For More Energy, Invest In Your Body (energy management series 2/5)

A crucial part of maintaining your energy is taking care of your physicality.  Simply, there is a mind-body connection, when you are in good shape, you feel great, and it takes intentionality and discipline to establish practices for maintaining your physical health.  How do you maximize your physical wellness first so you are able to contribute more effectively and easily?

Here are some components to consider:

1. Eating healthy.  Some people may not be aware of the types of foods they put into their bodies and the specific impacts on their energy levels.  Do you know which foods weigh you down and make you lethargic and which foods help you feel good and alert?  If you are unsure, you can work with a nutritionist to discover ways to eat healthy and maintain a balanced diet to be at the top of your game.  Simple changes like making sure you drink enough water throughout the day and a glass before a meal so you feel full quicker can alter how you show up.

2. Exercising regularly.  Having a regular exercise routine will keep your energy levels high and maintain your longevity.  The University of Vermont found that just 20 minutes of exercise can boost someone’s mood up to 12 hours.  You can do many things to promote movement and get your heart rate up.  

2A Gym routine.  Having a strength-building practice or taking classes can give you a great workout, introduce you to many kinds of exercises that help with cross-bodying training, and provide possible seeds for a new hobby to flourish.  It has the added benefit of being a social experience and can be incredibly motivating when you find the accountability to exercise together.

2B. Walking.  Walking is a great and simple exercise that keeps you active and sharp.  Many excellent leaders knew and incorporated the copious benefits into their daily routines. Thomas Jefferson talked about how walking helped with clearing his mind and being the object of his relaxation.  Similarly, Ernest Hemingway mentioned walking as a way to develop his best thoughts.  Because the nervous system only has a certain amount of bandwidth, walking is a great way to calm it down, even for 10 minutes.  A recent study shows that walking for 1 hour daily reduces the risk of major depression.  Doing it in nature is especially helpful because it reduces stress while increasing the ability to be more creative and have playful thoughts.  Attention Restoration Theory (ATR) “suggests that mental fatigue and concentration can be improved by time spent in or looking at nature.”  ART proposes that exposure to natural environments encourages more effortless brain function, thereby allowing it to recover and replenish its directed attention capacity.  Because you are in an environment with lower cognitive abilities, you slow down your brain, retrain it, use different parts, create more connections, and have better reflections.

2C. Practicing Yoga.  This exercise yields some of the best mental and physical benefits, such as relieving stress and tension, improving focus, managing difficult emotions, and unlocking creativity.  Physically, by practicing various poses, it builds strength, flexibility, and balance.  There is also the mental component of paying attention to what is happening in your mind when you are holding a challenging pose for too long.  With each position, your mind will react and it is good practice to choose how you want to work with that reaction.  It is about this beautiful balance of knowing when to strive with the right amount of struggle to be at your best and when to be at peace with where you are at any given moment.

3. Sleeping restoratively.  Having excellent quality sleep is one of the most significant differences you can make in your energy levels and performing at your best.  It is essential for your cognitive performance because when you sleep, you consolidate and retain all new information and learnings from the day, connect disparate pieces of information, and unleash creative problem-solving.  The toxins accumulated throughout the day get cleaned when you can rest.  This process is essential to keep your brain healthy and reduce Alzheimer’s.  Many people disrupt their sleep by having their phones next to them.  There are many things you can do to have better quality sleep.  For more on this topic, you can read my sleep series. 

3A Napping.  Napping for a short time can boost your mood and productivity and give you mental clarity, increasing your productivity.  Many people may feel like they do not have time for a nap in their day, but if 15-20 minutes can mean a supercharged next 2+ hours, it could be worth it to slow down to go faster.

4. Breathing deeply.  It is a great way to calm your nervous system and restore energy.  There are methods of breathing that can nourish your brain.  In Breath, James Nestor argues how we breathe matters and that there is a right and wrong way to do it. The right way to breathe can boost blood pressure, athletic performance, and balance our nervous system.  Nasal breathing (or inhaling and exhaling through your nose) is more proper and efficient than mouth breathing, which can be harmful because it causes the body to lose 40% more water.  Your breathing pace also matters; slow and deep are essential.  He mentions how 5.5 breaths per minute are optimal.  The most critical element is ensuring you take your time exhaling to get the stale air out of your system.  Many people like the Box Breathing method, where you inhale for 4, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4, and repeat.  Many Navy Seals use it to stay calm and focused during intense situations.  Buddhist monks use proper breathing techniques to lengthen their lives and reach higher levels of consciousness.

5. Partaking in regular self-care body rituals.  There are various things we can do to prioritize ourselves and take care of our body for a shift in energy and mood.  Going for a massage can be a relaxing feeling that calms our nerves, reduces stress, and restores our body, especially after any intense strain on it, such as prolonged exercise.  It creates peace and calm and sets us up for what’s next.  Taking the time to get a haircut, or going for a manicure or pedicure for our hands and feet can keep our bodies looking and feeling great.  Bubble baths with candles and music, saunas, and hot tubs can offer unique relaxing experiences. 

Taking time to care for your body matters.  It will contribute to your mental fortitude and keep you moving through life with higher energy levels.

Quote of the day: “No [persons] have the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training.  It is a shame for a person to grow old without seeing their beauty and strength for which their body is capable.” -Socrates

Q:  What is your favorite form of movement, and how does it impact your life? Comment and share below; we would love to hear from you!

The next blog in this series 3/5 will focus on cultivating a healthy mind for greater energy. 

As a leadership development and executive coach, I work with leaders to create effective personal energy management systems for themselves and their teams, contact me to explore this topic further.

How do you take care of your body?

How Well Do You Know Your Stress? (Stress Series 3/4)

When stress strikes and impacts your body and mind, how do you handle it?  Learning about your reactions can help you manage it and build resilience in its presence.

Here are 3 leading ways to get to the root of stress:

1. Explore your stress through questioning. Ask yourself:

A. How do I respond under pressure? Maybe you confront, avoid, break down, become irrational.

B. What does stress do to me physically? Beating heart, tightness in your chest or shoulders, sweating, knots in your stomach, or headaches.

C. How does it affect me emotionally? Do I get sad, angry, worried, or have a pervasive out-of-control feeling?

D. What are my go-to distresses? Are they positive: Laughing, meditating, practicing yoga, reading, socializing, or negative: excessive eating, drinking, procrastinating, watching tv, overworking, being rude to others?

E. Do I have a different reaction or destresser for a different trigger or context? Perhaps when it is dealing with family, you engage in emotional eating, but when dealing with a work event, you get angry and condescending.

It is ok to not have all the answers, but embarking on a journey of self-discovery can be the most important expedition you go on.  You can start by prioritizing your self-reflection by journaling daily, thinking regularly on these questions especially during mundane activities like brushing your teeth, or by reading about how other people handle the causes and effects of stress so you can provide a comprehensive solution.

2. Know your values.  Stress can occur when one of our values is being violated so knowing your values can help with an adequate response.  For example, you may be anxious about giving feedback to your team member.  Upon further scrutiny of the situation, you realize that the value that is being tested is your concern with fairness, so you want to make sure you are doing right by your teammate. You ask yourself, “by prolonging the conversation, am I being fair?”  You may realize that when you frame the situation through the fairness value you are much quicker to provide feedback so she can improve and help the team.  Or perhaps, you criticize yourself harshly and are stressed because it is violating your value of self-compassion.  When you can identify the principles that are being tested, you know how to put strategies in place that allow you to use your emotions wisely under stress.

3. Increase your response range. When we are stressed, our brain is wired to be more reactionary and our decision-making faculties are impaired.   We can resort to binary choice-making which limits the options available to us.  In tough decisions, we can reach premature conclusions rather than opening ourselves up to more and better options. A good way to combat this problem is to force yourself to generate several responses, even when you think you only have a few, challenge yourself to have at least 10 and then you can winnow down to a realistic and empowering three. Knowing that you have more options will reduce your stress. 

When confronted with a stressful situation, carefully appraise your core strengths and resources rather than panicking or disconnecting from reality.  Identify the source of the stress, think about the values that are being tested, and increase your range of responses so you can defeat anything that comes your way.

Quote of the day: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” – Mark Twain

Q: Which value, when violated, causes you the most stress?  What’s your best distressing technique?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear!

[The next blog in this series 4/4 will focus on dealing with stress in the workplace]

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with others to understand their sources of stress and have a game plan for working with it for increased performance, contact me to learn more.

What do you know about your stress?

Top 8 Ways To Deal With Stress (Stress Series 2/4)

In the last article, we talked about different kinds of stress and associated positive and negative impacts.  The focus of this article will be on ways to manage worry effectively.

Let’s Jump Into Leading Techniques to Deal with Stress:

1. View it positively. How you see it makes all the difference.  A study tracked 30,000 adults in the US for eight years and began by asking people, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" and "Do you believe that stress is harmful to your health?" Researchers then used public death records to find out who died.  The results showed that people who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year and viewed it as harmful to their health had a 43% increased risk of dying.  People who experienced a lot of anxiety but did not see it as harmful were no more likely to die.  In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little strain. Changing how you view stress can literally mean the difference between life and death. 

Furthermore, when you tell yourself, this is my body helping me rise to the challenge, you channel that energy to work for you and not against; you turn stress from debilitating to enhancing. Reframing it can provide a different look and open up an array of healthy possibilities to stare down the tension from an empowering position.

2. Get help. When you share with somebody how you are feeling instead of bottling it up, you can relieve some of the effects. When life is difficult, your stress response wants you to be surrounded by people who care about you, there is a built-in mechanism for resilience found through human connection.   When you reach out to others to seek support, you can bounce back more easily than if you choose to isolate yourself. You may be surprised that the very worry that you are convinced only relates to you is shared by others and more common than you think.

3. Play and laugh.  The best antidotes to stress are play and laugher.  It is hard for the human brain to think about more than one thing at any given time.  You cannot be both pepped up and driven down at the exact same moment so when you find ways to laugh, you are reducing the stress emotion.

4. Get busy. Winston Churchill famously said, “I have no time for worry.”  If you are doing something that involves planning and thinking, it is hard to fit in worry. Sometimes, taking your mind off the nagging worry will allow you to return to the problem on your own terms. What kind of project or task can you work on that will occupy your full attention?

5. Rehearse the worst-case scenario.  Instead of having these uninformed nebulous catastrophic thoughts bounce around in your skull, you can think through the worst-case scenario which can shed new light.  Perhaps we realize that it is not as bad as we are portraying it, or we discover the power we need to get through the toughest times. When we visualize, more information can surface to assuage our concerns and we can plan to mitigate those circumstances.

6. Know it will pass. Believing in the idea that the stress is temporary and that there is nothing life could bring to you that is beyond your strength to endure.  You can also ask yourself… how much is this thing that I’m worrying about really matter in the grand scheme of things?  How much am I willing to pay for this worry, how much have I already paid? 

7. Engage in future think. Picture yourself in the future, perhaps 1-3 years from now, and how you will not care about this trivial matter.  It helps us visualize not being in this painful moment but in a more joyous time. When we are so ensconced in the short-term, we are filled with all kinds of emotions, but when we can shift our mind to the long-term, the more rational side can balance the emotional side.

8. System design. If there is a problem that is causing you stress, you can address it by designing a system to combat the problem.  This can involve the following:

A. Have a process: When people panic they make mistakes, they override systems and disregard rules.  If you have a familiar process, you will be less stressed because you have prepared for this before and know exactly what to do. 

B. Get started: Maybe the first thing you do is write down what is causing the problem. You do not even need to devise a solution, you just need to begin. You can even pretend you are somebody else objectively collecting facts for the problem.  When you devote your time to research, worries tend to evaporate in light of knowledge and clarity.

C. Break down the stress:  When you can dismantle something or look at it from a new angle, it loses its force over you.  Don’t focus on the big goal, break it down into small pieces, and pay attention to taking the first step. 

Other techniques can include: getting adequate sleep, regular exercise, mental downtime, taking vacations, doing controlled breathing, practicing yoga, mindfulness meditation, getting acupuncture treatments, walking in nature, journaling, being of service to others, and practicing loving-kindness to name a few.

The main takeaway is that we are not powerless to stress.  When we proactively manage it, we will regain control and find more ways to be happy and fewer ways to worry.

Quote of the day:  “It is not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.” -Hans Selye, Father of Stress Research

Question of the day:  What technique do you use that is not on this list? Comment and share below, we would love to hear from you!

[The next blog in this series 3/4 will focus on ways you can learn about the sources of your stress]

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with others to understand their sources of stress and have a gameplan for working with it for increased performance, contact me to learn more.

Reduce your stress with these techniques

Making Sense of Stress (Stress Series 1/4)

There are no shortages of common sources of stress including work, children, finances, relationships, illness, overcommitment, loneliness, family dynamics, lack of work-life balance, and uncertainty, all exacerbated during these quarantine times.  While stress is a ubiquitous part of life, its negative effects do not have to be. The very way we look at stress can completely change its hold over us.

Stress, or this agitation in the body, usually happens when demands exceed capacity. It can come in many different forms. There is the type of stress which you bring onto yourself such as showing up for a meeting unprepared or skipping out on a commitment.  This is pointless stress because it can be avoided or minimized with advance planning and prioritization before the situation turns problematic. There is the stress that hits you like a bolt from the blue and even having done everything right, you could not have anticipated or controlled its arrival.  There is high-level stress that can be debilitating to your performance and there is low-level stress that can be enhancing. There is short-lived stress that provides the accelerating force for you to accomplish a task and there is long-lasting stress that chips away at your health and happiness each day.  The intensity and duration of stress matters, and when both are present, it is a recipe for disaster.

Stress: The Destroyer

The one thing for sure is that too much stress, especially of the acute variety can have deleterious effects.  It can muddle our thinking by crippling our abilities to think long-term, and it can compel poor decision making. University of Pennsylvania Professor and Author Annie McKee says, with chronic stress, “we have more difficulty being flexible or open to new ideas, we start seeing things in simplistic ways and we overreact to minor irritants; everything and everyone starts looking like a threat.” In this state, we are more likely to cause problems rather than solve them.  It is an endless loop – we do not think straight and we pick fights; we lash out, hide out, or opt-out. It gives us tunnel vision, the more stressed we are, the more focused we tend to be and are unable to see the periphery.  Neurologist Robert Sapolsky spent more than three decades studying the physiological effects of stress on health.  He concluded that long-term stress suppresses the immune system, making us more susceptible to infectious diseases and can even shut down reproduction by causing erectile dysfunction and disrupting menstrual cycles. Being chronically overwhelmed and fatigued can negatively impact our performance and can lead to mental health issues such as burnout and depression.

Stress: The Builder

Not all stress is bad, however.  A little bit of stress or a lot for a very short period of time can be a good thing.  Our stress hormones keep us alive!  If something was intent on eating us, our stress reactors would kick in and encourage us to run away. Sapolsky explains, stress hormones are brilliantly adapted to help us survive an unexpected threat. "You mobilize energy in your thigh muscles, you increase your blood pressure and you turn off everything that's not essential to surviving, such as digestion, growth, and reproduction.”  You think more clearly, and certain aspects of learning and memory are enhanced. All of that is spectacularly adapted if we are dealing with an acute physical stressor. Other than keeping us alive, moderate stress can help us develop coping skills and even kick us in the butt to boost our output.  Being unproductive can cause a feeling of stress and sway us in the direction of aiming to get work done. Having that deadline that is tight, but not too tight can spur creativity and motivation. Additionally, those stress states help us appreciate the periods of tranquility and the proactive steps we can take to spend more time in those peace zones.

It is important to notice the difference between stress that causes us chaos and stress that brings great results.  Fostering the good kind of stress and using techniques to minimize and avoid the bad type of stress will take you far. Regardless of the approach, we should never allow the stress termites to eat away at our lives. We have more power available to us than we realize and there is always some type of strong response we can offer.

Quote of the day: “Stress is caused by being here but wanting to be there” -Eckhart Tolle

Q: How have you used stress to achieve peak performance?

[The next blog in this series 2/4 will focus on 8 ways to deal with stress]

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with others to understand their sources of stress and have a gameplan for working with it for increased performance, contact me to learn more.

Embrace the good kind of stress while mitigating the bad type.