Daily Habits to Reduce Stress

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion musician and now executive coach to global leaders and high performers. Each week I'll publish a solo cast where I'll share my top high performance habits and methodologies to supercharge your life and career. If you enjoy the show, please take a short moment to subscribe and leave a rating and review. I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.

Are you stressed? Well, I'm about to share with you the skills of stress. And I think for any of us to even think of saying that we don't experience stress, I mean it's nonsense. We all experience stress. I do for sure and have done for many years. But that is part of being human and not all stress is created equal. Look, every single month I bring in a special guest for a group of leaders that I mentor and coach in my roundtable. And just today we had an incredible world leading expert on stress mitigation. And so we bring them in, do a Q and A and we learn from them. Some of the people we bring in are running massive multi billion dollar corporations. Some of them are running the most prolific sports teams, others are best selling authors and scientists. Try to keep it interesting, right? But today I was particularly enthralled by our guest and they shared some incredible things. I'm going to share the exact strategies with you because I feel like these strategies are simple yet so few of us actually access them regularly. We find ways to really resist them. So I made a few notes. Well, I made a lot of notes actually because he shared such gold. But a couple of things he mentioned, good things happen when we go towards the challenge. You know, when there's things that we're wanting to do, but it's scary. Move forward anyway. There's things that we really want to achieve, but we're worried about failing. Go towards it, don't move back. Great things do happen when we engage. I Mean, that's just common sense, right? But as I say, all too often, common sense isn't always common practice. We get in our heads, the reptilian brain, the amygdala really kicks in to try and protect us. We don't want to face humiliation, we don't want to face failure. So often we'll just pull back and not do the thing. A couple other things that he mentioned. I said this at the start. Not all stress is equal, and some we need to get rid of, and others, parts of stress we need to embrace and use to move us towards goals. You know, stress is what gets us up and gets us moving. Stress is what gets us to lift the phone. Stress is what gets us to go towards a financial target. Stress is what gets us off the road when there's a truck flying down towards you. Some stress is really healthy, and in fact, our perception of it can often shape how we experience it. One of my clients who was in the call today asked this expert, you know, I've heard that stress can change depending on how you look at it, and it can have different effects on your body. Well, of course that's true, because the feeling we get when we're anxious and nervous, the physical feeling, you know, those tummy tickles, the nervous jitters, are exactly the same feelings we get when we're excited. When we're excited about something, we get those tummy feelings. We get some jitters, but we look at it in a positive sense. So physiologically, same thing's happening, but psychologically, we're placing our focus on what it means to us. Now, how exciting is that? It means that we can take things like these physical feelings and replace what they mean to us. So in times when we're nervous, we can change that to, I'm feeling excited. Look, I'll be honest, and I share this a lot with you. Like, I speak at least once a week on a stage, sometimes up to three or four times a week. But I'm speaking to large audiences, and I love it. But I always get this tickle in my throat and in my chest roughly about 30 minutes to 15 minutes out from speak time. Now, in prior years, that stopped me from doing things, stopped me from getting to stage and speaking. I just wouldn't dream of speaking to an audience. But now it's what gets me to the stage. It's what fires me up. It's what reminds me, hey, I love this. It reminds me that it actually matters to me. So all I've done there is reframed in My mind, what it means to me. And it's went from crippling to, to really setting me up for a much more enjoyable experience. Now I'll share these five things. Actually six things. There's an extra one I added in at the end. There were six things that he mentioned that I just thought we all need to embrace. You know, he mentioned that we're all ridiculously busy and we're busy being busy, but often it's a facade, often it's us saying I can't do the thing that's good for me because I don't have the time. But then we look at our screen time on our phones and we see, geez, I spent an hour today on social media, I spent two hours today on emails. Right? That's not good. We have to function, of course, but spending time on those things and saying we're too busy to do the things that are good for us, that's addiction. We are simply addicted to the adrenaline and the cortisol, the stress hormones. And this is something he dug deep on today, something I've been researching for quite a while myself because I have felt addicted to those things. Addicted to the higher pace, addicted to the doing, addicted to outcomes, addicted to keeping an eye on what's going on in the world. And that often comes through a device. Right? So this for me really landed powerfully and it really reinforced for me a lot of the things I have been studying and learning and trying to implement. Do I always do it well? That's a hell no. Do I try consistently? Yes. That's a definite yes. So he mentioned that we're designed as humans to push. We're designed to push towards things. And to push means to be in a stressed state. Some people might call that upregulated or sympathetic. Your nervous system is sympathetic when you're pushing. So it could be two or three hours of making calls, two or three hours of leading a team, two or three hours of pumping those emails out, two or three hours of parenting. But we're not designed to do that continuously. We're designed to push and push for a while, but then we need to rest and recover. And if we don't do that, we get ourselves into chronic stress. And what does that lead to? Autoimmune disease, overwhelm, burnout, relationships that are really struggling. Now, I often say high performance is performing above the standard norms over a long period of time consistently whilst maintaining really great relationships or even just positive relationships and positive well being. If we're constantly busy, being busy and in the push state of go, go, go. Well, we're not giving our body a chance to go into that down regulated state. Or some people might call it the parasympathetic nervous system. So we want to make sure we're making time for this. And it doesn't take a lot of time. In fact, today this expert that we brought in from my leadership group took us all through an exercise in two minutes. And every single person said, I feel like a totally different person at the end of it. I feel more calm, in control, relaxed. It was beautiful, but simple. Now look, I want to share it with you. You've waited long enough. Please write these down. If you're driving, please make a mental note or come back to this. But number these are the protocols to calm, or some people might call them the skills of stress. But number one is nutrition. That's the most important thing to deal with. Stress. Nutrition, yes. The things we put in our mouth. What are we eating if we're eating crap, And I have been known to eat a lot of crap. If we're eating crap, it's not serving us. We've got to eat nutritious, whole, real foods. So important. But when we're busy, it's like, I'll grab the snack, the pie, the fries, the quick thing on the way home, the bag of jellies on the way home. This stuff isn't good for us. We know it, but we justify it because we're too busy. So what he named this was chemical stress. That when we're not eating good food, it's chemically stressing our body out. So the first things first, could you improve your nutrition just a little bit? Could you have one extra glass of water? Could you have a little bit more fresh fruit? The second thing he did talk about was fluid intake. And if we're not consistent with our fluid intake, then we start to put our body into a biological stressful state. So he talked about, you know, when you're dehydrated, sculling five liters of water at 9pm doesn't rehydrate you. It's about consistent action throughout the day, every day. Third, social connection. Look, you already know this. We are social beings. We love being with other people. We feel different when we come away from a few hours with somebody we enjoy hanging out with. I met with someone today who I only see maybe six or maybe every six to eight weeks. And I felt so connected and relaxed and joyful. I really did. That's the kind of person I want to be around more it was a deep conversation, him and I talking about emotion, emotional management. Like it was incredible. So social connection is crucial to stress management. Number four, sleep hygiene. You know, I've had some incredible sleep experts on the show. The expert today talked about watching the sunrise. Get out there when it's dark in the morning, just before it starts to get light and watch the light come out. That alone will set you up for better sleep. If you have better sleep, your stress levels will be so much less. Number five, connect with nature. And again, he shared some studies around how powerful this is. Getting out into nature, grounding your feet, you know, finding five minutes a day where you stand on grass or, or soil or sand, but actually grounding yourself, getting into water, walking around trees. But the crucial part here is leave your phone at home. Don't get lost on your phone. That's you in a stressed state when you're consuming and scrolling. Your mind is stressed, doesn't know what to do with all this information. Should I store it to long term, short term, what should I do with it? Should I take action on it? Should you fight or flight right away? This information, Scary, overwhelming, daunting, exciting. Get into nature and leave your phone at home once a day, every day. And last but not least, he talked about active stress control. I call that meditation. Right. He talked about meditation and how powerful it is to create meditation spaces and times in your day. And why? Because we have the ability to learn to refocus. Gives us more time to be more creative. Studies will prove this again and again. That makes us more productive, more effective, more creative, innovative, even happier. Meditation is a really incredible practice. Start slow with something like a two minute breath meditation. Close your eyes, Just focus on your breath. When you start to focus on what's for tea tonight, bring it back to your breath for a couple of moments. When you start to focus on the email you forgot to send, bring it back to your breath slowly and gently. That is meditation. That's active stress control. So I want you to really think about where you could be implementing these things. Those are six really simple tools that you could implement in your life. And I just wanted to shine a light on some of the incredible people that we do have coming in every month. I want to share some of those insights because I know that they're simple, but they're really golden. They work. So for those that don't know, we're just in the kind of latter stages of about to open the door for our annual event. That's right. Every year I run one event for the general public called hpl, the High Performance Leadership Program. It's here in Christchurch. For those who are not New Zealand, it's Christchurch, New Zealand, not Christchurch, England. And we bring in some of the most incredible speakers. We've had former prime ministers, we've had Steve Hanson, the former All Blacks head coach. We've had former captains of the All Blacks. We've had titans of industry, of business, philanthropy. And it's an incredible day where we all get together and I share what the seven pillars of high performance are in life and in business and in sport, and how we actually apply them. So if you would like to make sure you don't miss out on that, please go to my website and join the wait list. The wait list is open and we will sell out. We always do. So if you're keen to come along and be a part of it, go to jjlochlund.com and you'll see that there's events the High Performance Leadership event. And you'll see there's a button there to join the waitlist. You'll be the first to know with early bird tickets. And as I say, we always sell out. So please, if you're keen or thinking about it or you want to send some team members along, come along. Last year, the last few years, it's been anywhere between $1,600,1800 a ticket. This year we've restructured it where we're going to probably put the early birds out for about $250. So it really opens the doors to lots more people, lots more opportunity for you and some friends and colleagues to come along and have an incredible experience. So until next time, please get out there and lead your life on purpose. Thanks for tuning in today and investing in your own personal leadership. Please hit that subscribe button and I'd love if you'd leave me a rating and review. I've got some amazing guests lined up for you in the coming weeks and leaders, it's that time to get out there and lead your life on purpose.