Demystifying Stress

Stress. Everyone talks about stress these days.

How to de-stress, live stress-free, how to un-stress your life…

These all seem to be the theme of conversation.

But honestly I’m here to tell you that stress isn’t the bad guy.

Stress is absolutely necessary to life, we cannot grow unless there is stress present.

Life without stress is quite frankly not worth it, nor realistic.  

If everything was easy there would be no great feeling of accomplishment when we achieved something, no sense of relief after making it through a particularly challenging season.

There’s no greater proof of this than with muscle.

If we don’t work out (stress it), we quite literally lose it (atrophy).

So, if stress isn’t the bad guy? Then what is?

This is where it gets a bit complicated.

Stress is necessary, yes.

But being in stressful situations for too long: is where we start to run into problems.

The way we evolved is that stress would cause us to remove ourselves from a situation until we were “safe” again.

Think about cavemen life; there is a tiger in the bushes, our stress levels shoot up.

We remove ourselves from that situation, stress levels go back down.

Quite simplified but that’s the gist of it.

Nowadays we can’t usually remove ourselves from situations quite so easily and as I mentioned in a previous letter: we are extremely good at “making up” stress because it used to keep us alive.

Now that there aren’t tigers hanging around every corner, we deem the biggest threat to ourselves to be something fairly mundane in our lives – likely being work or our boss.

So even though that deadline won’t kill you, your brain does a pretty good job trying to convince you it could.

I’m not here to tell you to eliminate your stress, because that’s impossible, but I can give you a few tips on how to manage it better and it all comes back to my core tenets. Interesting, right?

Since there aren't a lot of tigers roaming around, acting as the biggest threat in our lives, we need to manufacture some things that take the number one spot away from work and deadlines.

Easiest way to do that is going to the gym and challenging our strength.

If we can convince our brain that there’s a chance a 200 lb stone will crush us semi frequently, it doesn't matter what the boss asks you to do tomorrow, it will barely blip on our stress monitor.

A movement practice, usually outdoors or in nature, has shown to drop our stress levels drastically.

There’s something about movement combined with nature that just gets the levels to plummet.

So after a particularly grueling work day, the best thing to do is get out and move, even if it is just a walk to decompress.

Lastly, get treatment, when work is making you run in the red, sometimes workouts and movement don’t help or they don’t seem like they’ll be enough.

That’s where a treatment can come in, as I said before, sometimes we need to have help to bring us down and when your nervous system is in the red constantly, outside help is always the best way to just bring it down a couple notches.

If you haven't booked in this week, let me help drop those stress levels.

There’s just a few spots left for this week.

Cheers,

Brandon

‍