We will start the conversation by taking one of our causes of stress from last week's episode and using our Coping Toolkit to work through it.
I will discuss how the Coping Toolkit is broken down into two categories: mind games and activities and how those categories have subcategories to help you work through stressors in your life.
Mind games and activities will give you immediate and long-term relief and require patience and persistence.
By the end, you will have the tools to move through stressful situations with more grace and ease!
We will start the conversation by taking one of our causes of stress from last week's episode and using our Coping Toolkit to work through it.
I will discuss how the Coping Toolkit is broken down into two categories: mind games and activities and how those categories have subcategories to help you work through stressors in your life.
Mind games and activities will give you immediate and long-term relief and require patience and persistence.
By the end, you will have the tools to move through stressful situations with more grace and ease!
Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode. I'm finishing up the series on what works for me, if you haven't tuned in. I really wanted to do a series talking about the personalization of different health behaviors we've basically talked about I'll call it healthy eating, health management and exercise. How do we make those fit our lives, our schedules, our preferences, our budgets, our family's activities schedule all of those different pieces, because what we are generally sold is here is a turnkey solution. Apply it rigorously and without flexibility, and then you will be successful. Obviously, that doesn't work for most of us. We are unable to sustain that. We fall off, we beat ourselves up, we hate ourselves, we're not doing the things that we said we were going to do. So what works for me is designed to circumvent that whole process, because who has the time to worry about hating themselves every day? We want to avoid that and we want to find some things that we can actually be successful with. So, when it comes to stress management, I talked last episode about figuring out what are your causes, what are your costs and what feelings do you want. So that's a bit of a precursor to what we're talking about today the coping toolkit. Now, I created this coping toolkit almost 10 years ago, probably a little bit longer, because it was in my book Don't Eat it, deal With it, your guidebook on how to stop eating your emotions.
Speaker 1:
Because when I was coaching I would see pretty consistent patterns of how stress was moving people away from the healthy behaviors that they wanted, whether that stress led them to drinking for comfort, getting high for comfort, gambling, eating, shopping, numbing out too much technology, all these different pieces that people would lean into because they just couldn't cope with the stress. And underneath, when I just say the term stress, that also means a lot of big feelings that could be anger or guilt, sadness, grief. I think many emotions and some people will call them like negative emotions. But I don't consider sadness a negative emotion. If something sad happens, surely I should feel sad If I have lost someone or something. That is sad and that is an appropriate emotion to feel they get pegged as negative One because socially a lot of people don't really know how to deal with people who are having a hard time. Certainly some of our behaviors that come out like anger like that makes it hard for everybody around. But again, my clients would have these big feelings and they didn't really know how to handle them.
Speaker 1:
So when I'm talking about the coping toolkit, some of this is really wrapped around our feelings. Some of it is absolutely looking at the stress, but understanding that a lot of our distractions that we fall into you know, the eating, the drinking, trying to be too busy, trying to achieve too much, zoning out on tech, all of those things being able to cope better decreases our need to be to actually have to stuff our feelings and push ourselves away from them. So the coping toolkit is something that I would use because, again, like I talked about last time, you know finding your costs and your causes. They're mostly the same and so being prepared for those stressors to happen Can be helpful for how you deal with that stress. I'm gonna use two different examples when I'm talking about this, and and one is, you know, a little bit more of a surface level and then one is more Deep, like a different kind of stress, just to give a couple of examples of how we move through this. So, again, this toolkit is in my book. I use it actually in a lot of the corporate wellness courses that I teach as well, because, again, people fall into distractions or unhealthy behaviors, if you will when they aren't coping very well.
Speaker 1:
So the toolkit is going to be two different pieces. So One is mind games. So this is absolutely going to be things where I'm in a situation where I cannot change my environment, because sometimes, when you're stressed, like some people say like okay, well, get up and walk for five minutes. Okay, if I'm a bus driver, I can't do that. If I'm in my car, I can't do that. I have a job where I have to sit at my desk. You know, even if I'm at my kids sport, you know, I might not necessarily want to get up and walk away. So for many reasons, that's not always feasible. So there are some things that we can do mentally to help change how we are feeling about this.
Speaker 1:
And then, on the other hand, we've got activities. So maybe I am in a place where there are things that I can do outwardly. I Keep those in two camps, again, because you know I have worked with a lot of people when the stress is in their workplace and again, they can't just get up and walk away and do something. So some of these things with the mind games and the activities are for immediate relief and some of them are for more long term. They are things that you are going to engage in and over time, it helps with your stress. So I don't want you to have the impression that, oh my gosh, look at this, I did this this one time and I'm a new person, I'm feeling great.
Speaker 1:
Some of these take Patience and persistence, which is fine, because we can all muster up some patience and persistence. So the examples I'm going to use basically is the first one is just being late. So Some people find this stressful and some people don't necessarily find this stressful. I'm going to say that there are things that certainly I'm doing and Maybe when my kids were younger that contributed to me being late and I Really stressed out about it because, again, I work directly with people, so somebody is waiting for me, I am wasting someone's time. If I am late, I'm being discourteous. I think it is really rude to have somebody waiting on me and the appearance that my time is more important than their time. So it causes me stress on a lot of different levels.
Speaker 1:
The other example, a little bit deeper, is looking at an aging parent. So my parents are, as everyone's, getting older and Sometimes, you know, there's just such a noticeable difference when, you know I all the words like feel so derogatory, but they also feel accurate where I feel like certainly less strong, you know, more feeble, a little more precarious when walking. And I will absolutely say one thing that I notice that I find certainly more heartbreaking than others is the sparkle in the eyes is less sparkly. So you know, when you can see someone is kind of losing that zest or that presence, that twinkle Hopefully you don't even know what I'm talking about, because it's hard to watch, it's sad, it's stressful because there isn't a thing that I can do about it and there really are no interventions but it stresses me out for a lot of reasons.
Speaker 1:
With safety driving, you know my dad is a big hiker, he likes to go out and do a 10 mile hike and then that is very concerning to me at times because what if he doesn't have reception? So again it also folds into like a greater stress scenario because what if something happens? And you can imagine like all of the different downhill effects there. My best friend just lost her father and so I've been watching that situation up close and the stress before he passed as he was declining, was very, very stressful. So those are the examples.
Speaker 1:
I'm sorry that I don't have a real pick me up type of stressor to talk about, but if it was real pick me up, it wouldn't be a stressor Now, would it Okay? So when we look at mind games, it's basically you know, what can I do for the scenario? So when I'm talking about being late, I do have some different things that I can do. Some are applicable to being late, some are not. So reframing a situation is always something that I think can be really helpful because our minds tend to track on like okay, here's this one way I'm thinking about it. So reframing Certainly I can look at being late as a learning experience, because I generally know exactly what happened that has made me late. And if I want to blame my kids and say it's because they don't know where their shoes are, they didn't have their homework together, all of those things, those are all real and those are things that we can work on and we can work on them together so that they master that area much better and it doesn't become an issue any longer. But reframing one way especially when something is in the past, we tend to really beat ourselves up or, in that situation you know, really get irritated with our kids. But I want to reframe this as we are moving forward. Here's what's going to be different and also I will have steps on how that makes it different.
Speaker 1:
And gratitude is also a piece that again not as applicable in this circumstance, but sometimes, when we are so stressed out, being grateful can help, especially if you go down far enough where you can feel what being grateful feels like in your chest. You can feel it in your body. That's certainly a great one, I would say, for my parents, because when we are together, I'm looking at the time that we are together and I'm feeling grateful. I'm glad we have this time. I'm glad we can walk around the botanical gardens together, I'm glad I can watch, you know, my dad eat a chicken burrito enchilada style for the four millionth time in my time, in my lifetime. But how can I bring some gratitude towards the situation and really shift how I'm feeling?
Speaker 1:
Another option in mind games is acceptance, and there are some things that are really stressful. I will say, you know, like a kid's schedule, that well, this is what we've all agreed to do. Like I'm going to have to accept and I'm going to have to get on board. That like, yeah, it's super busy and it's super tiring and my life feels like it's revolving around them. I definitely know it's not going to last forever, but is there some acceptance I can bring to the situation? Acceptance is really helpful. Also, again, aging parents, because this is the circle of life. I mean, my parents are not going to live forever and it's certainly generally a decline. So, accepting that, yes, this is part of it, this is part of life and being close to people, this is going to happen Acceptance can also really be helpful in, I think it's a lot of job stress that there's something and you just can't do a thing about it Then really accepting you know I could fight this all the time, but this is part of the deal and the stressor, and the stressor could be a manager, it could be a job task, it could be a coworker, it could be time constraints, but I really need to get on board because I'm spending a lot of time fighting this.
Speaker 1:
The next one is therapy. So again, I was saying that there are some things that are long-term. Therapy is long-term, but if I'm not coping and I'm having such a hard time that I have to lean on other things to make myself and this is a quote unquote feel better, then maybe I need more help than what I'm capable of doing by myself. And I think that a lot of times people want to think like, oh, I can do this, I got this, I got this, I can handle it, which is a way to think. I also think there is this entire subset of our population that went to school to learn these things and this information to be able to help us out. That's their entire job is to help us with our mental and emotional struggles. So therapy again, getting to therapy and staying in therapy have their own challenges, time-wise and financially, but absolutely, if I'm not doing well, I want to look at the effects of that.
Speaker 1:
So, if I can't handle my stress very well you betcha that I am grumpy, you betcha that I am distant from people I might be causing myself physical issues, stomach aches, headaches, all of these different things from the stress. And wouldn't it be great to have some keys on how I could feel better about the situation? Because, again, it's one thing to say like accept it and be grateful and they don't want that to feel like a platitude but having someone that can help you walk through your particular circumstance and give you insight and give you different ways to think about something different, different ways to do something different. It's all tailored just for you really is an excellent investment. I have been to therapy I don't know how many times and it's for old stuff and new stuff and things that I just don't have any idea what I'm supposed to do with, and luckily there are professionals that do so.
Speaker 1:
The last piece of mind games is self-compassion. There are so many times when we just really fall back on beating ourselves up over a situation, just being cruel to ourselves, idiot. I can't believe especially if something like being late that I'm contributing to. I'm doing it again now I've been rude again, but to have some self-compassion that on most days every single person is doing the absolute best that they can. Sometimes it looks better than others, but there isn't a reason and there is no benefit to beating ourselves up, because if beating ourselves up was going to help, it probably would have by now. Everybody's pretty good at it that it doesn't move us forward, it doesn't create positive behavior. We're not going to hate ourselves into great behavior, so that's something that we can really just cross off the list.
Speaker 1:
And how do I be kind to myself and, in an example of being late, I can be kind and I can still work on doing something different. The two are not mutually exclusive. Because I'm being kind to myself doesn't mean I accept what's happening. It doesn't mean I think it's appropriate, doesn't mean that, oh, I guess I'm not going to change this at all. It just means my choice is not to be cruel to myself in this moment. So those are options, and certainly not the only ones, but those are ones that I really use a lot with my clients reframe, gratitude, acceptance, therapy and self-compassion and those can be really helpful with your recurrent stressful situation.
Speaker 1:
And I think it's important, when we talk about activities next, that you've got a couple on each side that you can use. Okay. So now when we look at activities I talked about this a bit earlier but changing something that okay, something has to give and, oh boy, is there like a boatload of privilege coded over this. So sometimes we can change things and sometimes we can't. So if I'm talking about work, stress and oh look, I've just got another opportunity for a job that is just as good and not better, fine, if this toxic workplace the people I work with it's so problematic. I'm gonna change something, then okay, you can do that. So change something is always in that realm of something that I can control and a lot of things we absolutely can't. Maybe this job is your job. You have amazing health benefits and you've got somebody in your family who needs those amazing health benefits and you're kind of stuck there. So then we would look at is there something in the environment that can change? Is there a way that I engage with this toxicity that can change? So I think that changing something has a lot of merit.
Speaker 1:
I'm an action-based person and that could be like, if I talk about my parents spending a little more time, if I'm feeling like the clock is ticking, well then the clock is probably ticking and it would really behoove me to spend more time with them. And my friend that just lost her father said that it's one thing when he was having a hard time and maybe wasn't as pleasant to be around as he used to be, she still wishes she would have spent more time with him. So, changing something I talked about that with the lateness Is there something with getting ready for the next day that, before anybody steps foot in bed, these things are set out. These things are ready. Shoes are by the door, backpack is by the door, whatever it is, whatever that's causing the problem, outfits picked out, showering, bathing before bed, whatever it is. What is it that I can change and create some control that's going to give me a different outcome, that will give me less stress. You're not gonna believe that journaling is the next one. I know I hardly ever talk about it. Heather Sayers-Lamancom backslash journal to figure out how to do 3D journaling. That's in the book as well.
Speaker 1:
But when we are thinking about stress and when we are thinking about our stressors, it is so easy to be cyclical in our head, same thoughts over and over and over, same feelings over and over and over not productive. Sometimes we make ourselves more stressed, sometimes we're worrying, and when we take our feelings out of this mangled ball of yarn in our brain and try to straighten that out, putting pen to paper, it can be extremely helpful about how we are experiencing the stress. It can give us new perspectives and also, when we are talking about the toolkit, it can give us areas of maybe. I want to write down five things I'm grateful for right now and maybe with my job, the biggest thing I'm grateful for is that every other Thursday a check hits my account. Don't even have to ask for it, it's right there. So journaling helps you, have a conversation with you about what feelings are coming up, what steps you'd like to take next, what this reminds you of, and, again, the 3D method, where we write down the details, the dooms, the things we're afraid of and the desires. What do I want to see come out of this situation anyway? So journaling I can't tell you how valuable it can be when it comes to really struggling with our stress.
Speaker 1:
The next activity is exercise. Again, this is not one that oh my gosh, I went on a five-minute walk and now my life is very, very different. I think that it's cumulative. There are many, many, many benefits from activity, and I say walking a lot, and I probably shouldn't lean on that as much, because there are different abilities and people have different activities that they are able to do and different that they are not. So walking shouldn't always be the one. There are all different kinds of stretching activities. It could be something that's more high-powered I really want to do powerlifting or it could be something as simple as doing some quiet stretching sitting in a chair. So exercise, that's always been at the top of my list, that I feel like keeps the train on the tracks over here, and it takes all different shapes and forms. Especially, it depends on how I feel, and I don't use exercise as a way, even when I am stressed that something that is a have to, because I don't want to get into this circle of oh well, you didn't, and now look, because I'm traveling tomorrow morning and I was going to pack yesterday and I didn't, and I need to pack today and I'm going to be gone for a much longer time than usual, and I skipped exercise this morning so that I could journal, because I wanted to get clear on everything that needed to be done while I was gone, everything that needs to go with me, because, again, I'm gone but I'm also working while I'm gone, so there are a lot of details and I wanted that mental clarity, so I ended up, time-wise, picking that over exercise.
Speaker 1:
The next piece in activity is support. Support can come in different forms. It can be even support group and I find this, within grief, extremely helpful, but also with specific circumstances that you're dealing with. I have gone to survivor of suicide support groups when I had a very close suicide in my life because I did not know what to do with any of this, and therapy was helpful, certainly over time, but being in a room full of people that understood how I felt was so priceless and it was so lonely without that because nobody knew how I feel. Thank goodness, none of my good friends knew how I felt, and having that group was very grounding for me and it made me feel less bananas because I could relate to them and they could relate to me. I wasn't like a Martian anymore, which I felt like. A lot.
Speaker 1:
Support can also be just from good friends, people you trust, and this is so important in picking the people. I always call it our tree of trust. We've got to have people in the nest who you can talk to that are going to be very careful with your feelings. They are going to make sure that you feel listened to, you feel taken care of and they're not going to tell anybody the things that you tell them. So there are probably only a couple of people like this that you have in your life and if you do consider yourself lucky, I think having one-on-one support is really helpful and there can be ongoing things that support so if there is an issue that your child has and there are groups of people that are going through the same thing, then I know that that can be really helpful. Same thing with parents and even different support. There are different employee groups within corporations of people that get together and they have different things in common, but they're able to be there for themselves and again they don't feel as alone. And I think the aloneness, the loneliness, is such a plague and it's so difficult. It's such a terrible feeling. So if you can do something to remedy that, that's absolutely helpful with your stress.
Speaker 1:
And the last activity is hobbies. This always strikes some people as very odd, especially being older, because you do hobbies and fun things when you're younger and then you're older and you get serious. You have responsibilities and you have to make money and you have to keep house, blah, blah, blah, and we forget all about our hobbies. So I'm not necessarily talking about making your entire attic like a train set with the entire town and all your painted figurines. Do it if you want to. But there can be some really low key hobbies that you enjoy that almost have a meditative quality to them. They feel very soothing and very relaxing when you're doing them and these can be all sorts of things I like organizing.
Speaker 1:
Not going to lie, and I don't know how this actually got in my hobby category, but I was putting away Laundry yesterday and I have different organization things to wear. A little pair of socks has its own little thing and then the bras go in their own little thing and underwear goes all of it. I like it. I find it very soothing, I like to be able to see my stuff and find my stuff when I want it. But there are certainly other things that are creative. So there's all sorts of artistic things of drawing or painting Could be really temporary things like just doing chalk outside, but anything that uses more of a creative spirit that sometimes has zero purpose.
Speaker 1:
I think that sometimes with hobbies, people like hobbies that have a purpose and that they do something. I love plants and I will not lie, I've got a lot of plants, but it is something that has been extremely calming One. It's very challenging to learn Like, what do you want from me? Plants, like that is very challenging, but just getting into the nitty gritty this weekend I did a lot of because now we are coming up on spring, especially where I live. It's getting warmer so plants are waking up. They've been a bit dormant for a while and so now there are different things to do. So yesterday was assessing who needs a new pot, who grew over the winter, who didn't grow over the winter. So that's a fun hobby for me. But some people love working on cars, they like working in their yard, they like miniatures, like whatever it is. It can be something that you feel like, oh my gosh, this is so geeky, who cares? If something helps you with your stress, like that's fantastic.
Speaker 1:
I always put out the caveat that to have a hobby doesn't mean you need to go spend an enormous amount of money on this hobby before you ever really engage in it. That you can find even if you went to a craft store so many times. They have kits and it's a little kid of something to try, and I know that's that way with a lot of crocheting and knitting projects. You can just buy a little and it's got all the doodads and all the things you need. But again, it can just be you're making this tiny penguin, but you found it really satisfying. So I think that looking at hobbies, especially as an adult, is important, because it becomes too easy to make everybody else's activities and hobbies more important than your own, and I think that that is not a recipe for stress management. I think that is a recipe for resentment and anger. So, again, these don't need to be things that just fill your days, but it can be a little bit of time there, a little bit of time here, but that gives you some peace and contentment while you're doing it. So those are the activities that I focus on.
Speaker 1:
Change something journal, exercise, support and hobbies. So between these two activities and mind games, I always tell people the same as I did the last episode to kind of pick three because we want to see how well these work. So let's just say I'm really stressing about my parents. They're taking another road trip and again they're going the back way over the mountains and it's snowing and I find it so stressful. So what do I want to do? Well, I can pick a couple from each side, one I got to accept it. They're grown, they're going to do what they want to do and accepting that, I may perceive this as dangerous, but you know what they get to make their own choices. I'm not in charge of their life. So, acceptance, journaling, writing through.
Speaker 1:
These are the things that I worry about, but you know what? I hope they're really having fun and I'm really stressed and all of the different ways that I feel about this, and it could be something that I give myself self-compassion. I see why you get stressed about this, heather. Don't beat yourself up about it. I think it's very normal to worry about your parents as I get older, and so we look at all of these different situations that we're dealing with.
Speaker 1:
So in that last episode, you wrote down three causes. Look at these causes next to this coping toolkit. So keep pausing, write all these things down, but look at your mind games and look at your activities and what you said was a big cause of your stress. What is it that I can put into play? Do I just need more support from someone? Do I need to change something? Do I need to reframe this whole situation? Can I find some hobbies that I enjoy?
Speaker 1:
So that is the essence of the coping toolkit. We already know most of our stressors and then we get prepared and then, when we feel really stressed out, then we go into our toolkit and say what can I do now? Also, when we have surprise stressors, we can do this just the same. And life does like a good surprise, that's for sure, and we can walk through the same process of like OK, and as that surprise changes shape, gets more intense lessons. We can always shift what we are using in our toolkit, so hopefully this was helpful and hopefully it gives you some food for thought, especially when the stress feels so out of our control. Look at all of the options that we have here within our toolkit on how we get to deal with it. All right, I look forward to chatting with you next week.
