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Hi Team,

The best bit of advice about coping with stress that I have come across is "To give yourself permission to suck".

Living with a lot of stress can ruin pretty much any goal you might have. Stress tends to make accomplishing anything much harder. It saps your energy, interrupts your sleep, dominates your thoughts, reduces your concentration and the real doozy is that stress causes your body to store more fat. These are some damn good reasons to get much better at recognizing, understanding, and managing your stress.

"Stress is believing that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important." Natalie Goldberg

In last week’s email I outlined that stress is a fairly new human condition that has become a universal problem due to our lifestyle evolving much faster than our physiology. Other animals do feel stress, but most animals in their natural environment experience much lower levels of periodic stress.

“A deer may be startled by a loud noise and take off through the forest, but as soon as the threat is gone, the deer immediately calms down and starts grazing. And it doesn't appear to be tied in knots the way that many people are.” James Clear

Anxiety is the body’s natural response to uncertainty and living with anxiety for long periods becomes chronic stress. The most challenging aspect of stress and anxiety is that it only exists in our own minds. Therefore, we are completely responsible for our own stress. Anxiety and stress are also completely individual, so where one person feels extreme anxiety, another person could feel nothing. Unfortunately, we all contribute to our own stress, it's an integral part of living in today's society. We all have multiple digital devices that we use throughout the day (and just before bed!), we all consume social media and several forms of news, we over schedule our days and try to do 2 or 3 things at once.

However, there is also a good side to stress. Some forms of stress are positive and beneficial. Eustress is any type of normal stress that has a positive effect or outcome, such as organising an upcoming holiday or the family Christmas party, performing in a sporting event or even going through pregnancy. All these situations might be stressful, but they should not cause a feeling of panic or be overly burdensome. They should evoke a sense of excitement and anticipation and have a happy outcome.

For the last few years I have started the year with a dose of eustress. Maryanne and I have done a "Febfast" (giving up sugar, alcohol and coffee for the month of February). Giving up some of the "less-healthy" parts of our diet for 4 weeks
de-stresses our digestive systems and allows the body to cleanse and detoxify. Exercise is another one of the most beneficial forms of eustress. Our body sees exercise as a stressor—we’re making demands of our body, and pushing it to perform, which triggers the release of cortisol. The positive part of this is that exercise makes the body adapt to the stress, which makes it better able to handle that physical stress in the future.

"The most important key to longevity is not succumbing to worry, stress & tension." George Burns 

Our own expectations are a large creator of stress and anxiety. But accepting that you don't need to be good at everything and allowing yourself to suck in certain situations should go a long way to relieving some of the stress you feel each day.

Thanks for reading,
Stay safe and moderate your expectation