The Weird List - Stress

Speaker A: Hey, hey. It's the Playbook and it's Jason Thompson. We are on season number 11. We're calling this one the Weird List. And the whole idea is to look at advice that we have been given for a lot of things that we have been, you know, trying to get better at in their careers, in our lives and giving it a twist, trying to look at it in a, uh, different way. We recently did an episode called the Life List, which is sort of an owner's manual that you can have not only for other people, but for yourself to be able to understand how you can deal with things. Today. Well, today we're going to talk about something that seems to be, uh, just on the rise for everybody. I mean, how many times do you wake up in the morning or the middle of the night and you're like, I'm stressed? You know, there is a lot that's going on. Our economy is doing bad things. Our, uh, world has all sorts of bad things happening to it. Things that are keeping us up, things that are costing us work, things that are freaking us out. Stress. And. Well, here's the question. How are you dealing with the stress? Like a lot of people that, uh, I talk to, and this is anecdotal, of course, on a day to day basis. Not so well, not so well. We are kind of reverting to a lot of the things that we do when things aren't great, we don't think about it. And this is always my first piece of advice to anybody. Whenever you have some large scale persistent thing that, that is pebble in your shoe, if you will, is actually think about what you're doing, how you're responding, how you're getting forward. Today, what we're gonna talk about is we're gonna talk about four things. We're gonna talk about stuff that doesn't work when it comes to stress. We're gonna talk about the importance of doing the simple stuff. Cause the simple stuff oftentimes is incredibly effective. In segment three, what we're gonna do is we're gonna talk about the outliers, like the little things that you may not have thought about, like, uh, giving or scheduling your stress. Things like that that apparently work. Uh, some of these I've tried, some of these I have not tried. And then the last time, last segment we're going to talk about is getting proactive. But let's rewind back to our first segment and talk about that idea of stuff that doesn't work. I was mentioning just a minute ago that oftentimes when we are hit with emotional stuff, stuff that. That causes us to take a perspective or a judgment on it, that we sort of revert to some stuff that we have done, stuff that's been modeled for us, stuff that, uh, we've used in the past, and most importantly, stuff that really isn't effective when you get down to it. I know this firsthand. For years, I, uh, was having extreme stress in my personal relationship. And what I would do was I would call people. I know why I did it at first, right? At first, I did it because I was shocked about what was happening in my relationship, and I wasn't sure how to deal with it. And so I would do again, what I would always do in times of difficulty, which is I would turn to friends, family, colleagues. I mean, it got pretty bad by the end there. And what I would do is I would kind of outlay this is what just happened, you know, and oftentimes when we're complaining, what we think we're doing is we're venting, which is releasing the stress we're releasing. The thing here was what was interesting for me, and it took me many years to kind of realize what was going on, and I needed that perspective of time to step back and think, oh, I didn't see that at all. Which is what I would do is I would call somebody and I would, uh, say, this happened, and blah, blah, blah, and I get all upset. And then I would hang up the phone. And that in a venting scenario, you've gotten what you want, you've got it out of you, right? You can move on. You're lifting some of the negative emotion that's happening inside of you. But what I would do is I would pick up the phone and I would talk to someone else, and it would tell them the exact same story. Here's what that's not. That is not venting. What that is, is that is trauma dumping. And what trauma dumping is, is that it is. It's got a different output. The output is. The output for venting is to release the stress. The output of trauma dumping is begging people to see you. And we'll do another show on why being seen and validated is the number one thing that a lot of human beings want in our lives. But trauma dumping does not help you get there. In fact, over time, what it does is it alienates people. The way that you get at that is to understand that, and to understand that's what you're doing is to be able to take that step back and have that Self awareness. So when I talk about stop doing the stuff that doesn't work. And really what I'm saying is stop complaining. If there's a big if there, the if is if the complaining is not serving you as a venting mechanism. So if you're stressed and you talking to somebody or talking to your partner or talking to whoever it is and getting it out of you and that release is a good thing, then that's great. I have a friend who uses anger that way. What happens is something negative happens in their day. They look for something that can like rage bait, something to get them upset, that they can fight with somebody. When they fight with somebody, it's A, a bit of a distraction and B, it's, it allows them to have what I love to call the anger gasm, right? Which is I get it out of me, it's gone. Now. Now that's not healthy for a number of other reasons. Most importantly, the people around this person, um, don't consent to the anger. It just kind of shows up and they get picked at and then the fight happens and then things blow up and it doesn't go well. That's a whole other conversation. But it is an effective tool for, for that individual. It just isn't an effective tool for all of the people around that individual. Again, something that you have to look at, stop doing the stuff that doesn't work. If complaining does not work for you, if it doesn't have an output for you. Like another friend that I've got who consistently says to me, hey, you know, this is what's going wrong, I've got to figure it out. That I always say to him, I'm gonna make a T shirt for you. He says, you gotta figure it out. And again, that complaining, uh, is not helping him in any way, shape or form. It's just a strategy. It's just a methodology that he's used for his entire life. Okay, what else doesn't work? Well, really what you want to do is at some point when you're not stressed, good luck with that. Is you want to think about your stress habits, right? What is your natural and obvious response to stress? Do you bury your head in the sand? Do you go for a run? You know, and what kind of impact is that having? Is it a positive impact on your stress? Is it a negative impact on your stress? Again, in the quiet times is a good time to build that self awareness. And that's where I got at my idea around trauma dumping, which is I kind of dissected it when it was starting to cost me friends. People don't want to talk to somebody who's going to constantly just call them up and blah, right? Particularly when they don't resolve anything. Like at some point your friends will be like, yeah, you know what? I'd love to listen to you on a difficult day. And the 73rd time that that happens, they don't want to listen to that anymore. So look at those stress habits. Take a look at what you're using, positive and negative, and say, am I complaining without resolution? Am I trauma dumping somebody? Am I anger gasming? Am I on the other side? Am I doing exercise? Have I built in medit? Am I breathing properly? All that sort of stuff is gonna help you get to where you need to get to. One other thing from a stress habit that I want to address because I see it a lot with my kids. And uh, in fact, I was in the car with one of my kids the other day and we had a chat about this, about stress, anxiety, mental health. And it's the idea of giving into it, saying that it wins. Now I've done reading, you've done reading that things like emotion, they have about 120 seconds, about two minutes, where an emotion courses through you and you actually decide on whether you're going to cling to it and turn it into a mood for the day or you're going to release it. And oftentimes what we're doing is we're clinging to it, uh, I'm in a bad mood or my mental health is not great, or I'm having a bad mental health day. And listen, there is a case to be made to say sometimes you have to let that happen. But if your only strategy for mental health is throwing up your hands or using a pharmacological solution, then you may not be, uh, taking control of this in a way that can have a positive impact for you. What I'm trying to say is don't just give in before exploring all of the potential facets about how you can look at stress, you can look at anxiety, you can look at mental health because they're all linked. When you look at all of those and say, is there anything that I can do to take the edge off of this, to resolve this entirely, in addition to other options. And what I'm doing here is I'm really being very careful not to be glib about the fact that things like depressive symptoms, depression, anxiety do need pharmacological intervention at times. It's just that's not the only solution. Shouldn't be the first solution that you take. And again, I'm speaking from a place of experience here. When I have that stress, uh, is. Are there ways that I can address that? And when we come back, we're gonna talk a little bit more about some of those things that I did do to address stress in my life. And by the way, that doesn't mean that I don't get stressed. I still can't pretty stressed at times. All right, in this first segment of the Weird List on stress, we talked about stop doing the stuff that doesn't work. And what you do to do that is in a time where you are not experiencing extreme stresses, take a step back, take a look at your stress responses, your stress habits, and say, what am I doing? And how is this serving me? And take a look at both the positive and the negative. Complaining, trauma, dumping, giving into it. Negative, positive side could also be complaining. Exercise, breathing. Look at what your responses are and how they are serving you. All right, when we get back from the break, we are going to talk about how you should do the simple and obvious stuff that you hear about all the time when it comes to stress and anxiety. Hang on, everybody. We're going to be back with more pages from the Playbook right after this. M. Hey, hey, it's Jason. It's the Playbook. It's the Weird List. This week, we are talking about stress. What are some weird and atypical and novel pieces of advice that we can use to manage our stress? And, boy, do we have a lot of stress of late. Well, in our first segment, we talked about the things that you should stop doing. Yeah, I did a whole episode earlier this season called the Stop Doing Lists, inspired by something that I saw Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, say, do you have a Stop doing list? What should that look like? Well, on your Stop doing list is stop doing the stuff that does not work to resolve your stress stuff. They're the empty calories of stress. I can't believe I didn't come up with that in the first segment. I would have been so proud of myself. Yeah, stop with the empty calories. Things like trauma, dumping, complaining, giving in to the stress if it doesn't serve you. That's the little asterisk on that first one. Because if complaining is a venting mechanism, that actually has a positive impact on you and you're not doing it as your only approach. Yeah. It might have a place for you. And we're gonna talk about stress stacks a little bit later. Second thing that you wanna do, obviously, is you want to do the non weird stuff. You wanna do the simple stuff. The stuff that you hear about constantly when it comes to managing stress. And the thing that is really important with, I think a lot of the simple stuff is you have to make it a habit or part of your stress habits in a time when you're not stressed. You got to practice it and get better at it. And I'll give you an example of the way that that works. Uh, a few years ago, I was gifted a course for a book which we have covered a number of times on the show called Positive Intelligence. There are other books, other frameworks that you can use for this one. This one worked for me. I remember them giving me this course and saying, you know, you get a coach and you show up every week and, um, so I start reading it and I'm like, oh, no, it's granola and crystals. Which, when it comes to my stress habits, does not work for me. You know, I like neuroscience stuff that feels legitimate. And I'm not saying that any of those things are not legitimate. They may very well be something that works for you. I'm not trying to be pejorative or disparaging around that. If crystals and granola work for you, awesome, fantastic. You found your path for me, neuroscience works for me. Awesome. I have found my path. So at the time, the whole thing was, uh, it was called positive intelligence. The whole thing kind of centers around this idea of PQ reps. And there are other components to the book. But I really want to focus on this idea of what a PQ rep is. Essentially, it's meditation. Essentially it's meditation in as short as two minutes. And in fact, in the course, what they say is, do these two minute meditations and do them like five or six times a day. And so for the first week I did them. And, uh, you know, at first you feel a little bit silly in rubbing your fingertips together with such intention that you can actually. Or such attention and intention that you can feel the ridges on your fingertips. Okay, great. I did that for two minutes. And that sort of thing. Now what that's doing is it's training you on mindfulness. It's training you on meditation. And I woke up a week later, like on a Monday morning. So I'd been taking the course for about a week. I'd, uh, done the first cohort a week previous. I'd done the five to six PQ reps a day, done my reading, all that sort of stuff. I woke up in the Morning. And for one of the first mornings in a long time, not only was there no anxiety, when I woke up, like, thinking, I gotta sprint and make a difference to the world, there was nothing. It was like just bliss. The joke I make is it felt like I took too Ambien. I have never taken Ambien, but I know what the idea behind it is. And it just, I was so calm. I was so, wow, this is something. So when it comes to the simple stuff, let's start with meditation. I have started to encourage this in people around me as I have dropped this habit. Just like working out, right? You got to work out, you got to keep building those muscles. Same thing with meditation. And as I've been telling some people about this week's program, in advance of the program, I'm thinking to myself, you're not meditating nearly enough, so you need to build that back into your daily habit list. The reason is meditation isn't just simply a close your eyes and relax and breathe, and don't we all feel really great? Meditation's got science. Science backs meditation to reduce stress and anxiety. There are studies after studies on this. Uh, I listened to a podcast about a year ago where a woman, you know, she had been at a conference. And in the conference, the person running the conference basically had given a presentation. It's a scientific conference on the power of meditation. And so she was like, okay, this is a person I respect. I'm going to go and look for the data. Couldn't find the data, so started doing studies. And the studies began to reveal that meditation has an actual impact long term on our stress. It doesn't simply just take us out of the moment with mindfulness. It's one step, uh, ahead. It inures you from that stress because you begin to embrace these more abstract ideas of life is judgment, life should be you being love as opposed to showing love, all that sort of stuff. There's a root there. And meditation, even something as simple as starting your day with 10 minutes of meditation before you even get out of bed, can be a powerful, powerful ally. Okay, so there's one thing meditation, you know, is an obvious choice because we hear about it all the time. And now, you know, it's an obvious choice for a reason. The second thing is, uh, breathing. You know, again, this is a good one. When the stress is starting to overload you, is how to back that off. And it's so funny. Uh, I've been watching Wonder man on Disney. It's one of the Marvel Universe's pieces. It features Ben Kingsley. And Kingsley has a, you know, he's not the primary character, uh, in the show. The primary character experiences a lot of stress and he outputs it in a, well, let's call it a toxic way, right? He's a superhero who can basically, you know, make things blow up when he's stressed, right? Like he's just like everything around him starts to vibrate and kaboom. There's a scene where he teaches Ben Kingsley teaches the character named Simon. He teaches Simon box breathing. And you know, box breathing. Again, it's a component that I first crossed with yoga. And really what box breathing is, is it's a, um, it's breathe for five seconds. Like inhale for five seconds or three seconds or four seconds. I think I've always done four seconds. Breathe in for four, hold for four, breathe out for four, hold for four. Now, um, Ben Kingsley in, he has a coaster like a, like a, at a bar. So a square coaster. So he uses it like he runs his finger across the top. He says, breathe in for 5 seconds, 4 seconds. And then runs it down the side. Hold it. Then runs his finger along the bottom and then runs it up the top, uh, up the side, again the other side. So the idea is he makes a square, right? That's what box breathing is. It's a square. I've taken way too long to explain a really simple concept as complexly as I possibly could. Box breathing. It's a box. 1, 2, 3, 4. You breathe in, you hold, you breathe out, you hold. There you go. There you go. That's the easiest sort of thing. Now breathing works and it really works in a moment when you are stressed. Because here's the thing around a lot of stress is. Stress is a game of the mind, right? I really playing with this idea that lately that we are, we are computers, right? As human beings, we are computers and as computers, what we do, there is a way to program us. It's a weird way. It's a bit different than you might think. The logic system doesn't necessarily apply all of the time, but in the computers, this is one of the things that you can actually do, is remove you from the moment. Because the thing is that stress often is a judgment call. And what I mean by that is things happen. How we feel about those things is where the stress begins to rise. And again, we could probably get into this. This is a two beer fight, right? Like you just, you have a couple of beers and you chat it over. But, um, you can have some control over some of the things that happen in your life on which you put stress. I know for me, last year, you know, every day I woke up and I was thinking, oh, my gosh, like, my business is in trouble. And my business wasn't in trouble. It just, I felt it was and I was creating that stress. So having the box breathing can help a lot. Again, when something is really, really overpowering you, that box breathing can take you out of the moment, because ultimately that's what you're trying to do. You are trying to take yourself out of that moment so that you can deal with things that are around you. A couple of more simple things. Exercise. It's a proactive winner, right? Walk more. Simple. Walk more. Get a dog. That's what I did when I wasn't walking. I remember like 2017, 2018, I would sit in my chair all day and then I got a dog. Um, I didn't just get a dog. I got a Whip it right? And whippets. They ask for some exercise. We do when the spring is here. We do about 5k a day in addition to the lifting and the yoga and the other stuff that I've been doing. But I've been making exercise. Not just a nice to have or a, uh, thing to do at the beginning or the end of the day, but it's a huge component of my day now, and I'm hopeful that I can maintain that. That's the big area that I'm at right now is sustain what you're doing. Exercise will lift because like I said, we're all those computers, we have those chemicals running, those neurochemicals running through us. Dopamine, adrenaline, cortisone, you know, all that stuff when it's in a good place, can actually really drive you forward. Exercise will be something positive that you can get to. I talked about the life list on a whole show a couple of weeks ago. This is another simple thing that you can do. Go back to the show. It's your operating manual. What you can do and what's not in the life list. Currently, what I'll probably add is a stress ritual. What do you do when you are stressed to kind of de escalate things? Last two things on the list are two obvious ones, but we don't pay nearly enough attention to it. I've been a big proponent of sleep for years. I've started to get sleep trackers. Like, I have one of those smart rings. I have a smart watch. And it was. Surprised me, surprised me that my sleep is not as it's more fitful. Than I, uh, anticipated, and I started to deconstruct why. So if I eat after like 6.30pm, if I exercise after 6pm I am going to have a very difficult time falling asleep or staying asleep. So, you know, understanding your diet really helps. If you're really into it, you can ditch the alcohol, which is a depressant and is going to cause actually more stress than it's worth at times. It does take the edge off in the moment. It's going to mean that you're not going to sleep well. Same thing with sugar. You know, again, we've heard a ton of stuff about non natural sugars and the kind of impact it has. I'm working on that one. That one's a little bit tougher. And then timing when you eat. I picked up intermittent fasting a few years ago. It works for me. And again, that's going to be the big piece of advice that I'm going to give throughout the entire show today is do what works for you. Um, because I can time what I can eat. What it does is it helps me control my weight. So it's a calorie deficit issue. And it allows me to know if I eat too late, I'm not going to sleep well. So what do we do? In this one, we talked about doing the simple stuff. Meditation, breathing, exercise, build yourself a life list, get a handle on your sleep. Again, probably a whole show we're gonna do. And of course, think about your diet, because when you eat and how you eat is going to impact your stress levels. Being that proactive person gonna make a difference. When we come back, we're gonna talk about the outliers, the not simple stuff that you can do or the stuff that you're not actually thinking about that can make a difference. Hang on, everybody. We're going to be back with more pages from the Playbook right after this. Welcome back to the Playbook is Jason. We're talking weird list, we're talking stress, and in the first couple of segments, we talk about stopping the stuff that does not work for you when it comes to stress. Really what I'm inviting you to do is to actually be aware about what's happening in your head and then doing the simple, obvious, and often recommended stuff like meditation, breathing, and getting a handle on sleep. So now that we know all of that stuff, let's look at the other side of that same coin, which are some of the outliers. And the first thing that I want to talk about is this idea of giving it a personality and the first time I heard about this. Again, back to my favorite little book there. Positive Intelligence was if you can give the thing around you a Persona, you can deal with it as if it's a person. So give your stress a personality, right? Oh, there goes the stress. Give it a name. There goes Dave, right? Don't pick on somebody named Dave. Ultimately, what you're looking for here is you are looking to give it a face. Because if you can give it a face, you can deal with it. What's the old line? If you can name it, you can tame it, and you can remove some of the power of the stress. I have personally not tried this. I have had someone else try it. So I have another friend who suffers, um, with anxiety. And when I see that anxiety show up, I will call that Persona out by name in that moment. And you know what? About 40% of the time, it works. It actually de escalates. We can laugh or we can understand what's really going on. Being that metacognitive, being that aware about what's going on around you at any given time, when you peel back the layers, right, you think you're having a fight, but what's really happening is the other person is stressed about something and, and you really need to deal with that. Well, rather than doing the distraction thing, which is what we often do, and instead addressing the root cause, bam, you got some good stuff going on there. So give it a personality. I've talked about the second idea a couple of times on the show, which is the pause. Uh, philosopher Viktor Frankl talked about the idea of the pause being the single greatest piece of power that we have as human beings, which is when something happens, take a moment, take it in, don't react with brute force trauma. Because that's the whole idea, right? Is we see something on social media, uh, one of our political leaders does something we don't like, and so we make sure that we tell the world, and then we invite people. Because it's the way social media works is people will then react to that, which will cause us to react to that, which will devolve pretty quickly into some ugly conversation. Uh, occasionally it goes the other way, right? But that's when we take that time to be responsive and to build in a sense of what that response can look like. Meaning, you know, you begin with the phrase. You know, I've thought about this for a while. I looked at your post. I saw it for a while, but more often than not, it's the other way. It's like you're A jerk and you're an idiot and I'm unfriending you immediately. Having the pause will help you. And uh, obviously it doesn't just help you on social media, it helps you in life too. So if somebody says something that you don't like that causes an emotional or stress or anxiety or a mental health response is take a beat, breathe, go back to that breathing for a second, let it land. If it's landing negatively, ask yourself internally, what's really going on inside of me? Did they just trigger an emotional response, an identity response? Read the book Difficult Conversations and uh, it'll tell you a lot about all of that sort of stuff. So the pause can be really, really powerful because it allows you to take that control of your stress. And in a way that's what we're looking for. We're looking for control over the things that we do not like in our day. Two more things that you can try here. The first one is schedule your stress again. I haven't tried this one out, but I might, which is you reserve some time, let's say 15 minutes at 6pm every night. In the same way that you've got a workout, you are going to freak out for 15 minutes. And I've seen versions of this in media, you know, where people like, they will take time and they will cry. I believe there was a episode of Shrinking this season where they talk about it might have been this season or last season where they actually take time for grief, right? So I'm gonna put all of my grief into this simple time. I'm gonna feel the way that I need to feel about it and then I'm gonna let it go for the rest of the day. Conceptually. That sounds really interesting. In fact, I, uh, was telling a friend of mine about this idea and they said, well, does it work? I don't know, let's find out. Maybe I'm gonna find out, give you a little bit of an update, schedule your stress. The last one is one that I did take from our show on the Life list. Again, I find as a writer and a content creator, I spend a lot of time coming up with ideas, hacks, shortcuts, things that you can understand. And the one that I'm very proud of right now is there's two of them. One is the one about us being kind of computers with a weird operating system. The other one is building the drop down list, box of responses. So think about, you know, you're in Microsoft Word or Excel or PowerPoint, right? And you go up to the font. You want to choose a font. So there's a little box at the top of the screen with a down facing area. Click the down facing arrow and there's 7347 different fonts. Typefaces. Right? We'll have a font typeface conversation in a different episode. So that is a drop down list box. It's a box. It drops down and there are choices on it. What I'm trying to say is when it comes to your stress or anxiety, build the individual elements, put them in your own dropdown list box of responses to when you do have stress and use it. I'm going to give this a name. I'm going to do it right here. I came up with this last night as I was working on the script for the show. I call it a stress stack, which is what are the pieces you can put together in a stressful situation. Now obviously I'm talking about stress in a very generic way meaning hey, you can have all of these responses but in truth stress has a bajillion different flavors. And understanding what the cause of the stress means, you're going to choose the appropriate drop down list box. So is the box breathing thing going to help you when you're on stage and you're panicking because you've forgotten what's on your next slide? It might not be the best place for the box breathing thing, right? That might be where you have a warm cup of coffee nearby and you touch it and again that's your mindfulness moment. Build a drop down list box of ah, scenarios for like very present stress. That's public. Very present stress is private. Um, and then long form gnawing stress. That's public and private. Again, I'm making this up in real time, but the idea is your stress stack is a group of responses that you will pull from to try and reduce things. Maybe you know, again, if it's a non critical moment of stress, uh, that you need to deal with or that you want to deal with, it's just gnawing at you all day. You go for a walk, right? If it's a very present group of stress that you've got in real time, but you're not in a public setting, right? You're backstage waiting to get on stage and you're nervous. And I have done this, you do the box breathing, right? So building your stress stack, that is the one thing that you're going to do at the end of the day today. So I'm giving you like 35 or odd uh, insights and approaches that you can take to stress. And what you're going to do is you're going to put them all together in your stress stack and in your stress stack, you're going to have a drop down list of responses. Okay, so let's reverse engineer this. Let's back all of this up and say, what are we going to do? Well, in this segment where we talked about the weird stuff, the outliers, you're going to build a stress stack. And in building that stress stack, those are the individual elements that you're going to use in a specific type of scenario. You are going to have a dropdown list box of 5, 6, 10 things that you can do at any given time to manage the stress. And then how are you going to deal with this over the long term? You're going to schedule your stress. You have a time of day where you're like, no, I don't have time for you right now, but I will, I will. At 6pm today, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to hulk a maniac, this sort of thing, and then grab, uh, a sledgehammer in the backyard and break bricks. I'm going to scream, I'm going to cry, whatever that looks like for you. You're going to get good at the pause and we're going to talk a little bit about this idea, about the hard part, doing it consistently in the last one, and that idea of giving it a personality. You want to take the power away from stress, make it a person and then laugh at that person or deal with that person or dismiss that person. Whatever that looks like for you, make that real. All right, when we get back, we're going to talk about being proactive. Hang on, everybody. We're de stressing here in the pages of the Playbook. Hey, hey. Welcome back to the Playbook. It's Jason. It's the Weird List. We're talking about stress this week. In our first three segments, we have done a dive onto a bunch of tactics. In segment one, we talked about stop doing stuff that doesn't work. Stuff like complaining and trauma dumping if it doesn't work for you. In the second segment, we talk about doing the simple stuff, meditation, breathing and diet, among other things. Last time around, we talked about the outliers, doing stuff that's weird or different or unique. And in that list, I talked about the idea of building a stress stack, which is an automated sense of responses that you create. Now to build a stress stack, which is really a proactive approach. So I'm bridging last segment and next segment. Now it's a proactive approach to your stress, which is you can actually deal with stress before it's stress. And a stress stack can help you get there, which is what do you do when you're calm, to kind of stay calm, all of that sort of stuff. So the key there is to have that sense of awareness and to take the time. So if stress is something that is present enough in your life that you need to deal with it, then what you need to do is dun, dun, dun, deal uh, with it and the way that you deal with it. A lot about what we talked about in the first three segments. If stress is not present or if you'd like it to be less present in your day, there's stuff you can do. You can get proactive, which means you can be preventive. It's not preventative, it's preventive. You can get preventive around the way that you deal with stress. So there's obviously the key stuff, right? We go back to our idea of the obvious thing. So meditation and exercise and diet and sleep. Those four meditation, exercise, diet, sleep. And you might be able to argue that supplements help or a, uh, theragun helps. These are all things that I'm building into my life slowly but surely to make it better. In fact, I've just given myself an idea for another episode of the Weird List, but I digress. So getting proactive, yes. Exercise, yes. Meditation, yes. Sleep, yes. Better diet. And again, that can include caffeine, it could include alcohol, uh, it could include sugar. Uh, I'm working out what works for me. You should work out what works for you. Yeah, that'd be a great idea. Couple of other things when you can get proactive action. Somebody, I don't know who, said this to me and I really wish I could give them credit, but the line was action annihilates anxiety. So for me one of the things that happened was I started on this heart medication a couple years ago, made me sleepy. I started to nap more. Not only did I start to nap more, but I started doing non productive things which in of itself is great. At 2pm when you have a deadline, maybe not so great, but I would have. The nap that started at 15 minutes was now getting up to a couple of hours of going offline, playing the dumb little uh, video games on my iPad, watching a show, all this sort of stuff that for years as a freelancer I said I never do this, I never watch TV during the day. Suddenly I was doing during the day, and then I was getting nihilistic. And then my, my motivation, you know, like, it's just a slippery slope. And so you going the other way is get up. What I say to myself is, get the bleep up, right? So that I can do that. This morning, this morning that I, uh, recorded the, uh, to record the show, like, I knew I had to be up by a certain time and I literally said get up. To go and sit at my desk and make all of that happen. Action annihilates anxiety. That one works for me a lot. Right? Because when you get into action, what you're really doing is, first of all, you're getting stuff done. So you're feeling, remember that computer? You're feeling those neurochemicals starting on the rise. You're feeling the dopamine feeling really good because you feel accomplished. At, uh, the same time, it's also distraction. And I'd be really interested to find somebody who's an expert on this idea of distraction, on whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. But like I say, everything is distraction from death, right? Your career, distraction from death. And if you ever want to feel small in the universe, really focus on that. That's where the nihilism can rise, is think about that. But in truth is getting into action that creates a distraction where you don't think about it and you're actually getting something done. Done. However, that action can create the stress. So by being proactive with the sleep and the exercise and the meditation and the stress stack, you're actually doing things. Stress as not the problem. This is an interesting one. I talk about this a lot. I use an example, which is an organization. Your company may do this, which is they do like, uh, employee satisfaction surveys. And in the employee satisfaction survey, you know, it's somewhere in the middle. There are three questions on employee engagement. Employee engagement was something that was huge over the last decade. A little less so with their current economic situation. But what people would see is those three questions. Last year, you know, 92% of people said that they were, um, you know, engaged. And this year, 84% of people said they were engaged. That's a drop of 8%. Oh, my gosh, we have an engagement problem. No, you don't. You have an engagement symptom. You don't know what the problem is yet. Right. Could have been a bad quarter financially. Could, uh, have been new hiring stuff. Could have been turbulence in the market, could have been fear, could have been all of these things. Find out what the problem is. Now let's apply this distress Stress is not the problem. Stress, like anger, like specific emotions, is a response to something. It's a signal. And what you have to understand is what it's related to. And in a non abstract way, this is what you should be doing everywhere. Step one is be aware that something is happening and somewhere in the further steps is understand why it is happening. We talked about the methodology from the book Permission to feel the ruler methodology. Ruler is an acronym M. Uh, it stands for recognize. Um, recognize an emotion is happening in you understand if positive or negative label that L. Um, the E I believe is engaged with it and then the R at the end is regulated. Right? So really what you want to do is that first R is to say, hey, I feel stressed. The stress is not positive. So now you know what, and now let's reverse engineer this, right? Let's work backwards and go, if I'm stressed, why am I stressed? I'll give you an example. Yesterday, uh, I got word that a program that I've been working on for a number of years that they have had ah, budget cuts. And uh, I will be one of the budget cuts, uh, which is when I went to bed last night, I was feeling anxious and stressed and in a bad mood. So what I did was I'm like, I'm feeling anxious and stressed, in a bad mood. Why now? I've gotten better at this over the years so I was able to immediately target out and go, that was a triggering incident in the earlier in the day. And um, I need to find a way to resolve that in my mind. And that sort of stuff, the loss of that job combined with a loss of another job the week before, it's just the way the industry works. Um, and I've gotten better over the years at kind of going with the ebbs and flows. But I was freaking out a little bit last night because that's a human response. So uh, I allowed myself to have a bit of that freak out and then I started working my way back because I knew I wouldn't sleep well if I was dealing with all of that stress. Stress was the signal. So I was feeling crummy last night, but I had to understand why I was feeling crummy last night. And then I was able to resolve that. I reverse engineered it by figuring where, where did this start and why did this start? And asking myself is this really the thing that bothers me? The last thing I'm going to mention is oftentimes experts say that stress is really avoiding the real thing. And this is related to what we just talked about, about stress as a signal and reverse engineering it, which is we get stressed so that we don't actually have to deal with the thing that we have to deal with. We stick our heads in the sand. We all do it. I am terrible, uh, at administration. I got my knuckles wrapped a couple of weeks ago by one group that I am dealing with because I had not submitted my invoices. They were right and I knew they were right at the time and I didn't react belligerently. I said to them, you know, at the end of the day, you're right. I don't necessarily like the way that you communicated it to me. That's a whole other issue. So I'm going to address that. But I am, um, also going to get better at my, uh, invoicing. And I did last week, I actually did it on the Saturday the way it should be done and felt better about it all. I knew stress, the stress of not that gnawing stress of having to do my administration work, uh, was there, but that was me actually avoiding really the lift of doing it because it takes time and I don't want to spend the time. And that's not a good response to it. Stress, it is present, it is here, it is coming for you. Good stress, bad stress, it is part of life. The thing is, is that stress can be a good thing and can be a great motivator, but, uh, too much of it, well, it can derail you in a whole lot of ways. So what are you going to do about it? You're going to get proactive. That's what we talked about in this segment. We talked about exercise and meditation. We talked about action annihilates anxiety. We talked about stress as a signal and learning to reverse engineer it, uh, and get past the avoidance. We combine that with what we talked about in segment three, which is the outliers. Building your stress stack is the most important thing we talked about there. Your automated responses to stress to help you, well, navigate life. Then you're gonna do all the simple stress stuff. There's stress for you right there. You're gonna do all the simple stuff. You're gonna meditate, you're gonna breathe, you're gonna exercise, you're gonna sleep, sleep. You're going to diet and all that sort of stuff to make you feel good. And then obviously you're going to stop doing all the stuff that is not working but you think is working. Pick it apart. Is it Working for you is trauma dumping. Working for you is constantly complaining working for you. You figure it out. Because when you do, you're going to make a difference. And that's going to do it for this week's episode. We'll be back with a whole new. Whole new approach to the weird List next week only on the pages of. Of the playbook. Mhm.