i don't know about you but for me 2020 has been a bit of a stressful year
so i thought i'd share with you some of the things that i do every day to manage stress and anxiety
but in this video i'm also going to explain a way of thinking about stress that can transform stress
from something that is you know just something bad that happens to you into something that you can
channel to be more productive and also help you feel calmer so in this video you're going to learn
10 daily habits to reduce stress and anxiety and don't worry i'm not going to tell you to meditate
this video is sponsored by better help where you can get a professional licensed counselor
who can personally coach you through anxiety and stress for around 65 dollars a week so check out
the link in the description for 10 off your first month so i've been reading the little
house on the prairie books to my daughter and in book three we're reading a story about almanzo
and his farming family in the 1800s and they survived off of what they grew
and in one of the stories right before the fourth of july they've got their corn starting to sprout
in this in the fields and the weather starts to get weird so it seems like it's going to
freeze so before they go to bed the parents start to worry a little bit about the crops
and they they don't go to sleep they stay up and they watch the temperature and sure enough it does
start to freeze so they get all the kids out of bed in the middle of the night and the only way to
save the corn is to pour water on each of these tiny little stocks before the sun comes up and
if they don't their corn is going to freeze and they'll have no harvest that year so every member
of the family anxiously runs through the night hand watering each little corn sprout in their
acres and acres of fields and by the time the sun rose they'd managed to save most of their crop
they were exhausted but they were also content and after they did the rest of their morning
chores they were able to sit back and relax and appreciate the hard work that they've done
so the stress response is your body's activating response when you sense a threat in almanzo's case
this was their livelihood about to be destroyed your body turns on this sympathetic response it
sends out some adrenaline to spur you into action it heightens your breathing and your heart rate
to prep you for performance and almanzo and his family they use their stress response to spur
them on the worry helps them to be vigilant to not sleep to take this you know impressive physical
action and this stress response potentially saved them from complete crop failure so anxiety isn't
just something bad that happens to you it serves a function but our modern language confuses anxiety
with anxiety disorder and it's given this negative connotation to the word anxiety
but anxiety isn't out to get you it's your body and mind's performance mode so the stress or
the anxiety response can help you have more energy and get more done and then it'll naturally resolve
if you know how to channel it so i'm going to teach you some daily habits you can use to
naturally resolve your anxiety when you think of anxiety as a motivating energy to resolve problems
anxiety can become a powerful tool instead of just something bad that happens to you that you want to
avoid and even if you do have an anxiety disorder these tools will help you reduce your stress
levels and get healthier so let's talk about a modern problem that we all have one of the reasons
that so many people struggle with stress and anxiety is that we face a few modern problems that
make it a lot harder for us to deal with stress than almanzo and his family back in the 1800s
because our anciently evolved brain isn't so good at dealing with modern stressors we all need to
take an intentional approach to managing anxiety so the first problem that many of us face is that
so many of our modern stressors are connected to problems that we can't solve physically
so in almanzo's case when they were worried they got that jolt of adrenaline and cortisol
and they were able to use that physical energy to solve a physical problem they didn't feel stressed
afterwards because they burned off the adrenaline and cortisol when they were running around solving
the problem so for many of us our modern stressors are things like deadlines and assignments
traffic noise and our crops are sitting at a computer instead of planning corn
so if i'm stressed about a problem at work i may not sleep and i might even solve that problem
but the adrenaline and the cortisol stay in my system until i physically burn them off so this
is where exercise becomes clutch daily exercise is an essential part of reducing pent-up anxiety
five minutes of exercise has been shown to reduce cortisol and adrenaline levels
exercise can decrease overall levels of tension it can elevate your mood it can
improve your sleep and it can improve your self-esteem so aerobic exercise you know where
you're breathing really hard that tends to be the most effective type of exercise at reducing
stress but really any kind of movement is helpful so going for a walk or a bike ride or even just
doing like wall sits or stretching for a minute in your office those can all be helpful so the
first thing i'm going to encourage you to do is just find a way to add some movement to your day
now let's talk about your morning routine how you start your day is going to set the tone for
your entire day so if you're like many people the first thing you do makes your anxiety worse so um
this is what it looks like for a lot of people you're tired because you went to
bed a little bit late and the first thing you do is start scrolling through your phone you look
at social media or the news and then you drink some caffeine now caffeine is the most widely
used psychoactive drug in the world it crosses the blood-brain barrier in seconds and it makes
you feel more alert by reducing adenosine but adenosine is a relaxation chemical in your brain
caffeine can also increase adrenaline and it can make you feel more irritable more anxious and
more agitated now you can develop a tolerance to the alerting effects of caffeine meaning
you're going to need more coffee the next time to feel alert but you don't develop a tolerance to
the anxiety effects of caffeine so caffeine use can impact your sleep and your anxiety
for up to 48 hours and caffeine has been shown to contribute to anxiety and depressive disorders
so if you're serious about decreasing your anxiety try getting caffeine out of your system for at
least three days and see how how that impacts you i personally don't use caffeine because
of the impact it has on on my anxiety levels if you feel tired one thing you could try is
getting more sleep sleep helps your brain function better which makes it so you can
better solve problems and resolve situations that bring you anxiety so if the idea of
making these changes seems overwhelming um i'm just going to encourage you to start slowly just
make one little change every month there there is no quick and easy fix for anxiety like if you're
looking for some magical cure you'll have to check some other channel because that's not what
i'm selling but you can drastically reduce your anxiety by making small and sustainable changes
okay so now let's talk about your media consumption so our ancient
evolved brain is much better adapted to the world of little house on the prairie than it is to our
modern media almanzo and lara may have gotten a newspaper once a week or heard the news from town
occasionally but that news was often about local events the news was brief and infrequent
and actionable so stress about the news could be resolved by taking action so for example
if a couple in town got married they could make them a present or if a barn burned down in town
they could go help their neighbors build a new one this is the opposite of what we have today
so these 24 7 streams of disaster around the world these trigger our stress response as if
as if we're in physical danger but they they don't give us any place to act to create safety
so if you wake up in the morning and you just start scrolling through your feeds or you start
watching the news you're basically giving other people the power over your adrenaline glands
i do not recommend starting the day off with the news instead sit back for a second and think what
do you want the tone of your day to be for me i want it to be upbeat calm self-assured peaceful
and powerful now what kind of media does that for you for me it's prayer and scripture study first
thing in the morning for you it may be meditation journaling uplifting music but the important thing
is that the first thing you do is something you choose so i don't i don't just bury my head in
the sand when it comes to the news i choose to to check a couple of of straightforward news stations
um once or twice a day but i don't do it first thing in the morning i also i also choose to focus
more of my time on areas that i can take action on instead of on areas that are out of my control
the stress response is supposed to help you it's about performance and taking action but
it's also supposed to be the short-term reaction so it's healthy for bursts of speed but it becomes
unhealthy when it's chronic and when that stress remains unresolved so if you take the little house
of the prairie story they worried they didn't sleep they took action they did what they could
to save the corn and some plants lived and some plants died but then they relaxed our body has a
natural balancing reaction to the stress response this is called the parasympathetic response but
most of us don't know how to turn it on so you can choose to turn on this parasympathetic response
through grounding exercises or breathing exercises which i'm going to talk about later but the most
natural way to resolve the stress response is to simply complete a task so if you feel worried
about an assignment and then you turn it in ah you feel that stress go away and this is one of the
reasons why coping skills can only go so far in helping anxiety because anxiety is best resolved
by doing one of two things either taking action to resolve the problem or threat or
whatever it is or practicing active acceptance so letting go of things that you can't change
but in our virtual world even when we do complete a task or we resolve a problem it can be hard to
see the results so my next tip is that you find a way to acknowledge when you can set down a task
you you make it concrete so for me i really like checklists um i'll even like if i complete a task
and it wasn't on my checklist i'll write it on my checklist and then i'll check it off so that
i can um feel that sense of completion now there are lots of ways to do this but find some way to
mark off or to acknowledge when you've completed a task mike boyd just made a really interesting
machine that does this or simone yertz gertz i wish i know how to say her name right um they also
have some interesting ways to kind of mark off when they've completed something so i encourage
you to find some way to give yourself some physical tangible way to celebrate your success
now this can be really hard to do with long-running stress or long-term projects
but you can learn skills and practice them to turn off the stress one skill that i learned from
michael barrett who was the director of the center for change this is an eating disorder treatment
program is to every day when i leave work to make a conscious practice of setting that work aside
so for me i just say a little prayer about my clients i say lord i've done the best i can
i'm leaving them in your hands now there is a lot of different ways to do this but the basic
idea is choosing when to carry something mentally heavy and when to set it down so this could be as
simple as turning off notifications on your phone or setting boundaries at work about when they can
and when they can't contact you when your job is mostly mental or mostly emotional or virtual
i also really find it helpful to choose something manual to complete it can be really nice and
relieving to see physical progress on a task so this could look like cleaning something mowing
the lawn fixing something physical there's just something about physical tasks and completion
that seem to click that like ah switch in the brain it triggers that parasympathetic response in
our brain that says okay you're all right you're safe now and it turns off that stress response
now managing anxiety is about being intentional and in control instead of reactionary so i have
this picture in my head of me as a little kid coming home from playing at a friend's house um
you know it's evening it's starting to get dark and i i grew up in a super safe town but when it
started to get dark and i was walking home um you know how it feels like there's like that tingle
in the back of your neck and maybe you wonder if there's something behind you in the dark
um now of course in every single situation there was nothing back there but if you start running
then you get more scared and you get you get more and more scared the faster you run
and then you get through the door and you slam the door whatever you look out the window and there
was nothing behind you now that is how i visualize daily low level stress and anxiety it's like you
start to feel that tingle in the back of your neck and your impulse is to run so if you're at work
and you start to feel a little bit stressed you try to work harder you try to work faster and you
try to get more things done but that doesn't make you more effective i have the tendency
to try to fill every waking moment with busyness you know checking your email or just keeping busy
all the time by always staring at your phone so just like me as a little kid we perpetuate anxiety
when we run from it when we run from ghosts so instead of running like stop slow down
turn around and look around you and you'll see that there's nothing there
so what does this look like in my day-to-day routine this looks like taking the time to breathe
taking the time to slow down to do something calming or to do something grounding
this is this is how you regulate your nervous system throughout the day you may feel like you're
getting more done by just going faster but you'll be a lot more effective and less stressed out
if you take a minute every hour or so to just clarify and to breathe and to slow down
our brain is not very good at multitasking that can trigger that sympathetic that fight flight
freeze response so another way to help strengthen your parasympathetic response is to monetise so
our brain gets super overwhelmed by multitasking basically interprets too much stimulation as
being unresolved threats so close those tabs do one thing at a time and then just you know one
of the things that i do throughout the day that helps me calm down is to just notice where you are
so just notice right now that you are watching this video now i promised that i wouldn't tell
you to meditate but mindfulness is different it's just slowing down and noticing the present moment
noticing that you are doing what you are doing and then you can move on and get back to you know your
work or whatever so another essential skill to manage anxiety for your daily routine is to do
what i call big picture small picture so stress is not the problem chronic unresolved stress is
the problem this is the problem of the brain not knowing how to sort and manage all the stimulation
and all the triggers and all the threats that come at it and when we feel too many things coming at
us our brain interprets that as if we're being attacked as if we're in danger if if you've got
so many things that feel urgent but you can't do them all your brain can go into shutdown mode
so what do we do with this right no one no one has the time to do everything they want or need to do
so so how do i manage this i personally take the time to intentionally sort out and choose
what i'm going to work on what are my priorities and and what i can let go of and this i really
believe can help clear up that chronic unresolved stress so for me i don't know whether it's anxiety
or whether it's add but i am i constantly feel like my brain is overflowing with ideas
and tasks and to-do lists and then on top of that there's the screaming children so the way
that i i manage this is i'm constantly throughout the day writing down my to-do lists so i'll write
down a list of everything on my mind and then i'll just choose one or two things clarify
what is most important what are my priorities and then i just get to work on a couple of them
and that helps me manage my stress and anxiety so for some people clarifying looks like journaling
and this can really help with anxiety because it helps your brain sort through the confusing mess
and and to get clarity and then to get going again um another thing you can do like i do is
these priority or to-do lists but then just make sure to highlight only the few that you're going
to work on or journal the journaling skill of a brain dump or journaling about your locus of
control each of these things can help you you know clarify and manage your stress throughout the day
now i'm going to jump ahead here to sleep you know you think going to sleep would be my last
daily routine but sleep is really important so to be able to sort through
all these tasks you really need the executive functioning part of your brain to be working
and for that part of your brain to work well you need to get enough sleep
so when your mind is rested it can better manage all that excess stimulation
and it can resolve anxiety when it comes up but i know it can be hard to sleep when you're anxious
i have a hard time sleeping sometimes so if you're not getting enough sleep or you're having
a hard time sleeping i would say just choose one small step you can take to sleep better
now in order to manage anxiety another skill that i've had to learn was to get a little bit
better at saying no so resolving anxiety is about regaining self-control so if you want to resolve
anxiety you may have to say no to the occasional party so that you get enough sleep so that you
don't need coffee in the morning so that you're not stressed out and anxious throughout the day
choosing a sustainable path instead of a frantic one requires like a careful sorting of priorities
in your life so when we consciously choose to not overload our brain it can handle these
tasks with more composure so this is something i have to work on all the time is just saying
no to a lot of things that i want to do but i know are not going to be helpful for me
now next one i want to talk about is getting time in nature i'm not going to spend a lot of time on
this but there is a bunch of research that nature is really good for anxiety and i personally love
it so i'm going to encourage you to try to get some nature into your day-to-day life i am blessed
to live in an area where i can get out in nature every day but you can get a dose of nature even if
you're trapped in the city so go for a walk look at the sky water a plant keep a fish visit a park
or even just watching a documentary or looking at pictures of nature can be really soothing
for your brain so i'm gonna encourage you to make nature a part of your daily routine the last part
of my daily habits that i use to reduce stress and anxiety is i make sure that my day is not too full
i make sure that i turn off at some point during the day so take time to wind down in the evening
so that you have time to get ready to go to sleep and and get a good night's rest
and and wake up ready to take care of yourself so for me my wind down routine looks like turning off
my phone taking a hot bath reading some random book and even though i'm super busy with three
little kids and a job and a business i make it a priority to get a few minutes of peace most nights
so comment below what are you going to do for your wind down routine what helps you manage your
day-to-day stress levels when you take the time to resolve problems and to work with your brilliant
ancient brain you really can learn to reduce anxiety and to get a lot of things done okay
that's it i hope you find this helpful thank you for watching and take care