Techniques for Relieving Stress and Tension

You can do lots of things physically to energize your body, to calm your body down. The important thing is you need to find your release mechanisms, and you need to do them multiple times a day. By releasing my tension with the meditation, by bouncing in place, taking 10 deep breaths, closing my eyes, by self soothing this tension that we all carry here so much now, just releasing that, I'm like, wow, if you follow me around my house four or five times a day, I drop down to the mat and I just do a little vinyasa flow to open up the body. Because so much of mental resilience comes from physical release. My greatest teaching on this topic, I would just kind of summarize as the need to have release mechanisms or what I usually call a release routine. In your life, right? What happens is when you are stressed, energetically close down, and then a challenge comes up, you respond to it worse or different than you would if you were energized, healthy, buoyant, positive. You've all had a bad. Who's had a bad night of sleep lately, right? If you have a bad night of sleep, you know how you can be a grouch the next day. You know that you have this big project due, but you're tired, so you don't even work on it. That when you are mentally, emotionally, spiritually fatigued or overladen with stress and overwhelm because the way your mind is working, what do you do? Well, you perform worse. This was the stunning thing about high performers, is that their performance is so high, not because they have less responsibilities than people. In fact, usually they have way more, sometimes four to five times as many responsibilities, nodes in their network or obligations every week. So it's like, what, are they superhuman in handling it? No, they're just better at decompressing as they go. Right. Some people, they're just like. They're building and building and building and building stress, stress, stress, stress, stress. So a negative event hits them and they just implode because they haven't been releasing the tension. To be able to show up free in that moment, to be able to show up and flow with that moment. It's hard to flow with the moments of life if you're carrying all this hurt, all this pain, or all this stress. Raise your hand if you know what I'm talking about. So how can we do something tactical, Brendan? Let's get to it. Well, that's what I mean by having release routines. When you can learn to release the tension and the stress in your life on an Ongoing basis, you're more free and loose and in flow and in motion when that difficulty hits, that's key. If you ever work with world class athletes, they will train and train and train and train only so that in the moment of the race, they're loose and totally natural and going with the flow and running an easy pattern. All of that grit, hard training work is to find the flow in the moments that matter. Well, in our life, the moments that matter are the moments we're connecting with other people, leading, serving, contributing and dealing with the hardships of life. So what are we going to do? Well, we have to have our own routines of releasing that tension. So for those of you who know my release meditation technique, that's so important for me as an example, every day, usually once or twice a day, I just do the release meditation technique where I close my eyes, I try to release the thoughts, I try to release the tension in my body and I just repeat the word as my mantra, my meditation mantra, release. Like release, release, release. And I'll just do that 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes, once or twice a day just to release my thoughts. And the truth is, the first three or four minutes my mind is all over the place. And then that last few minutes or that next 10 minutes, my mind kind of lets go of everything and I find this open field and I'm still focused on the mantra of release, but now I'm in a whole different head space, if you will. Okay, so I'm in a different place. And that's real power. That's real power. So I really want to get your idea around that. Like, wow, what are your routines? You know, many of you know, every hour I stand up and get away from the computer and often close my eyes, I'll bounce in place, take 10 deep breaths just to get the tension out of my neck, just to get some breath back in my body to take the tension off of my eyes. And so when I do that, I'm more energized, I'm more capable throughout the day of focusing and doing my work, showing up released. You know, sometimes before I leave this room and I go into my house over there, I got to make sure I release that tension because if I carry it into the kitchen, if I carry it in the house, Denise is not going to like that. So I've got to learn to let that tension go, which I struggle with. It's hard. So I have to have a routine for that, right? There's all those things that we can do in self soothing that we don't even know. Helps us feel better. Like literally in the moment. I don't know where you're watching this, but maybe try something with me. Stand up real fast and I'll teach you just a simple stress technique, stress relief technique and see how differently you feel in a few minutes. Okay. See how differently you feel. Just all of a sudden you're like lighter, you feel better because you're going to do, I'm going to show you a simple stress relief self soothing technique, nothing fancy. You're going to be like, oh my gosh, that's incredible. So if you can stand up, I've already told you some of my favorite ones. I like to bounce in place, close my eyes, take 10 deep breaths. I do that every day. Another simple thing that you can do though is because some people really need to activate physiology in a different way is what I'm going to have you do is I'm just going to have you put your hand right on the back of your head. Okay? Take a nice deep breath in. And then I'm going to have you take pressure and just pull down, pushing in strong down to your collarbone. So you're gonna do put your hand on the back of your head, you're gonna put some pressure on, pull down, keep pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure, all the way down. Okay? I just want you to do that. Close your eyes and just do this five times with me. Okay? You're just gonna close your eyes. Take a nice deep breath in as you breathe out. Okay? Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. One more time. Breathe in, breathe out. Okay, now maybe you stand, bounce in place, take three deep breaths. Good. Now just see how you feel. It might be very simple because we only did five breaths, but if you did that like 10 times, but now you might notice in the next two or three minutes you feel different. You might even feel a rush here. You might see I'll turn red because I put pressure there. I feel a little bit of rush and a little bit of relief of the tension in my neck and my head in a minute. Keep breathing, otherwise you'll pass out. So I should mention that. Keep breathing. But you'll notice all of a sudden, like, oh yeah, I feel a little lighter. Okay, that's just a self soothing technique, right? You can do lots of things physically to energize your body, to calm your body down. The important thing is you need to find your release mechanisms and you need to do them multiple times a day. By releasing my tension with the meditation, by Bouncing in place, taking 10 de breaths, closing my eyes by self soothing this tension that we all carry here so much now just releasing that I'm like, wow. If you follow me around my house four or five times a day, I drop down to the mat and I just do a little Vinyasa flow to open up the body. Because so much of mental resilience comes from physical release. Physical, I would say freedom almost. So you got to find your own routines to make sure that energetically feel good. Because if your sleep sucks, your food sucks, you're not meditating, you don't take care of yourself, you don't exercise, of course that tension is going to show up and make you less resilient. It's going to make you more frustrated, more irritable. And I wouldn't say fatigued. Frustrated and irritable is going to help you become resilient in the difficult moments of life. Because remember, my friends, listen, if you followed me for a while in high performance, you know this. You're always training. You are always training. I am always concerned. I'm like, you know what? I'm in training because I don't know what the world's going to throw at me, but I'm training for it. I'm training my communication skills, I'm training my physical body. I'm training my mindset. Not because it's hard right now or it's terrible right now, but in case that stuff hits the fan, I'm tuned up and ready to go. I think that's an important concept in resilience preparation, having those release routines so you're light, adaptable, free, open.