The Liz Moody Podcast - I’ve Tried Every Hack To Reduce Stress—These 6 Actually Work To Instantly Feel Better
Episode Date: July 7, 2025If you’ve been feeling more overwhelmed, anxious, or stressed lately—you’re so not alone. In this episode, I’m sharing my absolute favorite tips to de-stress and start feeling more relaxed. Th...ese hacks will help you feel instantly calmer and more at ease day to day. I’ve had dozens of top expert guests share their best de-stressing tips with me—and I’ve tried them all! In this episode, I’m giving you my top tried-and-true tools that actually work. We’ll also dive into the reasons behind our modern stress—what’s changed in our environment, our habits, and even the way we consume information—and how all of that is affecting our nervous systems. We’ll play stress detective together too, because understanding your unique stressors is the first step toward actually doing something about them. Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now! Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Subscribe to the substack by visiting https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome. To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. This episode is brought to you completely free thanks to the following podcast sponsors: Seed: Go to seed.com/LizMoody and use code LIZMOODY for 25% off your first month. LMNT: go to DrinkLMNT.com/LizMoody to get a free LMNT sample pack with any order. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. Formerly the Healthier Together Podcast. This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 344. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Liz Moody podcast.
Guys, I have been so stressed lately, and I do not think that I'm alone in that.
So today, I thought I would get into why we all feel so uniquely stressed right now.
And more importantly, the things that I have found work the best to decrease that stress
so we can all start feeling better and more relaxed in our day-to-day lives.
I have tried pretty much every science-backed stress reduction tactic on the planet.
and a lot of them did absolutely nothing.
So this episode is just going to be about the meat,
about the stuff that really moves the needle.
Let's start off by just addressing some of what's going on here,
some of the very unique situations
that are making so many of us so stressed at this moment in time.
So you do not feel like you are alone in the way that you're feeling.
And also, you don't feel like you are insane in the way that you're feeling.
First of all, to a lot of people, myself very often included,
the world feels really scary right now.
now. There are wars and there are terrible things happening to innocent people all over the world
and in our own backyards and the weight of it can feel crushing. And then there's this incredibly
weird financial world that we live in where it's getting less affordable to have these things
that we have been told since birth constitute a good life like a single family home or a good
education. And, and at the same time, we are constantly exposed to how the wealthiest people
in the world are living. Like, I can see the intimate details of Jeff Bezos's Venice wedding,
which I never would have been able to at any other point in history. And there's this part of my
brain that subconsciously clocks like, oh, that is possible or, oh, that's what success looks like.
That contrast is so hard on our brains and on our satisfaction levels and on our feelings of
enoughness, all of which are going to increase our stress levels and also just keep us in the
cycle of thinking that we need to make more money to buy more stuff and then we'll all be happier.
And all of that work that we're doing to make the money to buy the stuff, what is that going to do?
It is going to make us more stressed.
And then on top of all of that, there's something that I'm seeing with a lot of the women in
particular in my life where they are now the breadwinners in their families because that's
the way that women in general are trending.
They're more college educated.
They're making more money.
And they are doing all of that.
And they're still doing a lot of the mental load of parenting of running their
household because that is how we have all been socialized.
And they are just exhausted.
It feels like more and more and more has been added on and nothing has been done to
alleviate any of that.
And on top of that,
The vast majority of people listening to this podcast are Gen Z and their millennials.
And if that is you, I just want to say that this is a uniquely stressful time in our lives as well.
The American Psychological Association has research that shows that 18 to 34-year-olds are almost twice as stressed as people over 65.
It's just a really challenging time in our lives.
Half of our friends are having babies and half are doing Euro summer.
We're under all of this pressure to grow in our career and make enough money to set up.
up the life that we want and find a life partner and figure out if we want kids and if we do
want kids, figure out how that fits into the timeline or if we have kids, we're taking care of
them and ourselves and maybe our partner and then throw some elderly parents into the mix.
And everything has trade-off. Something that I struggle with a ton is the immense amounts
of research showing that when women have kids, their earnings drop, their career progression slows.
It's called the motherhood penalty. And honestly, it's a...
a huge, huge reason that I have not had a kid yet. You guys are always asking me like,
okay, you froze the embryos. What's the timeline like? And the honest answer is I cannot
figure out how to have a kid and have the career and the impact that I want to have in the
world. It's an immense, immense point of stress for me. So that is the lay of the land,
but that's the bad news part of the podcast. Now we're into the good news part of the podcast. Now we're into
the good news part of the podcast, there are things that we can do to feel better and take back
control of our lives. The stress relieving tactics that I'm going to share here are going to be a
mix of addressing those unique problems and also just general stress relief that works,
regardless of the cause of the stress. And the first thing that does help with stress is one of the
reasons why therapy and journaling are so effective and why I started this episode by talking about
everything going on, and it is called disclosure. It's essentially just saying these things out loud,
getting them out of the spirals happening in your brain, getting them off of your chest, and out
into the world. This is one of my all-time favorite bits of science. Simply by giving words to our
feelings, we change the place in our brain that those feelings are processed from our limbic system
to our prefrontal cortex. The limbic system is that fight or flight response that we have. So when we are
not giving words to our emotions, we are trapping ourselves there in this state of heightened threat.
When we give words to things, whether out loud or in a journal, we activate our prefrontal cortex,
which is slower, it's more deliberate, it's more planning focused. So in this very real way,
you are shifting your brain state and thus your emotions by talking or journaling about your
stress. I feel my chest loosening, even doing this episode, it's like, okay,
Okay, we are addressing this. We are making a plan. We are creating that light on the horizon
of feeling better soon. So I would encourage you to name the things that are stressing you out,
either to a therapist or in a journal or to a friend or to a family member. And if you can get
specific, that is even better. It's something that Dr. Susan David, who is a Harvard professor,
she was a past podcast guest. She calls it emotional agility. And it's basically the more specific
that you can get with your emotions, the better that you will process them and the better that you
will deal with them. So the goal is not to be like, oh, I'm so stressed right now, or even I'm so
stressed about money right now. But I am stressed because I keep getting invited to these
bachelor's parties that I can't afford. And it makes me feel like I have to go into debt to have
these friendships and having these rich, meaningful relationships is a core value of mine.
It makes the problem so much more specific, which makes you more likely to solve for it, but also
it just makes it smaller. I'm stressed is like this huge gray fog that covers the whole sky.
I'm stressed about this specific thing is a single cloud that the sun can still shine around.
I love using journaling and conversations with my friends to play detective and really figure out
what is the specific reason, as specific as possible for my stress. And I really encourage you,
get as granular as possible because the more granular you are, the tinier, tinier that cloud is
going to feel. The other reason why I love this is while it makes you feel not alone, because
you're talking about things, you're sharing them with other people. Playing detective and really
trying to get specific about the reasons for stress helps stop a process that's called co-rumination,
which studies show is just absolutely terrible for us. That's when we go out with our friends
and we sit around venting about how shitty men are or how bad.
our jobs are or how terrible the world is and we just bitch and then we moan and then we go home.
Rumination is actually one of the hallmarks of depression and this form of overly venting together,
of just getting together and bitching and moaning is actually a form of co-rumination,
which is essentially all of us just sitting around and getting depressed together.
So the key here is to do some disclosure to share enough to not feel alone.
but not to get caught in that co-rumination cycle, which I think we can all feel when we come home
from hanging out with people and we just like, we just have like that ick sensation.
And I do think that looking for that specificity is a really nice natural safeguard against
co-rumination because it makes the conversation much more action-oriented.
You're not just like sitting around bitching.
You're trying to figure like, okay, what is it?
What is it really specifically?
I also haven't heard anyone talk about this, but I have been thinking about it a lot lately.
I think this is one of the reasons why social media feels so terrible.
We are co-ruminating with the entire world about all of the terrible things going on all over the world.
We are essentially entering depressive states with millions of strangers on a daily basis, which,
like that doesn't sound like it feels good and my experience of it is not that it feels very good.
Which brings me to the single phrase that's probably helped my stress more than anything else in the entire world.
Action is the antidote to anxiety.
There are a few reasons why this works from a neuroscience perspective.
When we are stressed, we are in that fight or flight response.
Our amygdala essentially hijacks our brain so that our prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for,
for rational thought and planning and decision making, that goes offline. So we get trapped in this
loop of everything is awful and there are no solutions, literally just because of the way that our
brain gets stuck firing. Taking even small actions requires our brain to engage our prefrontal
cortex, the planning part of our brain, which essentially tells the amygdala like,
I got this. You can stand down. So you stop that stress loop and you literally switch.
into a different mental state. Taking any action also releases dopamine, which motivates us to take
more action and it restores a sense of agency, the idea that our actions matter. This is always what I
think about when people tell me they have to follow all these news sites so they can be an engaged
citizen. I'm like, no, you are actually making yourself a worse citizen because you are
trapping yourself in a stress state that isn't bearing any results. It doesn't help starving children or
broken families for you to sit and feel awful about the situation or talk to all of your friends
about how bad it is or post little infographics on your Instagram stories. Many, many of us are
actually demotivating ourselves to take action and robbing ourselves of our agency by being
over-informed by keeping ourselves stuck in that fight-or-flight mode. We'll get back to taking
action in a second, but a micro-tip that has hugely helped my stress that is very related to
what we're talking about right now, is that I have specific sources that I check my news for,
and I do it early in the day so it does not mess with my sleep currently, because I know you guys
are all going to ask. I like Sharon McMahon. I like Ezra Klein's podcast. I like the free press.
I like the National Review. I like Heather Cox Richardson's newsletter. I keep the list
intentionally pretty short, and I intentionally keep it covering a pretty broad spectrum of viewpoints.
and the biggest, biggest thing that I cannot emphasize enough is I stop after I read or after I listen
to this list. So I know what's going on in the world and I've consumed a pretty diverse set of
perspectives about what's going on, but I am not doom scrolling on social media or reposting
infographics and videos that I have not fact check so much of these things that people are posting.
They are not, they're like seeing them, they're feeling an emotional, visceral response.
and then they are reposting them without checking or verifying the source material,
which just, oh, it drives me crazy.
And also then people DM me and they're like, why aren't you posting this thing?
And I'm like, well, because I validated it and it wasn't accurate.
It wasn't accurate.
And I'm not going to share misinformation or disinformation to the best of my ability on my social media.
Also, on social media, I am rarely scrolling.
I am mostly checking in with accounts that inspire me or make me feel the way that I want to feel.
Our brains cannot handle the biggest tragedies of the world entering our consciousness before we have brushed our teeth.
Also sandwich between like a meme, a fashion video, and then these terrible things happening in the world.
Our brain is not wired to process that.
Not consuming news in that way does not make you less of a good citizen.
It makes you more likely to actually make a difference.
Okay. So that's a little rant, a little aside, but it has actually really helped with my stress
level. So I would encourage you to try that to just curate a small list of news sources and check them
very intentionally so that the news is not finding you. You are finding the news. But back to action.
Obviously, if you can take any action about the actual things that are stressing you out, that's the best case
scenario, that's amazing. So if a work project is stressing you out, truly just get started on the
project by doing the tiniest, easiest task first. I promise you will feel so much better. Write one line
of the presentation. Send one email that you've been avoiding. Just start setting up your nursery
that you've been procrastinating on or cleaning out your closet. If you're stressed about layoffs,
refresh your resume, set up a networking date. Call your convalued.
if you are stressed about a political issue.
This is a micro tip, but one of the things that has helped me the most with my financial
stress, which is a really big point of stress for me, has been figuring out how much money
I actually need to live the life that I want.
Because until we know what that amount is, the answer is always more.
And I mean truly the life that I want, not the life that I see people living on Instagram.
I took some time with this.
I really sat and thought about it.
Zach did too.
and we compared our answers because obviously we're living our lives together.
But I wrote down my top five priorities in terms of lifestyle.
And then I researched to figure out how much they specifically cost.
Like how much actually is my dream house?
How much is my actual dream vacation?
What do I spend on food in an ideal month?
And I cannot recommend doing this enough because, again, until we have those numbers,
we are just on the treadmill of consumerism and we are being told constantly,
that we should want more and more and more.
And then after we were aligned on that list, we worked with financial planner to figure out how
much we needed to make and how much we needed to save to bring that life to reality.
And having a concrete plan around all of it has alleviated so much stress for me.
So bottom line, if you can directly take even the smallest, tiniest action around the thing
that is stressing you out, you will feel so much better.
But this is where it gets really interesting.
What I love about action being the antidote to anxiety is that any purposeful, goal-directed action
actually engages our prefrontal cortex.
So any action will decrease our stress, even if this is so critical, it's so interesting.
Our brains are so fascinating.
But the action will work even if it is not directly related to the thing that is stressing us out.
So you can be stressed about climate change and you can organize your sock drawer.
and you will feel better. What is the smallest plan that you can execute? Can you clean a room? Can you
make an appointment that you've been putting off? Can you return packages? I love returning packages.
I feel like I'm making money somehow. Can you follow a recipe and make an interesting dinner?
What I will often do is the second thing first. So I will do an unrelated action because sometimes when I'm
stressed, I get so stuck in that amygdala loop that I don't even know what action will help.
So if I'm sitting there and I'm like stressed about my career and I'm like, oh, I want to take an action related to my career that will help me alleviate the stress.
I don't even know what action to take.
So instead, I do the unrelated action first.
So I will do a workout or I'll make a meal or I'll declutter a drawer.
And then when my thinking brain is turned back on, I will see if I can come up with actions more directly related to the source of my stress.
But when I am stressed, I am always thinking what is any purposeful action that I can take or
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Speaking of doing a workout, this is one that I hear time and time and time again from podcast guests,
and it works annoyingly well.
Look, I am never going to love working out.
But it is wild to me how if I move my body in pretty much any way, my mood changes dramatically.
The person that I am after a workout can barely relate to the person that I was before a workout.
And I think that many of us don't get to experience the benefits of working out for our stress levels because we set the bar too high here.
So if I am stressed, I just take a walk.
I dance to one song.
Like sometimes, sure, I will go to the gym.
But truly, this is so important to remember, and I'm telling myself as much as I am telling
you, truly any movement helps.
And there is so much science that shows that movement is the most helpful thing for stress
and anxiety.
If it were a pill, it would be the number one thing prescribed by doctors.
If you are listening and you are stressed right now, if you do nothing else, please, please,
figure out a way to move your body to move some of that energy today as soon as possible.
Okay, I have two more for you, and they're both extremely effective for me, and I don't hear
people talking about them enough.
I actually debated over and over, including the next part in this podcast at all.
So a quick warning for people listening in the car with kids, it is R-rated, but it is so
so effective that I could not not mention it. So here's your warning. Skip ahead now if you need to.
But masturbate. It is crazy how much shame we still have societally around masturbation and especially
for women. I could do a whole podcast on how society has basically brainwashed us into thinking
that it's weird or it's gross or it's dirty. Or if women do do it like in the movies, it's very much
for the male gaze and not for our own pleasure.
When I was thinking about this episode, I had this moment where I was like, maybe I should just put
having sex in since an orgasm from sex helps decrease stress as well.
And then I was like, wait, it is so crazy that even I feel weird talking about masturbation
with you guys.
And I am a person who is down to talk about anything that is a hallmark of my personality.
And that is how much the shame is internalized.
But I also feel like it's my job to make this a safe space for exactly.
these types of conversations, the ones that the rest of society creates shame around like
our entire pros and cons of having kids series. And masturbation has so many research benefits.
It's free from some of the complications that some of us have with sex like worrying about a
partner's pleasure or worrying about how long we're taking to orgasm or thinking about how we
look or performing in any way, all of which can be very counterproductive when the goal is
stress relief. When you masturbate, you get to have an orgasm in your own way on your own terms.
And when you orgasm, your brain gets this insane rush of feel-good chemicals. You get endorphins,
you get dopamine, you get a flood of oxytocin, which inhibits the release of cortisol.
So I'll say that again. Oxytocin inhibits the release of cortisol. Cortisol, in a nutshell,
it's actually way more complicated than this, but in a nutshell, cortisol is a stress hormone. It's like
the main stress hormone that we talk about, and oxytocin, which is released when we orgasm,
inhibits the release of that. Orgasms are one of the fastest, most powerful ways to get out of that
fight or flight spiral and to ground yourself back in your body. It is this incredibly effective,
totally free, built-in biological hack that tells your entire nervous system that it is safe,
that everything is okay. The top way that I personally like to use,
use this is if I cannot sleep, if I have those like stress cycles where I'm just thinking about
everything that's going to happen the next day or everything that I need to get done. And I'm like,
how is it that I was so tired all day long? And then now that I'm trying to sleep, I'm having
eight million thoughts. That's when I will use this tool often. And it works like a charm. It is
immensely, immensely helpful. So hopefully if you feel shame around this, like this helped a little
bit, but like we need to normalize these types of things. Incredible tools. They're incredibly powerful.
And it's really just misogyny, the patriarchy, women being socialized, feel like our pleasure
does not matter. It is keeping us grounded in these shame states. So we can talk more about all
these things later. But for now, I will just say it's an incredibly powerful stress relief tool.
And I hope that you avail yourself to it. And then the last thing that massively helps me when I
am stressed is zooming out. I will zoom out to my 90-year-old self and I'll be like, would she
care about this thing that I am stressed about right now at all? Will I remember this in five years?
Well, I remember this in five months. So much of our stress feels world ending, but it is barely
a blip in the story of our lives. And sometimes I'll zoom out even further to the universe level.
One of my all-time favorite things to do in the world is to stargaze because it makes me feel
so small in such a good way. I love laying on my back and looking at entire galaxies and just feeling
like that fight that I had with Zach or with my sister or that thing that I was stressing about
with my job, it makes all of it feel so teeny tiny. Both of these, the zooming out to your older age
and just zooming out to the world, the galaxy, the universe, they are perspective-making activities
and a lot of stress desperately needs a little bit of perspective.
Just right-size the place of that work PowerPoint in your life.
Right-size what place not cleaning the kitchen should hold.
Right-size what you wish your friend said last time you hung out with her, but she didn't.
Often in our lives, it takes really bad things happening like divorce or death or sickness
to right-size the problems in our life.
It is such an immense superpower to learn to do it before one of those things happens.
Okay.
Actually, I have a bonus one.
Deep breathing.
I talked about the cyclic sigh in my book and that one is helpful.
It's like I use it and I love it.
But more often, if I feel stressed, I don't want to do like an entire breathing routine.
That's also why meditation is not included in this episode.
If I'm stressed, I'm just not going to be able to sit there and make myself meditate.
The idea of sitting in my own thoughts when I'm stressed is like it's just the last thing
that I want to do.
For me, meditation is something that I will do when I'm less stressed so that I can stay
less stressed in the future.
So like if I am not stressed, I will meditate with the hope that I will stay not stressed
longer.
It is preventative.
It's not something in the moment, which very much same for any sort of serious breathwork
practice.
But if I am in the car or in a meeting or just in those moments where I can feel my
chest feeling really tight, which is a hallmark of stress for me. I'll take a deep breath in through my
nose and I'll really try to expand both my chest and my belly. So like a deep, deep breath where first
first I feel my belly and then I feel it in my chest and then I will exhale as long as I can.
And I'll do that a few times over. I did it in the car when I was driving over here. It's on the bridge and
there's all this traffic and I'll just do a deep breath in. And I'll just do a deep breath in. And I
really try to feel my belly expand and I really try to feel my chest expand and that's the thing
that alleviate some of that tightness in my chest and I'll do it a few times over and it really,
really helps. I feel calmer. I feel calmer right now. Perhaps I should have done that at the beginning
of this episode. Okay, let's recap everything that we said in here so we can jog our memories.
If you're feeling stressed, try naming it, get really specific with yourself or with a friend or in a
journal. It's going to switch the way that your brain is processing it by making it more concrete
and specific. And then try taking any action, literally any action. Action is the antidote to anxiety.
You can take an action related to the source of your stress or you can take a completely unrelated
action, which is just a wild hack and we all need to be talking about that way, way, way more.
And then if you want, once you're not stressed, you can go back and you can tackle the original
problem, you can relieve the source of the stress and you'll be so much more clear-headed
and able to figure out the right actions to take. And try moving your body. I'm sorry, I feel so
annoying saying it, but it is just the most science-backed solution for stress that exists, period.
And yes, try the R-rated one, masturbate, it is free, it is powerful, it is this incredible
biological hack that floods your brain with feel-good chemicals. It tells your nervous system that you are
safe and it is one of the fastest ways to stop a stress spiral and I particularly recommend using this one
if you cannot sleep. And then our last two are zooming out. Ask yourself if your 90-year-old self
will care about any of this. It's an amazing way to right-size your problems. And also just to gain
that sense of perspective, really I cannot overstate. I have experienced. I have experienced.
and I've seen too many people experience, like a health crisis or loss.
And that is when they realized, like, oh, my gosh, all these things I was so, so stressed
about really were not what matters.
And I'm not saying that to discount these very real stressors we have.
I've just the practice of right-sizing the stress in our life is so, so important.
And something I think we all could benefit myself very much included from doing a lot more.
And then finally, in any moment that your chest feels tight, you feel those like physical symptoms,
especially of stress. That's when I find this works best. Just try taking some of those deep belly
breaths and exhaling as slowly as you possibly can. It is a simple in the moment tool and it really,
really helps. As always, I don't want you to feel more stress trying to implement these things.
I want you to feel calmer and more empowered just knowing that.
that this information is in your brain.
I want you to just trust that this information is there.
And the next time that you need it,
you will be able to pull up what you need.
You can trust yourself that in the moment,
your brain will know exactly what you need.
I know it's a tough time right now.
I know that life is freaking hard.
And I want you to know that you are not alone
and there are science-back tools that are proven
to make a big impact on stress levels
and that I have seen.
a huge impact with even just knowing that is so helpful for my own stress.
Like there is something that will help.
I don't have to feel this way forever.
I am not alone in this.
Just take it one step at a time.
If you could do me a quick favor right now, I would so appreciate you clicking copy on
the link to this episode and then sending it to one friend.
Literally, all of us have friends who are stressed.
Most of our friends are stressed for all of the reasons that we talked about.
at the beginning of this very episode.
Sending them a link helps them,
which they will be very grateful to you for,
and it's the best, best, best way to support the show.
And the second thing that I would so appreciate
is you taking one quick second
to review the podcast on Apple or on Spotify.
People tend to only write reviews
when they're really angry,
which isn't ideal for helping other people decide
whether to listen to the pod
and for algorithms deciding whether to recommend it.
I get so many DMs from you guys every single week about how much the episodes mean to you and how much
you love them. And I love, love, love. I love the hearing from you. So please do not stop sending me those
DMs. But also I feel, I'm going to just say universally here because I feel weird asking you when you
DM me these things. I'm like, could you just copy paste that note into an Apple review so other people
can see it? It would just, it would mean the world to me and it's so, so immensely helpful.
If you want to get evidence-based wellness products for money off and support the show, you can find discount codes for all of our current partners.
We have so many good ones right now.
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You can find all of that at lizmoody.com slash codes.
Okay.
I love you guys.
And I love that we get to have these conversations and digest and process the world together and make our worlds better.
together. I will see you on the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast. Oh, just one more thing.
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