How to Handle Stress

All right, and welcome back. On today's episode, we're going to talk about something important and that's how to handle stress, something we all have to deal with in life.

And specifically, I'm going to explore that through two important lenses. Now, these come through a book I recently read, the Upside of stress by Kelly McGonigal. And while reading that book, these two things really struck me because they particularly relate to a lot of the things I talk about on this show in terms of masculine development, men's work, and men's groups. So the first part, the first element, the first lens we're going to explore for how to handle stress is really just our belief about stress, or what we would call mindset, a word anyone in personal growth and development has probably heard before.

But mindset's just really what's our frame, what's our orientation, what's our belief structure about this thing? Right? Because that deeply informs how we experience it. And so our mindset around stress can be a complete game changer for how to handle it. Now, what Kelly found in her research about stress was a, for a lot of us, we've kind of been beaten over the head over the last couple decades with the belief that stress is bad and we want to minimize it or get rid of it, right?

Mindfulness, wellness, they're all about eliminating stress. And a lot of us have this idea that we need to get rid of stress in our lives to be happy. This is one of the most important shifts we can make around how to handle stress is just this mindset belief. Because here's what they found. Now, they did some research polling a bunch of different people about their sense of well being in the world, right?

Are they emotionally happy? Are they physically doing well? How long do they live? What's their life satisfaction? Now, the group with the poorest outcomes overall, you guessed it, was dealing with a lot of stressful things in their life. Deaths in the family, job loss, relationship loss, physical challenges, you name it. And those people had the worst outcomes right? In their lives, how long they lived, how well they felt, etc.

Etc. They found another category of people right right there in the middle that is kind of what you typically think of as what we all want. People who didn't have stressful things in their life. The they lived a little longer, they had better health, and yeah, they were a little happier. But the crazy thing they found was the group that actually scored the highest on all the markers of wellness in life.

So self reported satisfaction, happiness, physical wellness, emotional wellness, longevity. They were a group that actually also had stress in their life, just like that first group, but yet they lived even longer and were doing even better than the second group, the group without stress. Now, what was the difference? What was the thing they found that demarked these different groups of one and two and three?

And it was just mindset, right? Group three were people that didn't think stress was something inherently bad, that it was just part of life, so they weren't afraid of stress. That alone completely changed their outcomes in life. Now, the worst off are those who think stress is bad and are dealing with stressful situations and then better than them, people who think stress is bad but just don't have that stress in their life currently.

And then the game changer group three, the group that does the best on all these outcomes related to wellness. And that's the group that, yeah, they have stress in their life, but they don't think it's a bad thing. And specifically their mindset shift is not that stress is some kind of thing we need to avoid, but it's a shift of what stress actually means in our experience. And so the way Kelly defines it in the book, which I really like, is stress just means it's our body's way of telling us something matters here that I need to pay attention to.

And that's it. Something matters here and I need to pay attention to it. That's what stress is. And we don't have to get rid of it from that mindset and from that orientation. Now, I love this because it really connects to a lot of what I've discovered in men's work and men's groups, right? In that the masculine part of all of us grows through challenge and feedback and being at our edge.

Which another way you could think of that is we grow through stress, right? We grow through being in moments where we have physical sensations of our body telling us, this matters right now. Pay attention. This matters right now. Pay attention. And so as masculine leaders in the world, us reframing our relationship around stress to, hey, stress is just my body's way of telling me to pay attention.

This matters is going to help us become the most powerful versions of ourselves we can be because we won't be afraid of stress. And Instead, we might actually sniff it out. Meaning if we want to thrive and grow and become the most incredible men we can be, we need to get into healthy, stressful situations. We need to stress our systems, we need to stretch, we need to grow.

I love, love, love this. And it's what we're really wired to do, but it just requires this mindset shift. So instead of fearing stress, we actually kind of welcome it because it's our body's way of just saying this matters. Pay attention. And I know I've loved moving through the world now having a little hint of when I should pay attention and what matters most to me.

Because you don't get stressed out about things you don't care about. You get stressed when it's something you care about in some capacity, right? And so stress becomes our way of helping us figure out what matters most in our lives. And from there we can orient ourselves as men to make meaningful change in action. And it really just sources from this mindset shift.

Stress isn't bad. It's just a way of making me pay attention to what needs to be dealt with in my life. You know, the things I care about, the things that matter to me, I'm not stressed out about it. It's probably not that important in my life. If I am stressed out about it, maybe it's time for me to slow down and get curious about what really matters about this might be obvious in some ways, but it might be more subtle than others. And that's really important for us guys to get clued into.

And hey, the benefit is having this belief system shift, this mindset shift away from stress is bad. To stress just means pay attention is going to make you emotionally more happy, physically more well off, more self satisfied in life. And yeah, you can even live longer just with a shift in belief. Now the second element that goes along with that, because hey, there is reality, there is the world, that sometimes just a mindset shift isn't enough.

It's an incredible important component and sometimes the only component we have control over. But it's not the only part. And that's where this second lens comes in for how to handle stress. So we have mindset, which is just shifting our belief around what stress means in our life. And then the second piece is what we would call our resources. So what resources do we have available to us? The more we're aware of what resources we have, the more we can handle that stressful event.

Now I'm going to explore resources more specifically, but first I just want to give you an example. And that's right something a lot of us have to deal with. Cars and maintenance. And so my family car started getting loud a couple months ago, drifting as we would drive, gas mileage plumaging and boom. I got to take it in, right? I got to get it checked out. Turns out it was a broken axle and a bunch of things that had to be repaired.

And thankfully my wife and I had been doing due diligence with our finances and we had some cash. Right. We had a way to just handle it. They were like, here's what you need. I was like, okay, do it. And a day later I got my car back and it was totally fixed. Was it annoying? Yes. Did I not want to spend that money completely? Have I thought about it since this podcast? No. That's what made it not a stressful event in my life.

I had the resources just to handle it. Previous points in my life, I may not have had those resources and had to put it on a credit card or might have had to have waited and then been freaking out as I was driving that, you know, maybe my car's going to get even worse. And that's what would make it stressful. I didn't know how I was going to handle it at those times, but when I had the right resources, which in this case was the money and the right place to fix it, wasn't that stressful in the end. So it's important. While mindset can change a lot for us, there is this really key ingredient to what resources do we have access to.

Obviously money is a big one we're all going to think about. And yeah, money can help a lot with a lot of things. But what I'm going to focus on today in terms of resources and how they dovetail with what I talk about in this show and men's work and men's groups are three important things. The first one's physical resilience. Right. Just meaning how much can my body actually handle and body that can handle more energy of stress is going to be able to respond more effectively.

Now, to build a physically resilient body is really just three things in my mind. First and foremost, you gotta exercise, you gotta be working out. There's a lot of research coming out now that just exercising and those endorphins that are released are pretty much as effective as most major antidepressants and most anti anxiety medications. Gotta work out, you gotta work out hard, you gotta challenge and stress, you gotta your body to help it keep releasing toxins, keep opening itself up.

And keep being able to respond to the moment and not be too stiff and have strength and power. I mean, this stress thing can be really visible in just how we think about how we get strong, right? We have to exercise, stress our bodies so. So we can respond more next time. Now, in addition to exercise, the other pieces of physical resilience are. Am I eating well?

Right? You gotta eat well. What's your diet? What kind of things are you putting into your system and how do they interact with how you deal with stress in the world? Are you eating out of stress, right, as a reaction to stress, or are you eating to handle stress? Right? To give yourself that resilience, to be able to take on more stress. And then you gotta get enough sleep. This is probably a chronic one these days.

For a lot of guys I work with, I've dealt with it in my life. You gotta get enough sleep. If you don't have enough sleep, it's like you're walking around drunk and you're not going to be able to handle the moment and respond to situations that matter to you and that you need to pay attention to. So if you want to handle stress, one of the most important resources you can start focusing on is your physical resilience via exercise, eating well, and getting enough sleep.

No shortcuts on that. Now, the second part of this resource list I want to talk about for knowing and creating necessary resources around us for how to deal with stress when it comes is just our emotional acuity, right? Our ability to identify our emotions, which really start as sensations in our body, these feelings, and then knowing what to do with them, something that almost no men are trained to do in our culture, right?

We're taught to be afraid of emotions or hide emotions because they're weak. And so we just stuff them down and turns out they have an impact on our bodies, which makes us less physically resilient, which makes us less able to handle stress. So when we develop emotional acuity, an ability to know our emotions and know how to handle them, we're going to be able to respond to stress more, right? When we're not afraid of feeling grief, when we're not afraid of feeling anger, when we're not afraid of feeling disgust or jealousy, whatever that might be, we're going to be willing to just be with whatever that energy is.

As I've talked about previously, that energy, that emotion is usually going to help us create change in our life via action, energy and motion. And so if we're not aware of our emotional experience, we're cutting ourselves off from a huge source of energy in our lives for how to deal with stress. So learning to become present into our experience, identify our emotions, name our emotions, and then knowing how to work with them is incredibly important for handling stress.

And there's a lot of tools we can learn about in men's work for how to deal with those emotions and how to even identify them is something that's a really important piece that I found of being in a men's group. Getting that feedback, having that back and forth, being able to offer to each other, hey, it seems like you're this. Is that true? And then I'm like, no, it's actually this. We kind of go back and forth until something crystallizes that we both resonate around.

Suddenly I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm pissed about that. I wasn't even aware of that, or I was hiding from that, or I was afraid from that. And then now I can do something with that energy. Now that I'm aware of the anger in my body, I can move it in a safe way, which is actually going to free me up more to deal with whatever's going on in my life that caused it in the first place. And then finally, the third resource for how to handle stress, beyond just physical resilience and emotional acuity, is building community or what's our network?

This is one I've had to rely on myself a lot in the last five or six years and in the last year or two in specific. And that's just, oh my God, this big stressful thing has happened to me. Who do I have to connect with around it? Who can hold space for me? Who can I emotionally move some of this energy with? This one I cannot overemphasize as being an important part of men's group.

There's something that happens when we know we have somewhere to go and bring ourselves, right? I call it somewhere to land during a stressful event where we're going to be paid attention to and people care about us. And if we want to help brainstorming or coaching, they're going to do that. And if we just need to be heard, they're going to do that. I see this one a lot too. Part of the magic of men's groups where I see this and where I've experienced this myself in men's groups and in other centers and support resources I've gotten connected to is the profound capacity it opens in us when we get to connect with someone who's had to deal with that same stressful experience and may even be on the other side of it.

So I see this one a lot in the coaching men's group I run for guys around dating and relationships, right? Sometimes we have guys coming in who are a lot like me, late bloomers, really not comfortable with women, feel awkward, haven't had a lot of experiences and a they get to talk to me and I'm like, hey, I'm on the other side of that. Have a hot smoking wife and a beautiful family. Here's how I did it. You can do it too. They also get to talk to other guys who have been in the program who walked that same walk and are on the other side of it.

I know where you're at, I get your experience and I'm living proof that something else is possible. Boom. Big exhale. Or another place I often see this is men coming in who are married or in relationship and feel stuck, Just feel like they can't get what they want and maybe they can't leave because of the kids or they're afraid they'll never meet someone else. And within a couple days we've linked them up to some other men who lo and behold, were in the same situation previously.

I know it firsthand and it's one of the amazing things about being in a men's group. Now, when you swirl these all together right, what you get is. Yeah, how to handle stress. Number one, just shift your mindset around it. Stress isn't bad. Stress is just my body's way of cueing me. Something important is happening here and I need to pay attention. And in fact, if I'm a masculine oriented being that wants to grow in the world, I welcome that.

I look for that because that means I'm going to challenge myself. That means I'm going to be at my edge. That means I'm going to become something more than I could be otherwise. Stress isn't bad. That mindset shift alone, you could live longer just by taking that one on serious. Then number two, how to handle Stress is to develop the correct resources around you so that when stressful events hit, you have capacity for how to handle them.

And that capacity can flow from your physical resilience, which you build up by getting enough sleep, eating well and yes, exercising. So you have a strong, capable, responsive body. Your emotional acuity, right? So your ability to identify what you're feeling and then knowing how to handle those feelings, how to process them, how to move them, and how to do that in a way that actually allows you to harness the energy of them to create meaningful change in whatever stressful event you're having in life.

And finally, having community, right? Having a network around you that can support you through the stressful event. If you're doing the lone wolf thing like I've talked about, you're going to hold that stress inside and it's going to deeply impact you. Instead, consider oftentimes the things that are stressing us out the most, when shared in appropriate community, will create the most connection for us as well, which again gives us energy for being able to actually handle that stressful event in life.

So if you want to handle stress more effectively in your life, make the mindset shift and then build those resources into your day to day. If you want to experience men's work and men's groups in specific with me, you can check out my drop in groups at Evolutionary Men events. And if you want to join my intensive men's group coaching program around dating and relationships, watch my free training Evolutionary Men webinar.

Until next time.