4 Steps To Destroy Stress & Anxiety: A Guide To Stress

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. Today we're going to be talking about four different steps to destroy your stress and anxiety. And really, I'm going to give you some extra tips to make this an entire guide for stress management. So if you're someone who's been stressed recently or you've ever been stressed in your entire life, or you feel yourself starting to get anxious about things coming up in the future, this is a guide to help you with whenever you find yourself in that situation. First off, I wanna be real with you. Okay, let's be real. We live in a really stressful world and things continue to get more and more stressful. And in the past 100 years, the world has changed a lot for humans. Like our brains and our bodies have not adapted to this new world over the past 10 years, though. It's become a completely different universe for us, if you think about it. I was talking with my wife about this this past weekend, I was talking with Lauren. And social media and smartphones have really just taken off in the past 10 years or so. Like when they got really, really popular. Sure, you know, there's been smartphones for, since 2006. Ish. But really it's been about 10 years where people have started to become addicted to their phones. Probably even about five or six years, people are really starting to get addicted to their phones. I don't think people, I don't think people, the average person that's not listening this podcast has any idea what it's about to be in another 10 years. And if you're listening to this podcast, it's because you want to be better. And our brains are not meant to deal with all of the constant stimuli that we have every single day. You know, from your phone to your TV to your email, to your notifications to other people, to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We're just not really capable of handling all of that. And what happens is we get stressed out and we get anxious because there's just too much coming in. And if we're not careful, we're going to get too wrapped up in it. And it's only going to become harder as things start moving faster and faster in this world. And so really what's important for us, this is something I have taken a priority on in my life, is stress management. Because if you don't work on stress management now, you need to, especially in the face of constant challenges in everything that comes with living in the modern world that we live in. And it comes down to us being able to identify our triggers. Because what triggers me to be stressed or anxious doesn't necessarily trigger you to be stressed or anxious. So how well do you know yourself and what triggers you and what makes you anxious? And then once we actually figure out what they are, is we implement a effective stress management technique to help us manage our emotions, make better decisions, take better action, make us more resilient, and then just able to really cope in this world that we live in. So we have to start being proactive. And with how fast the world is changing, it's only going to get harder. So that means we must get better. The world's not going to change and make it easier for you. So today we're going to be talking about. In this episode, I'm going to teach you how to gain conscious awareness of your thought process. What triggers you, all of that. I'm going to teach you how to develop proactive stress management strategies that the benefits of journaling stress management and all of that. I'm going to teach you a tool to do that, and I'm going to give you a actual stress management technique that the Mayo Clinic created to help you with your stress. So let's go over that one first. The Mayo Clinic created something that was called the 4A's of stress management. And they really created just like a practical guide to your stress management, and it's just four A's. Okay? And it goes through number one. If you try to get number one done. If you can't, you go number two. If you can't get number two, you go to three. If you can't get three done, you go to four. And so when you find a new identity, identify a trigger. You start at one. If one doesn't work, you go to two. If two doesn't work, you go to three. If three doesn't work, you go to four. Okay? So number one is to avoid. Avoid as many stressful situations in your life as you can. Can you try to proactively create a life where you avoid as much stress as possible? Like, for me, I'm gonna be honest with you. I hate grocery stores. I don't know why. Like, maybe I was. Maybe I was, like, beaten in a grocery store in another life. I don't know what it was, but I just, like, hate grocery stores. They're just not. I'm not a fan of them, right? And so for me, I just try not to walk in any grocery stores. I order all of my food online. We had, you know, this morning, Whole Foods was at our house when I woke up this morning, sitting outside. So you can do Whole Foods. You could do Instacart. Is it more expensive? Yes. But is it worth it? For me, saving, number one, my time, which is precious for me and for me also, keeping peace of mind? Absolutely. I'll pay more for that. Now, avoiding doesn't necessarily mean that you're running away. So if you're avoiding, like a grocery store like me, or you're avoiding a specific person, it doesn't always mean that you're running away. What you're doing and what you should start getting better at is prioritizing your mental health, realizing that your mental health is a very, very important thing that you should be prioritizing over almost anything. Because the better mental health that you are in, the better that everything in your life is going to be. Every relationship is going to be and every person is going to be. So you're just learning to say no to unnecessary or possibly harmful stressors. So if you have certain people that are stressful, get them out of your life. If you can, spend less time with them, if you can avoid them as much as possible and avoid as many stressful situations in your life as you possibly can. Now, if number one is not going to work and you're like, I can't just avoid my boss, well, then maybe we go to number two. And number two is to alter the situation. If you can't avoid the stress, try to alter the situation if possible. So for me, have I never walked into a grocery store since, you know, Whole Foods and Instacart started delivering stuff to my house? No, there's always something I forgot. I almost always forget something that I need or we need to go pick up some ingredient. So I alter the situation. I do not go to this grocery store when they're busy. It just doesn't happen because that just makes me more stressed out. Because then there's people not paying attention. They run into me with their carts, and then their kids are sneezing all over my food, you know, whatever it is that might happen. Right? So if I have to go to the grocery store and I can't avoid it, well, then I alter the situation. I always go to the grocery store when I need to, if it's possible. The last hour that they're open, because there's almost no one ever there. I'm in and I'm out. I get what I need. I'm done. So that's A good example of altering a situation. Now, what if there's other people? You can't always change someone else, but you can ask them to change their behavior in the way they act to you, can't you? You can actually communicate that. And by communicating your needs and your feelings more directly, they might change. Now I get it. Some of you are like, my mom is never changing. Okay, cool. Well, they might not. Either they can alter or. Or you can alter with them. That's something that you need to figure out. And so you go through step number two, which is alter. What if you just can't alter? Well, that's when you go to step number three, which is to accept. At times, neither avoidance nor alteration is really possible. And so in these circumstances, what you have to just get better at doing is just accepting. Acceptance doesn't mean that you're denying yourself. But really, if I'm being honest, I. A lot of people's stressors come from resisting and not accepting. And I remember my very first mentor, one of my first mentors, he was used to always say that your stress and anxiety in your life will be in direct proportion to how much you're resisting the way that the world is. So think about that for a second. Your stress and anxiety, if it's higher, the reason why is because you're resisting the way that the world is. You're resisting the way that somebody is. You're resisting the way that your boss is, your mom is, your aunt, uncle, whatever it might be. So your resistance. I'm sorry, your stress and your anxiety will be in direct proportion to how much you're resisting the way that the world is. Acceptance doesn't mean pretending that you don't feel how you feel, though this is important. It doesn't mean that you just pretend that you don't feel the way that you feel. It's an acknowledgement that it's okay to feel that way. If someone stresses you out, it's okay to feel that way. If someone pisses you off, it's okay to feel that way. If someone screwed you over, you can hold resentment for them forever if you really want to, or you can just decide to accept what they did, they did, and you can move on. And many people are stressed out today over something that happened, like three years ago, it happened three years ago, it's over. Just accept it, move on. It's like the quote, the mountains that you're carrying, you were only meant to climb. Like, there's a really good parable of two monks, right? And monks are not supposed to touch other people. They're not, you know, they're supposed to be in their own little world. These two monks are walking through a forest, and they. They come to a river, and there's a woman who's trying to cross over the river, and she can't cross over the river, and so these monks are stronger. So one of the monks goes, you know what, ma'? Am, I'll take you across. So he picks her up, walks her to the other side of the river, drops her off to the other side of the river, says, have a nice day. Comes back to the other side of the river and starts going on his walk again with the other monk. And he's walking with the other monk, and they're just sitting there in silence. And about two hours later, the other monk who didn't take the woman across the river turns the other monk and he said, man, I can't believe you took that other woman to the other side of the river. I can't believe. You know, as part of what we do, you're not supposed to touch someone else. You're not supposed to touch anybody else. You're just supposed to be in your own world. You just broke a rule of being a monk. And the monk who walked the woman across the river turns. The monk who is thinking about this woman who he picked up and took across the river, he turns to him and he says, wow, you're still thinking about that. I dropped that woman off two hours ago. You've been carrying her the whole time. And that's really how a lot of people are, is the event happened, it's over. Stop carrying it with you. In some circumstances, forgiveness for other people is really what you need to do. And I don't say that you forgive somebody for their sake. It has nothing to do with the other person. You forgive someone for your sake. Because when you forgive, you're releasing the stress and the energy of. Of resisting and blaming the other person. And you are forgiving that situation so that you can get on with your life and stop carrying these things with you that you don't need to carry anymore. It could also be for some of you guys, a lot of you guys, forgiving yourself, you know, let's say you messed up in a relationship, you did something you weren't supposed to, or you said something you weren't supposed to. I don't know what it was. And it ended in turmoil and they broke up with you. Now I'm so stupid. I can't believe that I fucked this up. I'M not worthy of anyone's love. I messed up. I'm such an idiot. Maybe I'll be single forever. You could do that if you want. Or you could say, listen, that thing that happened six months ago, I messed up. I learned. I forgive myself. I will never do it again. See the difference between the two of them? It allows you to drop the thing and go on with your life. Do better next time, learn from it, and just be better. And so that right there is the next one, is to accept what happened. Now, if accepting is still not working as well as you want to, we need to learn, and this is the main thing that we all need to do is number four is to adapt. We need to learn to do our best in the face of stress and adapt to it. There's no such thing as a world without stressors. Long term stress management really means you adapting to unavoidable stressors. It means you altering your perspective and of the view that you have on the stressors, on the challenges and everything that happened, and building resilience. And you can look at it and you can see something. You could ask yourself, is this a crisis or is this a challenge? And if you ask yourself that question, a lot of times you're like, this isn't really a crisis. You know, if you won't remember something in five years, don't spend more than five minutes thinking about it. Like, is this a crisis? No, it's a challenge. Okay, well, let me adapt. Let me get better. Let me get better. Don't ask the world to cater to you. Just decide that you're gonna be better. If you are wanting the world to change for you, you're gonna have a really hard run in life, that's for sure. So those are four steps. Let me give you another tip that's really gonna help you out with your stress management, okay? It's called a stress management journal. So by creating a stress management journal, you can get, you can get. It really creates a really high effective strategy for your stress management. It is not the most comfortable thing that you could do, I promise you that. But it helps you because you can start to identify your triggers, you can understand your emotional responses, and then eventually, once you start to understand your emotional responses and your triggers, you can eventually develop coping mechanisms whenever you're in those situations. So the idea of the journal is for you to learn yourself, to actually learn who you are. You think you know who you are. I promise you there's a lot happening on the surface that you have no idea is Happening. So you ask yourself, you sit down with a pen and paper, man, I'm really freaking stressed right now. I don't know why I'm stressed. I'm really anxious right now. I don't know why I'm anxious. Sit down and ask yourself, write it down. Pen and paper. What's triggering me right now? Like, what is it that. Why do I feel so triggered? Hey, write down, how do I feel right now? Why do I feel this way? What can I do about it? And you ask yourself, what's triggering me? How do I feel? Why do I feel this way? And what can I do about it? And what happens is, you're going to start to learn yourself way more than you ever have. You'll start to see triggers way before they come up. And you'll be able to navigate better and either go around the triggers or you're going to be able to navigate better when you go through all of those triggers, because you'll start to see them coming and you'll develop coping mechanisms for when you do get stressed. And the main thing that I want you to remember from this episode is when you're triggered about something, try to get curious. Like when you're triggered, get curious, huh? Why do I feel this way? What's going on? What's going on in my body? What am I thinking? Is this true? Am I thinking something's gonna be catastrophic when it's really not? And you actually start to get really curious on yourself as you do this, though, very important part, because I know how a lot of people are. There should be no judgment. There should be no guilt. There should be no shaming. Instead, take a really compassionate and curious approach, as if you're just a therapist trying to help your client go through this thing. It just happens to be that you are the therapist and you're also the client. So that can really help you. Another thing that can really help with the journaling as well is to just dump all of your emotions onto a. Just all of it onto a piece of paper. Just journaling can be a really great emotional release. And when it's in your head, it's really hard to figure out. But when it's on paper, it can be planned and it can be worked through. And so just throw everything at that piece of paper. And as I always say, everything in this world is figureoutable. I had to Google it. Figureoutable is not a word. I made it up. But everything in this world is figureoutable. Can you just start to figure this out and then really, what it comes down to is starting to be more mindful of yourself and of your body, of your processing that's going on in your head. All of the things when you start to start, like, really sit down and figure yourself out. It helps you develop a sense of mindfulness. The idea is pretty simple. When we overthink, when we stress too much, when we ruminate about things, we are not in this moment. Like, you're out, you're somewhere else. Your brain can go into the past, it can go into the future, it can go in the present, it can go all over the place. But there is one thing that is always in this present moment, and that is your body. Your body is always in the present moment. And so when you find yourself being too stressed out, too much, overthinking everything, you gotta bring yourself back to your body, and you've gotta bring yourself to your five senses, and you've gotta give yourself. Just try this out, okay? Give yourself 30 seconds for each one of these. This is two and a half minutes. It will change everything for you. Give yourself 30 seconds and then look around and say, what do I see? Look at everything that's around you. And what I want you to do is you look at something and try to see the texture of it. Like, if you're driving your car, you're like, what do I see? I see my steering wheel. Instead of just seeing the steering wheel, can you look closer at it? Can you see the texture of the steering wheel? Can you see everything that's around there? Can you see the texture of your dashboard? Right? You look at the. Maybe you're at a stoplight and you're looking at the ground right now, and you're looking at the texture of the ground. What do you see? And you give yourself 30 seconds to just see, because seeing is in the present moment. Then you give yourself 30 seconds to say, what do I hear? What do I hear? And you start to listen to all the things that are around you that you can hear. And then after those 30 seconds, you say, what do I smell? I mean, just smell around. What do I smell? And then you say, after those 30 seconds, what do I feel? I feel my T shirt. I feel my shorts that I'm wearing. I can feel my feet on the ground. What do you feel? And the next one is, what do you taste? What do you taste? Taste the saliva in your mouth. Do you taste the coffee that you just had 20 minutes ago? And what you're doing is you're bringing yourself back to this present moment. Because your brain is almost never here. It's always. Almost always somewhere else. We bring ourself back to the present moment by checking in with the five senses. To put it another way is your brain can carry you all over the place. Your body, your five senses are only in one place. That's the present moment. So we wanna bring ourself back to the present moment. Because when we're stressed and anxious, we're usually in the future. We're in the future, we're thinking about all these things or in the past, and we're thinking about all the stuff that we did wrong. And instead, bring yourself to the present moment. And so you sit there and you start to figure out what is it that you see, hear, taste, feel, smell, all of that. And then what happens is you start to actually develop more awareness around yourself and you start to realize that you are not an anxious person. So, like people say, I'm an anxious person, you're not an anxious person. I'm gonna give you a little tiny reframe to help you. Whenever you think that you're an anxious person, instead of saying, I'm an anxious person, just say, I'm experiencing anxiety right now or I'm starting to feel anxious. That separates you from the actual feeling and the emotions so that you can manage the stress. Okay? If you say I'm an anxious person, that gives you no way to ever get out of your anxiety. If you say, I'm a stress, I'm always stressed out. That's just who I am. Those are both identity statements. That's not who you are. And if you think it's who you are, you'll never be able to get out of it. But if you say, I'm experiencing stress right now, I'm experiencing a lot of stress. Okay? It's like a passing cloud. Clouds will never be here forever. They'll eventually pass by. That stress will pass by, the anxiety will pass by. And you don't identify with the stress and call yourself stressed out or you're a stressful person, or you're always stressed. Instead of saying, I'm an anxious person, I'm experiencing anxiety right now. Really what I'm trying to get you to do is I'm trying to get you to understand that feelings and emotions and triggers, they're all going to come up. But what you need to realize is you need to disassociate yourself from those things. Because when you disassociate yourself from those things, you can start to figure them out so that, oh, I'M experiencing stress right now. What can I do? You know what I can do? I could take 60 breaths. You know what I can do? I can write all the things that are stressing me out on a piece of paper. I can start to plan out what I should do to make myself feel better. And you start to learn yourself more. You think you know yourself. We all think we know ourselves. But the older I get, the more I realize that I don't know myself, even though I'm working on myself to know myself even more than I ever have in my life. You start to learn yourself. You start to learn your triggers. You start to learn what stresses you out, what makes you anxious. And you can make a plan to either avoid those things, you can adapt to those things. You can change them around. You can do whatever it is that you need to by using the four A's and start being more present in the moment where you can actually start to work through those things in real time. So that's what I got for you on your stress management. That's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, if you have a friend that you think would need this, go ahead and text it to him. Send it over to him right now. Say, listen to this. I think this might help you out. Also, it'd be really great if you could share it on your Instagram stories and tag me robdial Junior. Only way that we grow is from you guys actually sharing this podcast. This podcast doesn't grow just organically. It comes from you guys sharing it. So the more that you share it, the more that we can actually start to grow. You know, we don't have any huge company behind us pushing this out, so if you would do that, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission. Make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.