Stress Proofing Your Trading Mind

Do you know how stressed out you can become when you're trading? And you're right at that moment, you're risking capital to an uncertain future. And all of a sudden things start building up. Things start building up before you know it. Like a guy that I was working with the other day, before you knew it, he was just hitting buttons. He got so cranked up that the stress was so much, he couldn't think. He was holding his breath. He was sitting there, tension, and he was just adding positions. As a matter of fact.

He made 40 trades and it cost him a bundle. The thing though is he got stressed out and he did not know how to unstress yourself, how to deal with that stress. Now, it may not be entry problems. It can be all over the place in trading about where you have problems. But the thing is, is what I want you to notice is traders get stressed out and they were never taught how to stress proof themselves. Well, that's what we want to do here. Okay, and let's start in the beginning. Let's start with stress. What is stress? The definition that I'm going to give it is this. It's meeting the challenges of living now, adapting that for trading, we would say it's meeting the challenges of risking capital to an uncertain future. Yeah. Now what happens at that moment? All sorts of stuff. All of a sudden you will see that the stress response triggers. And what you would notice if you had developed the observer that you need to be for trading, you would notice that you're holding your breath. Or like the guy that I was talking about just a little earlier, he was going.

This is part of an emotional anxiety attack that's happening. Okay. He wants, oh my God, I better get in right now. Now the thing is, though, in this stress response, he's holding his breath or panting, and then all of a sudden his muscles just start getting tense. He's actually triggering to fight flight. That's what he's really doing. The stress is building up. It's past being good. It's getting to the point where it's really beginning to affect the mind. And then he gets into burnout and all that fight flight stuff happens. So what I want you to see, there was an activating event in his trading and your trading that you're unprepared for. You move into it. That activating event starts creating the stress. The emotion of, oh, my God, you know, this is anxiety. What could happen? Or I'm so stressed out, I've missed other trades, I need to get into a trade What I want you to notice how wacky this thinking is or known as stinking thinking, too. The key, though, is this. You see the activating event, and all of a sudden you see the stress response. That's on automatic. Now, that automaticness is also telling you it's coming from two places. One, it's coming from your evolutionary psychology. I mean, a lot of other animals preyed on us when we were much smaller and not like we are today, and we ended up having stress. We had that. So you've gotten that as a trait from your caveman days. But what you've also learned is how do you deal with stress? And where we learn is an incubator called our families, our cultures, our institutions, and all that. The key, though, is now you've got a stress response, and you see yourself cranking up. You see the muscles hunching. You see the breathing alter, and that's all getting you ready for fight, flight, to flee, or to fight. That's what it's doing. The thing is, nobody notices the tension in the body. Nobody notices that it's sitting there, also altering your breath, and it's. The body is getting ready for action. Okay, dangerous action. But being threatened or sitting there with a big, huge opportunity they have to take care of. Right now, that's caveman. Okay, now, so we've gotten the stress reaction, rather stress response. But what happens if we really begin to understand stress in two different ways? In performance, peak performance stuff, there is a designation between stress being eustress, which is a good form of stress. It focuses us, it gets us ready for action, and we're looking for the engagement. You know, any athletic team is going to go through that kind of use stress in preparing to play the game. And you do the same thing when you're preparing for a test or when you're preparing for a challenge. And what I'm saying is we need to develop the ability. If we're going to have stress anyway, we need to develop the ability to have it show up as eustress. That increases performance. Okay. Rather than distress. Distress is that. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. It's what turns into anxiety. It turns into fear. It turns into what happened with this guy lost $12,000 in 40 trades, and he had no idea. When the smoke cleared, it was like, oh, my God. Yeah. And if you're around him, you realize he's really stressed, and yet he's never seen the physiology of that stress. He said it wasn't him on his radar screen. So what we're doing is we're retraining him how to respond to stress for you. For anybody else who trades in particular, the moment that you start engaging uncertainty, that can be an entry, you know, that can be, that can be when the trade turns against you, that can be when you finally get some profit there all that stuff when you take a loss, the thing is what you're doing is you're realizing, okay, I have now entered stress. And now is it you stress the good or the bad that's going to move over into anxiety and have me trade from a fear or an angry based type of trading.

So the first order, the first piece that you have to get is you have to decide that I'm going to learn to manage the stress by recognizing that breath.

Attention and heart rate are a function of emotional arousal, the emotions already triggered. Distress is another word for anxiety. Okay. And it's already triggered and it's growing and it's growing. And if you do not learn how to breathe with it to take the tension away, just lower the heart rate, it's going to hit a threshold moment that moves it from cranking up, getting ready for action to where it's delivering fight flight and you're cooked then. So that's the first thing is what I'm going to be asking you to do is really take a look at that. Now. How would you notice it? I encourage you to take a your phone, record yourself as you trade and start noticing those moments that you really have troubles with. What's happening in your eyes, your jaw, how you're holding your breath. Yeah, you're showing what could be distress or eustress. And the thing is you need to be in control of that because it's energy, whether or not it's focused energy on performing or focus energy on escaping or attacking, that's the only difference. And to give you an idea, eustress and distress, I want you to imagine.

The brain scan of a grand mal seizure where the person's completely out of control and it's really scary event. Okay. To the person in the seizure. Now what I want you to think about is a brain scan of an orgasm.

What you would discover. Very pleasurable thing, you know what you discover. The physiology of the stress response is the same, the brain waves. What's different is the interpretation that the observer has of the event. I've never talked with anyone that wants to endure a grand mal seizure. You know, an orgasm is a different deal. Okay, that's, now we're going. Okay, now we go. It's about interpretation yeah, now we're going. When I'm being stressed, what are the beliefs that are being revealed to me? If I only had the ability to look. With mindfulness training, you can learn to step back out of that and you begin to say, what are the beliefs driving this stress reaction?

There's only four of them. We don't need rocket science. What happens is that your beliefs are really about your ability to manage uncertainty. And they fall into four categories. Mattering. I have to make a bunch of money and I have to do it right now in order to matter or I don't know if I deserve easy money. You know something, I don't know if I deserve anything. I deserve all this, okay, adequacy. I'm not good enough. I'm going to be found lacking. I always lose because I'm not good enough. I can't handle the pressure. Or lovableness is that if I make a bunch of money, if I trade really well, people respect me and care for me. Those are the only four there.

So ultimately, once you kind of put the band aid with emotional regulation, you develop an observer, then you start looking courageously, I might add, at the self limiting beliefs that are driving distress. You believe a bad outcome, okay? And what you're doing is you're performing from that belief of bad outcome. That's why you get stressed up. Oh my God, I could lose. What I'm asking of you is to recognize that's all crazy. What really boils down to is that your mind has a belief that is producing all this action. And your job is to dig to the belief, okay. And begin to really challenge that belief and start asking, you know, I need to separate my performances, which is about competencies, from my being, which trading no amount of winning or losing touches that. And you begin to realize your beliefs about winning and losing are what this is all about. You take a look at them and you start saying what needs to change here. Now if you want to learn more about this, particularly at the level of belief and changing belief, I welcome you to check out my website, go to more of my YouTube videos and start really exploring. And ultimately I have a lot of free stuff for you to browse through, to look through. And a lot of people simply say, randy, you've made me a much better trader just on the YouTube stuff. But what I'm asking you to do, if you're really looking at it, going, oh, if I want to learn how to stress proof myself, I'm going to need to get at the belief itself. Yeah. To do that I encourage you to read my articles watch more videos and then start read my book for goodness sake okay mindful trading then what I really encourage you to do is start looking at our group course and if you're really into it you start looking at my individual work with me that's how you train the mind to be able to deliver stress proofing and I wish you luck and take a look at that really record yourself and look at what's happening you can see it it's in plain sight particularly when you use like a video camera your phone or even a mirror do that and take the next step explore further this is something that can really be beneficial to you and the deal is you have to have the courage and the honesty to take a step into that unknown and say I'm going to find the part of me that can trade and I'm going to pull that up I'm going to make that my working reality while I trade Yes.