Episode 16: 5 Practical Strategies to Reduce your Stress Levels

Is stress a big problem in your life?

Can you relate to feeling so stressed out that you can't think straight?

Maybe you struggle to remember a time when you didn't feel overwrought?

Or perhaps you're living with a partner whose stress levels are adversely impacting your relationship?

If stress is a problem in your life, this episode is for you.

I can empathise 100% with the damaging effects of chronic stress and thanks to my own experience (which I share in this episode) I know what it takes to firstly manage and secondly reduce stress so it no longer rules the roost.

Episode highlights:

• Understanding what stress is
• Not all stress is bad
• When stress becomes chronic
• Signs and symptoms of long-term stress
• Medicating stress Vs dealing with the root cause
• Practical strategies to calm your stress response
• How to reduce day-to-day stressors
• Seeking support for managing severe stressors

Stress reduction is achieved when you know how to manage the internal effects of your external circumstances - this episode will help you get started.

Download the PDF version of 5 Practical Strategies to Reduce Stress here.

Register for the STRESS LESS Workshop on Tuesday 1st October here.

Connect with me on Instagram @emmaobriencoach here

If you've got big goals, but you're totally stuck about where to start, I invite you to book a complimentary strategy call with me here.

We'll uncover what's holding you back from the goals you want to achieve and you'll leave the call with actionable steps to get you moving in the right direction.

For the tea on me, how I work, who I coach and the packages I offer, please visit my website - www.emmaobriencoach.com

You can also connect with me on Instagram @emmaobriencoach where I share an abundance of tools, strategies and brilliant content, you might also see the occasional dog.

Check out two of my FREE online workshops:

My 7 Step Formula for Getting Unstuck

4 Ways to Stop Procrastination in its Tracks

Transcript

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Emma O'Brien: Hi, folks welcome to episode 16 season 2 of the lemons and pineapples podcast in today's episode, I'm going to be sharing with you 5 practical strategies to help you manage stress.

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Emma O'Brien: Unfortunately, stress has become something of

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Emma O'Brien: an infiltrator in my life at the moment, as I navigate

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Emma O'Brien: supporting my husband, who is

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Emma O'Brien: on the road to recovery from years really of chronic work stress.

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Emma O'Brien: So often we hear about

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Emma O'Brien: the effects that stress can have

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Emma O'Brien: on you and the symptoms you can have from chronic stress.

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Emma O'Brien: trouble, sleeping.

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Emma O'Brien: gastrointestinal issues, brain fog, irritability, struggling to focus, feeling, hopeless.

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Emma O'Brien: struggling to connect and maintain relationships. And unfortunately, I have been witness to to all of these things. So you know, we can read about these things and go, yeah, yeah, that's what stress does. But I have actually been living this at the moment. And I think it's just really

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Emma O'Brien: inspired me to

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Emma O'Brien: go bigger with this work about helping people with stress management. Many of you'll know I'm a heart math practitioner and heart math is a set of emotional regulation tools which are really useful for managing stress.

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Emma O'Brien: So I'm going to talk to you a little bit about some ways that if this resonates for you, and maybe you are the person who is chronically stressed, or maybe you live with someone who's chronically stressed. I'm sharing some strategies that can help to start you on the beginning of the journey to reducing stress.

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Emma O'Brien: And we reduce stress by starting to manage it is the 1st step here. I just want to back the truck up a little bit here and talk about what stress is, because the way I'm talking about it here, and the way it's written about in the media and the and the way maybe you've read about it, and connected with it is that all stress is bad.

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Emma O'Brien: and stress

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Emma O'Brien: is useful

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Emma O'Brien: when it is

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Emma O'Brien: in the correct capacity and and the correct circumstance. So our stress response is a response to danger. And it's something that when it is

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Emma O'Brien: acute and in the right circumstances is really really useful. So let's take the example. Maybe you have a toddler, and you've taken your eyes off them for a nanosecond, we all know, with small humans. You got to watch them like hawks.

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Emma O'Brien: and your toddler is starting to run towards a busy road.

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Emma O'Brien: This will kick your stress response off very, very quickly. You're going to see that your small human is running towards the road. It's going to set off a cascade of fight or flight reflex responses within your body. So it's going to start your body producing adrenaline, which is going to help you run fast enough hopefully to catch your small human.

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Emma O'Brien: get hold of them.

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Emma O'Brien: restrain them. Whatever you need to do with your toddler and bring them back to to safety.

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Emma O'Brien: That is how a healthy stress response works. It helps you to in a moment of danger, to respond very quickly to something. And then, if you have a healthy, normal, regulated nervous system, your stress response will then come, wind itself back down. You will stop producing adrenaline. If the adrenaline has been going long enough to get you to produce cortisol in your body as well. It'll stop the production of that.

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Emma O'Brien: You're gonna have probably 5 min or so to really allow your body to calm down.

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Emma O'Brien: and then you'll be back to your normal neutral baseline.

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Emma O'Brien: That is what happens in an ideal world with healthy stress. The trouble is that most of us are living in a world with work commitments and

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Emma O'Brien: demands family demands financial demands, demands from looking at social media where we are being kicked into an acute stress response. Multiple times in the day, and it might be because your phone has tinged, it might be because somebody sent you an email.

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Emma O'Brien: And the danger here is that when we are repeatedly pushed into a stress response. We never really get back to that baseline neutral, and you never really recover. And this is when we end up in chronic stress, which means that we have cortisol being produced in our bodies all the time.

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Emma O'Brien: and cortisol. That's continually produced causes inflammation which causes disease. Which is why, when you are chronically stressed, you're going to have gut issues

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Emma O'Brien: because you are A, you've got a lot of inflammation. And B, you're not getting all of the blood flow to your intestines. That needs to be there because it's everywhere else waiting for you to to fight or or run away.

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Emma O'Brien: And

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Emma O'Brien: the other thing that stress does, and it causes huge strain on your heart is that when you are under stress, your cardiovascular system is working harder it includes increases your blood pressure. It increases your heart rate, and

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Emma O'Brien: we don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand the impact that has on your on your heart. Over the long run. Stress leads to heart disease. It can cause heart attacks, it can cause strokes.

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Emma O'Brien: It is a very insidious.

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Emma O'Brien: I guess it's a bit of an epidemic, really, that we are. We're living in.

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Emma O'Brien: And of course, chronic stress interferes with sleep patterns.

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Emma O'Brien: The less you sleep the worse. You feel stress leads to anxiety which stops you sleeping. And then we have this, this horrible vortex of stress cycle that's essentially feeding itself.

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Emma O'Brien: I think often. This is the point at which people can end up having their stress medicated

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Emma O'Brien: with anti-anxiety pills, antidepressants, and don't get me wrong. You'll hear me talk a little bit about medication.

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Emma O'Brien: Sometimes

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Emma O'Brien: a short course of medication is exactly what you need to be able to address what's happening in your life that's causing stress. But if you don't ultimately identify and deal with the root cause of your stress, all you ever do is numb the symptoms of it. And I think this is where a lot of people get stuck.

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Emma O'Brien: And this is where the work I'm talking about really starts to come in. And the the work of addressing the stress and doing the

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Emma O'Brien: in a journey that's required to really help reduce it in the long run. I don't think we can ever really get rid of stress a hundred percent.

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Emma O'Brien: It's it's a part of of our lives. But we can learn to manage it and reduce it. So it doesn't rule your lives.

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Emma O'Brien: So I want to share

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Emma O'Brien: reducing stress in the long run is, it is a journey. I have talked on the podcast before, about my own journey of recovering from Burnout.

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Emma O'Brien: I'm watching this journey unfold with my own husband at the moment of trying to support him, to make the long term changes to reduce the stress. So he's not chronically under stress. All the time it has been

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Emma O'Brien: really difficult for me watching somebody I love very much go through this. And it's why I share this information here on the podcast I've got A, A workshop coming up which the details are going to be in the show notes. I've also got a Pdf of what I'm sharing today. The link is also going to be in the show notes for you, so you can access that.

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Emma O'Brien: It's so important that we address. We address

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Emma O'Brien: the causes of stress.

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Emma O'Brien: It is it? It has the potential really to ruin people's lives. And it's something that is

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Emma O'Brien: deal withable. I'd love to say, avoidable. It's not. It's deal withable. You don't have to live in stress.

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Emma O'Brien: I'm just going to throw that out there.

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Emma O'Brien: So here are 5 practical ways that you can start to get a handle on and

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Emma O'Brien: get in touch with and manage

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Emma O'Brien: the stress

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Emma O'Brien: and reduce the stress that you might be experiencing in your life. And the 1st one is

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Emma O'Brien: when you are feeling very stressed. To pause and breathe. Breathing is such an underrated stress relief tool. But if you can slow your breathing down, you'll slow an increased heart rate down and you will start to calm your activated nervous system just by slowing your breathing down.

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Emma O'Brien: even if it means you walk out of a room and slowly count to 10 and take 10 deep breaths in before you have to go back in again.

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Emma O'Brien: it will help just to calm

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Emma O'Brien: a very alarmed and very activated

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Emma O'Brien: nervous system.

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Emma O'Brien: There's an exercise called heart focus Breathing, which is really really useful. If you go over to my Instagram Page, you will find that. Have a little rummage around there, and you'll find I did a video demo of heart focus breathing. It is a really really powerful and very simple tool to help you a in a moment of stress, to calm everything down and B to help you start to train yourself.

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Emma O'Brien: to be calm when there isn't stress, and then, when you know what calm feels like you have access to be able to calm your stress response when it is very activated.

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Emma O'Brien: The second thing you can do is move.

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Emma O'Brien: So if you're like me, and you don't really run unless you're being chased.

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Emma O'Brien: Any sort of movement is helpful going for a walk, getting up from your desk and and going for a walk outside the office, a walk around the block.

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Emma O'Brien: going and playing with the dog, going to a yoga class, going to the gym, if that's what lights your fire.

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Emma O'Brien: Anything that gets you to move is really great, because it starts to it breaks the stress state for a starter and any, any sort of movement helps you to access your natural endorphins, which will automatically help to soothe an activated nervous system. And obviously the more

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Emma O'Brien: regularly you exercise, the better it is for your earthly vehicle, the better it is for your heart, anyway. But movement is a great way of of dissipating stress, especially if you're very tense. And you're you're kind of really quite paralyzed. By the way you're feeling move, and you'll start to shift the energy of the stress in your body.

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Emma O'Brien: The 3rd thing is to start to get really cognizant of what does it feel like when you are stressed?

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Emma O'Brien: I have coached

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Emma O'Brien: many people

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Emma O'Brien: who

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Emma O'Brien: had no idea just how stressed they were all the time until we started to do some of the heartmath tools and started to calm their nervous systems down. And I believe, unfortunately, this is the case, for a lot of people is that we have become so used to living with chronic stress. We have lost touch with just how stressed we are at any given moment.

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Emma O'Brien: So if you can start to be the observer of what happens internally for you. When there's something that activates your nervous system.

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Emma O'Brien: you can start to really just notice and pay attention to what's happening in your inner landscape. And when you have an idea of what's going on internally, you can start to recognise when you feel your nervous system being activated, and you can

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Emma O'Brien: take action before it goes completely off the charts to start to calm yourself down as I've shared you can, if you can notice when you are

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Emma O'Brien: feeling that adrenaline start to rise and your heart rate start to increase because you're getting stressed, and you can take yourself away and just go and calm your breathing. You will slow that down before it goes into a full blown, reactive stress response. Or you'll end up the other thing we have. You know, we talk about fight or flight. There's also immobilization, which is when you just. It's a complete system collapse when everything just gets way too much.

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Emma O'Brien: The 4th thing is to really carve out in a day some time for yourself.

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Emma O'Brien: and this might be as simple as starting your day by having 10 min quietly having a coffee, or whatever your morning beverage of choice is

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Emma O'Brien: in the garden, and just having some quiet time for you.

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Emma O'Brien: it might be some time

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Emma O'Brien: you might be able to grab some time to meditate. You might have some time to go to a workout class to a Yoga class

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Emma O'Brien: 10 min quietly reading a book, something for yourself each day. I think

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Emma O'Brien: we often have this picture of self care painted as as being, you know, a whole Spa day which is fabulous. If you could do that fantastic. But one Spa day

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Emma O'Brien: every 3 months isn't going to

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Emma O'Brien: solve a chronic stress problem

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Emma O'Brien: daily, small daily habits and giving yourself a bit of quiet, quiet, and calm time. Each day is going to be far more useful than just going to a Spa. Once in a blue moon.

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Emma O'Brien: and the last thing when it comes to stress. And I think this is the most challenging part of stress management and reduction is identifying the things that cause you stress

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Emma O'Brien: and where you can reducing them. Now, this might be as simple as noticing that every time you have a whatsapp notification on your phone during your workday you start to feel a surge of adrenaline and feel your heart rate start to increase.

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Emma O'Brien: If your phone notifications are starting to kick you into a stress response.

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Emma O'Brien: Silence them.

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Emma O'Brien: And that will negate that problem for you.

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Emma O'Brien: It might be that

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Emma O'Brien: being disturbed in your office every 5 min by people coming in when you're trying to focus on something causes you to feel really stressed because then you feel overwhelmed. You can't get your work done and you're getting behind.

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Emma O'Brien: Is it possible for you to

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Emma O'Brien: lock your office door, put a sign, or set a sign on your door, or have some time out to go and work from home or work somewhere else to get something done where you need uninterrupted time.

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Emma O'Brien: when you can start to identify the things that cause you stress on a day to day basis. You can then make a choice to do something differently and to get rid of them.

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Emma O'Brien: I think the challenge comes, and this is where working with a coach or a therapist really starts to come into its own is when

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Emma O'Brien: you have

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Emma O'Brien: really big, long term stresses in your life that it's not as simple as just turning them off or throwing them away.

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Emma O'Brien: It might be something that you actually realise. Your

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Emma O'Brien: job that you have is the sole and main cause of stress in your life, and you need to change it. And you might need to do a complete career change. You can't do that overnight. That is something that requires some planning. It requires thought, and it requires a strategy, and it requires support. This is a this is where working with somebody like me is immensely powerful. If you're going on a big journey like a career change, it might be that your relationship is a cause of stress

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Emma O'Brien: for you. That's the situation I have been in. I was in a relationship with a guy over a decade ago

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Emma O'Brien: who was emotionally, very, very volatile. I never knew from one day to the next

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Emma O'Brien: what his mood was going to be, how he was going to behave, and that was

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Emma O'Brien: a long-term stressor for me.

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Emma O'Brien: Because when you're worrying about, is this person going to explode with rage? Are they going to be fine today?

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Emma O'Brien: My nervous system was constantly on alert, trying to keep me safe.

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Emma O'Brien: So ultimately I had to eradicate the relationship in order to get rid of that stressor. And that was something that took me time and planning to do.

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Emma O'Brien: And one has to think about these big life decisions. They're not something. It's not like turning a phone notification off.

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Emma O'Brien: So this is where support is really useful, and you don't have to navigate these things on your own, and you also are not obligated to sit in something that's causing you long term misery. Life is too short. So if you are listening to this and thinking, Oh, God! And I've got some big changes to make. Please reach out.

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Emma O'Brien: I am here to support you. There are a lot of people available in this self development space who can support you through big life transitions. So

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Emma O'Brien: ask for help. It's there.

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Emma O'Brien: I'd like to invite you if this has been useful, and this has resonated with you in the show notes. You can download a Pdf. Where I talk a little bit more about these 5 things that I've shared, and I'm also running a workshop on Monday, the 1st sorry Tuesday, the 1st of October.

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Emma O'Brien: where I am going to be.

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Emma O'Brien: If what I've shared here has resonated, you are very welcome to download a free Pdf, where I talk a bit more about these 5 strategies to reduce stress and share

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Emma O'Brien: you've got it in. You can have it in in written form to be able to see what I've talked about today. So you can go away and kind of have a bit more of a life inventory and have a look through this. I'd also really like to invite you to join me for a free workshop. I am running on Tuesday, the 1st of October, where I am going to be sharing more about

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Emma O'Brien: how we can

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Emma O'Brien: really learn to manage and ultimately reduce the stress in our lives, so we can enjoy life more. I'm a firm believer that we have this one. Go at this particular incarnation we are in, and

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Emma O'Brien: most of us are sleepwalking through it, because it's so hard with all of the stuff that's thrown at us from the outside, and when we can learn to manage the internal effects of external circumstances.

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Emma O'Brien: it becomes much easier to move through life with joy and with meaning and with purpose. And it's very interesting. I've been doing a lot of research around what causes stress and things that kind of really add on and trigger stack for stress and not feeling like your life has any purpose is hugely stressful. It's massively demotivating.

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Emma O'Brien: And of course, that causes us to feel stressed when it we feel like, what is the point of all this? What am I working so hard for? And if life is like one eternal groundhog day, it is utterly miserable. So I'm going to be sharing

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Emma O'Brien: my take on that I'm going to be sharing some stress management strategies. I'm going to be sharing more about heart math techniques in this workshop, so you can sign up for that in the show notes, and as I've shared, if this resonates for you, if you need help and support with the stress that's in your life, please reach out to me. You can pop me an email. It's Emma at Emma O'briencoach, dot com, or hop over to Instagram. Pop me a voice note and let's chat via DM,

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Emma O'Brien: so I hope today's episode has been helpful. This is stressless episode, really, number one, in what's going to be a series of podcasts. I'm going to be sharing about

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Emma O'Brien: how stress impacts us. And of course, as always. Because, I I really am passionate about sharing practical actionable tools in this podcast I'll be sharing ways that you can start to transmute and really reduce the stress that you're experiencing in the various areas of your life. So thank you for joining me today, and I will see you same time next week, bye, for now.