In this podcast, we discuss stress—the types, why it matters, how unhealthy stress might be sabotaging your weight loss efforts, and what you can do about it. We hope that the conversation will spark some ideas for the way that you can address the stress in your life.
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[0:00]Judi: Hello and welcome to The D.I.E.T. Podcast, where we explore an important question for those who are pursuing a whole, healthy and happy life. And that question is, “Did I enrich today?” I’m Judi.
Allison: I’m Allison
Bert: And I’m Bert.
Judi: We’re your hosts. And today we’ll be discussing stress—the types, why it matters, how unhealthy stress might be sabotaging your weight loss efforts, and what you can do about it. We’re really happy you’re here, and we hope that the conversation will spark some ideas for the way that you can address the stress in your life. Modern life certainly serves up what can feel like an endless list of stressors. Some of those are good stressors and they keep our lives exciting, but some stressors drain precious resources and get in our way. Before we talk about how stress affects our bodies and what some of the stressors are that
we encounter, let’s talk about how one can recognize stress. When we’re under a big bundle of stress, it can sometimes be hard to step back from the moment and see it for what it is. I know for me, stress manifests as kind of an irritant, something that I can’t quite put my finger on. The sensation is subtle, really subtle. It’s like having an itch without a source and I don’t know if you’re one of those folks, but I sometimes have an itch and I just can’t find out what it is that’s causing the itch. Something’s bugging me, but I can’t put my finger on it. And until I figure it out ⎯what the source is⎯it sits in the back of my mind, a nagging, distracting bother and it kind of brings me down. It can compromise my productivity and that’s where it gets to be a real drag. Allison, Bert, how do you recognize when you’re experiencing stress?
Allison: When I feel stressed, I notice that I’m getting really crabby and I’m usually such a pleasant person to be around, right?
Judi: You are!
Bert: Yes!
Allison: So, I notice that I’m crabby
with my husband and my friends and my dogs, who decide they really want to go for a walk right when I’m getting busy. I’m like “Come on, you guys, I’m working!” But, of course, they just want to go for a walk and sniff around and just be regular, healthy dogs. And I like walking them, so being irritated about it is really a clue that something’s wrong. The crabbiness is pretty easy to notice if I just tune in to myself. A more subtle sign, though, is what happens when I start losing sleep. That’s when my eye starts to twitch. Over the years. I’ve noticed that when my eye starts twitching, it’s been weeks or months of not getting enough sleep and enough rest. Unfortunately, I don’t always remember that when I’m in the midst of a stretch of tasks that lead to stress or distress, really. I tend to think it’s more of a sign of a nutrient deficiency. It’s something that is external and not happening within myself. So, I start googling things like, “Does magnesium deficiency cause eye twitching?” I do that so often⎯when it’s really probably just stress. What about you, Bert?
[3:00]Bert: I usually feel stress as sort of a sense of unease like a tension in my body. It doesn’t feel good, but it’s not such a prominent sensation that I always feel it right away. And it doesn’t feel painful, just sort of uneasy. It makes me have trouble relaxing. I have trouble just sitting comfortably, and it often affects my sleep. I’ll be thinking about things when I’m trying to sleep; those stay on my mind and keep me from sleeping. Sleep is really important, I know, so I try to push them away, but they keep coming back and that’s when I know it’s time to do something to try to deal with the stress, recognize where it’s coming from and know that I have to do something about it.
Judi: You know, Allison, it’s interesting that you said something about your eye twitching. That kind of piqued my interest. When you don’t remember that it’s a sign that your stress is significant, that it’s one of the things that starts happening when you’ve had stress for a long time, you said you start looking for something that might be deficient inside your body like some nutrient deficiency, right?
Allison: Right.
Judi: I think that approach to the somatic symptoms
that our bodies manifest in response to stress is pretty common. We don’t tend to see that our body is protesting in the face of an excess demand of some kind. To some degree, our body’s just requesting less. It’s requesting that we ease up on something and it may be our tendency to search for something that we can give to our body. So, it’s asking for less and we’re saying what does my body need? What can I give to it? What might be missing is more space. More time. More permission. So, in some ways when stress leads to symptoms like eye twitching or headaches or some other symptom, it may just be simply our body’s demand to be given priority, not just some other food or supplement that we can shove into it.
Allison: Exactly and with something like sleep deprivation, it compounds on itself over time. You don’t get enough sleep one night and then it adds up to a few nights in a row. And then you start adapting to the shorter sleep cycle and trying to compensate for the lack of sleep in other ways. But then, when it starts adding up to the
point of symptoms, and in my case, it’s that eye twitching, then I know it’s been a really long time and I’m probably really sleep deprived. You know, I should probably write myself a note about this as a reminder about the cycle that happens so often for me.
Judi: Man, those cycles of life, huh? The cycle, it’s so true, Allison. People start to have physical compromise when that cycle leads to unhealthy levels of stress. In an ideal scenario, we’d recognize we’re having stress long before our body starts complaining and sending up a bunch of red flags. So, when that happens, like I said, ideally, we would take early steps to address the stress. Hmm, you know funny⎯maybe not so funny—I think that was a chapter in AC the Power of Appetite Correction. Hmm, wasn’t it, Bert?
Bert: It was and is. It’s Address the Stress⎯exactly.
Allison: What a coincidence.
Judi: I didn’t actually plan that, but it is⎯it’s there. And, of course, it’s there, because it’s a really important part of all this. This brings up the notion that stress, appetite, weight loss–they are all connected and certainly you addressed that in the AC book, but before we focus on that, let’s take a moment to look at stress and recognize that not all stress is the same.
Bert: Well, it’s not, and it’s important to note that the effect of stress on diet–just so it’s clear in terms of our intake⎯stress, and our bodies’ response to it, both encourage more eating in a way that’s not within our control. It just is an automatic pilot sort of thing that if stress goes up, so does our appetite. That can be very challenging to deal with. It’s good to pick apart what’s going on in your life to see what the stress is coming from. One of the things that people can do to do that is to journal about it, to write it down, so it gets on paper, not just as a clutter of different feelings and ideas in your head.
Judi: Yeah, that’s a good point. Journaling is really helpful. I think a lot of the people that we interact with journal and probably, in part, for that reason. It helps us
get in tune with what our bodies are trying to tell us. The other thing is when we’re journaling, we can sometimes notice positive stresses in our lives, stresses⎯like I said a moment ago— it’s not all the same. It’s the full deal of good stresses, bad stresses, healthy, constructive ones and unhealthy destructive ones. Some stress gets us going. It creates tension, makes us more alive, more excited, more vigorous⎯lots of things!
Bert: Right, and a little pressure can really bring out our best at times⎯ things like competition where you know that there’s a stress, you know what you’re dealing with and then at some point, it’s over. That can be very good. Other stress that just challenges us in a daily way is almost essential in keeping life interesting for ourselves. When it starts to cause damage—in relationships, in your body, weight gain, that kind of thing, that’s when it becomes something harmful. There are those fun stresses⎯even going on a thrill ride like a roller coaster could be considered a stress. You know you’re
going to be fine at the end and you know it’s got a fixed time and so it’s not something that’s going to change your life a lot. We have to separate the little stresses and the normal stresses—there’s a formal name for that, it’s “eustress.” Not Y-O-U stress, but eustress, meaning a normal amount of stress. So that’s fine and that comes along with the variety of life that we take on and the challenges in it.
Judi: I’m curious you guys—when you’re riding a roller coaster—
Allison: Mm-hmm.
Judi: —is it stressful because you’re going up and down and it’s throwing you about? Or, is it stressful because you’re worried about it breaking down?
Allison: For me, I’m stressed that I think that the people that have put together the ride didn’t know what they were doing. And there’s a missing screw and I’m going to be the one special person on the roller coaster whose car just flies off!
Judi: Me, too! That is totally for me not the bit of a thrill. It is always a risk-management moment. When we talk about things like good stress⎯the word good has its
load and I’m not sure that’s the best word, but in the D.I.E.T. world⎯the “Did I Enrich Today?” thinking, the question that positive stress might prompt one to consider is, “Did I have variety? Did I have novelty? Did I have challenge? Did I have positive stress?”
Allison: Oh, yeah, and that quote by Eleanor Roosevelt: “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” I think really applies here. That’s probably what she meant in some way. Take on good stress. Face your fears.
Judi: It probably is. I like that, something that you think you can’t do. That’s great. When you mentioned the word eustress, Bert, it occurred to me that not everybody has that word in their roster of daily words. Eustress is E-U-S-T-R-E-S-S. The prefix eu-, like you said, means even, balanced. Like, euvolemic is just the right amount of water or fluid: not too much, not too little. And eustress would be just the right amount—not too much, not too little. We’re champions for good stress.
We love good stress.
Allison: Can you give us some examples of good stress? Not roller coasters?
Judi: Me?
Allison: Sure.
Judi: Okay, uh, good stress like—Hmm. What about having sex?
Allison: It’s a good one.
Bert: Is that stressful?
Allison: That stressor is a physical stressor, maybe, right?
Judi: Well⎯
Bert: Yeah.
Judi: It’s also⎯ Yeah it is, and I think it’s an emotional stress, too.
Bert: An emotional stress…well, that’s kind of interesting to think about, because our body can deal with mechanical stresses—things that make us work harder, we build up more muscles for. And, we’ve covered a lot of things with intermittent fasting. That challenges our bodies to do more with less frequent food intake, so those stresses are something our body has good ways of responding to. But emotional stress can go either way. It can build up resilience, but it can also get to you in some damaging way. Just like other stresses—financial stress may prompt you to do good things, but it can also have
bad outcomes. And since those didn’t exist a long time ago our body doesn’t know what to do with those. It just does the same old thing it did for the primitive stresses like starvation and facing a predator and the threat of being eaten.
Judi: Well, in a minute, Bert, I’d like you to elaborate on the primitive stressors and our bodies’ fight-or-flight/feed-or-breed responses, but before that I would like to elaborate for just a moment, just a few more minutes on the subject of sex.
Allison: Judi.
Judi: I feel terribly misunderstood. When I’m talking about emotional stress with sex, I’m not pinpointing some particular thing. If you think about it, a new job, a new assignment, a big assignment, a new romance⎯all that stuff⎯ it’s positive stress. And it’s emotional stuff. So, if, in my opinion, one is encountering sex with an intimate partner in a way that’s fulfilling, it’s going to be new and exciting or, in some cases, old and exciting.
I mean, it’s not going to be just an exercise like⎯I don’t know⎯preparing potatoes.
Allison: Oh my god, Judi!
Bert: We would hope not! Yes, put down the potato peeler!
Allison: What are you guys doing at home, preparing potatoes again?
Judi: Potato peeler, preparing potatoes⎯you guys are crazy!
Bert: I don’t think either of us has peeled a potato in 20 years.
Allison: I don’t⎯I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know.
Judi: Alright for the listeners, peeling potatoes is not really a particular thing. I really did just pull it out of the air, but it’s going to be something that you know has some spice. I’m talking sex again, not potato peeling. It’s going to have spice. It’s going to have some energy and, if exercise is good stress, then I’d say sex is good stress, too.
Bert: I agree in in that respect, but I have so often thought of it as a great stress relief, that⎯
Judi: True.
Bert: ⎯it’s so large on the stress-relief side that I didn’t
think of it as a stress in itself. But⎯
Judi: So, does that?
Bert: —maybe “Lucy, you’ve got some ‘splainin to do?”
Allison: That’s for another episode!
Judi: ⎯ totally different episode⎯maybe even when it won’t make it to the air. Alright, does that mean then, that sex is the panacea for everything that’s wrong with somebody?
Bert: I wouldn’t say it works that well. That’d be pretty nice, if all we had to do to de-stress was jump in bed. It helps, but, no, it’s not a cure-all.
Allison: Yeah, I don’t think it’s that easy, Judi.
Judi: Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Alright, we talked about some good stress and I think we’ve all at least come to a consensus that it’s not always intuitive. Potatoes can be stressful in positive ways and in less positive ways. Bert, you started to talk about the primitive responses to stress, and I interrupted you, because I wanted to clarify my sex perspective. If we can get back to that, in the book AC: The Power of Appetite Correction, you included a
wonderful section that discussed fight-or-flight and feed-or-breed stress responses. Can you talk about that here?
Bert: Sure. In that chapter I talked about how our bodies developed⎯ not just our bodies, but all the animals from the first organism that was a one-celled creature that managed to devour another one-celled creature⎯once that kind of predatory environment began, there were two stresses. One was a lack of fuel, which we usually call starvation, and the other was predation, or being eaten by a predator. For millions and millions of years, those were the two things that any living animal body had to worry about. The two things that the body could respond to those stresses with⎯if the threat is predation or a predator, then the fight-or-flight response comes in, which means you either
fight off the predator or you run away from it. When it comes to the starvation threat, that’s more complex because once you’re starving, it’s too late to do anything about it, because you’re no longer strong enough to gather food. Over time, animals and our human bodies have built in the sense of when things aren’t going well. And if things aren’t going well, you’re having a difficult time finding food, stress goes up and then that leads to an increased appetite. When you do find food, you pack on more of it into your fat stores, than you would otherwise.
Those two responses are still with us, but our bodies have not had time to develop any kind of healthy response to financial or relationship or job stresses. What happens is those two just get translated into what our bodies do know. That means you get into a fight-or-flight mode, which doesn’t work in most modern cases, or “let’s pack on some fat.” That’s what often happens when we encounter
stress in our modern world.
Judi: Stress can be one of the very difficult obstacles on the way to losing weight. You’re doing all the right things and for reasons that seem hard to explain or understand, you’re eating things that you don’t want to eat. You’re putting things into your mouth. People call it stress eating or emotional eating, so we even have language for that. A common symptom that we hear about is a very specific craving for things like chocolate⎯
Allison: Mm-Hmm.
Judi: ⎯ or very sweet things, so it can be really defeating when one is working to lose weight and stress sabotages the effort. So, it’s important for all of us to identify some ways that we can manage our stress⎯ either get rid of some of the things that are causing our stress or, when we can’t eliminate causes, then we have to figure out how to manage ourselves in the face of that stress.
One of the things that can be helpful in developing a strategy and a plan is to think about the various sources of stress relative to time. There are some stresses that are best dealt with in the moment. Those types of stresses are time limited and
sudden. They’ll go away soon, but having a repertoire of ways to manage that in-the-moment can be constructive. Examples of that might be a conflict and a confrontation with a colleague or with a person who is an opponent⎯ something that’s in the moment. It’s not going to be forever, but there it is.
A second category of stressors⎯ when I say category, I mean just for managing our thinking about it⎯ are things like the long-term stressors. Things that might go on six months, eight months, years or indefinitely. That would be things like financial stress, chronic illness⎯an illness that you’re having or your family member. Those stresses are often solved really slowly and require endurance along the way.
Bert: Family stresses can certainly fall into that group—of chronic stress. Those can be long-term conflicts.
Judi: Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. Allison, you’ve talked a bit with us about a coping strategy that sounds perfect for managing in-the-moment stress.
Allison: Mm-Hmm.
Judi: Can you tell us some more about that?
Allison: Sure. This isn’t something
that I came up with on my own. I heard about it a while back and then recently, I saw it again mentioned on a blog. it’s called the “5-4-3-2-1 coping technique for anxiety.”
Judi: Long name!
Allison: Yeah. It’s great. It’s easy to remember. You can use it when you’re having a stressful moment and you just need to re-center yourself and focus away from what’s happening outside of your body.
First, find five things that you can see. It can be something like a pen or a leaf or the threads on a carpet⎯just something that you can see. Once you’ve found five of those things and looked at them, you find four things that you can touch. Even touching your wrist or touching your shirt, touching the table or a writing implement will work. Focus on the feeling of those things and the texture of them in your hand. It lets you move your thoughts away from the source of your stress. After the four things that you can touch, move on to three things that you can hear. Listen for a bird or the sound of a lawn mower or a train passing by.
Then you move on to two things that you can smell. It can be a piece of paper on your office table or a marker, but don’t sniff too hard, or a cup of coffee⎯anything that you have around you. What you’re trying to do is just sense these things. Finally, focus on one thing you can taste, like coffee or gum that you’re chewing. Or it could even be a cup of water. Water doesn’t taste the same everywhere. So, you might say, “Hmmmm, I find a hint of lead or mercury in that cup of water.”
Judi: Oops!
Allison: Just focus on the taste.
Judi: And then you’ll become neurotic and you can really focus on that taste. That’s right.
Allison: You’re really just taking yourself down from a really high level of anxiety and then switching your focus to things that you can easily connect with and give yourself some sense of control and calm. It’s helped me in stressful situations a lot. For instance, I get really nervous on bumpy flights. So, I’ll use
this technique. And it’s easy to do when you’re on an airplane, because there are so many things you can smell on an airplane. So that’s it. It’s really simple: 5-4-3-2-1 and I recommend you give it a try.
Judi: Yeah.
Bert: Nice. That sounds good. There are some classic options that many people have heard of, but we should touch on those just as a reminder, because I find myself sometimes forgetting that I have some tools that work pretty well to deal with stress and I have to take the time to use them. One of those is just closing your eyes and imagining a place that you’d like to be⎯some getaway place that feels relaxed and good to you. Try to take in all the senses of the place, like you were saying with the vision and the touch. Take in the sights in your imagination, the sounds, the smells. Eventually you have to go back to wherever you were, but if you take that moment, it can let you gather your thoughts, get a sense of perspective and a moment of calm in the whatever
stormy, stressful environment that you’re having to deal with.
The other well-known tool is meditation. What we’ve learned is that you don’t really have to be a great meditator. You don’t have to be a Buddhist monk with years of practice to get something out of meditating. The exercise of meditation is practice for taking your mind away from the things that are clogging it and stressing you. The more you do it, the better it works. It’s like any other exercise. It helps you step away from the stress and keep it outside your body, rather than letting it get in where it can have its harmful effects. This can be part of yoga. That’s a physical stress combined with meditation⎯focusing on our breath, which is at the very center of ourselves, and lets us step away from the stress a little bit.
Along that same vein, there’s another way to relax. And that’s through body relaxation. I’m not sure where this technique comes from. I’ve heard it
many places, but it’s a progressive muscle relaxation exercise where either you start with your toes or you start with your head and tense a group of muscles in that area, like you’d to clench up your toes and then relax them and then you tense your ankles and feet and then relax them. Keep moving up your legs towards your body, then to your arms and then your neck and face and head, trying to tense and relax each muscle group that you can identify.
It’s not very strenuous. You don’t have to really clench hard. It’s a conscious way of making sure that each of your muscles has relaxed and that you’re not holding tension in some muscle group that’s going to be a pain later.
Allison: I really like that one, Bert. It’s always amazing to me when I do that and I start out at my head and I get to my shoulders. I realize how incredibly tight they are and everything is clenched and I wasn’t even conscious of it.
Bert: It’s one of my favorites. I do feel like it really works.
Judi: It does. It works for me, too. I have the same experience.
The process of moving through each of the areas not only relaxes the area, but it can also get us in touch with those muscles. It can help us calibrate just how tense we are. So, it might help us recognize the magnitude of our stress. That stress inside of our body is controlling it in a lot of ways that we hadn’t recognized before then.
Allison: Yeah. Let’s just take a second for anybody that can hear my voice. I want you to move through the muscle groups from the top of your head to the bottom of your itty-bitty toes and try to relax your body. Anybody can do that while they’re listening. Just relax!
Judi: It’s a great idea. And you know, it’s funny ’cause that’s one of the things I love about our trio is sometimes I’m that put-it-off-‘til-later and then try it out type. The spontaneity of that is pretty cool⎯without overthinking it. It makes me think again about meditation and how I’ve sometimes been avoidant of meditation, because I’m not very good at it. I know it’s good for me, but for reasons I can’t really figure out,
I can’t do it very well. I would go to yoga class sometimes and everybody’s meditating and I would follow the rules, of course, and do my meditation, but I found myself focusing away from what I was supposed to be focusing on more than I focused on the focal point⎯I guess, for lack of a better word. So, I would just, not really avoid it, but just never use it as a go-to tool.
Recently, I read some writing by a psychologist named Kelly McGonigal. She teaches a course at Stanford University that includes encouraging students to meditate. It’s an interesting course in that it’s not just traditional students that take the course. Apparently, a lot of parents and kids and professionals take the course, because it’s that highly regarded. One of the barriers to success that her students describe is just what I said—they’re frustrated with their trouble keeping focus while meditating. What she encouraged them to do was to take notice of how well they were doing while they were meditating, but also how well they were staying focused
when they were outside of that meditation time. She was recommending meditation for 5 or 10 minutes. I mean, this wasn’t a long time investment.
What she discovered in studying these students is that, throughout their day, they continued to notice when they lost focus and would redirect themselves to the task at hand. So, meditation really served as a practice ground for their daily life. They were able to maintain focus and make constructive choices in a more predictable and a more habitual way when they had a regular practice of even unskilled meditation for 5 to 10 minutes. So, I was pretty happy to see that my reluctance is misplaced. I can do my really clunky meditation and it still will probably yield a lot of benefits besides stress relief.
Bert: In that way, the meditation itself is a little bit of a stress. We’re stressing our minds to exercise them. I would say that definitely falls into a category
of good stress, because it is something that our brains can build up a strength from that later on makes things healthier for us overall. Just like the mechanical stress on our muscles or the nutritional stress of fasting, we’re talking about a place where our brains can do a lot more and overall be part of a really healthy response.
Judi: Yeah. It’s interesting when you used the words nutritional stress of fasting, I really love that because that is actually⎯
Allison: Me too.
Judi: Yeah⎯it’s a really constructive stress and I’ve never thought about it that way. It’s putting some demand on our body⎯that whole “no pain, no gain.” What’s really, really cool about it is it’s really not even painful? Once one is adapted, it’s just natural and easy and unremarkable. But it’s a great phrase: nutritional stress. I love that.
All the things we’ve mentioned so far can be done in stealth mode. Nobody has to know that we are taking some action to reduce our stress levels. In the in-the-moment stress categories there’s some things that we
can do that aren’t as private, but they’re still useful. One of those is taking a walk. This is a little bit like your 5-4-3-2-1 coping—
Allison: Technique.
Judi: —technique for anxiety⎯or something⎯that’s a long name. Anyway, that technique invites one to focus away from the stressor and to focus on other things. A walk really invites that as well. Not only is your body moving in space and you can feel muscles moving and you can take in fresh air or cold air or hot air or dry air. It’s an activity that invites the body to move and do something. It also presents a whole bunch of things to look at that weren’t in your view and weren’t available to your senses⎯touch, smell⎯all of those senses⎯when you were in your place of where the stressor escalated. It really does shift perspective and gives us a chance to clear our minds and our thoughts.
Bert: That’s nice. The walk
sounds good whenever you can get to it. Certainly, if the weather’s nice, it can really remind you that you live in a beautiful place and a beautiful world and there’s a bigger world out there than just whatever stress happens to be bothering you at the moment.
Judi: Mm-Hmm.
Bert: Another option for managing stress if you have a loved one or a friend⎯
Allison: Or a dog!
Bert: A dog, yes, a dog.
Judi: Yeah.
Bert: If you have a friend who’s willing, you ask for a hug it. It releases oxytocin, which is a stress-related hormone and that can help to calm your mind and your body. If that’s an option⎯you have somebody around⎯you don’t always have to explain what it’s about, what’s on your mind⎯a friend will hug back. Just ask for a hug and see what happens. I suppose if you can’t take a walk and you can’t find a person you want to share a hug with⎯
Judi: Or a dog.
Bert: Or a dog. You can also make your sensory distraction a little bit more local by lighting a candle that has an aroma that you like, or use aromatherapy oils and scents
to give your mind something else to dwell on for a little while and to focus on. Get that time to yourself to push the stressors outside and just take in your sensations.
Allison: I love that. I find that aromatherapy can change my mood so fast⎯faster than most other things. I can smell something⎯
Judi: Wow.
Allison: ⎯and the memory of that smell takes me back to a good feeling.
Bert: That’s interesting, because the chemical receptors in our nose are some of the most primitive receptors of any kind. The way that they’re connected into our brain may be even more deeply rooted than the ones for touch and other senses. In terms of the brain itself, they’re known as the first cranial nerve, ‘cause they’re up in front.
Allison: Interesting. Another thing that I found that helps me is something as simple as making a tiny little doodle in the corner of my paper. You could start a new drawing or a painting. Coloring, painting, doodling and really any type of creative work really has a meditative effect.
There’s a study that found that anxiety levels decline in people who are coloring complex geometric patterns, like those mandala coloring books that you see. So, it’s a really great way to reduce stress and it’s fun when you’re creating something colorful and nice. It’s just a happy thing to do!
Bert: I’m not sure you’d like the looks of my coloring book after I deal with certain stressors.
Allison: Potatoes?
Bert: Uh, not that kind.
Judi: Potatoes, that’s right.
Bert: I’m not gonna have a that kind of coloring book, but I mean, some stresses might prompt a response that would want to break the rules, like color outside the lines and make some kind of crazy violent expressive art rather than just delicately staying in the lines and following the rules as it were. Really breaking the rules and letting some of the stress out by doing that I think is another option for your art and your coloring options. It’s the artistic form of going out and just shouting your head off and screaming and letting it out that way. It’s
much more quiet.
Judi: Yeah, and it keeps Sharpies in business, right? Yeah or the manufacturers of Sharpies. That’s great, guys, thanks. And I think coloring outside the lines, breaking the rules is a nice segue to moving from in-the-moment strategies to strategies that apply for other timelines, because I think some of the stressors that people experience that are chronic, long-term stresses sometimes are about the rules. They’re about culture’s rules and society’s rules or the bank’s rules—things that that are just stressful in their own right. There are rules that we must follow and then there are those that we can afford to break. Being able to tease that out is nice.
There are a whole lot more in-the-moment stress management techniques. We’ve offered a handful and we’d love to hear from you about ways that you manage stress. Those can be fun stories and they can be stressful stories, but revisiting them can sometimes remind us of the importance of letting off steam. I’ll admit it. One time I was very stressed and frustrated.
I broke the handle of my hairbrush. I was really surprised at myself. Talk about breaking the rules. I didn’t break it on something. I just snapped it. When it was done, I was surprised and a little embarrassed and actually felt better.
Now, let’s move on to management strategies for long-term stressors. An enormously important activity for long-term health and stress management is playing—making time for leisure activities. Those are activities that are not goal-directed in the traditional ways. If we carve out generous amounts of time for playing, it can yield big dividends and it lowers stress.
Bert: Play includes a lot of things besides formal games, or even informal games. It can be anything that you do that’s pleasurable just at the time and so that can be hobbies. Maybe you’re quilting or knitting or you’re making a model of something. It can be just about anything that you find pleasant at the time that you’re doing it. As long as you’re not terribly invested in the outcome.
If your hobby is, say, drawing and you’re not particularly good at drawing, it doesn’t matter, because you’re not invested in the outcome. You just want to draw, enjoy the experience of drawing and go from there. The fun is not in how it turns out. It’s in the process of doing it.
Allison: Right. I think one of the problems people have is that they look at play as being something that’s not worthwhile, that it’s almost a luxury and that there’s no reason for doing it. But there truly is a reason to make that time, to carve that out, to do the things that you really enjoy that aren’t a means to an end, like making more money or other activities where you’re really focused on the end goal. You’re just trying to relax and enjoy this time with yourself and with others.
Judi: You know, play is more important than I had appreciated for a long time. I’m reminded of a TED Talk given by a psychiatrist named Stuart Brown. He started the National Institute of play, a place where they study play and they encourage play and they create curricula
for people to learn and to practice playing, which is kind of funny that we have to actually practice playing.
Bert: So, is this institute all work and no play? Or all play and no work?
Judi: I don’t know, but I like that. I would invite anybody to Google it. It is incredibly interesting backstory for the development of the institute and also Stewart Brown’s backstory’s interesting. As I understand it, he was a foren⎯he may still be⎯but he was a forensic psychiatrist who worked on cases involving serial killers. And what he discovered was that the most consistent unifying characteristic of serial killers, when he looked back through their life and their activities, was what he called a paucity of play. So, these individuals had a lack of play, a deficiency of play. Play is so important to the core of being human that to not do it is to stress ourselves sometimes to the point of horrific tragedy.
I’m not very skilled at budgeting time for leisure activities, but knowing and appreciating how
incredibly important it is for our health, for total health, has pushed me, has really compelled me to make it a habit and a practice to try to increase and recognize how much making time for leisure is critical to my best health— to our best health—as humans. So, what else can we do? I mean playing is obviously a huge one. What else can we do to manage our long-term stress? When you have stressors, Allison, that aren’t going away anytime soon, what do you do?
Allison: One thing I’ve noticed that I do when I’m under a great amount of stress is that I have a lot of negative self-talk. I beat myself up about not being able to reach whatever goal I was trying to reach, either at the moment or in the long term. There’s that critical constant voice that’s disapproving and just tearing me down. So, I think one thing to do is really pay attention to the way that you’re talking to yourself and then stop being so critical and worrying so much about the outcome. No one is clairvoyant. You don’t know what’s going to happen in the next minute or the next, you know, three years. So, don’t always
go to the worst scenario, which I know I do with everything, but you really have to be compassionate with yourself. Be realistic about your expectations to yourself.
Judi: You know, when you said that—I remember reading something quite recently that talked about framing one’s language specifically to avoid self-criticism. In the face of our very common expectation of perfection, many of us have this tendency to think that we’re not supposed to ever make a mistake, that being human isn’t okay. Well, the writer gave an example that goes something like this. Let’s say I’m regularly on time, but I show up late. Rather than saying, “I’m sorry I’m late”, instead say, “thank you so much for being patient” or “thank you for waiting for me. I know your time is valuable and I appreciate you making room for me.” It just switches it out from being self-absorbed in your own failure and, instead, it recognizes the generosity of the person who is, with open arms
ready to connect with you. Even you: your terribly flawed human self.
Allison: So, what you’re doing is you’re expressing gratitude.
Judi: Yeah, exactly.
Bert: That can really realign your perspective about what’s stressing you and put it in perspective. If somebody’s life isn’t in danger, then you’re really not at the highest level of importance as stresses go. Now there are certainly situations and careers where that’s common, but if we can work down from there to say that’s the peak importance in our lives. You look at what is stressing you and how does it fit in the big picture of your life, your family’s lives? How important is it really? And what is the whole picture around that? Looking at that perspective and getting a sense of where things really fit can decrease the stakes a good bit, so the stress, even though it doesn’t go away, may feel a lot smaller.
Allison: Right. Another way to reduce your stress in the face of long-term challenges is
to exercise. It really has so many benefits and yoga, in particular, is an activity that offers the best of two worlds. It’s both exercise and a bit of meditation. So, it combines two of those heavy hitters in stress management and can be really useful and helpful.
Judi: Bert, you mentioned that gaining perspective matters because many things aren’t do-or-die situations. When you were saying that it reminded me of an experience I had when I was a resident. I adopted a phrase that I use sometimes to manage my own stress when the stakes feel really high. The phrase is “just remember, you’re not going to die.” It’s kind of is an odd phrase, but at the end of my residency, I had a very public and very challenging task I had to do. Every chief resident in the Washington Urologic Society had to do that, so I wasn’t unique in some special challenge, but the stakes felt very high to me. It was like a rite of passage before graduating from
residency.
I was preparing for that and a colleague of mine who had undertaken the same task years earlier said that phrase to me. He said, “Remember, you’re not going to die.” He was right. At the time he said it to me I thought, “well, yeah sure that’s pretty obvious,” but as I let that sit with me, I realized I could make a long list of outcomes that would have been awful: like public humiliation, loss of confidence and a whole list of other things, but I was not going to die. It was a real bottom-line practicality. I was going to stand in front of a bunch of people and undertake a very challenging task. If I failed, that’s all I would do. I would fail. I’d walk away and live to fight another fight. So, it can be incredibly valuable in managing stakes. I’m happy to say that I prevailed in meeting the challenge and it was a success, but I’m guessing that knowing that no tragedy was going to happen, that I was not going to die was part of what set me up for success in
preparing without that ridiculous amount of stress that undermined my ability to focus.
Allison: Mm-hmm. In the lead-up to a big challenge, perspective is so important. One of the metaphors the three of us have shared can act as a reminder about the stakes. When we’re focused only on the challenge, it’s like we’re looking at it through a camera lens that’s zoomed all the way in, like a real close up. The only thing in the field of view is the challenge and any movement of the camera feels like an earthquake. Everything is shaking. But if we zoom out, then we can see all the landscape around the challenge. We see our friends and our family and the sky and the trees and our dogs⎯things that really matter to us usually more than the challenge. And when the camera moves, it’s almost undetectable. It doesn’t look like an earthquake. The zoom lens metaphor is a tool that can serve as a reminder when we’re having stress to pull back the view
and see all the things that are in play.
Judi: That’s great, Allison. I mean, it’s so true and the theme that keeps going over and over and over again here is perspective—that part of managing our stress is perspective. Sometimes, in the lead up to a big test like a final exam, I’ve been known to use the phrase, “Remember this is one test in one course in one high school career that will last for one hour in one lifetime,” or something like that. You know, some other thing that just brings this down to: we’re talking a miniscule piece of a whole lifetime. It can be so easy to spiral and hyper-focus that it’s worth having a few grounding images in our head that will help us to talk ourselves away from the start of that spiral.
Bert: We’ve covered a few ideas for managing stress. They can be used together. They can be used separately. Part of the challenge for each of us is putting together our toolkit of what works for us. Some of these might work better than others for some people and
there’s really no way to know until you try them out. So, in the same way that we suggested that approach for an intermittent fasting lifestyle to get to appetite correction, putting together a toolkit of techniques that work for a given individual is a similar process. It’s a Study of One: trying things, seeing what works, looking for new things if nothing works, and putting those things that do work in sort of a kit that serves possibly for the rest of our lives⎯in dealing with stress.
Allison: Mm-hmm. Judi, gaining perspective and measuring the stakes are part of the process of taming the beast, right?
Judi: Yeah.
Allison: Can you tell us a little bit more about that technique?
Judi: It’s a funny name. Yeah, sure, I’m happy to. I first used that name, taming the beast, in the context of my role as a parent. We had two youngsters who were high school students and as high school students do, they encountered all of the standard challenges:
demands of the scholarly world, social world, growing up, a changing body, changing relationships, you know, growing up is messy. Occasionally, they would become overwhelmed and show the signs of stress. I’m not sure that they always saw the signs of stress, but we could. It’s something that I think most of us probably connect with more as we grow with our own bodies. We learn how to recognize our stress better and that’s part of what we’re hoping to foster here. When this would happen, when I would notice that they were showing signs of stress, I would suggest that we go to the whiteboard and tame the beast. That was a phrase that called up the idea of a beast as a big, messy pile of things that are nagging at somebody: tasks, stresses, worries. All of these things heaped up in our thoughts like a big pile of menacing clutter.
It can feel like a monster that’s chasing us, ready to chomp on our behinds, you know, but it’s not. It’s not really that. It’s stressful real-life day-to-day demands, but our bodies see it as a threat and a very lethal
threat. So, the process of taming the beast is really a process of deconstructing the pieces and putting them in a specific spot with some constraints. What I would have them do is first make a list of everything that was nagging them. So, you make a list: your to-do list, your problems that you need to solve, worries, upcoming obligations—everything, the things that are bugging you.
Then characterize each of them, answering some questions like how long will they take? When is the deadline? What is the priority? What are the risks? What if I don’t do this? Really give them some more tangibility than just some nonspecific worry in your brain. And then you start putting them on a calendar with start dates and end dates. Take note of dependencies. If you have to get one thing done before you can do something else, then putting those out of order would be silly. And so, we would put things in order and start to discover, through the exercise, that there were typically enough hours in the day to accomplish everything
that was essential. And often, the non-essential things also had enough time budget to take care of, but the other thing it would do is invite a little bit of reordering of priorities.
We put in there things like sleep hygiene and play. We consider those very important to-do list items, not something to be shoved to the side in managing this task of slaying the beast. Because, if we don’t take care of those healthy ways of being, then basically we just become automatrons. I’ve mentored some adults who have worked through that same process, not just youngsters, and I’ve noticed that sometimes⎯actually routinely, I guess⎯they emerge from the other side of the exercise feeling empowered. It can take a couple of hours, but it’s well worth it. It’s worth the exercise. It can change that feeling from threatened to empowerment.
Bert: So, you’re breaking the big, stressful, tidal wave of stuff into lots of little bits.
[46:00]Judi: Yeah, bite-sized pieces.
Bert: So, you’re digesting the stress instead of letting it digest you.
Judi: Yeah.
Bert: I think you might want to go to, ah, the appropriate place to do that. You know what that would be?
Allison: Uh-oh.
Judi: The right place to digest the stress?
Bert: Yes.
Allison: What?
Judi: Uh-oh.
Bert: That’d be a stresstaurant.
Judi: Bert!
Allison: Bert!
Judi: Alright, so here’s a question.
Bert: What can you imagine having that menu, Allison?
Allison: Ooh, at the stresstaurant?
Judi: Wait, wait, wait, if we’re talking about a menu, should we have a trigger warning here?
Allison: Sure, trigger warning everybody. I’m going to start talking about some awesome food. So, the food that they would have. Just let me take a moment. They’d have macaroni and cheese, maybe some brownies, some french fries, little snack-size Snickers bars.
Bert: I was kind of thinking more along the lines of some peaceful imagery, maybe some meditation. Maybe some yoga—
Allison: You’re making me look bad, Bert!
Judi: I know, really!
Bert: ⎯and lots of coloring books
with complex geometric patterns. You could have a pretty long menu at the stresstaurant.
Judi: And some exercise, and then for after the exercise, time to sit and play and gather with friends and do what people do when they gather with friends, which is, you know, food-is-love kind of stuff—then we’d have the macaroni and cheese.
Allison: Right.
Bert: As long as we’re at the stresstaurant, let’s go ahead and order some of those brownies, too.
Allison: Okay. Yes, please. Maybe a la mode. I’m sorry. This is just too much. I need to go exercise.
Judi: Yeah, exactly. Well guys, this has been fun and thanks for taking the time. I’ve enjoyed having this walk down stress avenue into the stresstaurant and thinking about what we’ll be having for dinner tonight.
So, that wraps it up for today’s episode of the D.I.E.T. podcast. Remember, when you walk into a restaurant and you see the word diet or⎯no, they don’t have that word in restaurants, do they? No. Okay, when you go to a
newsstand and you see the word “diet,” recast that word into the D.I.E.T. version and ask yourself, “Did I enrich today?” Let’s recapture that word and turn it into something amazing. Thanks for listening!
Allison: I love it, Judi. And don’t forget to visit DidIEnrichToday.com for more information about intermittent fasting and links to purchase AC: The Power of Appetite Correction on Amazon and Audible. And, please sign up for the newsletter and we’ll let you know about upcoming events and when new episodes are available. We promise not to spam you.
Judi: All right. Well, thanks and I guess it’s a wrap. Bye!
Allison: See you next time! Bye!
Bert: Bye-bye!
