Reduce Stress & Boost Productivity: 5 Tactics You Need to Know!

Good morning, Believe Nation. Today we're going to talk about 5 ways to reduce your stress.

The first time I came to United States, Wherever I went, I heard this term, 'stress management.' I could not understand because in my understanding, we manage things which are precious to us— our families, our businesses, our money, our property. Whatever is precious to us, we will manage that. 'Why would somebody want to manage stress?' I couldn't get it for some time. Then I realized people have made a conclusion that stress is an extra limb that they have in their body. Stress is an appendage that they cannot get rid of. Stress is not a part of you. You get stressful because you do not know how to handle your mind. No attention has been paid as to how to handle this mind, how to handle this emotion, how to handle this body, how to handle these energies. Nothing has been done about it. You're managing such a sophisticated system accidentally. So you being stressful is a natural outcome of such unconscious living. There is no other way to be. Don't think your job is stressful. Now you are a student, being a student is stressful. If you don't find employment when you come out, or the college, that is stressful. If you get a job, even more stressful. If you don't get married, that is very stressful. If you get married, I don't want to say anything. If you don't have children, that is stressful. If you have children, you pull your hair out with stress. So, it is not your job or your life situations which are stressful. Stress is happening to you because of your inability to manage your own system. Not knowing how to manage the system is stressfulness. If this happened the way you want it, you wouldn't be stressful.

Model Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee used to write out a worry list on a piece of paper. He'd actually dump all of the worries that were swirling through his mind onto a piece of paper.

Why?

Because if it's in your mind, if you're worried about all these problems, they will consume your creativity and they will consume your physical energy. And your two best assets are: number one, your physical focus— your mental focus, and number two, your physical energy. I'll repeat that. Your two primary assets are your mental focus and your physical energy as a business person and as a human being. Protect those as we go through the intense disruption that will continue. So the first tactic is you write all the worries down on a piece of paper and then what Bruce Lee used to do is he'd rip up the piece of paper into many pieces and he'd hold a lighter to it or a match and he'd see them burning up. You don't have to do that but it's just simply powerful to start keeping a worry list so you sort of dump all the worries that are consuming your focus out onto a piece of paper, and then guess what? Your mind has space for its creativity to express itself.

So one of the best ways to stop worrying and start living is to take things one day at a time. Forget what's happened in the past that you cannot change, and don't worry about what might happen in the future. 99% of the things that you worry about will never occur. You can always use the Worry Buster formula to clear your mind. If there's a problem in your life that is causing you to worry, remember that most things you worry about never happen anyway. There are 4 steps to applying the Worry Buster to your situation to help you stop worrying completely. Number 1: Define your problem clearly. Accurate diagnosis is half the cure. What exactly are you worrying about? Write it down if you possibly can. Number 2 is ask yourself, what is the worst possible outcome of this situation? I call this a YPO— a WPO analysis, worst possible outcome. Some people call it filling out the disaster report. What is the worst? And think about what exactly could happen if this situation did occur. Step number 3 is resolve to accept the worst possible outcome should it occur. Whatever might happen, decide that you will be able to live with it. It won't kill you. Take it one day at a time. Now you've found out how to stop worrying. And finally, begin immediately to make sure that the worst possible outcome does not occur. Think of all the creative things you could do to minimize the worst possible occurrence. Pretty soon you'll be thinking positively and creatively again, and you'll be back in control of your life.

Got a sort of 5-point plan anyone can follow to get over stress and trauma. In their lives. Talk me through it. Well, I think, first of all, I wanna make one thing clear. The quality of your life is the quality of where you live emotionally.

We all have a home.

Angry people find a way to get angry, even if their life doesn't have anything to be angry about. We can always find it. Sad people find a way to be sad. Caring people find a way to care for other people. So one thing you gotta identify is where are you living? What's your home? What's your habit? And then the way to change it is, when I was homeless, literally on my own, just getting started, I didn't have the internet, but I decided I had to go to a library and I had to feed my mind. And I always tell people the first stage is, Weeds grow automatically. One of my teachers taught me, he said, "Every day stand guard at the door of your mind and feed it something good." 'Cause if your worst enemy puts sugar in your coffee here, you're fine. If your best friend by accident trying to help you puts some strychnine, you're dead. So if you feed your mind every day, 30 minutes a day of reading something, hearing something. Second, you gotta strengthen your body. And the reason, Pierce, is fear is physical, right? So is stagnation, so is numbness, so is sadness, so is rage. And when you go in and change your body by an intense workout or a run or even an intense walk and the blood's flowing is flowing through you, science has shown it instantly changes your biochemistry. Now your mind and body are working together. Third thing all these people did in common, if you watch, they found a mission bigger than themselves. Something that they wanted to aspire to that was worth more than their pain. And then the fourth thing is you gotta find a role model. You heard it with Nick. Almost everybody finds a role model that makes it real. I was with Warren Buffett and with Sara Blakely, the youngest billionaire. We did this roundtable about the future. And when you listen to this woman and when women meet her, they don't just love Spanx, her product that made her a billionaire. They love this woman because she's a role model of what's possible.

Yeah.

When you get a role model, it becomes real to you. If you get a plan, you get a goal plan and you take massive action. And the last step, number 5, there's always somebody worse off than you are. I don't care what you've done. So if you can go help somebody worse off, it puts your life in perspective and it also reminds you life's not about me, it's about we. I always tell people, The secret to a great life, the secret to living, is giving. And there's— when you realize there's something in you still to give, even if you lost your legs, even if you've been through a horrific financial situation, your life can improve. But more importantly, you'll have a meaningful life because your life will contribute to other people.

Stress is the big hidden ager of all. There are a couple things that really age us a lot, and stress is one of the biggest ones. And so often we stress out about our health, which is the exact opposite of what you want to do. And even in pregnancy, when women are all stressed out because they'll be hurting the baby from having a drink before they found out they were pregnant, or Maybe you just stop smoking cigarettes. You're more likely to hurt the child from the stress you're experiencing than you are from any toxic event that you engaged in. The same is true for your life. How do you deal with stress? It's not the stress per se, it's the response to stress that's important. Don't quit your job. Don't stop working. Keep doing the things that give you passion and vision in life, but practice some stress management techniques. One that I like to show everybody is deep breath. Take a deep breath. You don't go, "Pffff." like that, which is what most people do. So everyone out there, we're going to do this together on the count of 8. Okay, you're going to put your right hand on your stomach. Now when you take a deep breath in, the first thing to do is to push the stomach out. That brings the diaphragm down and gives you more room for your lungs to open up. Babies do this naturally. Singers do this. Athletes do this. But we forget to do it. So, 4 in, 4 out. Ready? Okay, deep breath in. 1. Push your belly button out.

2.

Push it way out. 3. 4.

Way out, way out.

Now Relax your stomach, 5. Exhale, 6. Now push your belly button towards your spine. Suck it in, 7, 8. Inhale, 1, 2, 3. Push your stomach way out, 4. Little, little hold it there for a second. Little ache a little bit up in here. Now exhale, relax the belly, 5, 6. Now suck the belly button towards the spine. Exhale all the air. Nicely done. That's a deep belly breath. It's the foundation of all yoga, which I do every morning. It's the foundation of mystic Christianity. Many religions' foundations support the fundamentally important aspect of taking a deep breath. And now as doctors we know— How often should we do that deep breath? 10 times when you feel stressed. Uh-huh. So in the course of a minute. You can be sitting in a group— You can be at your job and all of a sudden start breathing. You want to strangle the person next to you and instead you go, "That's fine, Marlo. I'm good to go." And it works. It's very effective. Yeah.

No, I like that. Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier? And here the science says yes. When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body's response to stress. Now, to explain how this works, I want you all to pretend that you are participants in a study designed to stress you out. It's called the Social Stress Test. You come into the laboratory, and you're told you have to give a 5-minute impromptu speech on your personal weaknesses to a panel of expert evaluators sitting right in front of you. And to make sure you feel the pressure, there are bright lights and a camera in your face, kind of like this. And the evaluators have been trained to give you discouraging nonverbal feedback, like this. [LAUGHTER] Now that you're sufficiently demoralized, time for part 2: a math test. And unbeknownst to you, the experimenter has been trained to harass you during it. Now, we're going to all do this together. It's going to be fun. For me.

Okay.

I want you all to count backwards from 996 in increments of 7, You're going to do this out loud, as fast as you can, starting with 996. Go! Go faster! Faster, please. You're going too slow. Stop, stop, stop, stop! That guy made a mistake. We're going to have to start all over again. You're not very good at this, are you? OK, so you get the idea. Now, if you were actually in this study, you'd probably be a little stressed out. Your heart might be pounding, you might be breathing faster, maybe breaking out into a sweat. And normally, we interpret these physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren't coping very well with the pressure. But what if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was energized, was preparing you to meet this challenge? Now, that is exactly what participants were told in a study conducted at Harvard University. Before they went through the social stress test, they were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful. That pounding heart is preparing you for action. If you're breathing faster, it's no problem. It's getting more oxygen to your brain. And participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance, well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more confident. But the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress response changed. Now, in a typical stress response, your heart rate goes up, and your blood vessels constrict, like this. And this is one of the reasons that chronic stress is sometimes associated with cardiovascular disease. It's not really healthy to be in this state all the time. But in the study, when participants viewed their stress response as helpful, their blood vessels stayed relaxed, like this. Their heart was still pounding, but this is a much healthier cardiovascular profile. It actually looks a lot like what happens in moments of joy and courage. Over a lifetime of stressful experiences, this one biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at age 50 and living well into your 90s. And this is really what the new science of stress reveals, that how you think about stress matters. So my goal as a health psychologist has changed. I no longer want to get rid of your stress. I want to make you better at stress. And we just did a little intervention. If you raised your hand and said you'd had a lot of stress in the last year, we could have saved your life, because hopefully the next time your heart is pounding from stress, you're going to remember this talk, and you're going to think to yourself, "This is my body, helping me rise to this challenge. And when you view stress in that way, your body believes you, and your stress response becomes healthier.

So what do you think?

How do you reduce your stress?

I usually go for a dance class. Dance class or get a massage. Massages are good. Or a pedicure. I love pedicures.

I've been to one pedicure ever.

Yeah? You get a color?

No, I cut my nails before going. I didn't know that— See, if somebody's looking at my toes, I need to— I need to cut them. Yeah, you gave yourself a pedicure before you got a pedicure.

Well, I didn't know a pedicure was cutting your nails.

Anyway, for me, what do I do? You know, I try to run a stress-free life and business with intention. I run what I call a no-crisis business. I don't have a cell phone so people can reach me and freak out. I try not to work with clients who always are dumping things on me last minute with intention. I try not to do that to my team too. I try not to last minute, "I really need this done tomorrow, guys!" And it really kills me when I have to do it. And I think that's the first part is that I just try not to have stress. And I think as an entrepreneur, you can design your own life and pick your clients and pick your lifestyle, and as much as possible, just try to do that. When I am stressed, it doesn't happen that often. I can handle a good amount of stress. I'm pretty chill in general.

Yeah, me too.

I genuinely need to breathe.

Breathe, that's good.

And just remind myself of the bigger picture. And I have to— when I'm really stressed, I have to be alone. I'm an introvert, and I need time to think and figure it out, and then when I have a plan, I can be around people again. But I kind of shut down and I go inwards if I get stressed out.

Yeah.

That's me. Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you have an amazing day. I'd love to know which of the clips that you saw today meant the most to you, had the biggest impact. Leave in the comments below and I'll join in the discussion.

And if there's a topic you want Evan to cover in a future Believe Life video, leave it in the comments below too.

I love it.

Thank you guys for watching. Continue to believe. And I'll see you soon.

There's no question that at some point, even if you decide not to be a stress case, you actively manage your perspective about time and importance, you're taking in breath, you're still gonna get hit with days where you feel overwhelmed. That there's a lot going on and you're kind of freaked out about it. So here's two very simple things you can do. One, Take a walk. You know, leave the office or leave your house, go for a little bit of a walk. You know, I'm not talking about, you know, walking across the country and leaving all your responsibilities, though that sounds cool. I would just say go for a short stroll. You know, 20 to 45 minutes of a walk outside, yes, outside, can completely open up your mind again, help you find calm and just some kind of inner sense because you're walking, you're moving, you're breathing. For some of you, that might mean exercise. You know, go for a run, go for a jog. Like, move your body to dispel some of that physical tension and your mental tension might go with it as well. Makes sense, right? And then finally, for stress, it's so simple, you're gonna hate it. It's so tactical and people hate when I say this, but it's time to get organized. Most of the stress that is in our lives can be managed if we just organized it, said, "Okay, I'm gonna deal with this on this day, this on this day, this on this day." If we really chunked out the hours of the day to move towards accomplishing the things that are troubling us, you know, sometimes just knowing that tomorrow you're gonna handle it from 9 AM till 10 AM, it creates peace of mind. It like moves it off the stress of now to saying, "That's the time this is going to be handled." And once you have this knowledge in mind, That's when I'm gonna handle it. It releases a little bit of that craziness that's going on right now.