The Five Minute Miracle/Stress Buster

The Diamond Hour presents the five minute miracle. Can you master the stress in your life in only five minutes a day? Well, my name is Stephen Barnes, and I'm here to tell you that happily, the answer is yes. This signature life writing technique combines knowledge from yoga, martial arts, Scott Sonnen, circular strength training, sports physiology and sports psychology, and of course, Hans Selye's crucial work on stress itself. Now, there are a number of different pieces. Imagine them sitting like elements on the rim of a wheel, all relating to the center. So it's not necessarily, I'm not necessarily presenting these in the most important order, but all of them are important. So one of the things that's important to understand is that stress is not what hurts you. Hans Selye, who popularized the concept of stress, spoke number of languages. English was not his first. Before he died, he said that if English had been his first language, he would have been known as the father of strain rather than the father of stress. Now, the difference between these two things is that stress, from an engineering point of view, is pressure per unit area, whereas strain is deformation per unit length. Briefly, stress is what you need to trigger an adaptation response. Strain is the maladaptive problem. So in circular strength training, there is a concept that the three components of technique are breath, movement and structure. That each of these is created by the other two. Breath is created by movement and structure. Movement is created by breath and structure, and structure is created by breath and movement. That if you damage any one of these, the entire technique begins to come apart. And that is where stress starts becoming strain. Now, in yoga, when I went through my yoga teacher training, I remember that Rod Stryker, one of our teachers, said that as long as the thread of your breath is smooth, you cannot hurt yourself. This was like a light going on in my head, but it took some time for me to be able to apply this in a really useful way. The concept that I learned from Pavel Satsul of Kettlebell fame, of synaptic facilitation, the idea that practicing something for one minute five times a day is more efficient neurologically than practicing something for five minutes once a day. Now, this is important because what we're trying to do is to overcome what's called the limbic hijack. Now, Daniel Goleman did a lot of research into this, and one of the things that he said is that anatomically the emotional system can act independently of the neocortex, some emotional reactions and emotional responses can be formed without any conscious cognitive participation, because the shortcut from thalamus to amygdala completely bypasses the neocortex. In other words, by the time you're in the zone, by the time you're in the problem, you're already gripped by the hijack and it's too late to get out of it. We've all experienced that. We're so angry we cannot think. Now the solution is a daily ritual that will short circuit the hijack, that requires little time or energy and becomes more rather than less effective over time. And this is where we come to the five minute miracle. Very simply. Every three hours, every hour divisible by a 3, 9, 12, 3, 6 and 9, you're going to perform 60 seconds of deep, slow belly breathing. Deep, slow. During any other exercises of quiet moments, notice the way you breathe when you're feeling powerful and centered. So you can begin to differentiate between the times when you're breathing in a powerful way and when you're breathing in a disempowering way, when you're having fear, stress or anger breathing. And consciously shift back to the deep, slow, relaxed belly breathing. Because the negative breathing is up higher in your chest, this will interrupt the negative pattern. The goal is to teach your unconscious to make this shift automatically, to create a Pavlovian stimulus response loop between a stressful situation and a resourceful response. Now there you have it. That's the five minute miracle pattern. Five 60 second breathing breaks distributed during the day. You can armor plate yourself against stress becoming strained if you do this and will actually take it seriously. For more information on this approach to personal development on the 101 life writing approach, go to my website, diamondour.com www.diamondhour.com. we have lots of free resources for you and we'd love to help you in any way we can. This is Stephen Barnes saying thank you so much for letting me be a part of your process and become the hero in the adventure of your lifetime.