MBA1383 Guest Teacher: Tom Cronin – How to Handle Stress and Work in Peace

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Hey everybody, it's Tom Cronin here from the Stillness Project and I'm the producer and co writer of the Portal film and book. And today I'll be teaching you how to find peace and calm in a very stressed out world. So let's get down to business. Why are we so stressed? That's a big question, isn't it? And you know, I've traveled the world and I've done lots of presentations in large audiences and quite often to start off a presentation, I'll ask the audience who in the audience is experiencing some level of anxiety, insomnia, depression, overwhelm, adrenal fatigue. And I asked them to be really honest with their response. And generally what I find is about 80 to 90% of the audience put their hands up. There was a recent Gallup poll that surveyed 155,000 people in 140 different countries. And what they found was that we are getting angrier, more anxious and sad than ever before and at the same time more affluent. So there seems to be some correlation between us acquiring more affluence and better standards of living around the world. Yet there's this correlation between getting that and seemingly getting unhappier and more sort of distracted and lost in the process of doing that. So today we're going to look at how to reduce stress in our lives. How do we live a More peaceful life and still not have to go off into a monastery in Tibet or shave our head, give away our possessions to still be able to work in the world. And a little bit about my background, I was a broker in Finance for 26 years. I was trading swaps and bonds for investment banks and domestic banks on international finance markets. And for the first 10 years of my life, I started in 1987, that career. And 1987 was a big year, was the year we had Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort. Was the year we had Wall street, the film with Gordon Gekko and Bud Fox. And was the year that Bonfire, the Vanities came out, which had that Central character, Sherman McCoy, the master of the universe, the bomb broker extraordinaire. So it was the sort of time in history where there was a lot of money and the markets were big and greed was good. And it was a very self indulgent period of time. Kind of feels like we're going back there again, doesn't it? So that was the year I started my career as a broker and I got swept into the industry and sort of started to really live that lifestyle. And before long I started to get extreme anxiety and addictions and there was a lot of drugs and drinking and late nights and partying. And this started to show up in my body and I started to get these symptoms that were cues in my body that what I was doing was unsustainable. And so I want us to look at what symptoms are symptoms, whether it's depression, anxiety, or panic attacks, or insomnia, adrenal fatigue. These aren't life sentences. You aren't born with this, you know, this, this anomaly. It's something that is a symptom that shows up in our body like a red light on a dashboard, letting us know that something needs to change. We need to look at the system and look at changing what's causing this problem. So if we get a light on the dashboard, that's not the problem. We don't need to put a sort of band aid over that light or we don't need to cover up that light. What we need to do is address the situation that's caused the red light to come on. And that's what is happening in our body. It's the same thing as like a vehicle in a car. So we need to look at what's causing these issues. That's what happened to me. Rather than sort of masking the problems, which is what we're doing a lot in our society these days is trying to make those symptoms go away by taking drugs or, you know, addictions and distraction we want to look at is get to the root cause of what's called that caused that anomaly. And one thing I learned in my travels after studying the mind and meditation for 25 years now, is that we have this sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. And they're two wonderful systems that a designed for sustainability, to survive. And one is to restore balance after we're in that intense situation, the sympathetic nervous system state. So if you look at the sympathetic nervous system state, think of S for stress state or stress response. Now the sympathetic nervous system state. What happens when we activate that, you know, marauding tribe starts chasing us or saber toothed tiger jumps out from around a rock. What happens is everything changes on a, on a physiological level. Our blood starts to coagulate so it doesn't go gushing out. If we get bitten or stabbed, we start changing our red or white blood cell count. We start converting more sugar into our bloodstream so we can move faster. We start producing cortisol, adrenaline or epinephrine. We start storing fat cells in case we can't eat for a period of time because we're on the run. All this is happening in our system on a mental level. What happens is our brain starts to function from the rear part of the brain, the reptilian part of the brain, and this whole frontal lobe of the brain starts to clamp down and contract, which is where we have intuition and creativity and wisdom and fluidness happening in our brain. What happens is that we start to contract that frontal lobe and operate from a very primal part of the brain which is just survival instincts. And then on a biochemical level, like I said, we produce norepinephrine and cortisol and adrenaline so that we can move quickly and get out of there. We shut down the production of melatonin. Your body doesn't want you falling asleep in a dangerous situation. It's not conducive to your survival. So you reduce your melatonin, you reduce serotonin. We don't want you feeling happy and friendly if you've got to go into battle. And we reduce oxytocin, that biochemical that enables us to feel love because your body doesn't want you feeling compassion and empathy for someone that is your enemy and you might have to kill them so that you can survive. So all this is happening in the sympathetic nervous system state. The stress response, which is all well and good if we're facing a marauding tribe or A saber toothed tiger. We're getting mugged in the laneway. But what's happening here is that we're sustaining this state for long periods of time in our lives. Because the incredible level of overwhelm that we're putting ourselves through, we're staying up later, we're not eating consistently, we're not eating in good, healthy environments, we're processing so much information, we're dealing with traffic and meetings and deadlines, and we just have this incredible overwhelm. If you look at where we were living our life 100, 200, 500, 5,000 years ago, to how we're living our life today, and particularly in the last 15 years, it's been an exponential curve that has put ourselves into such a state of overwhelm that our nervous systems are staying in these sympathetic nervous system states for quite a long time. So how do we navigate our way through this complexity? We've got to look for the simplicity in this complexity. So the simplicity in this complexity is that there is a way to sustain a much calmer, more peaceful way of living in today's world. And we have to be very mindful and conscious of how to do this rather than just get swept along by the sort of mainstream way of living. So we want to not be a cork in the ocean and get bobbed around by the way things are. We want to actually navigate our own path and carve through those tumultuous waves and find our own direction. So that means about being very structured and very established with our daily practice and making sure that we bring about levels of calmness throughout our day. We don't want to try to treat the symptoms of being in sympathetic nervous system state for long periods of time. What we want to do is simply get out of the sympathetic nervous system state. So how do we do that? Well, we move into parasympathetic nervous system state P for peace. P for parasympathetic. That is the restoration, the repair and rebalancing that happens in the body that naturally and spontaneously results from being in parasympathetic nervous system state. So the primary objective here is to get our body into the parasympathetic nervous system state. How do we do that? Well, obviously we lie down in bed at night and we sleep. But the problem is that the sleep's just not cutting it. For most of us, there's chronic insomnia levels. Our body's still riddled with cortisol and adrenaline, and we still have a lot of those symptoms. By the time we get to Bed of being in sympathetic nervous system state. So we need to get out of sympathetic nervous system state even before we get to sleep. And so that's where meditation is going to come in. And look, a lot of you probably thinking, there's no way I can meditate, it's too hard. Well, there is a way to do it that is just about applying sessions every day to committing to finding that deep peace. I'll give you a very simple technique that you can take away with you, and that is to simply find a quiet space, close your eyes and bring your awareness to the breath moving through your nostrils. It's a very simple process. As you sit there with your eyes closed, observe the breath moving through the nostrils, slightly cooling the skin around the rim of the nostril. Now, this will give you a central focal point. Now your mind is going to want to jump around. It will move away from that point and that's okay. But each time just bring it back to that central point of the breath moving through the nostrils and cooling the skin. And by focusing your awareness on this single point, what we'll do is it will calm down your nervous system and calm down your mind and calm down your physiology, getting you out of the sympathetic into the parasympathetic nervous system state where all of those symptoms will simply start to vanish and drop away. Now, it doesn't mean it's going to be easy, it doesn't mean it's going to be enjoyable, but it's going to be certainly good for you and make your life overall much better. You're going to produce more serotonin, make you feel happier, more oxytocin, feel more love, and more melatonin, help you sleep better. All of the symptoms of sympathetic nervous system state will drop away and you'll start to feel more vitality, more health, more happiness. I hope that helps and has added value to your day in some way, shape or form. What we were really going through here was how to reduce stress by getting out of sympathetic and into parasympathetic nervous system state rather than trying to treat the symptoms of being in sympathetic nervous system state. So I hope that helps. Now, again repeating, I'm Tom Cronin, the producer and co writer of the Portal and also founder of the Stillness Project. If you want to find out more about the film and the book that's coming out, you can go to EnterThePortal.com and also pop over to StillnessProject.com if you'd like to find out more about how to learn to meditate thanks for joining me today. And it's back to you, Omar Lifelock.

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Thanks Tom for that great lesson. Business can get hectic and get stressful and get our nerves. We can get our blood boiling. There are so many challenges along the path and it just gets harder and harder. That's the truth. How we handle it is really important. We got to get better and better at it. So Tom's lesson is only timely for me, but for most of us because hey, stress is always around the corner. Let's make sure we have a handle on it. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 RBA Show. If you love it, you hear hit the subscribe button so you don't miss a beat and share it with a friend. Share the show on Social with your friends or family. It's a great way to spread the word and it's the best compliment you can give us. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. It's really hard to to calm down when you're anxious about something in business, when you're upset, when you're really having a tough day and that stress is piling on, sometimes it's really hard to just get out of that funk. One of the ways I find that helps me a lot is to just get out of my physical state. So if I'm in the office, I just put on some flip flops, jump outside, get some fresh air even if it's raining, take an umbrella, whatever, change your surroundings, change what's around you and it can affect your mood. It can help you. It can help move things along and give you some perspective and remind you of all the things that you should be grateful for. Changing your environment really, really helps. Even if it just means popping out for a quick bite, a lunch, a coffee. This can help big time. 10 minutes out, 15 minutes out, even 30 minutes out might seem a waste of time, but it can help you be more productive the rest of the day, the rest of the week. Thanks for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care of.

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