How I Overcame Chronic Stress

In this episode I share how I finally overcame decades of chronic stress. You will learn what stress really is on both a biological and psychological level, how your mindset shapes your stress response, and how simple tools can shift you out of fight or flight and into clarity. I also break down the neuroscience of stress, the power of stress mindset theory, and why belief in your capacity to cope matters more than you think. This episode will teach you how to create space between stimulus and response, regulate your nervous system in the moment, and rewire your identity as someone who can handle stress.

What You Will Learn

• How the brain and body respond to stress
• Why mindset affects your biology
• The difference between stress as danger and stress as activation
• How to regulate your nervous system quickly
• A simple three step framework to interrupt chronic stress
• How to build belief in your ability to handle challenges
• How to lower your overall stress waterline and expand your capacity

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Resources Mentioned

• Kelly McGonigal and Alia Crum’s research on stress mindset
• Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
• Stress Mindset Theory (2012 Journal of Health Psychology)

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Website: JerryHenderson.org
Free strategy call available for those who want personal support in their stress mastery journey.

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Jerry

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome Back And New Cadence
• 0:50 What You’ll Learn About Stress
• 1:38 The Stress Cascade In The Body
• 5:09 Chronic Stress And The Waterline Metaphor
• 6:40 Stress Mindset Research And Findings
• 10:03 Belief In Your Ability To Cope
• 12:03 Stimulus Gap Response Framework
• 14:00 Create The Gap And Calm The Body
• 16:00 Reframing Through Curiosity
• 18:10 Building Self Belief And New Voices
• 21:15 Celebrate Wins And Retrain The Brain
• 23:05 Recap And Practical Takeaways
• 24:33 Free Strategy Call And Closing

Transcript

Jerry Henderson: 0:00

Hello everybody and welcome to Personal Mastery. I'm your host, Jerry Henderson. And if you're ready to create a life that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside, you're in the right place. Let's get started. It's been a while since I've done an episode. That's been very intentional. Got a lot going on with research I'm doing at Harvard University and with my coaching clients. And so something had to give in this season. And so I took a little break from doing the podcast, but I'm so thankful to be back here with you. And I do want to mention that I might find a new cadence with this podcast. And that may mean that instead of every week, there might be times where I put it out every other week, etc. And I'm glad to be back behind this microphone. And I'm so grateful that you're here today listening to this episode and a part of this community. Now, in today's episode, I'm going to be talking about how I overcame chronic stress, something that I dealt with for decades. Now, if you're new to the podcast, I'm Jerry Henderson. I'm trained in the psychology of human behavior at Harvard University. And every week I share tips and insights on how you can create a life that you love. And by the end of this episode, you're going to learn how stress impacts the brain, the body, the neuroscience around it, how it affects us physically. Now you're also going to learn how your mindset, the way that you view the stress that you're experiencing, actually impacts how you deal with or how you're going to handle the stress. You're also going to learn some practical tools about how to deal with stress in the moment, when it shows up. And finally, you're going to learn how to build confidence in your ability on how to manage and to cope with stress in your life. Now, the research shows us that stress or individual stress is on the rise right now. And I think we can all relate to that, right? Everything that's going on in the world. And that's why I thought talking about this today was so important to give you some practical tools on how to deal with it. So let's get into this and let's start talking about what stress is and what it does to us. So the first thing I want you to think about is that stress isn't just a response to circumstances, and it's also not just a set of chemicals, but it's also a mindset. It's our perception and our view of the experiences that we're having. I like to say that a lot of stress is the narrative that we carry about the circumstances that we're facing. So let's just talk a little bit how this might unfold. You know, for example, we'll have a trigger that happens in our life, right? An unexpected deadline or a relationship challenge, or maybe we get an unexpected bill in the mail or in our inbox. And when we receive that information, our limbic system kicks in. And what happens is in a split second, that information is received, it's translated to our hypothalamus. That hypothalamus is then activating the HPA axis and the HPA axis, which is associated with stress, is releasing cortisol, adrenaline, other chemicals into our system. And then all of that causes the heart rate to rise, it causes us to start tightening up, we get tense, we might start to get a pit in our gut. And what's happening is our body is preparing for action. And like I said, all of this is happening before our brain or the prefrontal cortex part of our brain has a chance to catch up to everything that's happening in that moment. Then, as we're experiencing all of that, our story starts to kick in. What do I mean by that? That's when we start to assign meaning to everything that's happening. We might start to say things to ourselves like, I can't handle this. Why does this always happen to me? Might start to interpret it as everything is falling apart and you start to catastrophize, project into the future of everything that's going to start to happen as a result of that moment that you experience that stressful trigger. All of this is cascading and it's happening really fast. Now here's the challenge. That story that you start to tell yourself, right, as you start to interpret what's happening, you kick in with your story, that story is going to produce even more stress. It's going to keep that whole system active. You're going to release more cortisol, you're going to release more adrenaline, and you're going to keep that whole fight or flight state active and actually start to make it worse. And then as a result of that, you're starting to hardwire that whole scenario into your nervous system. And because you're reinforcing that that event is bad, you shouldn't be experiencing it, or whatever story that's unfolding as a result of all of that, that's embedding it into your nervous system more and more. And so it's amplifying the entire stress response, the entire conditioning and the association that you have with those experiences in your life. It actually becomes a very real threat to your nervous system and your capacity to handle it has been challenged because the scope of this now is something that's really scary, really stressful. You ruminate about it and it takes up a lot of capacity, and you're stuck now in fight or flight. You're stuck in a chronic stress mode. And when we're stuck in a chronic stress mode, our capacity to handle stressful events becomes more and more diminished because what's happening is our water line of stress. And I use this example with a lot of the clients that I work with. I ask them, where's their water line of overall stress? And for many people, they're living with a water line of stress up to their neck. And any event that comes around, it puts that stress waterline up over their head and they feel like they're drowning. And so what we want to do is figure out how do you get that stress level, that water line of stress to come down in your life. And that's a lot of what we're going to talk about today, is how to bring that down. But I do want to help you understand that if you're in that place of chronic stress, your waterline's pretty high. And no wonder when you get the bill or you get the confrontation at work or whatever happens, it feels like it's flooded up over your head. And you feel like you're walking around on this planet, like I did for so many years, with a pit in your gut, this background hum of anxiety, and it has to do with the stress that you're carrying and your body's reaction to that and seeing those things as fight or flight scenarios. As I said, the good news is that if a lot of what's happening is our response to stress, it's creating even more stress. The good news is that we can do some things, intentionally do some things that can help reverse that. And I want to transition to start talking about how you can do that. And the first thing I want to start with is what's called the stress mindset. And yes, you have a mindset when it comes to stress. So what is stress mindset? As simply as I can put it, it's the way that you see stress. And if you see stress as something that's bad or harmful, it's actually going to be more difficult for you to deal with stress. Stress is going to have a bigger impact in your life versus if you see stress as something that's normal, necessary, not bad, that's actually going to show up in your life, and you don't label it as something negative, stress is going to have a lot less impact in your life, and you're going to be able to deal with stressful events more effectively. And there was an interesting study that was done that was published in 2012 in the Journal of Health Psychology, and there were 30,000 people that were a part of this study, and they found very clearly that individuals who saw stress as negative were less likely to handle stress well versus people who didn't see stress as negative and their capacity and their ability to handle stress. And the individuals who didn't see stress as harmful had lower levels of anxiety, they had lower health issues, and they actually had lower mortality rates than those who saw stress as something that was negative. What the study showed in a very real way is it's not stress that harms you, it's your belief that stress is harming you or will harm you that actually winds up harming you. Now, Dr. Crumb at Stanford University expanded on this idea and developed what is known as the stress mindset theory. And what she found is that people tend to fall into one of two mindsets when it comes to stress. The first is that stress is debilitating, it's gonna break me down, it's gonna harm me. The second mindset is that stress is enhancing, that stress can help me rise to challenges and build strength in my life. And then what she found is based on what mindset that you have, it doesn't just affect your psychology, it actually starts to affect your biology. Those with a stress is enhancing mindset have lower levels of cortisol, they have greater heart health and the ability to have faster cardiovascular recovery. And they also had better focus, better motivation, and better learning outcomes from the experiences that they were facing in life that could be labeled as stressful. And so the research around stress mindset is extremely fascinating to me. And I find it extremely helpful when I work with my clients to help assess their stress mindset and help them improve their stress mindset. And so the takeaway from this is that the way that you see stress, your mindset towards it, is going to determine how well you deal with it and the impact that stress is going to have in your life. Now, the other thing that's important to understand about stress or stressed mindset is the way that we see ourselves and our ability to handle stress. The research shows us that if we don't believe in our capacity to handle stress, stressful experiences in our life are going to have a greater negative impact on us versus if we believe in our ability to handle stressful events. So, in other words, if you believe that you can handle stress, your brain and your body respond differently to stressful events than if you say to yourself, you're not good at handling stress, you're always overwhelmed by stress. And when stressful things show up in your life, if you start to say things like, I can't handle this, this is too much for me, it's actually going to start kicking your brain into more of a stress mode, more of a survival mode, and you're actually going to diminish your ability to handle stressful events. And now listen, I know that stress can be very debilitating. I know that stressful events produce a lot of suffering in people's lives. Like I said, I personally know this from my own experience. But I also know that for years I didn't believe that I could handle stress well. And then as I began to realize that my mindset towards stress was determining how I handled stress. And when I realized that my belief in myself and my ability to handle stress was also a key indicator as to whether or not I was going to handle stress well, it gave me some tools to start changing some things. And I no longer felt like I was a victim to stress. And that's my hope for you is that you'll understand how stress works, how it's showing up, how that cascading happens that we talked about earlier, and how your mindset of how you see stress, when you can change that, it's gonna help empower you. And when you start to believe in your own ability to handle stress, it absolutely is gonna change your approach to stress. And it's absolutely gonna change your ability to deal with stress, and then as a result of that, you're gonna be less likely to be carrying around chronic stress in your life. So let's start talking about these practical tools that you can use to start shifting your stress mindset and start shifting the way that you see your ability to handle stress. So let's start by talking about a framework around stress, which is stimulus, gap, and response. And Victor Frankel talks about this, and he's a Holocaust survival who wrote a fantastic book that I recommend to so many people, which is Man's Search for Meaning. And he says this that between every stimulus and response, there is a space. And it is in that space that we have the power to choose our response. And in our response lies our growth and our freedom. I love that quote because what it tells us is that we have power, that when we face a stimulus, that stressful event, right? The relationship challenge, the bill in the mail, or whatever it is, that's the stimulus. And between that stimulus and our response to it, the story that we start to create, the stress that we start to feel, all of that is a gap. There's a little bit of a moment where we have an opportunity to respond differently or to choose which way we want our response to go. So here's where emotional mastery or stress mastery really comes into play and what really changed my life in dealing with chronic stress. Now, the first thing in this is to notice and to create the gap. Okay, so you get that stimulus, you start to feel the heart rate rising, you start to get tense, you know this reaction that you typically have to it, and you may typically kick into, oh my gosh, this is bad, I don't know how to handle this, you start to catastrophize. What I'm gonna ask you to do in that moment is just to notice what's going on in your body. Pay attention, get aware of what's happening in your body, get out of this story up here. That's going to create just a little bit of a gap. And in that moment, to say to yourself or to reframe the situation from this is danger, to simply saying, I'm aware that my heart rate is increasing. I'm aware that I'm being activated, and to not label it as danger, to actually use that language. This is not dangerous. I'm simply being activated in this moment. And what's happening is that single statement, or however you want to phrase that, is going to start calming down the limbic system, the fight or flight system, and it's going to start to activate your prefrontal cortex or that reasoning, rational part of your brain. And then that part of your brain, when it's online, allows you to think, process, problem solve, etc. Now, after you've created that little bit of a gap, then I want you to move into your body to start regulating your nervous system. Now you could do this by doing a quick breathing exercise like box breathing, etc. You can then start to relax your shoulders. Notice if you've got any tension in your jaw, letting the body relax. And what that's going to do is it's going to send signals to your brain that everything's okay. It's going to help move you out of fight or flight into a more relaxed state, which is very important right now. So what you're trying to do is get that nervous system to calm down. And the quickest way you can do that is through breathing and through changing your physiology to signal to your brain that you're okay in this moment. And the truth around this is that when the body signals that I'm safe, the mind does follow. So we want to start with our body, not trying to get up here and get all you know in our brain trying to figure out how to problem solve immediately. No, first we want to calm down the nervous system. So remember, when the body feels safe, the brain will follow. Now, let's go on to step three. After you've created some space, you've now started to regulate your nervous system, you can actually get into reframing what you're experiencing, the story that you have up here that can determine whether or not you're going to cascade into more stress, or you're going to find the capacity within yourself to handle what you're facing. How do you reframe it? Well, I encourage you to start asking yourself some questions. Instead of going down the rabbit hole of all the bad things that this could mean, get curious and start to ask yourself some questions because what curiosity does is it keeps that prefrontal cortex, that problem-solving part of our brain engaged and keeps us out of the limbic system. And so when you start to see the situation that you're experiencing and start to ask yourself questions about it, it's going to help you stay focused and help you reframe it in a way that feels more manageable. And so you can ask yourself questions like, well, what else could this mean? versus what you've immediately interpreted it as meaning. You can also ask a question of, what is this stress preparing me for? You can also ask yourself something like, how could I use this energy, this what feels like stress, all of this energy that you're having to move forward. But it's important to remember what we're trying to do in the question asking is to reframe it and keep ourselves engaged in curiosity, which keeps us out of fear, catastrophizing, and more stress. And here's an important thing to remember: reframing isn't about denying, right? We know when we're denying something, we're trying to fool ourselves. Reframing is about aligning ourselves with something that is as true, if not truer, than the story that immediately kicks up in our head. So instead of saying something like, I'm anxious, you can say, my body is preparing me to deal with an event in my life. Or instead of saying I can't handle this, you can say, I've handled challenging experiences in the past, and I can handle this. And the truth is your language does affect your physiology. The language that's used, the stories that you start to use will either tighten you up, get that heart rate up, or it's going to relax you. And as you do this, you're actually going to retrain your association to these stressful events. And you can begin to teach yourself that the activation of stress is not something negative, but it's actually something that's preparing you. And it's actually activating you, giving you the energy, trying to give you the mental clarity, the sharpness, etc., to deal with whatever is showing up in your life. So if you can see it that way as something that's preparing you, once again, instead of something that's trying to harm you, it is definitely going to change the way that you experience stress and your belief in yourself and your ability to handle stress. And so let's talk about that piece a little bit, your belief and your ability to handle stress. Because a belief that you can't handle stress is trying to serve you, it's trying to keep you safe. It's a survival strategy that you're using because your brain is trying to kick into a way to figure out how to handle this and keep you on red alert. And so the belief that you can't handle it is going to keep you in a more activated red alert state. And maybe you've carried that story for a long time, that you can't handle stress, you can't handle uh what would be quote unquote bad experiences that show up in your life. And maybe some of this came from early childhood experiences. I know that was my case where I got wired to think that I couldn't handle stressful events because I was told that, I was made to feel like a failure, all of the things that happened in my life. I didn't feel like I had the capacity to deal with stressful things in my life. Now that's not true. The truth was I just didn't have the tools. And that's the same for you. You may just not have the tools, and the lack of tools creates a sense of fear and a sense of an inability to handle these challenging circumstances in life, but it really is just about a set of tools. And we can all learn those tools, and I've just shared some of those with you earlier about creating the gap, then moving into the body, and then reframing. There's gonna be very powerful tools that help me overcome chronic stress. But I think the most important thing that helped me overcome chronic stress was changing my belief system about me and my ability to handle stress. And once again, I want to encourage you that you can learn the tools that help you overcome stressful events in your life and deal with the chronic stress that you might be facing. Now, how do you start to develop that belief? Well, the first thing I want you to do is I want you to actually look in your life for the evidence of when you've handled stressful events because guess what? It's there. If you're here on this planet right now and you've made it through some challenging events in your life, guess what? Your survival, you were able to figure out stress, you adapted, you figured it out. Did it always maybe show up the most healthy way? No, but you did figure out how to navigate and to get through challenges in your life. That is evidence that you know how to handle stressful, challenging events because you're here right now and you're listening to this. And so all of that is proof, it's genuine proof that you were able to get through challenging events in your life. Now, the second thing that can help build confidence in your ability to handle stress is that when that voice comes up that says, I can't handle this, when this happens, I always shut down, I don't have the capacity to do that. I want you to ask a question whose voice is that? Right? Because you weren't born with that voice. And you might say, Well, that's the voice of me just, you know, having experiences in life where I didn't handle stress well. Now, that's a part of it, but it's also something that gets embedded in us in early childhood experiences or in toxic relationships or you know, painful life experiences, where we get this voice that's inside of us that got trained in us to tell us you can't handle this, you're gonna fall apart, etc. But that is a training. Our voice that's we listen to, you know, those reactions, those are all trained responses. And we can train ourselves to have a new response. And the first most important thing in retraining ourselves is to identify whose voice is that? Where did it come from? And to ask yourself, is that a true voice right now in this moment, or is that a voice from the past? Is that a voice that got rooted in fear because of experiences that I've had? And here's the thing I want you to realize is back to the Victor Frankel quote, right? That we have a stimulus, we have a gap, and then we have our response. And each new stressful event, right? If we look at stress not as something negative, we look at it as something that life brings into us that gives us an opportunity to grow, and then what that does for us is it allows us to reframe each new experience as an opportunity for growth. And each new experience, we have the ability to choose how we respond, and we don't have to respond the same way that we did before. And handling stress is not an innate uh capacity, it is a learned capacity that we have. We learn how to deal with stress, and part of what we do to learn how to deal with stress is to reframe our ability to deal with it and to reframe stress in and of itself. Now, the other thing that's important to do in building your belief in yourself to handle stress is to celebrate every win, no matter how small. Because when you celebrate wins, it wires it into your nervous system that you're the type of person who does have the capacity to handle these things. Because we will spend a lot of time noticing our flaws, noticing when we've messed up and replaying that and then activating our stress response system as we replay the places where we failed or the things that we didn't do, quote unquote, so right. But if you'll shift that and start to look for evidence of when you do succeed or when you did succeed and celebrate that, when you celebrate it and attach some emotion to that celebration, you're starting to rewire your brain, and your brain is gonna start noticing when you win, and when you see that you did win and that you did have success, it is absolutely gonna build your confidence that you have the capacity to handle these types of things, and you can handle these types of things. I'm gonna keep saying that because I believe it's important for you to hear it. Because listen, the goal isn't to eliminate stress, the goal is to increase our capacity to handle stress, to shift our mindset away from stress being bad. So let's do a little quick review. We know that when we experience stress, it's gonna activate our system naturally. So just because you get activated doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. That's just a part of how the body works. It's preparing you, okay? And when you get into that state of feeling triggered or stress showing up, if you label it as bad, you're gonna have a lot harder time dealing with stress versus if you label it as something that can be enhancing in your life, that is something that's necessary for growth, just like when a tree, you know, a tree needs wind in order to get strong roots. We need wind or stress to help us build the capacity to deal with life. So it's something that's trying to enhance us. And then we talked about you seeing yourself as a person who can handle stress and reframing that, that you can believe in your ability to handle the stressful events that show up in your life. And so, as you do all of that, you're gonna find that your capacity to handle stress is gonna increase, and your ability to have an overall sense of thriving in your life is gonna increase because we can't get rid of stress. That's once again not the goal. Because if we do that, we're gonna have to go live in a hole somewhere, and then we'll usually find something to be stressed out even there, right? It's the stories here that create our stress. And so, what we want to do is be mindful of how it works, be mindful of how we label it, and be mindful of our view of ourselves and our ability to handle stress. And as we do those things, it's absolutely gonna help lower the waterline of stress in our life, increase our ability to have well-being and thrive. And we're gonna start showing up in life in a way that feels a lot more healthy. Now, if you'd like some help on your journey of managing stress and building the tools and habits in your life that allow you to cope with it, I encourage you to go to my website at jerryhenderson.org and set up a free strategy call where we can connect and see if working together one on one would be the right fit. I'm looking forward to learning more about you and the goals that you have. Well, thank you so much for sharing this time with me today. So grateful for you, and I want to remind you that you are worthy of creating a life that you truly love. And I can't wait to be with you in the next episode.