Transcript

Being Stressed Out · Wanzology

Stressed Out What's up, my fabulous people, how you living today? How you doing? Welcome. Welcome to another edition, another episode of WANZOLOGY. I am your host, The Wanz and uh, man, what a crazy world we live in, right? Always something happening, always something going on, just when you think you've got it all figured out, switch-a-roo!! Yezzir! Which got me to thinking, how do you feel? How are you feeling about your existence right now? You stressed out? Are you worried? Are you bothered? Are you good? Are you unconcerned? I for one, am stressed out, and I don't mean just by the price of eggs or the inability of the government to manage their own house very well, not communicate secrets across apps outside of secure protocols, that's a whole ‘nother subject! But no, I'm really worried, I'm worried about the state of the common person these days 'cause there is a lot going on. Do you have a family member that works for the government or used to? How about, are you a veteran or do you know one? We are only at the beginning of what I would say are going to be extremely challenging times and stress is going to be normalized. As humans, we're conditioned to protect ourselves. I get that part, but living at a heightened state of awareness for long periods of time is not healthy physically or especially mentally. So I wanted to number one, see if you understand how to figure out whether you are like way stressed out, and then a couple of suggestions that could help mitigate that stress if only for a little while. If only for a little while. Stress is one of the last instinctive actions that humans have. My limited research has pointed to something called the Vagas Nerve. The Vagas Nerve has one goal, protection. That's it. That's all it does. It wants to protect everything about you, your body, your mind, everything, everything. But it is very limited. It's very powerful, but its actions are very limited. There's FIGHT response where you try to fight against whatever's attacking you or feels like it's attacking you. There's FLIGHT, which means run away. Get away from whatever it is that you feel is attacking you, or you feel threatened by. There's FREEZE, which is pretty much how the first person in all the horror movies die. They realize that they're in danger and they don't move. And then there's FAWN. Fawn is very interesting, it's like negotiating with the devil, you wanna talk somebody out of it, right? Hopefully your best words will keep you from whatever danger you perceive. Those are the first instinctive things coming from the Vagas Nerve. They are reactions versus response. A wise person told me: “The difference between a reaction and a response is time.” And the more time, the smaller the reaction and the greater the response. Think about it. The best example everybody can relate to is the old hot stove. You don't leave your hand there very long. You react and then you respond…” Ow! That hurt!!! (curse, curse, curse!!). But there are other things that the nervous system reacts to and the reaction is different. Like when your significant other says, “What do you mean?”, or “Who's that?”, or my favorite, “Is something wrong?”, and some relationships, those are triggers and it's like, “Huh? Oh, oh my God!! I dunno what to say!”, your face will make faces and your, your body will move certain ways and then you know your goose is cooked because they know they got a reaction out of you, right? It, it could be at the job and you're at work and your supervisor asks you a question you don't know the answer to, or you're confronted with a situation where nobody else is doing anything and you don't know whether to stick around or to try to help. Driving down the road you are, a wet rainy day, it's hard to see, and out of nowhere you just see nothing but brake lights. You react every time, without exception. Now the difference between a reaction and a response is time and only humans really use time. None of the other animals really use time. They don't. They don't have watches, they don't care. Seconds are passing and seconds make minutes and blah, blah, blah, they don't care about that. But we have in common with them that, “Uh-oh! I could get hurt!! Move!”, “Uh-oh!! That puts me in danger. I'm gonna leave!!”, “Uh-oh!! Maybe if I just not move, they won't see me. And if I don't talk, they won't ask me.”, or the last one, “Hi, what are you actually talking about right now?”, you try to negotiate with the thing that scares you. That's the Fawn response, it's very complicated, but it is also very interesting, and all these things are meant to evade danger and return you to a calm and relaxed state. But if you don't recognize that you're stressed out, how do you know how to get back to a calm, relaxed state? And this is where paying attention to how you feel is very, very important to stress management. 'cause once you know you're stressed out, well three quarters of the battle is done. I describe it as a stop sign, a four-way stop intersection, right? And my M.O. was, I wouldn't realize I was at the four-way stop until I was in the middle of the intersection, which to me was too late. Big truck comes and smashes the side of the car that I'm in, right? Kinda like Wiley Coyote, every time it like gets caught somewhere, “Uh-oh!!”, it's going to fall down the huge cliff or “Uh-oh!”, here comes the anvil from the sky or “Uh-oh!”, and they always look at the camera and like “Uh-oh!”. It's like, “Man, if I only would've been paying attention before I got to that place, if only I could have stopped three steps before the edge of the cliff.”, “What happens if I moved like a three or four steps to the left or to the right?”, “What if I just didn't chase the roadrunner?” It's amazing what you can learn from a cartoon if you're paying attention, because humans are a lot like anything that's depicted in moving pictures. You just have to recognize the similarities. So, I go back to the four-way-stop example. It was very, very difficult for me. It's taken years, years of therapy for me to understand when I'm coming up to the intersection, what happens when I get to the intersection, and why I always blow through the stop sign and end up in a place that stresses me out. I really, really, really for some reason was addicted to beating myself up for making the mistake, and when I would self-evaluate, it got me more stressed out, which totally ate away at my self-esteem. And the more I thought about the mistake that I had made, the worse I felt. I had a great therapist who asked me, “Have you ever felt like this before?”, well, in thinking about it, sitting in a nice, calm office with just another person, yeah, I could think of stuff, but what I started noticing from my past is every single time that I felt ‘THAT’ sort of way, I was in certain situations and before I started feeling that way, things happened. What kind of things you ask? People were saying things or something out in the world would happen, and I would start to think about it and once I recognized what those things were and what those words were, I associated them with the word triggers. Triggers are the things that stimulate an impulsive reaction to save you from some kind of perceived danger. Your Vagas Nerve is always on guard. It wants to protect you, and that's all it does. It wants to save you from anything it perceives as a danger. The thing is, is that it's not very developed, so it doesn't understand how to evaluate one thing from the next to determine how dangerous something is. That takes the other part of the brain, the thinking part, but the protection thing, there's a reason you don't just walk out in front of a car. There's a reason that you just don't put your hand on a hot stove. There's a reason that when you're in a crowd of people and everybody starts moving a certain way, you look around and then you start moving with them too until you can figure out what the threat is. Now, some people just avoid everybody. They'll just go hide. Some people, they'll go in the opposite direction to see what it is. Everybody is different. The key is recognizing the signs of your stress. How's your breathing? Are you breathing faster, shallow? Do you feel like your heart is pounding in your chest? Are your hands a little moist, a little clammy? Are you fidgeting a lot or even a little bit? Are you looking around to see, “I know there's something out there. I can't see what it is.”, and you're listening and you're looking. Those are just some of the signs of stress, and it took me a long time to figure what I'm about to tell you out, but for me, it's the key. Once I figure out that I'm starting to get stressed out, the first thing I try to do is take a long, slow inhale. Then a slow exhale, blow out all the air that I can, and then I take another one and then I blow it out a little faster, and then I take another deep breath and I sigh. Then I go back to right before I took those breaths, how was I feeling? What was I reacting to? I start thinking about it, and this is what helped me recognize the intersection that I was coming up to that had the four-way stop that I always used to miss. The stop sign represented what's called a trigger. There are certain things that stress people out. You know, people that are afraid of spiders, they're afraid of heights, they're afraid of crowds, they're afraid of being alone. They're afraid of something, and when they're near that situation, that thing they're afraid of, they react and you've seen them!! Probably said, “Hey, you okay? Are you all right? Relax.” They're in the middle of a stress response. They haven't gotten past it enough to respond. All they're doing is reacting. The difference between a reaction and a response is time. How much time? Well, that depends. Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Those are immediate instinctive responses to a stressful event happening outside of your body, but if your mind takes an interpretation of what that thing is, well then you've already gotten past the reaction part and you're into the response part. If the world is getting you down. Some people are really, really stressed out about the news. I get it, I get it. Some people are really, really stressed out about just losing their job 'cause they worked for the government or for the Forest Department or the V.A. Some people are really, really stressed out because they're worried about their mom and dad's, grandma or grandpas with their own social security check. There is a lot going on in this world to be worried about, to be stressed out about. What are you gonna do? How are you gonna handle it? For me, the key has always been breathing because the more I can breathe through that tension, that fear, the faster that I get back to calm and reason, and I can understand better what exactly is happening, what's really going on. Because your mind, it just gets the red light, oh, something's happening, and then it reacts. You have to be aware of when that starts to ramp up. That's the key. If you're not sure about how to manage a stress response, if you're not sure about how to handle your stress, do some research. Maybe even engage in a couple of these like self-help apps, like Better Help or Headspace. I like Calm. Calm, teaches me how to meditate and that meditation conditions my body into recognizing or being better at recognizing stress. And the sooner I can recognize that I'm starting to spin up, the better the chances are that I can stop myself from spinning out. It's no fun to spin out. So, there's Headspace, there's Calm, there's Better Help. There are a couple of online magazines that I totally dig and totally, totally recommend. One of them is For You, guy, the Better Man Project, really dig that. I also get stuff from Very, Very Well Mind. It really has cool articles that I can relate to, to help me better manage how I feel. I get notes from The Universe every day from tut.com, https, tut.com, notes from the universe. And all they are is just like little notes, little short readings to help you think. And some of them have been instrumental in keeping me from spinning out. So that all being said, if you are stressed out about anything, maybe take some time to think about, have you ever felt like that before and if so, when? I had a shrink who had me do that, and he called it “evidence”. Stuff that's happened that you've been through, you got through, and that's your evidence that you can get through whatever you're going through. A lot of us have made it past elementary school, past middle or junior high school, past high school or college, or our first job or whatever. You had to go through whatever came before to where you are right now. You may have been through whatever is stressing you out before. What did you do then? Did it work? How did you recognize that situation? Then? Did you recognize it now? Did you react the same way? These are all questions that help. Help you figure out how to better respond instead of just react to your stress. Because stress can kill you. You can get so worried about stuff and get so spun up, your heart could explode. You could deprive your body of oxygen to the point where you will pass out. Stress is not healthy. So, if you are stressed out or if you know someone who is stressed out, I encourage you to at minimum, talk to someone about what stresses you out. We don't have to carry the weight of our lives all alone, and everybody knows heavy stuff is easier to carry when people help you carry it. You just have to get outta your own way to let them help you. Don't be stressed out. If you are stressed out, take a couple of deep inhales, maybe three, maybe five, and then figure out how you got stressed out. Alright? There's a lot of online resources that can help you with stress management. I wholeheartedly endorse that you investigate 'cause this is not a one size fits all thing. The pain of stress might be inevitable, but the suffering is completely and totally optional. It's completely and totally up to you, but if you do nothing, nothing will change. Cool. That's all I got. Don't get too stressed out. And if someone is stressed out, make sure you reach out to 'em. Okay? I will see you next week, later!