Exploring how to manage stress and change in our lives

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Hi there, welcome to Zevo Talks. My name is Ann Gleason, delighted to have you here. So April is Stress Awareness Month. And to mark this, we’re going to focus on the topic of stress for this particular episode of Zevo Talks, but in a way, hopefully that is fitting to our current experience in a lot of different ways.

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So first things first, the bad news, we’ll get it out of the way quickly. Stress, unfortunately, is inevitable. Stress is a part of life, you know, we can’t avoid it. So it’s not about figuring out a way to eradicate it from our lives.

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It’s about being more realistic in a kind of a gentle, encouraging way for ourselves and building ways to manage it in the best way that works for us. You know, so listen, we all know this from a rational perspective, but it’s good to kind of say these things out loud, hear ourselves saying them and have that as our starting point for dealing with stress.

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So like change, like taxes, like challenges, like any kind of distress, depending on what your your own particular lived experience is like. Stress is going to be there, whether we like it or not. And most of the time we don’t like it.

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Let’s be real about it. But we can find ways in order to help to take care of ourselves through it. So, you know, outside of that, the inevitability of stress, it’s also important for us to look at our own particular context.

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So, you know, stress is going to be different from person to person. And it’s not about comparison. It’s not about saying, well, you know, these other people don’t seem stressed about this particular thing.

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If you feel stress, then your experience is stressful. It doesn’t matter whether somebody can’t specifically relate to it or it doesn’t resonate with them. If you’re going through it, then it’s very real.

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And then that means that you, you know, you need to look after yourself within this situation. Along with that, it’s also important to look at context. Context for ourselves, context is everything for us.

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So we can’t look at specific parts of our lives or specific experiences within our lives without looking at the wider context. So if we’re to look at, let’s say from a timeline, the one thing kind of jumping out at everybody, when we look at that particular wider context for ourselves, is living through a pandemic over the last two years.

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And everything that has come along with that, depending on what your own personal situation has been like throughout that, from that kind of subjective experience, but also what’s happening outside in the world and how that can affect us.

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And in a little bit of a deeper sense, the cumulative effect of experiencing stress throughout the last couple of years, let’s say, and to understand that these things build up. So if we are experiencing different kinds of stress, then we have to take in the bigger picture.

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We have to take in that wider context for ourselves. And of course, it’s not just the pandemic that we are dealing with now. There’s the world events that are happening, for example, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and any kind of personal situation or situations that you might be dealing with within your own life.

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Because aside from world events, aside from pandemics, we will also always have different kinds of stress within our lives, within our own kind of personal setting. So to look at how to deal with stress and how to manage stress, it is an interesting thing to look at now because there might be an element of frustration that you might be experiencing if you are thinking about what to do about stress,

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given your own circumstances, given your own context, and given that kind of timeline that we’re looking at at the moment. And I was reading Sally Roolie’s latest book, just there, Beautiful World Where Are You, it’s called Great Book, if you wanna check it out.

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And it was interesting to me because when I was working on this and exploring this, I was also reading this at the same time. So there’s a section in it where one of the main characters talks about the experience of stress and that the main advice around it is not to get stressed.

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I mean, I’m sure that a lot of us can identify with that feeling of being on the receiving end of the advice, and there might be no badness in it, of course, but that advice of, oh, don’t be stressed, don’t get stressed, don’t feel too stressed.

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Whereas if we were to kind of answer that in a really honest and open way, we would say, yeah, of course, we don’t wanna be stressed. And if we were able to be in a position where we didn’t feel stressed, then we’d be there already, wouldn’t we?

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So maybe you’re in a situation where you’re on the receiving end of that kind of advice, don’t get stressed in virtual commas, or maybe you’ve listened to different kinds of advice given by those around you.

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Maybe you’ve tried mindfulness, you’ve gone for your walks, and you’re still experiencing that stress. or maybe that situation that you’re in combined, because we have to look at bigger picture, we have to look at wider context, we have to look at everything that is coming into our day to day lives, not just those things that are peaking our stress levels.

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We have to look at things that are maybe getting into our lives in a subtle way, maybe things that have been normalized, for example, the pandemic, and looking at everything that’s on the list for ourselves.

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And maybe it’s an experience or maybe it’s situations that can’t be dealt with in a moment’s notice, can’t be dealt with certain things like mindfulness or taking a 10 minute walk or anything like that.

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Not to take away from the beneficial aspects of them, of course, of these things, of mindfulness and of getting out and getting fresh air, but maybe now, given the cumulative effect of everything that we have been dealing with, and maybe given the wider context of everything that we have been navigating and trying to find our way through, maybe we need to look a little bit deeper as to how we manage that stress or how we make a plan to manage that stress.

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So like I say, the mindfulness and taking those walks, they are very beneficial, but they can be part of a bigger picture. So what we’re gonna do today in today’s podcast is to look at the routine of managing stress in three separate kind of timelines.

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So what we’re gonna do is look at short term, we’ll look at medium term, and we’ll look at long term. So we’re not just focusing on the in the moment, let’s say kind of treatment or help for stress, but we’re not leaving it out either.

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So we’re building it as part of a kind of a larger, a more kind of layered structure for ourselves. So with the short term, what we’ll do is we’ll look at what we can do in this moment. What we’ll do in the medium term is to look at what we can do in this month, and what we’ll do in the long term is to look at what we can do this year.

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So you’re allowing yourself that process of having different aspects of that kind of greater structure for looking at stress and for managing stress. So first things first, what we’ll do is we’ll focus on short term, okay?

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So this is something that you can do in this particular moment. If you’re feeling that stress in your body, if you’re having those racing thoughts, if you’re having those difficult emotions that are distressing and confusing for you, there’s a couple of things that we’re gonna do that you can do in this moment.

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And remember, it’s not just this, this is part of that bigger picture when we are dealing with that stress. So what we’re gonna do first, we’ll do two particular techniques. I won’t bombard you with stuff, so we’ll take these two and go forward with them.

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So the first one is a particular breathing technique that I like to use called the 4-4-8 technique. And what’s useful is to look at the beneficial aspects of having a breathing technique, of focusing on breathing, of deep breathing.

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So deep breathing is so useful for us because the deep breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which moves us from fight or flight into what’s known as rest and digest. Basically what it is, it’s sending that message to say, everything’s fine, nothing to worry about, we can calm down and we can relax.

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So really beneficial use there for that. So what we’ll do now is that 4-4-8 technique. Basically what it is is we’ll breathe in for four seconds, we’ll hold for four seconds, and we’ll breathe out for eight seconds.

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I’ll guide you through this. So if you are in a position to be able to take time for yourself now and do this, if you’re in a position to be able to close your eyes, even better, if you’re driving the car, maybe don’t do that.

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If you wanna pull over, you can do that. But if you’re in a space where you can fully relax and get in touch with yourself. So we’ll start now and we’ll do four rounds of this just to get a sense of what it feels like in the body and how it feels for us overall as well.

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So what we’ll do is we’ll take an in breath, two, three, four, hold, two, three, four, and out. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Breathe in one. two, three, four, hold, two, three, four, and out, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

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Breathe in, one, two, three, four, hold, two, three, four, and out, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Last one, one, two, three, four, hold, two, three, four, and out, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

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So that’s the four-four-eight technique. How does that feel for you now? How does that feel to have done that and to go through that sequence of doing that? What’s useful for myself, I love a good list.

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I love taking notes in the phone. But what’s useful is to have something like this in the notes in your phone so that you can access it easily. If you are in a situation where you’re highly stressed or maybe you’re going into overwhelm or panic, then you won’t have a lot of access to rational thought, very little in fact.

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So the easier access that we have to these things in the moment is so, so useful for us. So keep a little note on your phone. Be as detailed as you want. Try it when you’re in a calm space as well so that you can get used to what it feels like to do it.

Speaker 2

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Speaker 1

The second technique that we will do for this short-term focus on stress is, in this moment, is progressive muscle relaxation technique. Now, this is something that can be really, really useful to focus on the tension that we might be holding in our body.

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It’s really good for helping you sleep if you do it before bed, and it can help us to get in touch with those parts of ourselves that we might be holding tense, that we don’t even realise that we’re doing it.

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So, there can be really long, kind of, not really long, but like 30 minutes, 20 minutes techniques that you can do with this, but what we will do in this moment is just to focus on three different parts of the body and use this progressive muscle relaxation technique on these, just to get a feel of it, just to get a sense of it.

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So, what we will do is, we’ll take three different parts, we’ll take our fists, our shoulders and our jaw, we’ll tense them for 10 seconds, and then we will release them for 10 seconds. So, again, if you’re in a position now to relax into your chair, wherever you’re positioned, maybe not to do it while you’re driving, if you want to pull over, but if you are in that space where you can take part in this,

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please do, see how it feels. Okay, so if you want to hold out your fists in front of you, hold them tight, close them in into little balls, and we’re going to count for 10, and over the course of those 10 seconds, if you want to hold them tighter and tighter and tighter.

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So, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and release them. Even if you can just drop your arms by your sides, let your hands fall loose, let your fingers fall loose, and allow yourself to feel that lovely tingling you might be feeling, you might feel a softness in your hands, and just letting that tension go in this particular movement.

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How does that feel? Does that feel nice? Letting it go, letting it feel all loose and really letting that tension go. What we’ll do next then is we’ll do this for our shoulders. So, we’re going to count for 10 seconds, we’re going to hold our shoulders right up to our ears.

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So, if you can imagine them touching off your ear lobes there, and we’ll count for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and drop them. Let the shoulders drop, let them fall down. No need to be holding them anymore, just really letting that tension go, and allowing yourself to have that release.

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You know, we do hold a lot of tension in different parts of our body, like our fists, like our shoulders. So, it’s these particular parts that’s really useful for us to release that tension for ourselves.

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The last technique that we’re going to do, or the last body part that we’re going to use is our jaw. So, often we can feel ourselves clenching our jaw, and it’s only after the fact that we actually realize that we are clenching it, and we can get pain in our jaw, pain in our teeth, headaches, all of that kind of stuff.

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So, letting that go. So, what we’re going to do now for the 10 second count is to clench our jaw really tight, as tight as we can, and we’ll count for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and let that jaw drop.

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Just open that mouth, let the teeth come apart, let the tongue be loose, just letting everything around that jaw area become really soft, really loose, just letting all of that tension go. So, there are different parts of the body that we can use within that progressive muscle relaxation technique, plenty of them online, and I think that there are, you know, there’s really something to be said for having the notes for that in your phone.

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If it is something that you can, you know, bring with you, if it’s something that you can use in the kind of calm moments like that 4-4-8 technique, we want easy access to these things in the moment when we need to deal with stress in that short term.

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So, the next focus that we’re going to have with the managing of that stress is medium term. So, this will look at what am I going to do for myself over the next month. So, we’re going to look at that from a self-care perspective, and in a deeper sense then, we’ll look at it from both an internal focus and an external focus.

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How will I look after myself in these ways? You know, the starting point with any kind of self-care is to, well, first of all, understand that self-care means so much more than the bubble baths and the face masks while they’re great.

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And I’m a big fan of them myself, but there’s more to it than that. You know, there’s more to it than just that kind of aesthetic of it, I suppose. And you know, when we look at self-care and when we look at taking care of ourselves, often it can start with, OK, giving myself permission to do it.

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And that is something that might seem quite simple. It might seem like an easy thing to do, but it can be quite tough, especially if we are in a specific role in our lives. We’ll go into that. But if we are in a position whereby we’ve kind of put ourselves last on the list, really, really good to address that and to be mindful of that.

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And, you know, especially in times of high stress, of difficulty, of distress for ourselves, so important for us to take time for ourselves, take time for rest, take time for joy, for fun, for laughter and crack, for, you know, creative expression, for distraction.

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Distraction is huge as well for emotional process, whatever it is that we need to do in order to take care of ourselves in the right way. And it’s about integrating more time for ourselves. It’s not about flipping a switch and having a whole new routine for ourselves.

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It’s not easy done, you know, it’s about building, building that over time really gradually. But again, like going back to that idea of giving yourself that permission to do it, understanding the importance of looking after ourselves from that mental health perspective, especially if you are in that role where you are in that kind of caring position, whether you’re, you know, a parent, guardian, a carer,

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a teacher in the caring profession in some form, even more important to do it, always important, but you really have to focus on it as a part, an essential part of your routine and of your care for yourself.

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So we can do that from that internal process, looking at that self-care piece, looking at what we need, giving ourselves permission and building time for it over time, let’s say. So then from that external perspective, it’s good to look at our support network.

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What does that look like for you? So think now to yourself. Who is in my support network? What is available to me? And within this situation, it’s quality over quantity all the way. We’re not looking for hundreds of people in the contact list or anything like that.

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We’re looking for people in our lives who understand us, who are there for us, and the relationship is a two-way street, okay? So if you are in a position where you’re dealing with consistent stress or cumulative stress, and it’s becoming apparent that you need support, don’t be afraid to either ask for it, to reach out, and don’t be afraid to take help offered to you from people around you.

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Allow them to make the decision of providing that help, and you don’t need to do the work on that. If you are in a position where, let’s say, you feel like you need to do everything yourself, what we really need to do is to look at that.

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So it’s really important to take a moment, take that reflective space, and to see, okay, why do I think like this? Why do I have this idea that I need to do everything myself or else? You know, and that kind of, or else can be lots of different things, or else it won’t get done, or else it won’t count, or else, you know, anything that can be kind of pertaining to your life.

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What we also need to do around that is to look at the impact of going forward like this, doing everything myself, refusing help, not taking help, being afraid to ask for help, the impact of this on our emotional wellbeing, on our mental health, because the fact of the matter is that we all need help, okay?

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And we all, at times in our lives, need to reach out to others, the same way that others, for sure, have reached out to us, and we’ve provided help. Like I say, that two-way street is so, so important when we’re kind of looking at connections, looking at relationships, and looking at that internal and external focus.

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From a self-care perspective, it also includes that support network for ourselves. Now, to look at long-term then, and to look at how we can best manage our stress over time to say, let’s say, over the next year.

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So there’s a couple of things that we can focus on within this kind of long-term focus, and the first one is boundaries. Oh, boundaries, I love talking about them. They’re something that come up in my work so much, and they’re so important for us.

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To look at what’s there, okay, to look at what boundaries are in your life now, what’s there in the first place, to see if they’re working for you, and to see, perhaps, do you maybe need to create and maintain new ones?

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Because a lack of boundaries can be very stressful for us. It can be stressful in the moment, and it can be stressful over time as well. And a lack of boundaries can create a lot of frustration, a lot of resentment, so it’s a difficult space to be in.

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It’s important for us to, again, like that self-care piece, to give ourselves permission to create boundaries. We may not have learned about boundaries. We may not have learned anything good about boundaries.

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We might have heard that they were a bad thing, that they were harsh or cruel or nasty or anything like that, but everybody needs boundaries. We need time, and we need space, and we need pace for ourselves.

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We are human, and it even sounds like a bit of a silly thing to say, doesn’t it? But it’s something that we need to remind ourselves of, that we need space to process what’s happening for ourselves, to slow down, to rest, and we can’t be go, go, go all the time.

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So if there are situations in our lives where we need to put these boundaries in, the right people in our lives will understand and respect those boundaries. There might be people that maybe these new boundaries are not beneficial for them, but that’s their issue to deal with.

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That’s not our issue. You might get a certain kind of a reaction around the boundaries. Again, not your issue. We have to have these for our own health in general. You know, it’s so, so important for us to have that, and to communicate boundaries as well, to instruct somebody on where our limits lie.

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It’s good for us, and it’s good for them as well. So if you are somebody that needs to look at this, start small. Start in a low risk situation and build from there. It is a useful thing for us to do, majorly useful.

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And it’s something that we can kind of build on that experience and build on those reference points over time. Another thing that we have to look at is work. Now, work encompasses lots of different parts of our lives.

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We are working and pushing ourselves for so much time in our lives, and it is something that naturally has an impact on us. Not just in our day-to-day work, let’s say, there’s other kinds of work that we are carrying as well.

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So emotional labor, let’s say, emotional labor would be, let’s say, the kind of unspoken work that’s being done, managing the household, planning all of the family activities, lots of different things that kind of go unseen, but take it out of us energy-wise as well.

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So really important to see what’s happening for me in my life. Where am I spending most of my time? Where am I spending a lot of my energy? And what kind of an effect is this having on me? All of these things relate back then to that kind of self-care piece and that boundary piece as well.

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Because if we are pushing ourselves and we’re not giving ourselves rest and we’re trying to do everything ourselves, then it could easily be on a path to burnout. So we have to be very careful of that process and very careful of being consistent with our time to manage that stress over that long-term period and to be realistic about the impact as well.

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Taking ourselves away from the shoulds, I should be able to deal with this, I shouldn’t be able to deal with that. Going back again further and factoring in that context. What’s my context within all of this?

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So what can I do for myself to take care of myself in the best way? Another thing that we can look at as well, and this is the final part of that long-term plan, is communication. Many of us find it very difficult to communicate our needs for lots of different reasons.

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Again, maybe we didn’t get the teaching in our younger days about it. Maybe we feel like we need to put ourselves last on the list. Maybe we need to, we feel like we need to focus on others. But to be able to speak about our current experience, our lived experience, speak our truth, to be able to be open and clear and honest about what is happening for us can help to deal with situations as we move through them.

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And that, of course, will have an effect on our stress levels and the amount of stress that we’re carrying. So think to yourself now, can you speak openly about what you’re experiencing, about how certain things are affecting you?

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Within your lived experience, whether it is workplace, whether it is in your relationship, whether it is in your home life, whatever it is, do you find it easy to speak openly about it? And if not, what is the rest of that context for you?

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Because when we think about communication, it’s good to look at it in the sense of working together, collaboration. I’m communicating to you about what my experience is so that we can deal with this issue together.

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It’s not about winning, it’s not about being in competition, even though many of us will have been in situations like that before, of course, but it is about, okay, let’s deal with this together. Whether you’re thinking about your team and your workplace, or whether you’re thinking about an issue with your partner or whatever it is, how can we look at this together to work through it together?

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So this is why it is so, so important for you to be open about what your lived experience is like, so that you can get that kind of realistic starting point and going from there. And this is something that we can work on throughout our lives.

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And this is why it is a long-term focus about building our communication skills and opening up that kind of permission piece around communication as well. Also, you absolutely have a right to speak about your perspective.

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You have a right to speak about how certain things are affecting you. Also, you have absolutely every right to speak about your perspective and to speak about how certain things are affecting you, especially if it’s causing that stress.

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Because if you’re being open about that, you can get to that collaborative space and you can use that shared space to move forward together. And the great thing about that is, is that it develops and deepens those connections and those relationships around you as well.

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So. To wrap up then, you know, maybe more of those common suggestions for stress that we’ve been hearing over the last two years are feeling a little bit frustrating. Maybe we’ve heard them so many times that we are thinking, I actually can’t do this again, or I can’t just do this again.

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There has to be something else. And perhaps you’re thinking to yourself, God, if I have to go on another walk now, I don’t know what I’ll do. But, you know, there are more ways or there is a deeper way to look at stress, to focus on it.

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And it’s really important that we do it. So this is why we’re doing it in this specific routine or in this specific structure. So looking at it short term, medium term, long term. So in that short term space in this moment, we went through that breathing technique, that four, four, eight technique, breathing in for four, holding for four and breathing out for eight.

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We had a look at the progressive muscle relaxation technique. So we focused on tensing and releasing our fists, our shoulders and our jaw. We looked at that medium term as well. So this month, focusing on that self care piece, that internal perspective and that external outlook as well towards our support network.

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And also we looked at the long term focus as well. So looking at boundaries, looking at workload overall and looking at that communication piece as well. So that’s it, folks. Thank you so much for listening.

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Hopefully there was something of use in there for you. As always, if you would like further support on your mental health and your well-being journey, please reach out to us at ZevoHealth. Go to ZevoHealth.com and we are delighted, of course, to help and support in any way that we can.

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But for now, take care of yourselves and go easy.