in them, right?

1:28:55So it's like that protecting, providing, and it's just that receiving. I believe in meritocracy, right? And I believe the exaggeration of anything would lead to something unhealthy or above all, professionally, personally, to something that would burst at some point. And you think about like that providing side of men, like you say, like, okay, if that was the old school, you know, role, right? Model. The other side to it is looking at all a woman wants is emotional safety to feel safe. Safety can come from, of course, like, you know, that monetary aspect of security that that brings, but it also comes from emotional safety.

1:29:28And stability. And stability, right? So you have to provide that if you feel like you can't provide more than what the woman is. It's like looking at actually what can I provide as emotional safety, stability. And that is all that any female really actually craves because we're wired that way for a man to give that to you. I was having this incredibly, again, revealing an interesting conversation here in the show with one of the leading psychologists. She's a relationship therapist. and she was telling me that one of the big factors that contribute to couples breaking up or divorces and that obviously leads to stress as you were referring to is that the roles right now are not as well defined as they used to be in the past now i am not saying and also she wasn't saying that the roles in the way that they were defined in the past were correctly defined no what she was saying is that at least they were defined yeah so you know where you stand and that goes back to what we were saying managing expectations so if my grandmother was responsible for a b c and d and that's maybe more household related things and my grandfather for d e and f and that's very much clear and there's not an overlap they both are adding value to the relationship and they respect each other even though those values are not comparable but they're fundamentally important and for the relationship.

1:30:54But right now, our roles need to constantly be redefined, especially according to who you're meeting, because everyone has a completely different understanding of their self-worth and what value they bring and what not, which I think has a lot of benefits, but also at the same time, a lot of complications when it comes to building relationships. And ultimately, this leads, in my opinion, to one thing, which is, I think, great for you for your business, but it's stress. Yeah, it's confusing. right i think i completely agree with you it's causing so much confusion for people because everyone wants to feel purposeful and valued and like they bring something to the table in whatever capacity that is and also to feel you know i believe the human's greatest the greatest want and need for humans is to feel seen and heard right and if you are confused about what your role is what you're bringing to the table it's confusing like no one's really going of have any security and any sort of clarity with it right and that's why we kind of have so much different stress in relationships because you haven't defined what it is you feel you want in a relationship what you bring to the table with your partner it might be incompatible and then everyone's sort of stressed and feeling like a lack of self-worth or you know lack of validation and I really think it like you say it's time for it to be less I think that people really need to start redefining how and what they're bringing to the relationship and why and what that's based on now is it because society is telling you that you should be a woman who has you know a ceo level job and you should be able to fend for yourself and you shouldn't take anything for a man or is that because you actually want that you know it's like looking at what you want as a person and deciding that for you

1:32:41let's look at solving this problem so definitely it is fundamentally clear that the world that we live in now is stressing us for so many different reasons let's look at preventive measures um what are some simple things that i can do that anyone can do on a daily basis that would in a way prevent us from being stressed yeah so i look at so like in our book we talked about something called the three l's right which is our model that we go off which is about limit learn and listen and so the primary thing to do there is the limit part right we allow so much undue stress into our life on a daily basis on this rat race without taking any of it out so every single sunday evening particularly i say this to people it's like go through and write down what are all the tiny things that caused you stress that week if you're being honest about it and start to remove like three of them five of them because you can right so i'm looking at things like okay that's limiting limiting right so we call it limiting the needless stress in your life because the stuff that you cannot control right we know that like if you've got someone um you know the way to look at this is like if you've got someone in your office who really stresses you out you might not be able to limit that because you might not be able to not be around them or you might not want to quit your job so you're going to have to look at that in the way of how do i start to deal with that other side of mentally emotionally which we can go into but the things you can limit it's like okay well i can limit the amount of time that i spend on my phone today i can limit the amount of times i watch the news i can limit the amount of time i spend with that person if it's in my personal life because they're causing me stress you know looking really getting honest about what you're allowing into your life just out of habit and limiting the needless stress because when you limit those tiny micro stresses that brings your threshold down that brings it you know your stress levels down and then when the biggest things that you can't control come on top they're more easily to deal with because your your level of stress hasn't just sort of been simmering up and up from useless bits of stress that you could have caught up in the morning i've recently learned and perhaps it's related to this to your first limit the the power or the benefits of saying no um years ago if i was invited to anything even if my body was tired even if i wasn't really looking forward to maybe see those people i would say yes um and i would i'm pretty sure that that had an effect physically on myself definitely on my cortisol levels and then at some point i was like i had a friend of mine that he's a bit like also very energy oriented and so on and he was telling me learn to listen to your body your body is wise my immediate answer to him was like if i would listen to my body i would be obese but fine uh but then i took him seriously and he told me learn how to say no and protect yourself make conscious decisions for me this was more in a social context professional i'd like to think that i've always had reasons why i decided or not decided things and i practiced that and i found that I felt so much better in saying no than yes.

1:35:57Yeah. And it's so contradicting, right? Because you're saying no, no, it sounds like negative. You're doing less, perhaps less things. And I found it so positive, so liberating. I love that you say that because I truly believe in a strong no is better than a weak yes, right? If you can have the conviction to say, no, I don't need to go to this. Like, are you saying yes because you feel you have to, because you feel obliged because a family member, a friend, whatever it is, they're sort of making you emotionally stressed to feel bad if you don't turn up. What effect is that having on your mental stress, your emotional stress, your energy levels that week?

1:36:35So it's looking at your schedule every week and being like, what am I saying yes to out of obligation? And what can I actually, you know, push down to later in the line, whether it's a meeting that you could cancel and do in two weeks time and give yourself the space every single week, if you look at your schedule, you should be able to see space in it for yourself if you can't see space in it for time with yourself whether it's half an hour whether it's an hour for a walk in nature whether it's 15 minutes then to like meditate collect your thoughts like whatever it is then you're doing something wrong because you have to give yourself i truly believe space not only to process how you feel but you have to give yourself the space for boredom you know like we are so scared and i feel also like you grow if you don't have that space you can't grow 100 because you're constantly absorbing so much right we we not only consume food but we consume information from you right now and then later on with several meetings and my friends but just like when you go to the gym the real muscle growth happens when you're resting yeah not when you're breaking fibers which is that's what's happening to your body when you're exercising i feel like personal growth um can only happen when you're resting totally when you're taking that me time totally and it's like i truly believe that with you know we touched on spiritual stress earlier that's a lot of reason why people get spiritually stressed as well because they have no concept of how to just sit still be still with their soul connect inwardly to like those intuitive messages not from their mind but from what somewhere deeper than your mind is telling you without all the outside noise and expectations of the world and when you can connect to that part of you of just sitting in stillness for 10 minutes and not being afraid of you know what you might hear what your mind might say that's such a powerful practice for people and it also will allow you to actually be like okay well I can I can sit with myself I'm not I'm not scared of my thoughts I'm not scared to be bored like I appreciate everything that's coming out of me you know what's the second L the second L second L is learn um so yes limit learn and listen so learning the skills you need to learning the language right the skills you need to manage your mind, your heart, your body, your soul.

1:38:45So it's looking at those things like, you know, pattern interruption and meditation for your thoughts and practicing the good things for mental stress, like gratitude, as corny as it sounds, you know, everyone's like, be grateful, be grateful. There's a reason, right? Gratitude actually rewires your brain to be more easily look for the good in the rest of the day rather than the stressful things in the rest of the day. And also it actually lowers your stress levels, lowers your cortisol levels. so doing those kind of practices and then learning the language of you know of your heart learning how to be curious with your emotions like I always say to people like you have to treat your emotions like you would a friend if a negative emotion comes up and you think oh my god that feels awful how would you treat your friend would you tell them you know go away shut up judge them be horrible belittle them no but we do that to our emotions we're like oh god I don't want to feel that instead it's like okay sit with it sit with yourself take a deep breath and i always do this process it's like okay if um if you feel a negative emotion and you're like okay i'm listening to this and i'm actually feeling really anxious today or i feel fearful whatever it is take 10 minutes sit down close your eyes take a few deep breaths and notice in your body it could be like i call it the curiosity structure so it's like which where why and what so like which feeling am I feeling?

1:40:04And just breathe into that. Okay. Like, okay, I feel anxious today. Where am I feeling that in my body? And then place a hand like actually over the part of your body where you're feeling the anxiety. Then you bring your awareness like to that space within you with the physical. And so behind your hand, actually go into that breathing deeply. Be like, where am I feeling this in my body? Why might I be feeling that? And just allow yourself to, okay, why might I be feeling it, breathing into that anxiety. And then what can I do about it, right? So it's like, do I need to have a conversation with someone?

1:40:37Do I need to do some deep breathing exercises, whatever it is? So just getting curious. And then another way of dealing with that, as crazy as it sounds, is actually talking to your emotion as if they were a person. So instead of Alberta, it's like, anxiety high. Like, what are you here to show me? What can I do for you? And the sooner you move towards a negative feeling, the sooner it leaves. This is the kind of complex like myth we have. It's like we ignore it. No, your emotion gets louder. Go towards it with kind curiosity. It'll dissipate and disappear because a negative emotion, I always say, is only trying to alert you to one of two things.

1:41:12It's trying to alert you to something outside of yourself that you need to take action on and change or something inside of yourself that you need to process and heal. All it wants is your attention. So as soon as you give it that attention with kind curiosity, the sooner it'll leave. So yeah, it's like starting to really learn those things like learning how to even you know with your body for example it's like how do you put your body into parasympathetic state so like at night time the one of the easiest things you can do for yourself is having your legs up your headboard with your back flat before you go to bed oh my god that's what it does my girlfriend does that every night and i look at her and i'm like what the hell are you doing it's because she's very clever so that's what it is it automatically puts your body into parasympathetic state like restorative poses like that right so even if you feel particularly anxious doing a full body shake like shaking out every single limb there's that phrase like you know robert sapolsky wrote that that book why zebras don't get ulcers an animal when it's running away from a threat if it gets away from the threat it will do a full body shakedown afterwards because that puts it back into parasympathetic state we're the same right so it's like looking at those tiny little hacks that tell your system chill you don't need to be stressed for how long should we do this what the body shake the body shake until you i say like two to three minutes and that's actually legs up for like 10 minutes in the evening it's really nice 10 minutes or more like you want to do you know i could do it for like 20 minutes in bed just listening to a nice music or meditation but like 10 minutes just before you go to sleep breathing deeply listening to some chilled music with a dimmed light you're gonna have a nice evening at home with my partner we also practice what you're mentioning gratitude so probably like i think a year a year and a half ago i was under a lot of work stress because we were going through a transformation period in my company um and i'm not a complainer so i wouldn't be a person that you would know that i'm stressed unless you know me very well because I like to deal with those things internally.

1:43:16I guess maybe that's something that I need to work on, but definitely my girlfriend, after so many years being together, she could spot that. And then in those days, she would ask me before going to bed, what are three things that I am grateful for? And that immediately brought me back to that baseline. My cortisol levels immediately fell down. And then after doing that, just on the days where I was stressed or if I would see her stressed, and we have very different stressors or different factors that make us stressed. We told each other, why don't we do this every day? Why do we need to wait until we're stressed to get distressed?

1:43:56Because we're always going to be in this loop. So why don't we do this every day? And since then, every day, before we go to bed, we ask each other what are three things that we're grateful for. And obviously, because you do it on a daily basis, sometimes you need to say the very very small things like today i really appreciate the coffee that i had just that feeling of that morning coffee it was a bit slower than the previous day and i'm grateful for that and then other days maybe something bigger happened oh i am very grateful that i just landed this deal or something like that yeah and i found that very powerful i love that you say that though because also that you do it every day when you're not stressed because it's such an important thing for people to realize.

1:44:36A lot of people say like, well, I'll deal with these things. I'll deal with these things when I feel stressed. And it's like, no, you build resilience of how to deal with stress effectively in the easy times, right? You want to have that toolbox, that automatic thing that's just building that up in the background. It's like only going to the gym when you get fat. You go to the gym, you get slim. I'm going to wait until I'm fat again to go. It's all you're doing is that. So you want to be like more like, okay, I can do this. Like it's more smooth. So I really encourage people to like, when you feel good, still do your practices, like meditate, do your gratitude, journal, do all these different things.

1:45:08Like don't wait for you to have a breakdown in stress to start to deal with it. But that's how I think humans generally perceive health. We only appreciate it or we only want it when we don't have it. Another fantastic cardiologist that came to the show, he shared with me this beautiful quote. He said, a healthy man or a healthy person wants a thousand things. A sick person only wants one. Yeah. And that's so powerful. It's so true. Third L, listen. Yeah, listen is, sorry, it's the final one that none of us do. Listen is actually being so in tune with yourself that you can listen to, okay, I understand my mind is stressed right now.

1:45:51It's about awareness, essentially listening. So the more aware we are of when our mind is stressed, when our heart is feeling, you know, when you're feeling an uncomfortable emotion, when your body is giving you that tiny little ache instead of waiting for, like you say, the breakdown of being burnt out or in hospital later. And when your soul is actually trying to nudge you to guidance. So I look at things like, you know, the universe, whichever way you want to go with this, you're always being shown like little breadcrumbs of where you should go. And we can have what I call like a side swipe from life when it's like, I need to get your attention and redirect you because we haven't been listening.

1:46:28We haven't been listening to our intuition, listening to our soul saying like, you need to leave that job. You need to leave that relationship. This isn't good for you. And then out of the blue, you'll get made redundant like I was because life is like, you're not meant to be on this path. So it's like about listening to yourself on a deeper level, like noticing how you feel, how your mind is, what your body's telling you, what your soul is whispering to you and then actually taking the action to do it. I get why less people can follow this one because the first two, I guess almost anyone can limit certain aspects of their life because it's a very logical, pragmatic, tangible thing that you can do and measure and identify.

1:47:06Also learning. Again, these are different techniques that you don't necessarily need to either have a lot of money or a university degree. Anyone can relate to it and practice it. But I believe that in order for you to apply the third L, listen, it requires a very different understanding of yourself. And by that mean, not necessarily being more intelligent, but definitely be more brave and confident and open-minded. I would say those three things, to be comfortable with who you are and who you are not, which I think is more importantly. What are my strengths? But most importantly, I accept my weaknesses.

1:47:46And then be able to work with them. Totally. And it's like, you know, awareness, you know, I truly believe it's like you can't change anything you're not aware of, right? So you can't change your level of stress or your happiness levels if you're not aware even of what's causing you stress or how you feel or when it's coming up. And with resilience and stress particularly, I look at it as, you know, people think like resilience, you know, is about withstanding. You have to keep going and push through stress. True resilience and stress isn't about withstanding. It's about understanding. It's about understanding yourself.

1:48:17It's about understanding when those feelings are coming, how to process them, understanding what your intuition is telling you, understanding when you need to limit, how your mind is reacting. So I really encourage people to start to just tune into themselves more. And the starting point for that is actually that space. Like, have you given yourself 10 minutes this week just to be with yourself? And if not, ask yourself why are you scared to be with yourself? Because that's the first question. but also i found i found this very powerful i think it was around two years ago the power of silence so again in my meantime i try to be very quiet um but also not only in my meantime but right now i try to be as quiet as possible during my day because that's the only time that i can really process things and be able to see things and feel things that if i am constantly talking and I believe that we live in a society that talks over each other.

1:49:14I won't be able to reach those conclusions. I won't be able to understand them, see them, perceive them, analyze them. So recently in one of our social media channels, I challenged people to do one thing for the day, which is today speak 50 % less. I love that. Do it consciously. And then drop me a message and tell me how you feel at the end of the day. what are the benefits that you found from this and for me it's exactly what you're saying i get into a very self-reflective mindset and my approach to process things is completely different it's much more appreciative understanding less demanding yeah and i love i love that you say that because you know i truly believe you can't create clarity from confusion and confusion comes from overstimulation on too many people's opinions like I love that phrase of when someone says if you've got a really important decision to make do not ask 10 people to help you like go to yourself once and try to get the decision in silence and if you can't go to one person you truly trust who's a good reflection because the more people you ask the more confusion you're going to get and the more we stimulate ourselves in the outside world conversations all the time and don't have that silence, that space, the less clarity we're going to have.

1:50:33And when you talk about, I love that you said, you know, people today don't really listen. It's true, you know, the funniest phrase I heard years ago was God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason. You're supposed to listen twice as much as you talk. And I was like, that's such a good phrase. And we do, we listen to respond. The amount of conversations you might have with people sometimes where they're just waiting to say their point rather than listening to what yours is and then responding from that place it's really we're kind of in this overreactive motion like you say speaking too much always thinking thinking so it's just i think even the practice of having 15 minutes to yourself every day in silence you know seclusion is one of the greatest creative practices we can have for like innovation feeling creativity connecting to your soul and it's i think people are just scared of silence these days sadly so we've just unpacked a set of things that we can do to reduce our stress or perhaps even prevent it.

1:51:31What can I do as a third person that loves someone and I want to help them reduce their stress? Is there something I can do? There's two sides to this. One side you're not going to like, but there's one thing I will say to people, right, is that it's one of the most frustrating things when someone you love is stressed and all we want to do is help, all we want to do is fix, but you can't help anyone who doesn't want to help themselves. Like I learned that the hard way with my dad for six years of trying to get him to do Reiki, trying to get him to see a therapist, trying to get him to do certain things, right?

1:52:05Until someone is ready to deal with their own stress, their own stuff, they're not going to do it. It's like that phrase of which I truly believe it's like, people don't change for other people, they change for themselves. They change because they want to. And the same goes with like managing your stress. So the first point is actually creating less stress for yourself by realizing that you can't control their response to stress. The only way you can help them, I believe, is two parts. If you want to be sneaky, it's like sidely just putting in the background. Say if you're living with someone or you have a family member of playing podcasts like this, just in the background in the car, it's like, oh, one idea might land with them because they might be listening to it that day, right?

1:52:43Or like saying you read a good book oh you know you should think about reading this book not telling people what they should do because a stressed person is always like shut up don't want to listen to that and indirectly introducing indirectly introducing them and seeing from your own example of how much it's helping you people are more like well you know alberto looks really happy and calm i wonder what he's doing you know that kind of thing and that's what i thought of you by the way thank you That's very kind. It's, you know, looking at that side, but also, you know, I truly believe with stress, right?

1:53:17If a person isn't ready and you try to push them, you're actually going to cause a lot of stress for both of you even more, right? And I did learn this the hard way, like I said, with my dad. I had a period of time when I was arguing with him constantly, every day, calling him about doctors to try and get cancer sorted, all this kind of stuff. I realized in that moment, I was like, all this is doing is causing our relationship a huge amount of stress. It's causing me a huge amount of stress. He's not doing what I want. It's causing him even more stress because I'm annoying him. And we were always like best friends.

1:53:49We had the most incredible relationship. and I realized okay I was like this is out of my control so I have to actually surrender to that I have to surrender to let this go and so when you think okay I want to fix someone else you have to also look at the part of yourself that is the reason as to why you're so hell-bent on fixing that person what is it within you that you feel is you know it's so emotionally sort of triggering for you that you can't fix the situation like go back inwards to yourself and really look at that because the truth is, is that we can't control anything else but our own responses.

1:54:22And so if it's causing you a lot of stress, I'm not saying you, I'm saying anyone, having someone they love really stressed and miserable, of course that affects you. But why is it so, so stressful for you that you feel like you have to fix it, that you're the one that's going to save the situation and start to reflect on that in a journal. And also, like I said, just breadcrumb little things around that might get them to change their perspective because it's usually we have to get to that point as a human, right? It's like usually that crash when someone's so stressed, they have to get to their rock bottom to want to change it.

1:54:55And when you're someone who's conscious, who hasn't got to that rock bottom and started to do the work themselves to change it, it's really frustrating to watch someone you love, you know, not help themselves. It's like the worst feeling, but you have to let people go through their own process. You know, I truly believe that. It's like everything happens for that reason, that moment. You know, when you look at it, even from a spiritual perspective, I look at it like, okay, well, maybe that soul needs to go through that process right now to learn something, you know, a month later in a different way that you can't see.

1:55:22So don't try to control the uncontrollable, essentially. I think a lot of people listening to this might think that the end goal by learning all these things is to live a stress-free life. Does that exist? You're in the modern world, no. So unless you're like sipping a pina colada on a beach somewhere with that additional device. So again, this is managing people's expectations. So even though you learn all these things, you're going to get stressed. It's about managing them, right? A hundred percent. So like for me, you know, our book is called Unstressable, right? And Unstressable isn't about being like Yoda on top of a mountain and not having any stress.

1:55:58I still get stressed as a human being, but I will come back from stress within five, 10 minutes, half an hour, a day maximum, rather than a week, a month, a year that some people sitting right so it's really about so that's the goal that's the goal it's like how quickly can you bounce back from stress and notice it and change it alice if you had to compress all your knowledge into one essential advice just one that we must implement in our daily lives what would it be it's a tough question i was thinking about this the other day and i was like god you know there's so much of stress right but for me it actually always comes back to awareness of the self when you can become aware of yourself, like notice what triggers you, what's stressing you and how you feel and what kind of thoughts you're having, everything changes because the truth of how much stress we create is because we're just numbing out.

1:56:51We're not aware and we're going on this sort of spiral, this hamster wheel continually, not taking any notice of ourself, not becoming aware of what is actually going on within us. And that causes so much stress around us. So the more aware you become, the easier it is to change and then everything starts to fall into place. Thank you. Thank you. I profoundly have enjoyed this. And I'll probably send you a few other questions in the next days that will pop in my head. But I truly admire you because I admire people that turn challenges and problems into something positive. And in this case, you've turn them not only into something positive for yourself but something that would definitely impact a lot of people's lives and i find that admirable and you have my utmost respect for that you have clearly endured a level of stress trauma anxiety that i met that i think very few people not only go through that in their lives, but can barely imagine or grasp what that can feel.

1:58:02And you could have had the choice of giving in, but you didn't. You learned from it, and you just wanted to apply those lessons with the world. So thank you for turning a problem, a real problem, into a gift for everyone. That's very kind. Thank you. I've really enjoyed this conversation, And, you know, I think it's true. It's like everyone has these challenges in different ways. And some people have way more stress than I've ever had. And some people have less. Like we all have these different levels. But I think it's, I truly believe that anything can be changed into some kind of gift because you learn something from it, right?

1:58:42Whether you realize it in that moment or whether you realize it later, like everything is happening for us rather than to us. So to try and remember that when you're going through a really stressful time. I'll finish by giving you a very personal example. And my uncle, my mother's only brother, passed away less than a year ago. And we were all very close to him. He was, yeah. And he has three kids, my cousins, three girls, and his wife. And he left them behind. And he died without giving anyone any notice. So it wasn't from a cancer. He just went to bed and had a heart attack. and this had a tremendous impact on my grandparents bearing their only son, my mom, my cousins, my aunt and then my twin brother and I but I am, I guess, unconsciously since I was a kid and I guess I don't have to force this within myself a positive person and immediately after when this happened my mind thought I am pretty sure that even from this shitty sad situation something good will come out of it I don't know what it is and that was literally the day after I immediately thought am I a psychopath for thinking this so I didn't voice it to anyone I didn't share that with my mom obviously she just lost her brother or even to my girlfriend with which I share almost everything with just shared it with myself and then a month later one of the benefits that I saw and I think it's a benefit that is incredibly important.

2:00:21And we still have that benefit in our family is that we all got together in a way that we never did. So I am 28 in a couple of weeks from now, 29, sorry, in a couple of weeks from now, in the 29 years that I've been with my family, we've never been so close. And what I mean close is to be logically and emotionally close. So we open up about our emotions and we didn't do those things with, let's say, the second tier of our family so I would share it with my mom but not maybe with my grandparents or my cousins now we do that but also at a logical level we share what's going on in our life so they live in Spain I live in London and when we get together we really share we openly share I'm going I'm doing very well with my partner my business is doing this or that so we really update each other at a logical and emotional level and we feel very loved in a way that we've never felt before and this happened because my uncle died and this is a positive thing so just to finalize what i'm saying is that even from the saddest moment when most people will only see pain there is something positive that you can take away from it yeah so thank you for sharing that and i truly believe i'm sorry for the loss of your uncle and i it's amazing that you see the gift that it's given right And a lot of people, we can't see it.

2:01:40We're not meant to see it then, but you'll see it at some point, whether it's 10 years, whether it's a year, a month, what it was. And I always truly believe that. You just need to be willing to see it. Yeah, definitely. Thank you. Thank you so much.