[00:00:36] Vesna: Welcome to the Peak Revival Podcast. My name is Vesna. Today I'm gonna talk about the antidote to stress, and I'm not talking about supplements or sleep. So quite often most of the advice for stress management is, you know, sleep, more, meditate. You know, there are supplements to take for cortisol or for the nervous system. Take a regular break, have your boundaries, all of that kind of stuff. And there's nothing wrong with any of those. Okay? And it's certainly things that I prescribe for the physical body to restore the physical body with excessive stress.
[00:01:08] But there is something that comes even before them because when you're looking at those things, they are used after the fact. And that means that after you've been through an excessive period of stress, well you need the supplements for the nervous system and for the cortisol, you need to have more sleep.
[00:01:22] You need to have, you know, regular breaks. Or maybe you do need to set up boundaries, but that's. Really not going to be the biggest needle mover in the moment. Okay. And so meditation is great though. Meditation I feel like is something that we can use, as a preventative as well. But there are two other areas that can actually antidote stress.
[00:01:43] So what is stress to begin with? Because most people will say. Things going wrong in my life or things happening in my life or the amount of work that I have to do people that I have to look after, whatever it is. But actually stress is something that's more unknown and something that we dunno what will happen or we don't want what [00:02:00] did happen, right?
[00:02:00] So it's an outcome that we don't want and it creates tension in the body and. When I talk about stress, I'm not talking about life challenges. And again, that's what people think, right? This didn't work out for me, I might lose my job. Or, have have enough money this month.
[00:02:16] Life challenges and stress are different challenges in life. We cannot. Avoid a lot of them. And life is a series of challenges, okay? And that helps us to stretch and grow. And if you're a driven woman like me, you're gonna put yourself into situations that you want to grow. You want to reach your highest potential.
[00:02:35] So you wanna grow your business. You wanna develop personally, right? There are things that you wanna do, and you're gonna put yourself into situations that's going to be challenging, and it's gonna help you to stretch and grow. So that's something that, I see successful women, they really put themselves into, they're not afraid of that, but the stress isn't coming from that.
[00:02:51] the stress that we feel is within our mind and it's driven by thoughts. And so the first antidote to stress is really
[00:03:00] understanding the nature of thought
[00:03:02] so our experience of life comes from. Our thinking, right? Our thinking creates our feelings, which then creates our experience. We create meaning in things.
[00:03:14] We anticipate what could go wrong, and that drives a lot of stress, Dr. Robert Polsky, he wrote the groundbreaking book, why Zebras Don't Get Ulcer, he said. You know, human beings, we've developed so much that we've become so, advanced that we can use our own minds to drive ourselves crazy and drive ourselves into a stress response. And he called it anticipatory stress.
[00:03:36] So we anticipate what could go wrong. We, we may say, I may not have enough money this month, or I may lose my job, but we already live as if that's happened, right? Our mind is already trying to work out. How do we resolve this problem? But the problem hasn't even happened yet. We're just anticipating that it could happen and because our thinking activates this process, we, our body doesn't know the difference.
[00:03:59] And so [00:04:00] it's, living in this moment that doesn't actually even exist in the real world. We feel like it's going to happen, and therefore we create and generate the stress response. and you would've noticed this yourself, and I notice this all the time, we do very well. In the challenge, meaning we do very well when something has gone wrong, not when we think it can go wrong, but when something goes wrong.
[00:04:25] We are like, oh my gosh, this is so bad. But then in that present moment, we actually have access to so many resources that can help us to overcome those issues. But when we anticipate it, we're pretty useless, right? We're pretty useless in trying to resolve a problem that doesn't exist, which kind of makes sense, right, when I say it like that.
[00:04:43] But that's what we do every day and we drive our stress response. If we don't see the nature of thought, that our thinking shapes our experience regardless of the situation that's happening, right? If we don't see this and we think we need everything to be in a certain order or in a certain way, in order for us to feel calm and on top of things, but we don't see that we are driving that stress within our own thoughts.
[00:05:07] So when I speak to a lot of women who have a lot going on, you know, they're juggling business and family and they're taking care of people, there's financial stress or there's so much going on, right? But underneath that situation or that challenge in life, and again, we, you're not going to be immune to those challenges.
[00:05:26] Nobody is, right? Everyone has to navigate life in the best way possible because life is always kind of. Throwing curve balls at us. But underneath, when I speak to women underneath that challenge or that situation, there is a lot of thinking, The pressure that women feel, the expectations from others, that it's all on me or I have to be the best at this.
[00:05:47] I can't fail. I have to do more. What about if I look like an idiot? What about if I look fat? Whatever it is. If you look at the situation that's going on and look at the thinking that's underneath [00:06:00] that, and if not for that thinking, right? If not for that thinking, you would have a completely different experience to that business challenge, life challenge to do list, right?
[00:06:11] So everything that's created, all of our thoughts that are created are changing our experience of that challenge and actually robbing us of the ability to. Access resources to overcome that situation. So again, if we don't see that, we have a lot of this thinking that's tainting the experience. We don't get access.
[00:06:32] So as much access to fresh thinking. cause fresh thinking at the end of the day is what helps you to overcome or find solutions, helps you to find the next step. And I'll explain more about that. So I wanna give you an example. Like if I was to do this podcast and think. Y oh gosh, I'm gonna look like an idiot doing this podcast.
[00:06:49] Right? But and I don't, but you know, if I did, but if I showed up to the podcast without that thinking, like without the thinking that I'm gonna look like an idiot every time, then I would speak more authentically. I would open, I would share more. The content would be richer, it would be more engaging.
[00:07:06] It would connect more with people, right? Because I wouldn't be in the head, in my head, or editing myself. Right. But if that thinking was there, I'm not gonna have the same podcast content that I do without that. Right? And so you have to see the thinking or the thoughts that are underneath that experience.
[00:07:25] so that takes me then to, we often have habitual thinking about stuff, right? We go through the worst case scenario. We see the negative or the negative thinking how things can go wrong. What are that, what's that gonna mean, And the only thing that can release stress in that moment is for you to have a new thought. A new thought carries a new feeling, carries a new experience. So fresh thinking is kind of our superpower, right? We have this ability to have fresh thinking about something and we get a fresh perspective. We get.
[00:07:57] Fresh ideas. we know the next step. We, we, [00:08:00] there are things that come to us that we're like, oh, I can't believe I didn't think that before. Of course I should check in on this, right? And when we're so consumed with our habitual thoughts and our negative worst case scenario thinking and catastrophizing and all of that, we are less able to hear the fresh thinking, right?
[00:08:18] We still have access to it, but we are less able to hear it, and therefore we get stuck in this habitual negative loop and that generates a lot more stress for us, right? The more stress creates more cortisol, cortisol. Moves us outta the prefrontal cortex where we can make decisions, where we can think rational.
[00:08:34] It moves us into that fear part of the brain, and we're just not in a good place to make any decisions or to help ourselves out of this situation. but you have to see that, right? You have to understand that, that actually, when I'm stuck in this negative loop, I'm not going to know the best way forward because there's.
[00:08:51] Always fresh thinking. There's always a solution. There's always something that you can do or see differently that will help you to navigate that challenge. And this is something that we rely on, and that's why I call it an antidote to stress. When you can see the nature of thought to create your reality, and that fresh thinking allows you to see things differently, come up with new ideas, see the next step, well, that's what you're gonna rely on.
[00:09:17] Right, because your habitual thinking just keeps you stuck in the state of permanent stress and burns you out, right? It doesn't give you anything fresh or new. It's just the same stuff you think every time, right? Different scenario, but same kind of negative thinking,
[00:09:30] Fresh thinking is something that we can rely on
[00:09:32] and if you do rely on it, if you do see this for yourself, then that becomes an antidote because when a stressful situation comes up or a challenge comes up, you're like, I need fresh thinking around this. I need to see this differently. Right? Instead of burying yourself in your mind with so much dread and worry and concern.
[00:09:49] So that's the nature of thought. So understanding the nature of thought creates our feelings and experience and fresh thinking will help us to find the next steps. it is our superpower and it's not often talked about. So that's [00:10:00] the first antidote to stress. When you can see that you can yourself out of stressful situations very fast.
[00:10:06] The second antidote to stress is trust. often we think about The antidote to stress is something that can make us feel calm and confident or relaxed, right? But
[00:10:19] when you trust yourself that you have the resources to overcome anything,
[00:10:25] it takes the stress away. Like not, maybe not completely, but it massively takes the edge off it, right?
[00:10:31] So I remember years ago, so in my business, you know, we have different. website pages that, um, create this whole funnel if you don't know what a funnel is. But it's just a series of steps. And my funnel was completely optimized in a working funnel. I'd had it running for two years and perfected it.
[00:10:50] And then one day someone that was working for me deleted all the pages. I don't know why. It was an accident. I dunno what happened then. But all the pages had disappeared, so you can imagine was quite stressful. And I remember thinking, oh my gosh, this is the end, right? This is absolutely the end. Now, I've had different scenarios where my Facebook page was shut down, my ad account was shut down, like.
[00:11:15] Different scenarios where I have overcome those. In those moments I thought, this is it. This is me done. Oh my gosh, how am I ever gonna come out of this? Can you come out of this? How do you, because that's where the mind goes, right? And each time I've come through that, it's built my trust, it's built my confidence and trust to know that I have the resources to overcome this.
[00:11:37] And so I hear my business clients, you know, they go through other periods of, you know, financial stress because, you know, cash flow and business is always up and down. It's the nature of business. It's normal to have that a hundred percent. I will often remind my clients like, you've been in business for a long time.
[00:11:53] Like you've been in worse scenarios than this. And they'd think back and they'd be like, oh yeah, one time I just didn't even think I could pay my [00:12:00] staff, like I was going to getting money out of the, from my credit card, from the cash machine. I was like, right, so you overcame that, right? And they're like, yeah, actually that was way worse than this.
[00:12:09] Okay. And I'm just sharing examples because when you trust that you have the resources to overcome anything, when something goes wrong, you lean in on that. You're not gonna catastrophize and lose your head and think, oh my gosh, this is the end. I can't do anything here. You are going to lean in on that because you have trust in yourself.
[00:12:29] You know that you've overcome so many different adversities in business and in life that you could overcome this too. So trust in yourself, like whether you've been through a health scare or a divorce or a bankruptcy, you've overcome these events and landed back on your feet. And that's what you rely on.
[00:12:46] That's what you remind yourself. That's what I remind myself When things go wrong, I think, okay, been worse, scary scenarios. We, we, we got this right. I just have to figure, I can figure it out. It'll, it'll come to me.
[00:12:57] But there's also trust in your body to heal itself. You know? So if you've been stuck with a chronic illness for a long time, it can feel very hard to trust yourself, but you must cultivate that trust in yourself because your body is well equipped to heal itself, and then you have to trust in life. There is an intelligence behind life, and that intelligence is guiding us all the time through the power of our thought.
[00:13:20] It's guiding us all the time, and we can have trust in that rather than our insecurities and our fears and our doubts.
[00:13:28] So trusting in yourself, trusting in life, trusting in your body, trusting in your mind that it knows how to solve problems. Is what you can lean in on when things go wrong, and that releases a lot of the stress because you know, you just have to remind yourself, I've been through worse, I've overcome so many things.
[00:13:49] This I will overcome too. So they're my two unusual antidotes to stress. I grant that they would be not something that you'd maybe think that I was gonna talk about, but they're really [00:14:00] powerful because they're fundamental things that you can understand and lean in on and use. And as you see this more and more for yourself every day.
[00:14:08] You won't be so stressed, you won't catastrophize so much. You won't get stuck in this habitual negative loop of worry and negative thinking.
