Pam Strand (00:01):
Welcome to the Longevity Gym. Hello, my name is Pam Strand. I'm your podcast host. This podcast is an accumulation of my personal and professional experiences over the past 20 years. Twenty years ago, I left my consulting career because I was tired and I was tired of being tired. I was curious about how the body and mind work and how they work together. I was also curious about what life could be like if you followed your dreams. So off I went. I became a personal trainer and a life coach, working with people in their middle years, helping them to get stronger and healthier. Along the way, I also explored my own life, not only how to be healthy and fit, but how to create a life that feels meaningful and satisfying. At 64, I'm still exploring and learning, still helping people be stronger and healthier and still following my dreams.
(00:51):
I thank you for tuning in and listening to what I find fascinating and helpful about fitness, health, life and being your best at any age. I want to continue the conversation about stress that I started in the previous episode, episode four of this podcast. Specifically, I want to share some thoughts and information about managing stress and what that really is. I recognize that stress, well, stress can be a stressful topic. It feels funny to say, but it is very real. Sometimes I run into very strong resistance to discussing the topic Resistance even to using the word stress. But I see such profound transformation when clients have moved beyond the resistance and opened up to the fact that their bodies and minds may be operating under stress. Whether the stress comes from a mindset of seeing themselves as a failure because they couldn't perform an idealized version of an exercise, or maybe they finally learned how to back away from exercise for a bit, to allow an injury to heal, to really heal or even realizing that their inclination to keep pushing harder and harder to accomplish a goal may actually be working against them, creating more tension and more stress and certainly not more resolution.
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That inspires me to keep going and continuing to discuss this topic, and yes, even continuing to use the word stress because that is what's going on in the body. The more we can learn to meet the body where it is and give it the support it needs, the better, the stronger, the healthier it gets. It gets to thrive and we do too. I get it though. I feel the resistance to stress in my life too. There seems to be an aversion in dealing with what stresses us. I think many of us have trained ourselves to persevere in the face of stress, and fundamentally that is a good thing. But in the long run, it's not best strategy because chronic and or frequent stress in the body can ultimately rob us of our energy for life and increase the risk of chronic disease. But working with stress can be so much more than merely coping with stress, especially when stress is more of a constant in our lives, and that certainly is the case in our world and in our lives today.
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My hope with this conversation in this episode is that your curiosity is triggered that you get a little more curious about stress and more open to what stress is and how you can manage it to your and your body's benefit. Because learning to effectively manage stress really is something that can transform your life. So let's get started. Here are some important notes that I want to cover before I dive into the conversation. What I'm sharing is not medical advice. It's not diagnosis or treatment, and it is not a substitute for medical guidance that you might need, nor a substitute for what you know is healthy and safe for you. Rather, what I am sharing is information and my thoughts about how we can better support our body's systems in a way that creates more strength, health, and resilience.
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Stress is what happens to the body when its homeostasis is disrupted.
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Homeostasis is the dynamic equilibrium that ensures the body's internal environment stays stable, this stability, which is necessary for health as well as life itself. This equilibrium is maintained by a set of complex interdependent systems, feedback loops and mechanisms. Stress or the disruption to homeostasis is also managed with its own set of systems, feedback loops and mechanisms. When there's a disruption that your brain becomes aware of, it sends out a signal to mobilize your systems to respond to stress. The signal is also meant to get your attention as you and your behaviors are part of this response to stress as well. Then your body deals with the stress or the challenge, and when the stress is over, it puts the brakes on and switches from fight or flight to rest and digest. In other words, from the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system to the parasympathetic branch. This breaking and switching is important because that is when the body can switch from fighting the disruption to its cleanup and recovery activities. Those include things like clearing out the byproducts of stress, the cortisol and the adrenaline, clearing out the inflammation that your immune system produced in order to fight the threat.
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Pam Strand (05:54):During This phase, your body also goes about making repairs to anything that got damaged during stress. That could be damage to your cells, your tissues, or your bones. Think about something as simple as a cold. Once the cold, the cold virus, has left the body, there's still a lot of cleanup to do, clearing out nasal congestion, lung congestion, maybe you need to sleep more because the body is tired from fighting the virus. Ultimately, through these systems and feedback loops and mechanism, the body returns back to its baseline level of health and performance. Modern everyday life creates challenges for the body as it deals with stress. One, stress is so constant that the body rarely gets a chance to turn on the brakes and switch to the rest and digest stage in order to do its cleanup and recovery tasks. Two, we've learned to persevere so well in the face of stress that our behaviors in response to stress are largely coping behaviors that soothe us while we are stressed and disguise the fact that our bodies and minds are in stress mode, at least that's my perspective.
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For example, the stress response may give us so much energy that we start to go into overdrive in order to use up all that energy, so we overwork or we go about having extreme amounts of fun. Those things though, end up adding more stress. We could reach out for yummy, but yet not so healthy comfort food, maybe drink more alcohol than we normally do, both of which are stressful to the body, or maybe we just check out and crash on the couch. Scrolling the internet, which triggers a different type of stress. The blue lights, the constant switching of attention. These behaviors while they soothe us, they don't really give the body what it needs to recover from stress. Your body needs the stress to turn off and then needs rest, sleep, nutritious foods, hydration and your brain and cognitive and emotional systems need the same thing too.
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Stress is a natural part of life, and stress is what helps our bodies learn and adapt so it gets better, stronger, healthier, and more efficient in dealing with stress. But stress can be good stress or bad stress, and I'm sure you're familiar with those terms. Good stress builds us up, moves us forward, helps us grow and get better. Bad stress brings us down, depletes us, holds us back and damages us, and we can have our own perceptions of what is good stress or bad stress to the body. However, whether stress is good or bad is highly dependent upon four variables, how intense the stress is, its duration, how we perceive it, and how well we recover from it. Let's look at these four variables. First is intensity. Intensity is how strong or forceful the stressor is and the stressor being what causes the disruption in homeostasis.
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Good stress is on one end of the spectrum, causing a slight or little disruption if any. Bad stress is on the other, intense to very intense. The more intense, the stronger the stress response needs to be in the body. Perception does affect the intensity to some degree, and we'll talk about that in a moment, but the things that we perceive to be good, they can be intense too. If we have more of it than our bodies can handle. For example, working hard, extra hard on a really great project at work, maybe doing a lot of fun things all at once. We may be able to control the intensity or we may not be able to do it. For example, things that come to mind are extreme cold, the sudden loss of a loved one, having a huge project dumped on our desk. We really can't control those things, but we can focus on what we can control.
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For example, we can bundle up when it's extremely cold. That lowers or protects us against the strength of the brutal cold. We can share our grief with loved ones when we experience loss. That reduces the intensity. Find ways to delegate or share tasks on that huge project. Maybe develop presentation skills so when we're asked to speak in front of an audience, that's less intense stress. Wear earplugs around loud music or intense noises that can damage our hearing. Those are ways that we can manage intensity.
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The second variable is duration. Duration is the amount of time we experience a stressor or the amount of time our bodies are in stress mode, dealing with it. Being exposed for a short period of time, makes it be more on the good stress end of the scale. Long chronic exposure is on the bad side of the stress scale. Taking more frequent breaks during a workday or when you're learning new skills as well is one way to lessen duration in extreme cold or heat. Being outside for shorter period of time is a way to manage the duration, spending less time with people who drain you during your physical or doing your physical therapy exercises consistently so your injury heals more quickly.
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The third variable we can manage is perception. Perception involves our thoughts, beliefs and views of stress in general, and then also in particular of what stresses us in our own lives. Seeing stress as something that can make us better, makes the stress more productive and less stressful to our bodies. Perceiving something as bad makes it more draining or more toxic to us in our bodies. I learned a really great framework in my studies with ipec coaching. This framework, called energy leadership, breaks perceptions into seven levels. There isn't time to discuss all seven in this episode, although I hope to do that in the future. Here are the highlights. There are two types of perceptions. There are anabolic and catabolic perceptions. The anabolic perceptions build us up, move us forward. They're restorative and energizing. The catabolic perceptions drain us, wear us out, hold us back. They're toxic and damaging. They're filled with stress and burden.
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These catabolic perceptions are thoughts and beliefs that we're victim to our stress and our environment, and there's nothing we can do about it. Catabolic perceptions may also drive us to see right and wrong, and those are the only two options. It's right or it's wrong, and there's only really one way to look at things, and most often that's usually my way of thinking. Everything else is a threat. The anabolic or energizing perceptions include finding ways to cope with stress, to do one's best, to be thoughtful and concerned about one's wellbeing, and taking action with that intent. To see challenges as opportunities to grow, perceiving whatever comes our way as an experience. Being confident in your abilities to deal with what comes. Learning and knowing that there's various ways to perceive something and that we have the ability to perceive the way we want is actually a less stressful approach to life, but it does take adopting a growth mindset, knowing that stumbles are a part of life and that we can get better as we go.
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The fourth variable that determines whether stress is good or bad is how while we recover from it. Recovery is the back end of the stress response I described earlier. The stressor is turned off and the body turns off the stress response and switches to the rest and digest and begins the cleanup and recovery task. This phase is important because it's where the body heals, learns, and adapts to the stress getting stronger and better, becoming more efficient in dealing with stress, in helping us and enabling us to persevere it also, this phase also helps us bounce back or learn to bounce back quickly, completely and hopefully better than before. As I described in the beginning of this episode, our current world and lives make recovery difficult because stress is constant and chronic. Our bodies barely or even rarely get a chance to switch into recovery mode.
(14:57):
To me, that means we need to be more intentional about giving our body the support it needs to recover from stress. Remember, managing stress means meeting the body where it is. You may not perceive or believe your body is stressed, but if that baseline level of equilibrium is disrupted, it is in stress mode. Rest is one way the body perceives the stress is over and then can put the brakes on and switch to the rest and digest branch of the nervous system. Rest can be active involving movement or passive when there's no movement. Whether active or passive, rest is a stillness that is refreshing and rejuvenating mentally, emotionally, and physically. And take care here to use that as a measure of rest. Because moments of inactivity like sitting on the couch and scrolling the internet may look like rest, but it is likely not very refreshing to the body nor the mind.
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Types of rest may include engaging in a hobby, sitting quietly with deep breathing or practicing mindfulness for a few moments in a day, resting over the weekend, taking vacations. Recovery is also about caring for the body and mind after stressful times. Rehydration, nutritious foods, those things are important. Massages, meditating, breath work, rhythmic movement, joint mobility work, singing, laughing, being with close friends. All of these are examples of things that we can do to give the body more of what it needs to recover well.
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And let's not forget sleep. For sleep really is the recovery rockstar. It is where the body and brain do much of the repair. Cleaning out waste and restoring. Sleep is kind of interesting because we can be in control of how much sleep we get and we might skimp on it, which ultimately creates stress on the body, and stress can disrupt replenishing sleep, so it is somewhat of a vicious circle. But if we really focus on sleep and make sure we're getting the highest quality of sleep possible, we really are supporting our body in its recovery activities.
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Seven to nine hours is the ideal amount of sleep, which is the amount of sleep. We are amount of time we are in bed and asleep, not just the time we're in bed. All phases of sleep are important. Light, deep, REM.
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In my longevity studies, I learned that the ideal time for deep and REM is a combined 120 minutes. While we can't control the time we are in each stage, we can do our best to prepare the body for the sleep it needs relaxing before we go to bed so we can ease our way into sleep and not crash land. We can eliminate foods late in the day that we know interrupt our sleep. Alcohol and caffeine are likely suspects. We can always also make sure that the environment we sleep in is conducive to high quality sleep. Make sure that the temperature is cool. We've eliminated distractions such as light and noise, and we also have eliminated with things that can disrupt our sleep like our co- sleepers.
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I love that phrase. I learned that in a course, but that could be our partners or anything, any living object or any living thing that we share our bed with. It could be our pets, our dogs, our cats, our partners, our children.
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I'm going to wrap up the conversation at this point. I hope the information I shared in this episode makes the phrase manage your stress more impactful and meaningful to you. If this is an area of your life that you want to explore, I invite you to sign up for my newsletter as I will be announcing a new offering on stress in the very near future.
(19:16):
You may also be interested in the newsletter as a way to stay up to date on future podcast episodes. There's a link or a form in the show notes to do just that or visit my website, www.strandfitnessonline.com. You will see a signup form at the bottom of my homepage.
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Thank you for tuning into this podcast and for being on this journey with me. See you soon.