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Lesson Info

Know Your Stress Dashboard

So the point of this is to be a little more in touch with your own dashboard. When are you starting to come off of center? What are you just starting to come off of center? Because there lies the piece of information for you. How can you cool it down? And what can you do about it? So we had a question much earlier about, well what if I what if I need this to get going? What if I need that pressure to get going? Well, we call that cortisol dependence and cortisol, The hormone of stress is a hugely active hormone. And when you cannot read this and I understand that I'll actually want you to because I'm going to summarize it for you too much. Cortisol fell off the chart. This says fat, Oh, dumb, bald, sleepless cycles, forgetful and sick. Too much cortisol all the time. If that is your ammo from motivating yourself is cortisol. Eventually it interferes with all the natural healing things that your body does. I would probably assume that everybody who's listening has cut themselves shaving...

at some point, isn't it? Pretty incredible that we make a gash in our skin several layers down so that blood gushes out across the bathroom onto the toilet paper and into the mix a mess. And several days later our skin is back together. Let me think about that. That's pretty amazing. Our body puts itself back together. This is what we do when we're healthy. We put ourselves back together when we're constantly stressed. We interfere with all of those mechanisms when you're on and you're you're in this cortisol mode. There's another hormone called D. H. E. A. That goes down when you take a rest and you go from your sympathetic cortisol, adrenaline driven body to your parasympathetic, relaxed body. The D. A. G. A. Comes back up and the cortisol goes down and the more times in our lives we allow those to balance the healthier we are. So it's not about living at this zen, nothing ever phases me life. It's about balancing. Okay, I reacted. I drummed up and then I give myself a rest and I replenished. I balance my energy. That's going to allow your body to not get these ravages of cortisol. If you don't believe it ages you. Um I did some work on some skin aging that occurs from constant stress because it releases all of these sort of kind of sort of sort of kinds. That's the word which are little messengers in the immune system into your skin that takes away the hydration and that causes the wrinkling and that's what's behind the aging and the skin looks dull because we recognize somebody who looks stressed. Hopefully make up has helped we recognize somebody who has stressed. We see it and we don't even, we can't necessarily identify and say this is exactly what's up there. But they've done these studies where they are, they put up a series of faces and they say is this person stresses this person stressed. We know it right away and it's a combination of this dullness, a change in the oxygenation of the skin. You keep doing that. It sets in and if you need proof, look at the beginning and ending presidential pictures of four years in office and the ones who have done eight years dash impressive. It's really impressive. It's way more than eight years expected aging because the job is humongously stressful and we see it in the person. We also see people when they come back from vacation, I have let go. You can see it and if you can see it, imagine what's going on that you can't see inside your arteries. I mean, this is why we really should care inside your arteries of skin to and that skin when it's damaged, collects cholesterol, which makes clots, which makes heart attacks, which makes strokes. The stuff really, really matters. It truly matters. Um, Every single system of your body is affected by stress. Every single one because you're robbing it's normal energy to take it for the stress reaction. So let's talk about one system in particular. This is your brain, this is your brain on stress. It's not good. It's really, really not good. As I told you perform a bit of a brain geek and studying. It's just been amazing. And I became very brain centric for a while, 100 billion neurons between your ears, approximately. That's debated. But I mean, that's a lot. That's a big number. No matter how off that is. If you took 100 billion pieces of paper and stack them, they would reach from here to the moon. That's a big number of neurons. 10, fit, 10,000 neurons will fit on the head of a pin. There's a lot going on up there And it takes enormous energy. It only weighs about £3 and it takes 20 of your oxygen intake to run it. So I don't know about you, but £3 is not 20 of my gross weight at all. So it's really, really intense metabolism up here. The brain developed from the brains, we share brain stem with all lower life forms and then we get into the mid brain, which many other species share. A midbrain reptilian brain, sometimes the lower brains called. Then we have this cortex which was the last part to evolve and it's the part that makes us humans. It lets us think. We are supposedly the only species that worries about the future and the past. So these are the jobs of your prefrontal cortex right there. Um Just a little brain aside. So if this is all up here, what happens if we bump our heads against things? What are we hurting? Okay. Guess what? The only animal animal organism that has its brain attached to its skull so that it doesn't hurt it by bumping it. Anyone? The woodpecker. Mhm. Yeah. The rest of us hurt ourselves even with a helmet on, we hurt ourselves. These are the frontal lobe functions. So when we're in the stress reaction and we took the blood away from that part of the brain and sent it to our legs. Are we as good at these things? Were really, really not. Which is why in the middle of stress we make some pretty poor judgments. It's why we're aren't we aren't able to do critical thinking. I have a bumper sticker. I live in Ashville north Carolina, head of the bumper stickers. I think we have critical thinking the next national deficit. It's okay. We we can't do the kind of complex cortical functions when we're in the middle of stress. And if you're making your living through creativity, what do you need? Your frontal lobe on? You needed to be emotionally regulating, You needed to be making connections between things that are novel, putting things together in different ways. You need cortical function to be creative. So this stuff isn't just about not being ill, it's about being at your best if you want to be doing all these things well, that's why you need a proactive stress strategy. I used to do these guided visualizations with people and I would say I'm in san Francisco right now, I'd say it's a lot like the cable cars in san Francisco, the chain is always running, but you have the choice whether to hook into it and go with it or not. So to me that was always kind of a cool analogy of because when I first learned about meditations, I mean I'm a. D. D. And I thought you know stop thinking, who are they kidding and stop thinking about the thought that I'm worried about not happening, but I realized you don't have to stop thinking but you can acknowledge it's there and like the chain for the cable car not hook it and let it go by. So you're not judging it for being there. You're accepting that it's part of you, you have a brain that tends to go here, but you also have this ability to unhook from it a little bit. And I find that to be just, I'm good with analogies or thinking of something physically that is sort of the same thing that I'm doing mentally, helps me. We're in our busy, busy lives and we're doing all of these things and we spend an awful lot of the day doing stuff subconsciously, we're really only aware of a little bit of what we do, you know, luckily we've all had lunch and people are digesting at the same time there listening. You know, our our bodies are doing, our bodies are multitasking. That's a whole another subject, I'll get to later, I promise. But there's a lot going on and we're very, really only conscious of a little bit of it, and we can train that. We can train to have more choice in that. But while we're so busy because we get hooked into the chain and carried along with the business of the day, we need to disrupt that to get our awareness back to put that ball back in the check engine light of ourselves. So we need to disrupt something. You've got to stop the train of thought that you're on and actively choose to stop and think about how you are. How am I right now, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. If I were gonna have a little gauge with four needles on it on my dashboard, where are they? So I've come up with some things that I've done with people to disrupt this because you really beat. It takes training at first. We don't naturally do this. That's why on the dashboard of our car, if our car needs oil, the light pops on that one. We tend to pay a little more attention to because it knows it has to disrupt our day when we're driving along thinking about where we're going. It's got to disrupt us to bring our attention to what it needs to be. So if we want to interrupt ourselves to bring our attention, we gotta get tricky about it. So I use a method I call, connect the dots. I these little dots, you can purchase it any office supply store and place a little dot, pick one color and you put it in several different places like on your phone. Probably not in the middle where I would need to read something probably more discreetly up here in the corner, but I missed um put it on your phone, you put one on your steering wheel, you put one on the refrigerator or on your laptop or somewhere unexpected. And when you see that dot, you stop and do the breathwork and when you do that breath work, you ask yourself, how am I right now? So on the first breath, the 1st 555 breath, you ask yourself, how am I physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually? Right now it's disruptive but it's building that awareness muscle and you've got to disrupt. So after about two weeks I won't see this red dot anymore, I just won't see it, it's still there, I won't see it. Then it changed colors. That's the trick. You gotta, you gotta keep disrupting yourself. The other hint that I have up there is something I've done with a lot of clients who are super busy is tie the disruption to another habit you're going to go through a door anyway, so every time your hand touches the door handle, take it as a moment to say, how am I who do I want to be? Just make a ritual of it because this becomes a habit and that session part three is completely about how to create these habits successfully. So love to have you join for that. But creating a ritual, a ritual is the beginning of a habit, it's interrupting what you were doing, whether it's to do a ritual you already have in place, whether that was prayer that's been mentioned or ritual, you stop in the middle of the day to eat lunch, tie this to that and check in with yourself. How am I right now? If I were gonna put myself on that curve, where am I right now and what do I need and who do I want to be? So I'm going to put that together with the breath work as we go forward. But do you understand the concept of disrupting your business to check in?