Out Think, and Rethink Stress.

The purpose of the series of webinars I did in 2023, was to help us all go from goal setting to goal getting. It all started with my New Year's resolution to inspire more people to self-health responsibility and more self-peace, because I believe the more at peace we are as individuals the more likely we are to actually bring about some kind of World Peace.

So today, let’s learn how to Out Think, and Rethink Stress.

What we’ll cover today:

· stress anxiety depression

· resilience

· grit

· then something better

· and then we're going to talk about lemonade

· and the upside of stress

· and 16 years younger in five minutes

Recap on some previous related webinars

Webinar 18: Routines and Habits of Excellence

“Up to 90 percent of our everyday behaviour is based on habit”

Jack D. Hodge– author of The Power of Habit

So if you are permanently feeling stressed, it probably has a lot to do with your habits. And your habits and routines can change, so your stress can change too.

Watch Routines and Habits of Excellence to Learn the Mental Skills needed to overcome the mental barriers that trip you up, to perform at your highest level, even when its hard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qLuHoA5foM

While today, we’ll talk some more about how to change habits, and also WHAT habits to implement.

Webinar 14 we spoke about Stress Awareness Month & Elite Mindset

https://youtu.be/TR6MpXebK2Q?si=0B_FuvI2EkxReJxu

Building a mindset to help you feel on top of the world, 10 feet tall and Bulletproof. So to help with that I talk about the Mental Performance Mastery program, where Elite Mindset is the very first pillar, and I'm an MPM certified coach.

So we talk about motivation and commitment, focus and awareness, self-control and discipline, process over outcome, meditation and mental imagery, routines and habits of excellence, which we covered last time, time management and organization, leadership, and the right culture, all of these things will help massively decrease stress in yourself and if you run a business in your business when you implement all these tools

Mental Performance Mastery

1. Elite Mindset

2. Motivation & Commitment

3. Focus & Awareness

4. Self-Control & Discipline

5. Process over Outcome

6. Meditation & Mental Imagery

7. Routines & Habits of Excellence

8. Time Management & Organization

9. Leadership

10. The Right Culture

Webinar 7: Heart Stress

https://youtu.be/9S2yZr5LmRY?si=XIuDhTYcGTQQpodT

Which of these is you or sounds more like you?

· Experiencing stress depletes my health and vitality.

· Experiencing stress debilitates my performance and productivity.

· Experiencing stress inhibits my learning and growth.

· The effects of stress are negative and should be avoided.

OR

· Experiencing stress enhances my performance and productivity.

· Experiencing stress improves my health and vitality.

· Experiencing stress facilitates my learning and growth.

· The effects of stress are positive and should be utilized.

Most people think of stress as generally bad, but there are probably circumstances where you actually feel more like it's positive, such as when you go to the gym. Lifting weights is the stress that causes muscles to get bigger, bigger and stronger, by actually stressing them. And how do you improve your cardiovascular fitness? By adding stress to the system. It is the same with all the other forms of stress in life. The only way that you can really grow in any aspect of life, is to provide some kind of stress to yourself.

Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It
by Kelly McGonigal

“So as we begin this journey together, I offer this conception of stress: Stress is what arises when something you care about is at stake. This definition is big enough to hold both the frustration over traffic and the grief over a loss. It includes your thoughts, emotions, and physical reactions when you’re feeling stressed, as well as how you choose to cope with situations you’d describe as stressful. This definition also highlights an important truth about stress: Stress and meaning are inextricably linked. You don’t stress about things you don’t care about, and you can’t create a meaningful life without experiencing some stress.”

“The latest science reveals that stress can make you smarter, stronger, and more successful. It helps you learn and grow. It can even inspire courage and compassion.

The new science also shows that changing your mind about stress can make you healthier and happier. How you think about stress affects everything from your cardiovascular health to your ability to find meaning in life. The best way to manage stress isn’t to reduce or avoid it, but rather to rethink and even embrace it”

So again I'll quote that again…. “Stress is what arises when something you care about is at stake… You don’t stress about things you don’t care about, and you can’t create a meaningful life without experiencing some stress.”

The Heart Math Institute ‘Depletion to Renewal Plan’.

Anxiety and anger are states of high energy just like happiness and excitement. So if you're feeling anxious or anger try and realise they are actually close to happiness and excitement, because it’s probably something you care about. So what are you excited about when you're angry? When you're anxious what are you getting excited about? Can you even slightly change from being on the cortisol/stressed/negative side to the DHEA/love/positive side?

Sadness, apathy and depression are low levels of energy, similar to containment and serenity. So you can, when you do the right things, trick your nervous system into producing a different hormone and this is what many of the Heart Math Institute tools are about.

So if you want to learn more about that reach out we can get on a coaching program.

Back to the Upside of Stress where Kelly McGonigal talks about the challenge response.

The Challenge Response

“Like a fight-or-flight response, a challenge response gives you energy and helps you perform under pressure. Your heart rate still rises, your adrenaline spikes, your muscles and brain get more fuel, and the feel-good chemicals surge. But it differs from a fight-or-flight response in a few important ways: You feel focused but not fearful. You also release a different ratio of stress hormones, including higher levels of DHEA, which helps you recover and learn from stress. This raises the growth index of your stress response, the beneficial ratio of stress hormones that can determine, in part, whether a stressful experience is strengthening or harmful…”

So how you frame and think about stress and situations can be controlled if you plan everything correctly, for instance by using a goal setting process called WOOP which I have mentioned before. [2024 note – I’ve learned more tools based on the Navy SEAL training in the Unbeatable Mind coaching program].

Learning how to reframe and rethink stress is very important as that leads to what chemicals you produce and how you learn from each stressful event.

Science tells us that stress is most likely to be harmful when three things are true:

1. You feel inadequate to it; [solutions in webinar 14]

2. It isolates you from others; [solutions in webinar 1]

3. It feels utterly meaningless and against your will. [solutions in webinar 1]

In Webinar 1, we covered a lot about meaning and how to seek meaning and find meaning in the moment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg1lHE_gM40

As we've seen, how you think about stress feeds into each one of the three harmful factors and if you build your mental resilience, build your mindset, and learn how to think differently about isolation and meaning you will automatically decrease the harmful stress you're under.

So this I shared in Webinar 1:

Meaning of Life – Three Domains

Cognitive – Sense of Coherence – ‘I matter’

Motivation – Purpose in Life – ‘What I do matters’

Affective (Significance) – Engagement in Life – ‘Life Matters’

There are different levels of meaning and you can get meaning from each level and you can give anything meaning even when you don't think it has meaning to begin with.

Watch the webinar for more, and here’s one of the quotes that I used from Mother Theresa:

“The greatest disease in the west today is not TB or leprosy covid it's being unwanted unloved and uncared for we can cure physical diseases with this medicine to a point um but the only cure for loneliness Despair and hopelessness is love there are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying or a little love.”

This is one of the things that I think is so important we realize about health, it's not just about Pills and Potions, it's not just about eating healthy, it's not just about exercising, it's about having greater awareness of what's happening in the world, and what we as individuals can do to help the world by helping ourselves. It goes both ways.

Hormesis

Building your ability to cope with stress is resilience, and the term hormesis refers to the science of ‘whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger’.

To quote an article from Nature.com:

“Hormesis refers to adaptive responses of biological systems to moderate environmental or self-imposed challenges through which the system improves its functionality and/or tolerance to more severe challenges.”

‘Challenges’ it's a better word than stress.

Hormesis builds your ability to cope with any stress. There are forms of hormesis like exercise, and when you exercise you switch stress off, soak up stress hormones and as you push yourself to tough limits you become more resilient to stress.

Saunas are a form of heat hormesis. Again it helps you cope with more stress and feel less stressed in your life.

Cold showers are something anyone can do quite easily. Cold exposure when it's controlled helps you feel more resistant to stress and it also improves your immune system

Breath holding. Again very easy to do. There's the Wim Hof method for instance (something I used to do a lot of).

Certain herbs and spices that are good for us, are hormetic stressors. That means that they cause tiny amounts of chemical stress, or stimulate specific biochemical pathways that our body associates with stress, so it responds by getting stronger in some way.

You can now see there are all kinds of techniques, tools and habits that you can use to make yourself more resilient to stress. As you make yourself stronger in one area it improves resilience in other areas too. So a cold shower can actually make you more resistant to emotional and mental stress , and improving mental and emotional tolerance can make you tolerate more exercise. Heat can make you tolerate more exercise and more mental and emotional stress. The right herbs and spices also help in all areas.

There’s more you can do for hormesis and one of the best places to learn more about that is the Energy Blueprint by Ari Whitten or my ‘Anti-Ageing - 7 Weeks to a Younger You’ course.

Now this brings us to a guy called Tom Morris who I'm fortunate enough to be a friend with now on Facebook.

Tom Morris has a joint PhD from Yale in Religious Studies and Philosophy, one of the most popular professors at Notre Dame and, at one point he was the official Disney spokesman for Winnie the Pooh!

You may have read the ‘Tao of Pooh’ and the ‘Te of Piglet’, a couple of popular books in their day about philosophy based on the sayings of Winnie the Pooh, but Tom Morris is a real philosopher.

He has written many books, including Philosophy for Dummies, Stoicism for Dummies, and the much shorter Plato's Lemonade Stand.

“This book will offer a practical philosophy for how to flex and innovate your way forward in the face of life’s irritations, shocks, defeats, disappointments, heartaches, and failures. The good news is that we’ve long had some profound advice on how to deal with the vast range of difficulties we face. It’s as succinct as it is vivid and memorable:

When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”

and it goes on …

“… In the face of a real tragedy, you may think it to be ridiculously trite, or even glib. But it’s not at all. Beneath the simple surface image of the advice, there are great depths to be explored and powerful insights to be used. It actually captures a profound philosophy of life.

And yet there’s a basic problem with the popular adage. Nearly everyone says it, but no one says how. Nobody tells us exactly, or even remotely, how to do what’s so vividly recommended. This book will solve that problem, providing guidance from some of the wisest people who have ever lived”

So what does this mean?

It means that people can say ‘When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade’, but how do you practically turn something sour into something sweet?

Grit and Resilience

“I agree that both resilience and grit are indeed vital characteristics needed for any challenging success in our time, as they have been in every other era. But the old adage about lemonades is particularly interesting because it hints at something more.

We’re not told that when life hands us lemons, we should just bounce back emotionally and regain our poise, or that we should perhaps instead grit our teeth and persist in soldiering on despite the sour fruit. It makes a rather radical suggestion that we should do something that involves a transformation, and one that results in much more than the simply tolerable. It doesn’t just help us put pain into the past. It urges us on to use our difficulty to create an outcome that’s even delightful.”

Antifragility

A new concept. Beyond resilience. Taking the stress and turning it into fuel.

I first came across Tom Morris and Plato’s Lemonade Stand on the Heroic.US app and website, created by another living philosopher, Brian Johnson.

And these are Brian Johnson's words in his notes about Tom’s book:

“Resilience. Grit. Bouncing back when we get knocked down. Those are obviously wonderful qualities. Yet… They’re not quite enough.

We need a word for the OPPOSITE of fragile.

Note: It’s *not* resilient.

It’s ANTIFRAGILE.

As we’ve discussed countless times (I promise to keep coming back to this idea as it’s SO IMPORTANT), when we’re fragile, we break. When we’re resilient, we can sustain more challenges (before breaking then bouncing back).

BUT…

What if we could actually GET STRONGER every time life kicks us around?

We’d be ANTIfragile.

When life gives us lemons, we’d make lemonade.”

This is what so many of the world's most resilient leaders do: they just keep on bouncing back and getting stronger and better because they are antifragile.

They don't break and shatter, they break and get stronger.

Forging an anti-fragile confidence is Objective 2 in the Heroic Protocol and so yes you can join Heroic you can join go through the 300-day coaching program with Heroic, or you can have a ‘Heroic Coach’ such as myself take you through it and build you a more personalised plan or program.

Heroic Protocol

1. Objective I: Know the Ultimate Game

2. Objective II: Forge Antifragile Confidence

3. Objective III: Optimize Your Big 3

4. Objective IV: Make Today a Masterpiece

5. Objective V: Master Yourself

6. Objective VI: Dominate the Fundamentals

7. Objective VII: Activate Your Soul Force

As well as the coaching program Heroic has an app that comes in both free and premium versions.

The app is designed to keep you on track with ‘optimising’ your life. Even using the free version for 30 days has been shown to improve your energy levels, make you more productive and more connected with others … and less stressed.

30 day Free Trial of Premium Heroic App - https://www.heroic.us/optimize/letsgo?fpr=peace

1 Billion People With Mental Health Issues

Forging antifragility worldwide can help lessen the mental health burden.

Anxiety and depression increased by 25% in the first year of covid 19. The enforced isolation was a mistake on many levels, which I did point out in my early COVID-19 blogs.

Beating ‘mental health’ worldwide is not about more drugs, it's about changing how we adapt to things and this is something that is missing massively from the health services of the world.

Depression is the world’s leading cause of disability.

So what can you do to instantly feel better if you are depressed or anxious?

If you’ve watched some of my other webinars already, you'll know that the right kind of breathing can have an incredible effect right away.

It’s all about ‘changing your state’.

It's hard to feel depressed when you're looking at yourself in the mirror and smiling. Even a fake smile can change how you're feeling. It's also hard to feel depressed if you sit up straight or start jumping around and listening to your favourite music.

While there are very simple ways to do it, practising changing your state is something that you want to do every day so that when you need it it's easy to do. It's a skill just like playing tennis. You can't one day appear on Centre Court at Wimbledon and expect to beat who's against you. You've got to put in the practice.

This is why having Routines and Habits of Excellence, that you practice and track daily (with something like the Heroic App) is fantastic because you're training for the hard times.

The Nervous System

The autonomic nervous system is the part of our nervous system that basically controls everything that we don't have to think about: so our organs, hormones, digestion, breathing all these sorts of things.

A measurement that can give us an idea of how well your autonomic nervous system is working is heart rate variability or HRV for short.

While smart watches do a very basic HRV measurement, I use something more sophisticated with my clients in the clinic.

This is my heart rate variability (see the video) it's going smoothly up and down in a sine wave and lots of 100% scores.

Poor HRV is linked to poor general health, including depression.

There are many ways to help improve your HRV, but here’s one you may not immediately think of: chiropractic.

Something that is rarely spoken about, even in chiropractic circles, is the success of the chiropractic mental asylums. When I was at chiropractic college in the 1990’s there was ONE lecture about this important topic, but now it’s not taught at all.

Delving into the history of them revealed of all kinds of amazing things happening to people with stuff like schizophrenia, depression, anxiety and even ‘insanity’ by basically giving them clean living and regular chiropractic adjustments six times a day.

The main treatment was an adjustment to the top bone of the neck, in a very specific way that was very, very, safe, called a ‘toggle recoil’.

So what is the effect of regular spinal care on HRV, in my clinic?

16 years younger in just five minutes - see the video from about 25 minutes for more before and after readings.

My point here is that the right kind of adjustments done at the right time in the right way will dramatically reduce the amount of stress your nervous system is under and help you feel a whole lot better.

There is a link between the spine the brain the nervous system and when you adjust the spine it has effects on the brain and is usually beneficial and gets things working better in multiple ways such as improved blood flow for instance.

So what causes spinal dysfunction?

All kinds of different stress.

Physical stress like being in car accident, or if you've fallen over, or if you just sit all day, or if you sit slumped in your sofa at the end of the day watching TV.

Chemical stresses. Are you eating properly? Without the right raw material from food, you can not repair yourself. Some foods cause allergies, which can cause muscle tension that pulls your spine out of place.

Emotional stress: this is a major cause of neck tension that then puts pressure on the top joint in the spine – which then makes you more stressed!

How common is spinal dysfunction at the top of the neck?

Dr Gutman in Germany examined a thousand infants and found problems with 80 per cent of them. And when the spinal dysfunction was corrected, other health issues improved.

Many people have spinal issues without neck or back pain, and therefore benefit with spinal care.

This is not saying that everybody is going to feel the benefits of spinal care, but a lot of people may be surprised at how good they feel when their spine is moving and when it's kept moving on a regular basis.

Time to warp up, and urge you to action with one of my favourite quotes by Jiddu Krishnamurti:

“It is no measure of Health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”

This is pretty much what we are at the moment – a sick society - and we need to make some changes.

It's up to you to decide to get healthier, it's not up to the government, it's not up to the NHS and it's not up to the pharmaceutical companies.

It's up to you to decide how you live your life and whether you do something on a daily basis to make yourself healthier or whether you do something on a daily basis to make yourself sicker and closer to taking more drugs.

Its up to you to decide whether or not you want to adopt The Magnificent Seven Health Strategies I share in almost every video I do:

1. Think right

2. Talk right (communication inside our body, and with others)

3. Drink right

4. Eat right

5. Move right

6. Detoxify and

7. Sleep right

These all help protect your brain, your body and your bowels so you become a truly healthy individual.

It's up to you to implement the Fantastic Functional Three of functional movement, functional nutrition and functional thought (or as I now prefer - functional philosophy) in your daily life.

And you can do that with the Heroic Protocol you can adopt the 10 pillars of Mental Performance Mastery.

And if “You don't stress about things you don't care about, and you can't create a meaningful life without experiencing some stress”, so start rethinking your stress and who knows what your life may be like.

If you like my help reach out uh either through:

www.beatbloodpressure.com or www.bodyinbalanceuk.com

You can reply to the emails or call on 01707 662 704.