How To Permanently Reduce Stress

It's no secret that stress sucks. We are all very familiar with the negative impacts that it can have on our emotions, but we oftentimes don't realize is it can physically kill us. It's linked to the six leading causes of death in the United States. So knowing how to reduce and how to eliminate our stress is one of the most valuable life skills that I can think of. And that's what this video is about. It's about the three levers that each and every one of us has to eliminate the stress in his or her own life. But before I get into that, we've got to cover the. The biggest misconception that I hear all the time, and I even am guilty of myself when it comes to stress, and that is externalizing stress, saying that it comes from an event, that it's this job interview that we have, that it's a conversation that we have coming up that we're nervous about. Or maybe we're just nervous about flying on an airplane and we think that that is creating the stress. The truth is there are people all over the world that just do not get stressed about those things, right? People that can walk into a job interview, cool as a cucumber, or who can fly on an airplane without caring. I happen to be one of them. It doesn't bother me, but there are other triggers that I have and that I'm. You have. So for the rest of this video, I encourage you play along with this, go through the exercises for one particular thing that you know causes you stress in your life, and let's see if we can eliminate it for good. So let's start by defining what stress actually is. It's a mindset and it's this. Stress comes from needing to have something turn out a certain way that we feel that we can't control and that we worry could go badly. Those are your three levers. That sentence has all three components that we can use to destroy stress. So let's start at the beginning with this first part. Stress comes from needing something to happen. If we stopped needing things, if we stopped getting so caught up in what we wish would happen and trying to control so much, we wouldn't feel stressed. Right? This is the whole Buddhist philosophy is letting go of desires. Now, I don't advocate going that far. I do believe, though, that the quality of your life is going to be directly impacted by how many things you think you need. And trust me, fewer things is going to be better here. So if we can eliminate feeling like we have to have things to happen that's going to save us tons of stress. So the first thing to let go of is the past, right? If you've done something in the past that you're regretful about and that you wish you could do differently and you turn over in your head, you can't control it, right? You're not gonna be able to influence it that way. So it's just gotta be let go for things in the future that we need to turn out a certain way. A job interview. I feel this all the time when I'm on an airplane, right? And I have a connecting flight and I need to get to that flight on the best way to handle this is something called fear setting. And this is something that Tim Ferriss discusses in his book, the Four Hour Work Week. But it goes like this. Let's take the example of the airplane. So I'm on an airplane, I'm going somewhere, I have a connecting flight. It's got an hour and 45 minutes, and we took off 45 minutes late. So I'm going, crap, this is going to be a really tight layover. I don't think I'm going to make it. I got to rush off this plane. The way that I calm myself, that I deal with that stress in that situation is by stopping, needing to make that flight. And I do that by fear setting. I go, you know what? Let's assume the worst thing happens. I'm not gonna make this flight. I'm gonna be stuck all day in this airport, maybe even through another night. I'll have to get a hotel. I'm gonna be a day late to my vacation or my meeting or wherever it is I'm going. And then all of a sudden, even though that's doom and gloom and it's not what I want, I can relax because I've clarified what's going to happen in the future. And I go, you know what? That would suck, but I can deal with it. That is the best way to deal with neediness. If you're worried about breaking up with someone, right, Go through fear, set it, go. What would happen if I broke up? Would I actually die? Or would I be sad for a while and get over it? If you left your job or were fired, would you starve, live on the street, right, and be left out in the cold? Probably not. You'd probably have to move in back home or with a friend, or take a smaller apartment and a pay cut at a job you didn't like, but you would survive. When you start to fear set truthfully things are not as bad as they seem. So that's the first P you want to get rid of feeling like you need things. Second piece, moving on to the control part. If we can increase our feeling of control, if we can increase the feeling of certainty, we can actually reduce stress. And this is why most people, right, feel safer when they're driving than they do when they're flying. When they're flying, they have no control when they're driving, even though it's more dangerous and way more people die driving and they feel like they're in control so they don't get nervous. So if we can increase that feeling of control, that's going to reduce the stress. Best way to do this is something called tree planning. And I did this when I left my job for the first time. I was very nervous. How would I pay my rent, right? How would I make any money? And what I had that I just dug up for this video is a five page document of all the things that I could do that could generate money, right? I have on there, I have, I could lower my student loans by casting them over 30 years. I, I could reapply to college so that I didn't have to pay my loans for another year. I could busk on the street, play guitar for tips. I could bartend, I could wait tables, I could do odd jobs. I could Airbnb my bedroom and sleep on the couch, which I did. I have five pages of things that I did. And the weird thing about this is, even though I left my job and this is a longer story, but got down to $300 in my bank account sleeping on the floor, I wasn't ever stressed because I knew, okay, if I, if I get to the end of this and this business doesn't work, all that I have to do is go back to this sheet and start at the top and work my way down and I'll be fine. It won't be pleasant, but I'm not going to die. So when you can kill that uncertainty by tree planning, and the reason I call it tree planning is because most people have a stick plan. Here's where I am, here's what I need. If I don't get there, I'm screwed. It's terrible. A tree plan has different divergent paths. Alright, if that doesn't work, I'll go here. If that doesn't work, go here. If that doesn't work, go here. When you have if then statements in your plan, you have more certainty that it's going to work out. That's going to reduce your stress. So that's the second thing. We've got fear setting, we've got tree planting. The third part you think will go badly. Now, for this, I know that I've used airplanes a lot, but it's actually because my roommate inspired this. And he is somebody who is really not stressed in his life. But when he gets on an airplane, he gets very nervous. He's worried that it's going to crash. And I always found that interesting about him, which is what made me start thinking about the ways that stress occurs in our life. And for him and me, the difference is not that I need my life any less than him. The difference is not that I control the airplane more. The difference is that he thinks it's going to crash and I think that it's going to land safely. So the best way to change our beliefs, yes, he's read the statistics, he knows. But we want to do that on an emotional level. And the best tool that I know of for this is an NLP tool called the Swish pattern. You can YouTube this, Google it in greater detail, but I'm going to give you the one minute version right now. Basically, what you do is on this hand, you place the image that you do not want to happen. You fail the job interview, the plane goes in, crash and burn. The conversation goes terrible. The girl rejects you, whatever it is, and you play it out on this hand. On this hand, you have the good thing that you'd like to see. The plane lands safely, job interview goes well, you get a date with a girl, whatever it is, and you look at this hand and play it in your head vividly as you see it in the way that makes you nervous. And as soon as you start to feel that heart race or get a little bit nervous, your head, and with your hands in your mind's eye, you swish them out, right? You have this image explode through this image coming towards your center of vision right here. And what that's going to do after you do it 10, 20 times. It can take several minutes to do, but it starts to train your habits, right? You get in the habit of, every time I think of the plane crashing, boom. Think of the plane landing safely and having a great vacation. You do that consciously. You direct your brain, you say, this is what I want you to do for 10 minutes, for maybe 20 minutes. It's not that long of a time. It seems like it. But then even unconsciously, when you're sitting on that plane and you start to go here, your brain will automatically go down that new route of going. Nope. When we do that, boom, we see this new image and you won't feel so badly about it. So those are the best three things that I have for eliminating stress in our lives. It is a mindset. It doesn't have to be part of our everyday existence. And those are just to go over them again. Fear setting, that will kill neediness. You'll feel like you don't need things to go in a certain directness or a certain route that you have your overarching goals that you can achieve in a ton of different ways. Tree planting, that's going to give you all the different paths that get to those goals. And then of course, the swish pattern, which is going to just make you more optimistic and feel better. That's it for stress. That's all I've got right now. But I do have an announcement and I want to thank two people for actually setting up charisma on command channels in different languages. And those people are Jose and Eric. Jose for the Spanish channel and Eric for the Russian channel. If you want to check those out, you in those native languages, if you speak them, go ahead into the description. I'll have links to those. If you like this channel in English, go ahead and subscribe. Of course, I'll be doing all of the English. Those guys are doing the dubs. But we have these kind of Q and A style that I take from my roommates and from the comments. We've also got charisma breakdowns of fictional characters, real life people so that you know how the most charismatic people among us do what they do, how they speak so eloquently, how they feel so confident, how they tend to magnetize people towards them. If you have any suggestions for videos like this Q and A style, go ahead, write them in the bottom. Or people you'd like to see me break down. I'd be happy to do that. And of course, I hope that you guys have enjoyed this video and I'll see you in the next.