Making Friends With Stress

Stress is only the response of your body and mind to circumstances. The fight or flight, or fear response is hard-wired into your body to help you survive in a dangerous physical environment. Short bursts of fear are actually good for you and ensure your ability to avoid and survive danger. Always feeling this stress response is not in the best interest of the health of your mind or body. Change how you view stress. See challenges as opportunities to grow and learn and thrive.

Transcript

Hello,

And welcome to the How to Choose Happiness and Freedom show.

I'm your host,

Lauren Foster,

Happiness teacher and founder of Be Happy First.

As a certified life mastery consultant,

Masters of wisdom and meditation teacher,

And primal health coach,

I'm on a mission to help one million women learn to be happy and free on purpose.

Healthy,

Wealthy,

And joyfully living life on your own terms.

Happiness is a choice,

And you can always choose to be happy first.

Thanks so much for being here.

Now on to today's episode.

In this class,

We are talking about how to live your life on purpose.

You're supposed to have an amazing life.

You're supposed to have a body that feels and looks great and a way to create and move through this world that makes your soul come alive and generates all the money that you need to live and give in the way that you want to.

So the key is to be happy and live into this amazing life that you're envisioning for yourself,

And that's what we're here to teach you.

So the beautiful part of this is that when you work on one area of your life,

All of that effort and intention spills over into other parts of your life.

So when you're focusing on having a great relationship with your body,

You're going to notice that your relationships with your family and friends and your loved ones become more satisfying,

Become happier and more fulfilling and more intimate.

And when you get a healthy attitude about money and the way that you're interacting with the world and with currency and creating your big fat bank accounts,

You'll notice that your health begins to improve and your body begins to feel better and your habits in that area of your life begin to get lined up as well.

So no matter what area of your life you're focusing on,

You will get benefit and that can be the catalyst to spill over into the other parts of your life.

This month we're talking all about your body.

So the first thing that we need to do is to have a great relationship with our bodies.

And the way that we do that is we begin a conversation.

If you think about how you developed your best relationships,

You didn't just say hello at once and then,

You know,

How you doing and then say goodbye.

You had more and more intimate conversations and you got to know each other better and better.

And this is the same way that you cultivate a relationship with your body.

And the free meditation that we've shared with you this week is a great way to get started with that.

It takes about 15 minutes and it just teaches you a technique for checking in with each part of your body and beginning to open a dialogue and finding out what kinds of messages your body has to give you and to start this relationship so that you're developing a respect for your body that helps you to make good decisions about what you give to it.

Meaning what kind of food you give it,

What kind of beverages,

And most importantly,

What kind of thoughts and self-care do you provide for your body that really wants to support you and to be there for you in everything that it is that you want.

I promise if you will start this conversation and get this relationship with your body going,

Your body will meet you more than halfway and will serve you in all the ways that you're longing for it to do so.

Today our topic is about stress.

We're going to talk all through them about our bodies and different ways of communicating with and improving on our health and obtaining our ideal weight and optimum health and really feeling good and comfortable and confident in our bodies.

Today's specific topic is about stress.

We're going to talk about what stress is,

What kind of effects it has on your body and on your life,

And most importantly,

What you can do about it.

What is stress?

I love the way Wayne Dyer talks about stress.

It really doesn't exist.

It's not something you can go out to the store and buy.

It's not something you can go pick up off the ground.

It doesn't grow anywhere.

Stress is only a response within the human mind and body to outside stimulation.

And just like every other circumstance,

You can't be caused stress or fear or anxiety by anything outside of yourself without your permission.

When you are learning to manage your perspective and manage the way that you are responding to things,

Then this is the way that you go about managing stress.

Your amazing body is completely and totally equipped to help you survive in a very hostile environment.

To illustrate this point,

I want you to imagine that it's 30,

000 years ago and you have left your tribe around the morning campfire and gone off to gather some berries to add to your morning breakfast.

And suddenly you hear the unmistakable sound of a saber-toothed tiger.

Now before you can even turn your head to look and make sure that what you heard is what you thought you heard,

Your body has already started to react,

Has already started to prepare you to either fight or to flee.

What this means is that all non-essential functions for your survival for the next two minutes are shut down.

There's no food being digested.

There is no growth hormone being secreted.

There are no sex hormones being secreted.

Anything that your body doesn't need for the next two minutes is out of here.

In the meantime,

Your liver dumps glucose into your blood system.

All kinds of hormones start getting enacted like cortisol and adrenaline and epo-adrenaline.

You can look up,

If you love scientific terms,

All of the hormonal responses that happen in your body,

But your blood actually begins to get thick and sticky in case you get wounded.

It's already preparing to clot and save you from bleeding to death.

Your body's remarkable.

And your blood leaves your vital organs,

Heads to your arms and your legs to give you the energy and the up that you need to either fight or flee.

And your face will become either flushed or white.

You've seen people's face drain with fear.

This is your body pulling blood away from the surface of your skin so that if you are cut,

If you're slashed by that saber-toothed tiger,

Then you're less likely to bleed out because there's not as much blood at the surface of your skin.

So all of these essential functions are amazing for you in the short term.

After your encounter with the saber-toothed tiger,

You're either going to win and survive and have a great story to tell back at the campfire,

Or you're going to lose and become breakfast for the saber-toothed tiger.

But either way,

It's over.

And within 20 to 60 minutes,

Assuming you survived,

Your body will return to its normal state.

Now,

The problem is that in our modern world,

We are perceiving threats to our survival all the time that aren't.

And so our bodies are staying in this heightened state of fear and fight or flight with too much cortisol,

With too little hormonal activity,

Too little digestion,

Too much fear response happening when there really is no fear present.

So what we do about this is,

First of all,

We begin to manage our perspective so that we can go,

Oh,

OK,

Body,

Everything's OK.

Our survival is not at stake here.

Just because the boss is yelling at us and we might lose our job,

That doesn't mean we're going to die.

Getting our responses back into proportion with what is actually happening is one step towards managing stress.

Now another way of looking at stress is that it's not the stress itself that is so bad for you,

But how you perceive stress.

Now there was a really interesting study that Sean Aker,

One of my favorite teachers,

Will always talk about.

He is a teacher of positive psychology.

But he talks about how there was a study where there were two groups of people and one of them was told the standard line.

Stress is a killer.

Stress will shorten your life.

It will cause heart disease.

It will cause high blood pressure,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

All of the things that we are all told about how stress affects us,

We're told to one half of this group.

The other half we're told,

Stress is actually good for you.

Stress is just an opportunity for you to look at challenges,

For you to grow,

For you to learn something,

For you to expand your way of thinking and expand your perspective and find different ways of navigating throughout the course of your life,

Which is good for you.

And it strengthens your mind and your capability and your neurons and all these great things.

So in this study,

They expected that the people who were told that stress is good for you would have less stress.

But that wasn't what happened.

Everyone still had the same amount of stress.

But the group that was told that stress was good for you did not have the negative physiological markers of the group that was told that stress is bad for you.

Instead of saying,

Ah,

I'm so stressed out.

My life is driving me crazy.

Say,

Ah,

My life is stressful.

This is awesome.

This is a great chance for me to learn something new.

This is a great chance for me to become a different version of myself,

A better version of myself,

The type of person that faces challenges as challenges and overcomes them and accepts the kudos and the pride of having overcome that challenge.

This is something that you can do in any moment.

You can set a timer on your watch to go off every hour and just let that be your check-in time.

Okay,

What's going on in my body right now?

Is my jaw clenched in fear?

Am I breathless?

Is my heart racing?

Am I allowing my surroundings,

My circumstances to cause physiological responses and emotional responses that I don't have to,

That don't serve me?

And then how could I look at this differently?

How could I look at what is happening in this moment in a different way so that my perspective serves me instead of harms me?

Stress is an invention of the modern world.

It's a word that we created and it is unavoidable.

But the way that you look at it is completely and totally up to you and you can manage this.

We are going to talk about some other stress management and self-care rituals as we go throughout the month,

But meditation is a really,

Really good one.

This free Connecting with Your Body meditation,

I strongly encourage you to go and get that,

Download it,

And just listen to it for a few days.

And every day and see how it makes you feel.

And if you commit to 30 days of spending just 15 minutes each morning connecting with your body,

I promise you at the end of 30 days you will have a much stronger,

More intimate,

More familiar relationship with your body and you'll be able to hear the voice of your body better than ever before.

Until next Tuesday,

Remember that happiness is a choice and you can always choose to be happy first.

Thanks so much for being here.

I'll see you next week.

Reviews

Great advice. Thank you.