[00:00:00] Vesna: today I'm going to talk about how to reduce your stress levels even when your life is stressful. Now, I get a lot of women say to me, I want to feel better. I know that I feel burnt out, exhausted, anxious, in panic and poor sleep and all these symptoms due to my stress levels, but there's nothing I can do because my life is really stressful.
[00:00:57] And so, when we're in this stress state. Our body is not in a healing state, so if you were going to really look at the nervous system in a very simplistic way, there would be two kind of branches, and one puts us in this kind of rest and restore phase, and the other one is the stress response, so we can't be in both, right?
[00:01:16] So if we're in the stress response, we're not in the healing state, so yes, it does make it very hard for your body to recover, restore your energy, have balanced moods and emotional well being, and get your metabolism back online. But, there is a lot that you can do to bring down the stress levels and the stress hormones in the body.
[00:01:36] Even though it's very chaotic around you. So how do we do this? Because we know that yes, stress is going to make you more tired you get triggered from things happening in your environment, at work, in your relationship with your finances, what's happening in the world. Whatever it is, and it kind of creates this, you know, it kind of stacks up for us.
[00:01:54] And so there is a lot that we can do with reducing stress hormones in the body. And I'm going to show you some of those ways. So number one is cortisol reducing foods cortisol is our main stress hormone, kind of when we're in that chronic state of stress and cortisol has all of these side effects, which, um, affects our mental function, our mood, our metabolism, our digestion, our ability to sleep, and so much more.
[00:02:20] So there are foods that we can have that will help to reduce cortisol, and these are things like carbohydrates, and even high glycemic index carbohydrates, so high GI carbohydrates. So not all carbs are bad, because carbohydrates will help to switch us out of the fight or flight response. So in our brain, when we enter the fight or flight mode, we get all of those stress hormones being released but carbohydrates helps to switch us back into the prefrontal cortex.
[00:02:50] this is kind of the executive functioning of the brain and that helps us to be more rational, it helps us to make decisions, we have better judgement, we can calm ourselves down and we can solve our problems. but When we're in the fight or flight mode, we can't do any of those things, right?
[00:03:06] So carbohydrates, things like banana or mango or rice, right, helps to move us back into the prefrontal cortex and when you think about it back in our hunter gatherer days We would have things like, you know, honey occasionally or berries and that would do the same thing And that's why there is this natural craving when you feel stressed to go for chocolate something sweet or junk food or pasta or bread whatever it is in that category, right? Because you're craving, your brain is craving that switch back into the prefrontal cortex where it knows that you can deal with everything that's on your plate, that it knows that you will know the next step forward, right? But in the fight or flight response mode kind of when we're in that kind of reptilian part of our brain, we are just chaotic back there, right?
[00:03:53] So we can't make a decision and we just kind of get stuck in this loop. So things like starchy fruits and starchy vegetables help to switch us back into prefrontal cortex. The other thing to mention is the dosage, right? So too much of a good thing is not a good thing So if you have, if you were to sit down and eat a, packet of chocolate biscuits or ice-cream cream In order to relax yourself and what ends up happening, it goes to the other extreme because too much of this carbohydrate or sugars will cause blood sugar level fluctuations, which will also increase cortisol. Okay. So small dose is good. Uh, high dose is not good, but carbohydrates absolutely help to calm down the stress response.
[00:04:35] They also help to increase serotonin production. So serotonin is our, uh, brain neurotransmitter that helps us to feel like everything's going to be okay. I can handle what's going on. I feel good. There's a sense of calm in the body, right? And carbohydrates also bring that on.
[00:04:50] So carbohydrates, high carbohydrates, small doses. add protein with it as well. Okay. I talked about that in the other episode, but making sure that you add chicken, meat, fish, eggs, yogurt, some kind of protein source to make sure that your glucose levels stay balanced, right? And it maintains your glucose levels for a lot longer.
[00:05:09] So again, glucose fluctuations are linked to elevated stress hormones. So in a way, what we're looking at here is reducing the internal stress. So we're kind of biohacking the hormones for you to feel more relaxed.
[00:05:22] The second thing is to add some calendar space right? So when you get to your computer at the start of a day or on your phone, you see your calendar and you're like back to back and you're just like, Oh, I'm dreading today. The problem with that is that it doesn't allow for any kind of contingency in there that if something runs over time, that you have time to get everything else done.
[00:05:45] And the problem with that is that our mind stays focused on that. calendar and how long we have to get things done creates a lot of stress for us and we don't create pockets of time during the day where we can decompress. Okay. One thing about human beings, we are terrible at predicting how long something is going to take to do.
[00:06:01] Okay. I am definitely guilty of that. I'll do a whole to do list and I look at it and think I'm never going to get that done today. I know I'm not, but sometimes I fool myself and I think that I will only to reach disappointment by the end of the day. So. We need to have some space in our calendar just to allow our mind to decompress, because as our stress hormones rise during the day, if we have nothing to to help bring them back down.
[00:06:27] Like we're still working at full speed and feeling quite stressed. They're going to stay high. And so what we want to do is create a break. Could just be five minutes. Go for a quick walk, get some sunlight, just get away from the desk. Right. And little breaks throughout the day will these kind of little pockets of decompression time to allow your stress hormones to come back down and for you to feel a lot better.
[00:06:49] Third thing is a do now list Okay, you've got your to do list. Everyone has that. What I like to do and what I recommend for my clients is to get everything out of the head. The mental load of carrying this mental to do list is phenomenal. Write everything down on a couple of pieces of paper of what you need to get done.
[00:07:08] And as you're looking at that list, really look at what is the priority. And you know, I mean, you can use different matrices. There's the Eisenhower matrix, which looks at the priority listing. But I think for most business owners and women, they know what their priorities are when they. Have it all down on paper, right?
[00:07:25] When you get it out of your head and put it down on paper, you can really see clearly That absolutely needs to be done. that's going to be a roadblock or that's going to have the biggest impact, whatever it is, but look at your priorities and pick a few of them and put them on your do now list and everything else, forget about it, forget about it for a day or two days, and just focus on those priorities because the mind loves to just have focus on one thing.
[00:07:51] But if you've got a couple of things on that list, It can function so much more freely. There's just so much more space in the brain, but if you're carrying around a hundred things in your mental to do list, it is absolutely overwhelming for your mind. Okay? So if you can simplify that list, you will work much more quickly to get that done.
[00:08:08] And then you can go back to your list and look at the next lot of priorities. So it's really just kind of a mental, Kind of separation, all the things that you need to do and just focusing on the priorities. Number four, sleep If you want to bring stress hormones down, you need to be sleeping.
[00:08:23] So remember how I said, You know, we have our nervous system, we have the healing state, we have the stress response, right? We can't be both. When we're sleeping, I always say sleep is like a magic pill. could put it in a pill, it would be the most amazing remedy, drug, medicine to heal absolutely anything in the body, okay?
[00:08:39] So go to bed, get eight hours and get to bed by 10 p. m, right? The power of 8 before 10 makes a huge difference to your hormones, resetting your brain, detoxifying your brain. Processing your emotions, basically just a reset overnight so your body can recover and restore and get going the next day. And the fifth one is a really important one.
[00:09:02] And it's really looking at your mental state so if I was to kind of really just boil down a mental state to two mental states, and obviously I'm making this up, there's obviously variations in between, but it's always around these two areas. There is like this very noisy mind, where the mind's in a loop, It's over thinking, it's over analytical, it's unable to let things go, you're carrying, like there's a mental load in there, right?
[00:09:28] So there's a lot on your mind, so it's kind of stuck in this noisy, noisy place. in that noisy place, we have a lot of cortisol, a lot of adrenaline being released because we know that mental stress is actually one of the biggest sources of stress. And so that noisy place actually creates a lot more stress than anything else in our environment that would happen, okay?
[00:09:48] So something happens at work, something happens in a meeting. You look at the number in your bank account, right? It is not that situation. It's that we carry it around, right? We're trying to process it. We're trying to work it out. We're trying to find a solution. We're trying to be okay with it, whatever it is, but we're creating a lot of noise and that noise triggers The stress response and the stress hormones and it means that we're just not going to perform at our best.
[00:10:12] So that's one state of mind. The other state of mind is a clear state of mind. It's when we have clarity. It's when we have clear thinking. It's when we have insights or intuitive thinking. It's when we feel calm as we move through our day and we know what we need to focus on. And this clear state of mind is the state of mind That solves our problems.
[00:10:36] let's be honest, life is full of challenges, that's never going to stop. Um, if you're in business, that's the name of the game. you know, your mind is trying to work out solutions or create the things that you want to create in your business or your life and so it gets stuck in that noisy mode.
[00:10:50] But that clarity state of mind, that clear state of mind, that quieter state of mind is actually where we get all the creativity And it's actually where we get all the big ideas and the solutions to our problems. And so when we can see that this is going to put us in a stress state, but it's not going to help me find my solution, and the clear state of mind is really where I'm going to find my solutions, and actually where I perform at my best.
[00:11:15] If you look back at moments of when you performed at your best, it's generally in a clear state of mind. Not many people perform really well under heavy, heavy stress, right? But in a clear state of mind. And it makes sense. To not keep switching back to a noisy mind, not keep trying to work it out in our head what we need to do, but to really value a clear state of mind, that is what navigates our life and gets us to where we want to get to.
[00:11:39] So I guess in a way, it's kind of dismissing some of this noisy thinking, which is really noisy. You know, always urgent, but dismissing some of that and allowing our mind to shift back into that clear state. And, and we do this all the time, right? We dismiss certain thinking, I used to live in a very noisy part of Sydney and there was a train line behind me.
[00:12:01] There was a highway in front of me. And I remember when I moved in, I thought I'm never going to be able to sleep here. And my mind adjusted to it within the first couple of nights, right? And you may have had a similar scenario where a dog barks in your and eventually your mind adjusts to the barking noise.
[00:12:16] You don't even hear it anymore, right? Dog owners definitely do not hear their dogs barking as much as they actually do, right? And that is our mind's ability to switch and dismiss that thinking, And keep us in a clear state of mind. So we have that ability, we just need to Take it up a notch, right?
[00:12:32] So those are the key areas that I would look at to reduce stress hormones, create more pockets of time to allow the stress hormones to reduce, and really get into the cause of this mental stress, allowing our mind to switch to a more clear state. That's where we want to be. That's where peak performance is.
[00:12:47] That's where we create what we want to create and resolve our problems from that state.
