The Three R’s of Stress Management

Yesterday’s post we really talked about what stress is, and what stress can be. So we got a good foundation and knowing what stress is, and today, I’m going to tell you how to manage it using a little tool I call the three R’s of stress management.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Health REBELs is charting a new path to health, one that’s dedicated their focus to wellness, not athletics. Here we break free from common standards and redefine healthy living by following the REBELs Oath

The REBELs oath says

  • Reject extremes
  • Energize ourselves through healthy habits
  • Break free from common standards
  • Excite ourselves about our potential, and finally,
  • Love ourselves and act accordingly.

Personal Training Spokane The Health R.E.B.E.L.s Oath20

I know you know about the REBEL Oath, right? We just talked about that in the intro, the five part framework that guides my coaching, and all the healthy decisions that we make within it. Do you remember the holistic wheel, the six components of healthy living, the six components the mindset, the activity, nutrition, sleep support, and stress management. You know, as a health coach, if I want to help people get the best outcomes for their health, we have to talk about stress management, because we talked in the last episode, how stress can be really deleterious, it can be that distress. And we do want stress, right? Remember, stress is the language the body uses to make changes.

But we want to make sure that stress is the good kind of stress. We want to manage it so that we’re getting the right outcomes and the right benefits and not getting held back or cut down by stress. So in my coaching part of this is stress management. Today, I want to give you the biggest tool I give clients. The most impactful tool that we use for managing stress is a tool I call the three R’s.

And I once I once told someone this, on one of our coaching calls one of our client coaching calls every week we do a community coaching calls so that clients can get more interaction with their coach, but also to feed off the energy and the excitement of everyone else. And part of that coaching call comes with a q&a and one of my clients, Amanda had asked what my number one trick for stress management was and I cheated.

I cheated. I didn’t give her one answer.

But I did. I gave her the three R’s, technically three answers. But I want to give that to you today as well. So the three R’s. The first R is going to be reconsider. Yesterday’s podcast talked about the mental prism, right? The research that Kelly McGonigal showed that it’s not necessarily the amount of stress that harms people. But it’s that conception around stress whether it is good for them, or if it is killing them. That ends up being a self fulfilling prophecy. So when we interact with stress, the first step is to reconsider it.

We naturally think that stress is bad we have been by default, we expect it to be bad, we’ve been told that it’s a killer. But can you find the benefits to it? Right? If there’s a big work project that’s coming down, there’s a deadline? Are you becoming a better professional? Are you honing your skills? Are you practicing? Are you excited with the challenge? Does it make your job more interesting? Is there benefit to the stress? If you’re going through some challenges in relationships, is this killing you? Or is it giving you an opportunity to understand your partner better? Understand your friends better so that you can be more engaged, more passionate and more involved with them? Is there a way to reconsider the stress that you’re going through?

And now before we go on, I do want to talk about this because I know there’s going to be somebody listening to this saying “this is some Pollyanna bullshit there. You’re encouraging me to be delusional about what’s going on.”

But that’s not true either. That’s not true. I don’t I want you to look at the world through rose tinted glasses. I don’t want you to be delusional about your situations. But the reality is, every situation has multiple true statements. Right? Psychologists explore this a lot more with dialectic Behavioral therapy and can be a huge tool for Stress Management, But they explore this a lot more and we can see this in different situations.

When we look at my laptop, there’s a lot of aspects about my laptop that is true. My laptop is black, my laptop is lightweight, my laptop can fold in half. But it cannot fold backwards. I used to have the yoga laptop that could get in like seven like three, four different positions. This current laptop cannot. A laptop is it’s a it’s a PC, it runs on the Microsoft operating system. It’s a Dell. My laptop has like a 12 inch screen, there’s a lot of things about the laptop, that is true.

Depending on the situation, and depending on what’s relevant, we often bias towards a very small amount of those truths. So I may be in a situation if I was artistically minded, that the color of the laptop might be the truth that I want to look at that might be the truth that guides me towards the best decision making. Maybe that maybe I need a lot of work content and storage. So maybe talking about the memory space on the laptop is a truth that’s more relevant.

When we talk about reconsidering your stress, I’m not asking you to be delusional, I’m not asking you to make up some fairy tale story about what’s going on in your situation. But I am asking you to look at your situation and find the other truth that may benefit you more than the one that you’re looking at right now. The first step in stress management, the first R is to reconsider. We want to try to shift those distress the bad stress into eustress, the good stress.

But maybe that’s not enough.

The second thing that we can do for stress management, the second R is to reduce. If we can reduce the amount of stress, we can change how toxic it is to us, we can change how detrimental it is to us. You can see this with exercise. We talked yesterday about how exercise is a good stress. We do exercise to get stronger to get leaner to get more stamina to get more energy to increase the circulation so that we can so that we can change circular or cellular regeneration in the body, right? There’s a lot of good stresses to exercise. But what happens if you exercise too much? If you exercise too much, you might injure something, you might tear a muscle you might pull a hammer, you might pull a muscle, you might tear a ligament you might dislodge attended, you may cause a lot of soreness and pain and aches.

Too much exercise too much stress is a bad thing. But managed in the right amount we can get some really good outcomes. We can also see this with poison. This is remarkable. There was a study done by the US Navy, there was a little town near near a I don’t remember the exact details, but it was near a radioactive site. And they were curious, and they expected that the radiation would cause more sickness in this in this community. What ended up happening though, was very minor exposure to radiation actually made the residents healthier. Now this is while this goes against natural conventions, we think that radiation will make us sick. But in very small doses, it’s just enough stress to make the body healthier in large doses. It’ll give you cancer, it might kill you. Right in big doses. It can be really good in small doses, and might actually make you better.

So if you’re overwhelmed with stress, is there a way that we can reduce that exposure? We don’t necessarily have to change that stress, but we could change how much we’re getting. And that can change whether it’s it’s benefiting us, or whether it’s holding us back. But look, sometimes that is outside of our control. Sometimes we try to reconsider. But it’s hard to find the good side and some things. We can also try to reduce, but some things cannot be reduced.

And that’s where the final part comes in.

The final R is respond. How are you going to respond to the stress? Are you going to respond to stress in a way that snowballs makes things worse? Are you going to respond to the stress in a way that holds you back and anchors you down and prevents forward movement? Or are you going to respond to the stress in a way that guards against that in the future? Are you going to respond to the stress in a way that helps push you forward so that you can make progress in your goals in your health and in your life? How are you going to respond to the stress? Now this is something that we can actually practice, we can practice how we respond to stresses by evaluating how we responded in the past.

In deciding how we would like to respond in the future. You might not do this perfectly, you might say that you want to respond in X way. But then the situation arises and you find yourself responding in a why way. That’s okay. It might take some practice, it might take a lot of mistakes. But eventually, when we choose how we want to respond to the stress, we can develop the strategies that make the stress good for us, instead of bad. So last, last episode, we talked about what stress is, it is the language of change. We talked about the two types of stress, there’s good stress, and there’s bad stress, their stress that makes good change and stress that makes bad change. And today, we talked about the three R’s that assist us and help us manage our stress.

The first one reconsider the second or reduce and the third are respond. With this little mini masterclass, this two part series on stress, you should now have more skills, more capabilities in your wheelhouse, to be able to manage stress and make it so that it gives us some good changes. I know it’s super common to feel overwhelmed and to let stress wash over us. That is the common standard. That’s what’s holding so many people back from more health and more happiness. But at Health REBELs, you know what we do we follow that REBEL oath and at the center of it, it’s breaking free from common standards. We’re not going to passively allow stress to bear us down.

We’re going to use the three R’s to manage it. And make those signals positive so that we can have the best health the best happiness and live without feeling held back. That’s just one part of the REBEL. Okay, that’s it for today. And you know what to do REBEL, keep the rest of the REBEL of not just the B but the are the E, the other E and the L until I see you again for another episode of the Health REBELs podcast. You know what to do? Keep the oath

I hope that episode helps give you some steps you can take to break free from common standards so that you can live a happier, healthier life. I’d love to continue to support you on that path to redefining healthy living. So I want to invite you to join my free Facebook group, the Health REBELs community. There we post daily content to redefine what healthy living means by following the holistic wheel and the REBEL of you’ll also get community support with like minded Health REBELs. If you’re not already a member, search for the Health REBELs community on Facebook or go to facebook.com/groups/health REBELs. I look forward to seeing you in there REBEL