Stress management techniques

So, without any further ado, I'd like you all to give a warm welcome to Caroline Cavanagh. Thank you, Welly, and thank you to all of you for choosing to spend the next hour of your day with me here. It's a real privilege to be here, and I really love talking about what I do. It was lovely to get that introduction. I was going to sort of say, I'm not going to introduce myself now, it's already done, There's a bit more about me at the end of this, so if you're still interested about hearing a bit more than me, you can stay. If not, get back to your desks. But what I do really hope that's going to happen today is you've come in here with a willingness to participate. I could talk about stress academically, but to be frank, it's pretty boring, and you're going to learn an awful lot more by actually trying and doing some of these things. So don't worry, I'm not going to have you dancing around the room, but it's quite lonely up here seeing all these faces around here, so the more you interact with me, the more comfortable I'm going to feel. So be nice. I'm going to Okay, excellent. Okay, is there anything else I need to tell you? I don't think so. Should we just get on with it? Yes. Excellent. Okay, the mind-body connection. I didn't do art at school, so you wouldn't believe how long it took me even to do a rubbish stickman like that. There's a real good reason that this bit and this bit are joined up. When it's working well, we have a nice smiley face. However, this thing often comes into our life. Oh, don't know what happened to that 2 S's then. Stress. Okay, hands up if you have ever left a dining room table having overeaten and have that just one more wafer thin mint moment. Come on, fess up. Yeah, most of us. And did you, during that meal, recognize that your tummy was going, I've had enough? Stop eating. But your head was going, Yeah, but it tastes so good! Or, it's a bit rude to leave food on my plate, or, I really don't like waste, I have to eat it. Yeah? So this bit and that bit, not communicating. Or maybe another context. Your body is going, I'm really, really tired, I just need to go to bed now. The head's going, but I've got to see what happens in the last episode of Game of Thrones! Yeah. Do you know, I've never actually seen Game of Thrones. So you stay up, and you're even more tired the next day. Personally, for me, where I experience it an awful lot is I'm in the gym, and I think I just need to do another 20 squats to hit my target, and my legs are going, I don't think so. My head's going, you're going to do it. And the next morning, I can't walk. Yeah? So it means that bit and that bit aren't talking to each other. All of those scenarios, though, are about internal stress, the stress you are creating yourself. No one's forcing that food into your mouth. No one's stopping you from going to bed. It's internally created stress, and in the scheme of things, that's the easier one to deal with. However, we live in a stressful world, and for me to stand here and say, oh, just take stress out of your life, it's impractical. Yeah, there's always going to be those Muppets who can't park properly and take up 2 spaces, which means you can't get your car in. And I had a call with Wally this morning going, I can't park anywhere! You're in the wrong car park. Problem solved. So, saying we can take stress out of our life is unreasonable. But what we can do is all of that external stress, reduce it down a bit. And meaning, again, we have a happy person. So, right now, become aware of how you're feeling. If 0 was no stress and 10 was highly stressed, just mentally in your own head, have a number. How are you feeling? Okay? Everyone got a number? Nodding heads. Has everyone got a number? Yes! Yay! Thank you. I said it's lonely up here, talk to me. Once you've got that number, I'd now love for you, if you will, just close your eyes for a second. And now just really tune in. Notice where your shoulders are in relation to your neck. Notice how your clothes feel against the skin of your back. Notice how your shoes feel, how your feet feel inside those shoes. And now move your attention to your hearing. Just listen. You can hear my voice, but what else can you hear? Are you now aware of the air conditioning? Can you maybe even hear your own heartbeat? Can you hear your tummy rumbling if you haven't yet managed to eat any food? Tune into your sense of smell now. What can you smell? Your own perfume, the scent of the person beside you. Perhaps you don't even notice anything, but noticing nothing is noticing something. And now, just briefly, open your eyes and look at what's right in front of you. It might be the back of the head of a person, but what can you notice about them? That person's been sitting in front of you for the last couple of minutes. Okay, thank you for doing that. Now, what's your stress score? Has it gone down? Yeah. That took probably no more than about 90 seconds, and you've just reduced your stress, because what you did for that very short period of time was tune into you. You had a mind-body connection. So let's talk a little bit more about this word stress. There's lots of different words that we can use: discomfort, pressure, tightness, loads of them out there. There's one very important one that I focus on: dis-ease, meaning you're not at ease. But you've got that word in a much more familiar format, haven't we? Disease. And this is why I am so passionate about talking about this stuff. So I'm going to tell you a little personal story, if you don't mind bearing with me. About 25 years or so ago, I was working in a company regularly doing 60-hour weeks. My 37-year-old brother had a stroke and ended up being severely handicapped, and I was the only member in the family that was prepared to step up and help him. My mum also had a major illness and ended up with peritonitis in intensive care for a couple of weeks. Stress levels, whoa. Yeah. And I didn't listen to my body. I kept going, kept going, because I just need to do this work, I just need to go and see my brother, I just need to go and see mum. And I ended up in hospital. Yeah? Because what will happen at some point when this and this aren't communicating, a part of you goes, enough! If you won't flipping listen, I will make you stop. And I got a very effective illness that made me stop for quite a long period of time. As I was recovering from that illness, I had about 4 weeks, I think, off work. I can't not go and see my brother, I can't not go and see Mum, but what I can do is change my work. So, I went back on with a slightly different attitude to things, and then decided I was going to set up my own business. Brilliant, stress levels come down. Then about 10 years after that, I found myself in Germany. Married to an army officer, with a newborn baby, an 18-month-old toddler, and no family around because they're all still back in the UK. I can do this. Army wives are strong, strong people. And, Edley, I'm a woman, therefore I must be invincible. Ended back up in hospital again. Yeah, but what really wound me up at that point is I didn't even flipping learn from the first time. It took another time. For me to go, okay, I'm not listening. And when I don't listen enough, I get a significant, serious disease. Since that point, and the last time I was in hospital was 15 years ago, I can count the amount of colds, not even serious illnesses, I've had on one hand. That's not because I don't have stress in my life. I've got 2 teenage kids, for Christ's sake. Right? It's because I now do what I'm going to be talking to you about. And for those of you who kind of like macro things, we're going to be talking about 3 kind of key pillars that you can look at and focus on to reduce stress. For those of you that like detailed things, you have the potential to leave here today with 9 tools, 9 techniques that you can use. Now, I will be amazed if there's anyone in this room that takes on all 9. It would be amazing, but I will be amazed. But if every single one of you in this room does one of them, you can genuinely create a change in this organization. One of the basic rules of physics is that every action has a reaction. By you changing what you do, it has a reaction on other people, and it's what I call the ripple effect. It just keeps going on. So I don't know how many people in this room 70-ish, something like that. 70 people making a change in how they behave is going to create not just a ripple, but a flipping great tidal wave. But the more you do— this is all about you. You make your life better, but the wonderful thing is, by you being less stressed, happier, more content, it ripples out and touches other people too. It's not selfish. to look after yourself. When I was in hospital with a newborn baby and a husband that spent a lot of time in war zones, who was that helping? Yeah, it put a huge amount of stress on people to look after my children. I was a crap mum, pretty lousy wife, because I didn't look after myself. I now am really selfish, and I'm not embarrassed to say that, because by putting me first, not to anyone else's detriment, I'll still share cakes, most of the time, but by looking after me, I can be the best mum I can be, the best wife, the best daughter, the best sister, the best therapist. I practice what I preach. So let's have a little bit of a biology lesson now. Anyone like biology? I'll take that as a no then. Okay, so we talk about the mind and body, but really, what's being separated is the 2 parts of your mind. You have the conscious mind, which sits here, frontal lobes. It's rational, logical, deductive, mature, and it has the capacity to go into the past and out into the future. But then, a bit like in an iceberg, you have this whacking great thing underneath the water called the subconscious. The subconscious has— whoa, I didn't mean to do that. Oh, that's better. So it has— does these 3 different things. It runs the body. So that little exercise that you've just done, your clothes have been on your back ever since you got dressed this morning, but you weren't aware of them until you actually consciously tuned into them. Your heart's beating now. You're not thinking about it, pretty good job, because you might forget. So everything— the most important thing that the subconscious mind does is it runs your body. It also stores all of your experiences. It's like there's an infinite database inside your head, and everything that you experience is going into that. And it also controls your emotions. If someone tells you a joke, you don't think, hmm, shall I laugh or not? You just laugh. Yeah? If someone does something, you know, cuts you up on the road, you don't think, oh, shall I have road rage now or not? Yeah? It just happens. And all of these things, you don't have any conscious involvement. So this is really, this bit, the subconscious mind, is where the incredible power is. But this is also like a radio. This is the part that's receiving the messages that this is sending. It's a bit like there's radio waves in the air all of the time, but it's only when you tune your radio in do you pick that frequency up. And you can pick up classic FM, you can pick up, I don't know, Heart. All the things are out there. It's what you choose to tune into. If you're choosing to tune into stress, you'll find it. Yeah. But if your radio's not even turned on, your body's going, help! You're not listening. You end up, as I did twice, in that situation. So a lot of what we're going to be talking about now is about understanding more about this thing that's under the water, the subconscious mind, that we really rarely pay any attention to because no one's ever told it to you. They don't teach this stuff in school. Yet. I'm working on it. Pillar number 1: nothing has a meaning beyond the meaning you give it. Now, when you first hear that, it can sometimes take, like, a little bit to get your head around. But I think in the little sort of advert that I wrote for Waleed, I spoke about a curry. I can put a curry down in front of 10 people, Few people may go, "That's really nice." Few people will go, "It's just not hot enough. It's too tame. It's nothing more than a chicken stew." Some other people may go, "Whoa! It's blown my head off." It's the same curry. Yeah, but based on what's going on in their database, remember that infinite database? If they're someone that's grown up in India eating lots of spicy food, they're going to think it's too mild. If they don't like chili, they're going to think it's too hot. It's the same thing, but they are creating their own reality. It's good old John Lennon: Nothing is real. But you do create your own reality. And the reality that you're creating is based on a lot of things that are going on at that subconscious level, and I just want to talk you through 3 of them. These are 3 filters. So, when you Google how much information does your brain take in every day, the number's so big I don't even know what it's called. It is megabytes of data that your mind is taking in all the time, and it's increasing because we live in such a busy, you know, techno— technological world. So, there's huge amounts of volume coming in through our eyes, through our ears, sensory, all of those different things. And so we have 3 sort of like macro filters, 3 filters that are going, don't want that, don't want that, so you can— your brain can start to manage it a bit more. So we're going to have a little bit of fun with these, okay? Right, in a second, I'm going to flick onto the next slide, and I would like you all please to just read out loud what you see on the screen, okay? Go. A bird in the bush. Okay, I heard a lot of a bird in the bush. I'm now really worried because the people I pay my council tax to can't read. Look at it again. There's 2 thes. Yeah, a bird in the, the bush. But you did what most people do because in your database, you have read so much in your life that your brain knows we don't need 2 thes. So, it just deletes it. Just got rid of it, but it's there. You just didn't see it. Okay, let's give you another chance. Okay, so again, I'm going to click in a paragraph. As soon as you're ready, shout out to me how many Fs can you see. Go. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. How many Fs? 3, 4, 5, 6. Oh, I really am worried now. Okay, so I've gone from 2 to 6. Okay, I'll help you. Right, so let's look at it. So we've got one there and one there. So an F at the beginning of the word, most people will register because that's how we start to recognize and start to get our brains going. It's 26 letters in the alphabet, I'm looking to just all the Fs. It helps to start narrow it down and help you read. So I think Everyone. I heard lots of 2s straight away, so no one missed those. Yay! We have 1, 2, 3 ofs. We're up to 5. So ofs, they're a bit of a meh word. If I took ofs out of those sentences, you'd probably still be able to recognise that sentence. They're not critical, they just add a little bit of value. So we're up to 5. There's another one. Oh, lurking in scientific, we're up to 6. So again, letters in the middle of a word tend to get deleted because if I even took F out of that word, you'd still know the word was scientific. There's a 7th. Where's the 7th? Yeah, so there's an F up there. So it wasn't how many Fs can you see below, And so as soon as I put that second paragraph up, you deleted the whole title. Yeah? It was there. You just chose not to see it. So that's deletion. And we'll come back to looking at the relevance of deletion in a minute. Let's look at the next filter, distortion. Oh, no. We've got— hang on. You can have fun with that one. Go on. Have a little play with that. I'm going to do it. Oh, the concentration on faces. There's some real furrowed eyebrows out there at the moment. Yeah, do you get the gist? Yeah, so even though All of the letters are mixed up. The fact that the first and last—it's like bookmarking a word—it gives you a reference. Your mind's got enough references in its database to be able to work out what that word is. Is there anyone that found that really easy? Yeah, quite a few of you. Okay, I'll recognize that my council tax is in good hands. Okay, so let's move on now and look at deletion. Sorry, distortion. What do you see? A face or a vase? Hands up if you see vases. Yeah? Hands up if you see faces. Excellent. Now you know there's faces and vases, can you see both? Yeah? And when you switch between the both, can you almost feel something changing in your head? Yeah? Okay. Next one. What do you see? Ducks. Okay. We've got rabbits and ducks in the room. So if you see a rabbit, ears out behind, it's looking this way. If you see a duck, beak out that way, looking that way. Again, try switching between the two. Can everyone now see both? Yeah. But again, depending on whether you saw a duck or a hare, rabbit, whatever you want to call it, first, Is your mind distorting things? You're all looking at exactly the same image. Next one. Which middle circle is bigger, the one on the left or the one on the right? Left. Oh, you're cheating! Yeah, they are actually the same. But how things around it are grouped will give you a different sense. And that's really important when it comes to stress, because if a lot of people around you are perceiving things in a certain way, you're more likely to feel that way too. Whereas when you're just in isolation, look at the thing in the middle, you're independent. What do you see there? I hear someone said spiral. Tube. Tube? No idea, don't care. Yeah, it's actually concentric circles. Yeah, all of those, if I was to do it with my flipper, which I don't think would show up very well, they're just concentric circles. But because you're used to seeing images of spirals, you distorted it, and that's what you assumed it was going to be. Oh, I love this one. Okay, so look at the chart and say the color, not the words. So I'll do the top line from you: green, red, blue. Yellow. Okay, we've got furrowed eyebrows again. Okay, bit of fun, but it also shows you again how your mind is filtering information. So, if you're very right-brained, you find it quite easy to say the colour. So, they're more artistic type of people, they see the colour more than language. The other way around, if you're left-brained, you're more logical, more rational, your brain will be saying, I want to say yellow, even though I should be saying green. Okay? Doesn't mean you can't, but it's where are you, where is the path of least resistance, where is it easier for you to go to? But now on to generalization. What do we see here? A chair. A chair. Yeah? Everyone happy it's a chair? Okay, I'm confused. Chair is something you sit on, yeah? I can't sit on that because it's a picture of a chair. Yeah? But everyone in this room saw it as a chair because we generalize. And we need to because we've got these millions of bytes of data going in our head all the time. So if you don't generalize, it would be absolutely impossible to even get out of bed. But generalisations can actually be quite stressful. All right, this is going to be a bit of fun now. We have universal beliefs. These are very broad generalisations, so if you want to say the answers to this out loud, go for it. Men are all— Come on, girls, come on, what are you going to say? They're all jerks. What was that? Men are all difficult. Right, boys, time for you to get your revenge. Women are bad at— Come on, be brave. Come on, come on, come on. Nothing. Oh, he's not brave. He's not brave. The most common one I get, that one, is women are all bad at driving. Whoa. Yeah. Okay. To be successful, a person must— Work hard. Work hard. Yeah, really, most common answer I always get. But do you? Do you have to work hard to be successful? You can just be really flipping good at something. Okay, the next one I'm going to put up is more serious. I don't want you to say it out loud, but just the instinctive answer that comes up Hear it. Was that answer a positive one or a negative one? Again, just be aware. So if I was standing up here going, "I am tired," that becomes my reality. I'm tired. I really don't want to be standing here in a warm room in front of a load of people. My energy level goes woof. Whereas I could say, I am amazing! Yeah? Different energy. I'm creating a different reality just through how I'm having a universal belief about myself. Your self-talk is so, so important. What you say about yourself, your mind hears, even if it's just a thought. So be nice to yourself. I'm going to come back to that in just a minute. And this one kind of pulls all of these things together. So, the way I normally— I do a lot of talks in schools, because, you know, deletion distortion is a big thing for a lot of teenagers. This slide, it's how many faces are in this slide? I'm not going to go through it with you in a huge amount of depth, but deletion comes in, Because— whoa, I keep doing that, don't I? Because a lot of people don't see the little Chinese man in the big face. There is potentially, if you choose to see it, a baby in there. But then distortion— you can't see the face, therefore, is there a face there? You can see some faces up here, a bit like that vase face metaphor. Similarly, there, there's a couple more. Generalization. You've got a dog down here. Does a dog have a face? Yeah? But a lot of people won't count that. Does that bird have a face? You can see the bird. Has it got a face? Yeah? So when I ask how many faces on this, on this picture, I get anything from an answer of about 3. I think the most someone's ever picked out for me was 13. All looking at the same picture based on how they were deleting Distorting. Generalizing. So why am I talking about this? Why are these 3 things important? Because how you delete, how you distort, how you generalize gives your world a meaning. That meaning leads to a feeling, such as stress. The stress then leads to a behaviour, such as being short-tempered. So if you want to change a behaviour to not be short-tempered or stressed, the best way to start is by changing one of those things up there. So in a workplace, if you are feeling stressed, Tool number 1: What might you be deleting that when you choose to notice will change the meaning for you? A great example I had once is someone was really, really winding me up. It wasn't me, they were causing my stress. Until I found out that they had a newborn baby, were getting no sleep, were absolutely on their knees. And I went from being really annoyed at that person to actually being really empathetic. Yeah, because I deleted the fact that he was actually on his knees and doing his best given the resources that he had. Tool number 2: What could you be distorting? If you were to see things from a different angle, would it change your association with that thing? You know, is it a rabbit or is it a duck? What could you look at and see from a different perspective? It's a bit like we look at our world through a camera lens. Change that lens and make it wide, you see a lot more. Focus it down, you might see something very, very clearly, but you'll ignore all the things that are out there. We have an expression in our language about talking— seeing things through rose-tinted glasses. Yeah, everyone knows what that means. It's just a filter. How we choose to see things. Tool number 3, are you generalizing? A fantastic thing. If there's any of you here, I don't know if you kind of work in teams or if there's anyone that works together, we have certain words that generalize. There are things like all, always, everybody, or the opposite, never, nobody, nowhere. They're generalizations, and there lives no scope for anything out there. You're always late! Really? You might be often late, frequently late, but you're not always late. So become aware of your own language and the impact that's having on people. So if you were to say to someone, you're always late, stop. Pick up on those words and think to yourself, is that true? It's unlikely. Yeah? You're often late. And as soon as you speak the truth, again, there's just a bit of a whoa that goes on inside. More importantly, back to that physics, every action has a reaction. The person receiving that feedback goes, do you know, I am often late. Whereas if you said to them, you're always late! No, I'm not! Yeah? Stress. Whee! So that's something that you can all take away from this, I think, really easily. Become aware within each other. It's great to be able to pick up on other people. I say I've got 2 teenagers. If they say, oh, you're always— I don't know, what would they say to me? Oh, we always have supper late. I'd go, always? I think it was on time 2 weeks ago. Yeah? It just gives me that little bit of wriggle room. And they go, yeah, all right, not always, but most of the time. Yeah, fair enough, most of the time it is. Yeah, so you start doing the cooking. So generalizing is a huge source of stress, both for you because you're not seeking your truth, and for the person that's receiving that feedback. So put those generalization kind of words on your radar. Again, they're things like all, everybody, everywhere, always, and the other ones on the opposite side: nobody, nowhere, never. Do your best to remove them unless they really, really are true. So there's your first 3 tools. Become aware of the filters that you use. You may feel more aligned to one of them and sort of recognize, maybe I do delete things quite a lot. Or you may be aware of, actually, I do use generalizations quite a lot. Work on that. It makes a profound difference, believe me. Pillar number 2: thoughts, feelings, and vibrations. Your mind cannot tell the difference between reality and imagination. So if I was to say to you, imagine going back to your desk, the phone's ringing, you pick up the phone, And the voice at the other end says, is that Mr. Such-and-such, Mrs. Cavanagh? This is Dr. Smith from Bath A&E. I'm terribly sorry to tell you that your husband has just had— been involved in a serious car accident. Imagine that scenario. What have you noticed? Anyone? It seems to be a bit of a shock. Tummy flip? Yeah? Sickness feeling? It's not true, hasn't happened, everyone's fine. Yeah? But even the thought— and I'm sorry to have sort of given you quite a negative, but the negative ones tend to have more of an impact— even that thought created a physiological response in many of you. That's how powerful your thoughts are. It can make you feel sick. It can make your heart rate race. You're still just sitting in this room listening to this weird woman with a thing in her hand. Yeah? That's how powerful your thoughts are. Your thoughts result in feelings. Your feelings are a chemical reaction that's going on in your body. We are just a massive bag of chemical reactions contained in something we call skin. The whole time, That we're talking, there are hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions going on every single second. Breathing, respiration, all of that stuff, chemical reactions. Every chemical reaction has an energy attached to it. So feelings lead to what we call a vibration. Have you ever come across someone that just buzzes? Yeah. And they're lovely to be around, aren't they? Yeah, it's because their energy, their chemistry inside their body is up here somewhere. What about the other end of the scale? Come across people that you spend half an hour with them and you're going, oh my God! Yeah, energy vampires. They're often people that are struggling with depression. Their energy, their chemistry is so low that they're actually sucking the life force out of you too, because they're so depleted. So, how we vibrate, again, has an impact on everyone around us, back to that same ripple effect. Has anyone heard of the law of attraction before? Yay! A few? Excellent. A lot of people, when I talk about the law of attraction, they go, oh, here we go, here comes the woo-woo thing. It's not woo-woo. I have had so many examples of the law of attraction, I now believe in it as much as I believe in gravity. It's real. It's based on a very simple principle that like attracts like. Buzzy people, they're the ones that always win the flipping top raffle prize. Yeah? But have you ever got out of bed and you stubbed your toe? It's like, ugh, ugh! And then you're running late and you go to brush your teeth and you squeeze the toothpaste and it explodes all over your suit. And then you sort that out and you get into the car, you get to work, and you step out of the car into a massive great puddle and you spend the rest of the day with a wet foot. Yeah, because you started the day on a negative emotion and you just attracted more and more negativity into your world. Again, I'm sure you're aware of people that you know that we just say things like life has dealt them a tough pack of cards. They generally are pessimists. They're people that vibrate at a low level and just more and more Negative things come into their world, but you are not. It's not a vibration that you can never change. We all have a residual vibration. Some days we're a bit buzzier, some days we're a bit lower. And again, we use that language. God, I'm buzzing today. I'm feeling really down. But that residual kind of baseline level, you can move up. I used to be quite a negative person, but I've done a lot of this work on myself, and I now. I'd hope. Most of the people that know me say I'm more at the buzzy end of the scale most of the time, because of a lot of these things that we're talking about today. So, here are your next 3 things, if you're one of the detail people. Mindfulness. What we just did, that first exercise where you closed your eyes and just tuned in, is one of the things that we now deem as mindfulness. It's about tuning in to now. Do you remember that iceberg picture where I said the conscious mind tends to spend a lot of time in the past and a lot of time out in the future? The subconscious mind, which is here at the back of your head, only is focused on the now. So when the two of them are working in different time spaces, it's like having two outputs of energy. It runs the battery down blinking quickly. Your brain, even though it only represents about 2% of your body weight, consumes 20% of your energy. Probably even more when you spend a lot of time worrying about what's happened or thinking about what hasn't yet happened, whilst the subconscious mind is going, hello, how about focusing on the now? That exercise that you did when you closed your eyes brought both of those minds Into synchronicity. They focused on the same thing. So those 2 energy drains suddenly went, whoo! The result that you— I think most of you experienced— is your stress levels went down a notch, maybe more. When you bring yourself into the current time sphere, which is what mindfulness is all about, you have a change in your energy. Because those 2 parts of the brain are suddenly aligned. The more you do that, the more you're reducing that energy outflow. So, as I said, I do quite a lot with— I've worked with teenagers. Something that they really relate to is their phones. If I say, right, you start off your day with your battery 100%, phone works brilliantly. You use it, it runs down during the day. If you've got 48,000 apps open, it runs down pretty flipping quickly. It'll get down to the point where some of those apps don't start working as well. And eventually it'll get down to the point where it goes, hmm, nah, emergency calls only. So we need to keep that battery topped up. And sometimes it's by, don't have all the apps open, just focus in on what you're doing now and reduce that energy output. You experienced the change in just a few seconds, in what, about a minute and a half the exercise took. Even if you did that once an hour, your energy output at the end of the day would be very, very different. No one knows you're doing it. And the other wonderful thing about doing that exercise regularly is it trains your brain. So your brain actually gets used to coming into that. It becomes— your brain is much like a muscle. If I went in the gym and did 20 press-ups any day, I'd get bigger biceps, I'd be stronger. If you do this regularly every day, your brain learns, stop being out there, come back in and realign. And you notice, like you did before, notice that person in front of you. Oh, they need their roots doing. Sorry about that. Or something you may hear. It's always around. Your clothes, how they feel, how your body feels, back to almost where we started. Be in tune— rolling the shoulders back, well done— of how your body is actually feeling, because if you're aware of it, it gives you the potential to make a different decision. No awareness, decisions come from absolutely everywhere. When you're aware of what you're— how you're feeling, what you're doing, you have a whole new range of options available to you. So that's mindfulness. Attitude of gratitude. I love this. You can choose to change the chemistry in your body. So back to what we were saying a minute ago, your thoughts have a chemical reaction. Every chemical reaction has a vibration. So choose your thoughts. There's a lovely little exercise that I teach most of my clients to do, and this is something you can either do it— a great time to do it is when you're brushing your teeth at night. Everyone does it in those 2 or so minutes. there's not much else you can be doing. Have an attitude of gratitude. Reflect back on your day and think of all of the nice things that happened, because there were some. And it might have been that person that opened the door for you. You can just mentally think, thank you to that person that opened the door, that was nice. And the rubbish, the most rubbish of days, your attitude of gratitude could be, Thank goodness the day's over. I'm still alive. Tomorrow's a new start. There is always, always something, and I'm using always deliberately there as a generalization. There is always something that you can find to be grateful for at the end of the day. Again, this is like a muscle. The more you flex your gratitude muscle, the stronger it becomes. My gratitude muscle is huge, and I now find myself all the way through the day going. Oh, I'm going to think about that tonight and be grateful for it. Log that one away. But I appreciate it in the moment there more. Yeah, so my internal chemistry, every time you have a gratitude feeling, it is releasing chemicals called serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, all of the feel-good chemicals. The reason I ask people to do this at night is that means that those chemicals are then in their body when they go to sleep. That affects your quality of sleep. It also means they're probably still kicking around a little bit when you wake up in the morning. So your waking thought is like, oh my God, here we go again. You wake up thinking, hmm, do you know, I had some really good things yesterday, I wonder what's going to happen today. How's that going to affect your stress levels? Attitude of gratitude. Brilliant one, it's one of my favourites. If you're going to take something away, and you only want to do one thing, make it this. Third thing, random acts of kindness. And this is kind of taking the attitude of gratitude on one step forward. Yeah, you can be grateful for things that you've experienced, or you can actually create them yourself. So the random acts of kindness, I've got a list of 50 acts that you can actually go out and do for someone, because the wonderful thing is When you make someone else happy, you get a buzz on it too. Guys, if you give your wife a bunch of flowers, do you feel good for doing it? Or do you not give your wife flowers? Yeah. Yeah, true? If you give someone a lovely present and they light up, do you feel good for having done it? Yeah. So you can actually start to do things for other people that makes them feel good— ripple— but you feel good too. It bounces back. So if any of you want to buy into this— has anyone seen the film Pay It Forward? Yes. If you haven't, do. It's on Netflix, it's amazing. Make sure you've got a big box of tissues before you look at it. But the principle is phenomenal. When you do something for something nice, it just ripples out and it touches so many people. We can all, as individuals, make a massive difference in the world. Your world is your reality. Make it a good one. Number 3— oh, running a bit out of time— increase your body's ability to communicate. So, we've spoken about the filters, we've spoken a little bit about mindfulness, communicating, head and body chemistry that's going on. This is now all about the body. Our last 3 things. Nutrition. I'm not a nutritionist, but it's very simple. You don't put rubbish fuel in your car, because if you did, it wouldn't run. But a lot of us put rubbish fuel in our body and expect it to run well too. Yeah, there's a huge amount of research going on at the moment that links gut health to mental health. Yeah? I'm not going to preach, but it's just blinking obvious. If you eat a better quality of diet, Your body will be sending clearer messages. It will work better. So do the basics, help it along. Hydration. Very simple. Is it easier to swim through mud or water? All of your chemicals are flowing round in a hydrated environment. If your blood is really thick, it's really hard for those chemicals to get there. They're not going to work. If you're well hydrated, you're creating that chemical environment that allows the chemicals to work at their best. Very simple tip, and I see a lot of you have got sort of drinks in here now. Get a 2-litre bottle, you know, old Coke bottle, I think like that. Have it on your desk, because whilst you have to keep going to the kitchens or whatever to filling your cup up, you probably won't do it. When it's there on your desk and you just keep topping up, topping up, you'll be amazed at how quickly 2 litres go down. And yeah, hands up, for the first couple of weeks you're doing this, you might take more trips to the toilet. Live with it, it's short-lived. Very quickly your body adapts. Without being too graphic, when you do go, you just make it more worthwhile. Hydration is really, really important. The last thing, again, flipping obvious, sleep. Sleep is when that battery gets topped up. If you only plugged your phone in for 20 minutes every day, It's soon going to not work. Current research in neuroscience is saying you should get, for most adults, 8 hours of sleep. Very few of us get that, but that's what we need to get 100% top-up to our day. So I think those are fairly obvious, and I'll just park them where they are. So who am I? Who said I'm an author? And here's one I made earlier. I'm a national award winner, okay? So I have won a national award by the Association of Professional Trainers and Coaches. 39,000 memberships, and little old me won it a couple years ago now. Military husband, 2 teenagers, and a dog. But most of all, I love talking about what I do, and I hope that's come across to you today because I genuinely believe I want to prevent even one person from doing what I did twice and getting to the point that you don't manage your stress, that your stress manages you and puts you on your back. So thank you. Thank you for giving me this hour. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for joining in. And how can I help you? I've got 3 handouts, so if you would like to receive one of my handouts, either scribble on a business card numbers 1, 2, or 3, or all 3 if you want them all. So number 1 will be the mindfulness exercise, 2 an attitude of gratitude exercise, 3 the random acts of kindness exercise. If you haven't got a business card with you, any scrap bit of paper, Which I've probably got around. You can come and just put your email down, and I will email it to you. I'd be delighted to do that for anyone that wants them. I also do a lot of one-to-one sessions, so if anyone has been interested in taking any of these concepts to a little bit higher level, you know, things like the stress impacts on insomnia, anxiety— anxiety and stress, it's really, really hard to separate. They're very much the same thing. Or you're thinking, yeah, I actually, I do need some work on my filters. Perhaps working with me will allow you to make that change more quickly. So for anyone in this room today, if you would like to just have a 15-minute consultation with me over the phone, I would love to do that with my pleasure, where I can just tell you a little bit more about how I work so you can make the decision, is this right for you or not? And for anyone that then wants to work with me directly, I'm happy to give anyone 50% discount off the first session. Very happy, because the more people that learn this kind of stuff, the more everyone wins. And I do have some copies of the book there. It is available on Amazon. I've only got the paperback here. If you want a Kindle version, pop over to Amazon. I think they're £12.99 on Amazon. I've got some here today. To keep the change easy, a tenner. And I'm sorry, Mike got up this morning, we were talking about technology, my card reader decided decided it wasn't going to function, so I can only take cash payments today. So, I apologize for that, but that's just how it is. Oh, it's just on 2 o'clock. I am not going to rush away. If anyone wants to ask me any questions, I'm going to loiter around, but I think we've probably got 2 or 3 minutes. Reluctantly. Has anyone got any questions or comments or anything that you've learned that you want to share? Don't all rush at once. I just wondered about social media. Yeah. Because I've been thinking about the amount of time I spend just looking at Facebook and how now we do spend a lot of time filling our brains with that. I didn't know if you've had— got any— you've got any experience testing that out, like having breaks from social media, that kind of thing. There is a lot of research going on at that. As I said, I do a lot of work with teenagers, and my personal belief, having worked with a lot of teenagers, that the reason that teenage anxiety, self-harming, even suicides is going like this, it's not down to the fact that exams have got harder. I'm not convinced they have. It's social media. Yeah. Social media is not real. So you are looking at stuff that most of it, the images have been digitally enhanced. They're not real. Also, that little screen has a big impact on your brainwaves. So yeah, if watching, scrolling through and looking at kittens playing relaxes you, brilliant. But don't do it for at least an hour before you go to bed. And again, look at social media now if you wish to and think of those 3 things, the 3 filters. What's been deleted? A heck of a lot of that on there has been distorted. Where are the generalisations? And you'll start to see it in a very different perspective. Personally, I choose not to use social media very much at all. I use it as a way to keep in contact and get back in contact with some of my army wife friends. We're in different corners of the globe now, but I use it more as a means of communication. I rarely ever look at my newsfeed. And if I want something done on social media, I just give it to my 16-year-old and go, sort. Yeah, because they seem to have an inane ability to do that. It's got to be a personal choice. If you find that spending a lot of time on social media— do you end up feeling better or feeling worse? There's your reference. Yeah, if looking at Facebook stresses you out, stop doing it. It's a bit like those internal references again. If you are eating too much, it's causing you stress, Stop putting as much food in your mouth. Yeah? If social media is spending a lot of time and getting frustrated because you're not then out in the real world— social media is not real— put it down. Get out in the real world because now is the only moment you can enjoy now. Thank you. Hope you've enjoyed it. See you again. Thank you very much, Caroline. That was fantastic. Thank you.