308: Powerful Stress Management Approaches Designed for Times Like These

It's important to remember that stress on its own is not a bad thing. Stress is really important. It's a vital part of life. But when stress becomes a way of life instead of a part of life, that's when we see more of the problems.

Hello everyone, this is Kathy Caprino and welcome to my podcast, Finding Brave. I've created this show for everyone who longs to create something bold and brave in their life. To rise up, speak up and stand up for who they are and to reach their highest and biggest visions. Each week I'll be speaking with inspiring guests from all walks of business, leadership, entertainment, the creative arts and the entrepreneurial world. And they'll be sharing their intimate stories of Finding Brave and offer their best strategies for building your most rewarding, joyful and meaningful life, business and career.

Hey, friends.

Kathy here. I am thrilled to announce an event that is truly special coming up on June 13, designed for folks who would like a stress reducing, calm and enlivening retreat experience in New York City's Central Park. For the first time, I'm teaming up with my dear friend and top stress management expert, Jordan Friedman, who I've had the honor of interviewing on my podcast twice now to offer a live retreat and tour experience in the heart of New York City's iconic Central Park. We'll start with a two and a half hour walking tour guided by Jordan.

Who'S a fabulous licensed tour guide of.

Some of the most beautiful and relaxing spots in the park. Followed by an energizing and supportive Q and A session where Jordan and I will help you directly address and navigate some of the biggest stressors you're facing today. We cannot wait to spend this special and meaningful time with you surrounded by nature, beauty and the deep, deep calm of the urban oasis of Central Park.

Spots are limited, so check out the.

Details and Register today@thestresscoach.com Central park retreat. Jordan and I will love to offer you this special experience and be with you on June 13th.

Hope to see you. Hello everybody. Kathy Caprino here. Welcome to another episode of Finding Brave.

I'm.

I say it every time, but I mean it every time. I. I'm beyond excited and honored and joyful to have the guest we have today, Jordan Friedman, who is not only a dear friend, but such an inspiration and you'll hear it as well. He is, he's known as the stress coach and I'm going to tell you all about him. But Jordan, you're so meditative and calming to be with and you people will hear it as well, and we have lots to share with you, particularly around powerful stress management approaches designed for times like these. I don't think there's a topic that's more relevant than this right now. So, Jordan, thank you for taking the time. I know you're going through a lot of things. Awesome programs you're developing, Big Move, etc. Thank you for taking the time to be with me here today.

Oh, you're welcome, Kathy. Hi, everyone. And it helps me to talk about it too. I'm. I'm a part of this world, this stressful world, just like everyone else. Right?

That's it.

We kind of can't not be. Unless we're really living in isolation and not looking at the news or Instagram, etc, which hopefully we're not doing a lot of. All right, folks, let me tell you a few things. Let me tell you, tell you about Jordan. And also I just want to touch on it here. As you probably heard in our introductory ad, Jordan and I are doing something we've never done before on June 13th that we hope will be not only joyful and restorative, but help you work through the biggest stressors you're going through. So we'll tell you about that in a minute, but let us launch into what Jordan has to tell us about managing our intense stress right now. Jordan Friedman is known as the stress coach. For 30 years, he has created a chill factory of programs, courses, coaching and tools to help people work, relate, sleep and feel better. He's the former director of Columbia University's Health Education program.

Wow.

Author of the Stress Managers Mint, the Stress Manager's Manual. Love it. And the host of the great podcast the Chill Factory. Jordan is also a New York City tour guide who leads fun and empowering tour experiences where work groups, meeting attendees, organization members and others use sites like Central Park. What do you call Central Park, Jordan? The Urban Oasis.

Greatest urban oasis ever created.

Oh, I love Central park so much. And you'll hear about more of it to foster stress reduction, team development, creativity and problem solving. So there you go. That's only the. The tip of it, Jordan. But thank you for being here again. Now, let. Let us dive in here. Can we?

Sure.

I think that your personal story of why you were drawn to working with stress and stress reduction, it's really an incredible, inspiring story. Could we start there, how you were drawn to this?

Sure. The interesting thing about my story is I didn't know it was a story in the beginning. It's often true, right? We don't realize our stories until many chapters in so for sure, I knew that when I was 10 years old, a brain tumor was discovered in my head. And it.

How old were you again?

10. 10. And it was one of the largest brain tumors ever discovered. So that was a big thing. But leading up to that, leading up to the discovery of the tumor, I was, you know, I'm using air quotes. Normal kid, you know, did everything all other kids did. And I was a really good reader. I did well on tests, I was super creative. But mainly I love to read. And I used to. I was in the fifth grade then or fourth grade leading up to it, and I would go into the kindergarten classes and read them books. There was some kind of program that my school had. Anyway, brain tumor was discovered, probably had been growing since I was conceived. That's why it was so large. They thought it was cancer at first because of the size and the makeup of it, but then through some, you know, X rays. I say X ray, that sounds old fashioned, but this was a long time ago. So the medical technology we have today, which is super, super advanced, wasn't quite as advanced then. So they had a lot of trouble determining what kind of tumor it was. But fortunately, they determined it was not cancer and that they could remove it as best they could in two brain surgeries. I had a brain first brain surgery a week after the tumor was discovered. And that removed the mass of the tumor, which was attached to my brain but also eating away at my skull on the inside. And then a month later, I had the second brain surgery to try to remove all of the tentacles of the tumor that went through my skull and around my sinuses and optic nerves and cheekbones and down the back of my neck. They couldn't remove all of it, so they created some room, hoping that it would disappear as I got older. And in fact, that is what happened. But it did not disappear until I was 26.

So I had a brain and it wasn't cancer, right?

It wasn't cancer. So I had this tumor until I was 26. And as a result, I had a friend who's an ophthalmologist, tell me this recently, I have brain damage because the optic nerves are part of the brain, not a part of your eyes. So my optic nerves were damaged as a result. That's the big, the big impact of the tumor. And I was nearly blind for a while in the beginning of this whole ordeal. My sight did get better over about three years, but pretty much stayed in place after three years. So I have lots of blind spots, more in my left eye Some in my right eye. The big thing that, that, that affected was my ability to read. That's why I started out by saying that I used to read to, to kids a lot. And then all of a sudden I couldn't read anymore. I couldn't read in the conventional way. I couldn't read the way you just read my intro. Kathy can't sit and read a newspaper. So I had to sort of learn and be supported and use technology which has progressed incredibly since then to be able to read and do things I need to do. So anyway, fast forward, fast forward. I'll finish my story in a second. I got to college, I was away from home for the first time and I had a lot of physical symptoms. Stomach stuff, indigestion, you know, I won't go into the gory details, but all that stuff that a lot of us know, I had it on a regular basis and I went to the doctor at the health service at the University of Maryland where I went to school. And he said, you know, I'll give you some medication for how you're feeling, but what I really think you need is a stress management class and there's one on campus. This was not just a one off stress management workshop, this was an academic class as part of the education department at Maryland, a rarity in the 80s. And I thought the doctor was, you know, I didn't like his advice at all. I was 18 and yeah, you're like.

What is this nonsense, right?

Like I'm not stressed. I'm. Yeah, I have a visual impairment, but, but I went to that class, I followed his advice, I went to the class and that first day, I remember like it was yesterday that the professors started talking about stress and we even did a stress reduction exercise. And it was like, it was like the door was open to me to a place where stress didn't have to be a 24, 7 reality. I think that even though I, I resisted the doctor, the doctor's advice because I didn't think of myself as stressed, I was super, super stressed because for, for, you know, eight years and then in college when I was there to fend for myself, I just had to do everything differently. Things took me ten times as long as everyone else. My tests had to be read to me. I was embarrassed about the whole thing. I would always pretend I had normal vision and that creates a whole other set of stressors and pressures. So that really added up to me getting lots of physical effects at a pretty young age. 18, we see that a lot more now. And Then I dipped my toe into the world of stress reduction, and I loved it because it helped me feel better, but it also, like, opened this door to my career, even though I didn't know it at the time, but I loved the class. I took more classes, My professors were incredible. And then I just kept at it and got to develop my own work after Maryland, at nyu, at Columbia. And here I have all of these years later.

What a really get.

Really getting to do what thrills me, which is to help others reduce their stress and maybe open the door a little bit for others. Like, the door was opened for me. And it all, you know, helps me too, because as I said before, I'm still stressed. I get stressed like everyone else. So.

What a story, Jordan.

I have to punctuate a few things and get your thoughts. You may not agree, and that's so perfectly fine. I don't mean to push ideas, but I. It really sounds like if we believe in this kind of thing, that maybe we came here for a reason or we signed up for some of our challenges. It's unbelievable that you went through all this. You didn't know what stress was. You didn't realize, it sounds like, till you took this course, that you were living in constant stress. And the irony of. Didn't you say that it was one of the only stress reduction. Was it a master's program?

No, it was. It was undergrad. There. There was a master's component, yes. But it was both offered to undergrads.

It's incredible.

Yeah.

It's really one of the only in the university system in the US Right at that time.

I mean, so now if you think. If you think back to the 80s, right. We didn't talk about mental health.

I mean, we didn't even know what that. What it means, what it feels like, what it looks like, how it presents.

Yeah. So I just.

I mean, it's quite remarkable, isn't it? And there's one other piece of it that I want to make sure people hear. Did you not tell me in the past, Tell me if I'm wrong. You were doing your homework and suddenly you couldn't see it well, or you weren't getting it and your mother was looking over your shoulder and tell me, tell us what she said.

Wow, you have a good, good memory.

I'll never forget it, because I'm like, that's a mother who knows their child and isn't afraid to get help. But let me not ruin it. What did she do?

That's exactly how it was discovered. There Were. No, there were no symptoms at the time that I or anyone else was aware of. I say at the time because in retrospect, there were some mood changes.

Some.

Breathing, heavy breathing kinds of things, but just didn't, you know, think of them as, oh, he probably has a brain tumor. But I was sitting at the kitchen table the first day back from school after Christmas break, working, writing something, an essay or something like that. And my mother said, why are you writing off the lines? You're not writing in between the lines of the loose leaf paper? Do they even have loose leaf paper anymore? I think I, everyone, it's paper that has lines on it, so you can write in a legible way. And she said, what, what's, you know, why are you doing that? And I said, it was a little hard to see in school today. And she, you know, my mother really, she leapt into action. She got the eye doctor on the phone. I was in the eye doctor's office the next morning, and he put the occluder over my right eye and I couldn't see anything out of my left eye. So that was, it was less, all of it.

I'm turning on my light here because I'm going very dark here in my room. How's that? Is that better?

Great.

I just, I want to hug up your mother for that because, you know, today so many parents are so stressed and so, so overstretched that they might not. And this is not demeaning, diminishing, judging parents. I, a parent of a 27 and a 30 year old, and I was racing around, spread too thin as a vice president, et cetera. But the fact that she was in the fabric of your life enough to see that, comment on, on that and then act on it, I just find that remarkably wonderful.

Yeah. Another thing that was very fortunate with this whole.

You are blessed, my friend. Blessed. Thank you for sharing that. What a story. So let's start with times like these and, and you know, that statement, a million people will have a different interpretation of what that means. But so let me just say, I think in times here in the US and other countries of great change and rapid change and change, that perhaps I'm not getting political here, that we never saw coming and that directly impact our daily lives from the money we feel we can save and spend to our jobs to layoffs, all of that, you know, it's, it's high anxiety times for many people. I know because I have a lot of clients whose world has been upended in their careers. Mine has been impacted. Tell Us. What happens with stress in times like these?

What particular.

I didn't prep you on these specific questions, folks, but what in particular ratchets up our anxiety in ever changing, evolving times? Can you explain it to us?

Yeah, so you, you said it really, with the word change so very baseline here. Change is a threat or a demand. It could turn out to be something terrible, it could turn out to be something good, but it is something different that we as human beings need to react to, figure out whether it's good or bad, because that helps us protect ourselves or do what we need to protect ourselves to be safe. That is essentially the fight or flight response in action. And we don't have control over that in, in a. Again, in a core sense. So I'll, I'll give a very, you know, sort of understandable example that we've all experienced or certainly we in New York City here have experienced, and that is you. You're waiting to cross the street. The light, the little man in the box says, go. And you start crossing the street. And you get in the middle of the street and you see a car coming at you. And what happens? You automatically jump back away from the car, back onto the curb. You don't stand there and say, now should I stand here? Let's just see what happens. Maybe it should be interesting. No, you don't. You immediately do it. Your heart pumps into action, your muscles bump into action, blood starts flowing to enable you to almost automatically jump back on the curb. So that car coming at you is a change. It's a threat, it's a demand. So when you talk about our times, yes, we've had a big political change. There have been changes in the financial markets. There have been changes to people's lives. There have been changes to jobs. And all of those things can put demands on people, can put stress on people. It doesn't even necessarily have to happen to you. You could have a family member or a friend who is affected more directly than you are, but you get concerned about them, you get worried about them. So all of this, especially when it's unpredictable and unreliable, so you're not sure what's going to happen from day to day, which could be the case with a lot of what goes on in our lives, regardless of governments or financial situations, that all keeps us in fight or flight stress mode more of the time. And then when you add in, and we can talk about this, because I do think it's important when you add in things like watching the news or reading the newspaper or looking at social media all the time, where you're getting more and more and more stuff about current events, for example, that you already know, but it's said in a different way, so it sparks your interest because you need to know whether to fight or flee it. You need to know how to react to it. So that's all to say. It keeps us in a heightened state of stress for, for longer periods of time. And that causes lots of other things, like the stuff that I experienced when I was a kid, difficulty sleeping, of course, you know, mood.