The Mindset Mentor - How to Lower Your Stress and Anxiety

Episode Date: July 21, 2022

With all that is going on in the world right now, it's good to have some tools in the tool belt to help you lower stress and anxiety. In this episode, I'll teach you how!   Want to master your mindset? Every Monday I send out an email with mindset tips for the week, click here to receive that email: http://mondayemail.com/ Follow me on IG for more inspiration here: https://www.instagram.com/robdialjr/ Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Welcome to today's podcast episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host Rob Dylann. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you want to receive an email from me every single Monday with mindset tips and tricks to go into your week and master your mindset, go to mondayemail.com right now. Once again, mondayemail.com right now. And I'll start sending that to you absolutely free. Today, we're going to be giving you a four-step process to lower your stress and anxiety. Why? Because there's a lot going on in the world right now. And I feel like no matter where you are, whether you feel a lot of stress and anxiety or whether you feel like life is pretty good and

you're doing pretty well, I feel like this will help you a lot. And the reason why is because I was looking at statistics the other day and overdoses are up 30% and there's a new suicide prevention hotline that's put out. And so I think it's 988. So in America, you call 988 and immediately goes to that number. But the number of people who are calling the suicide hotline that's put out. And so I think it's 988. So in America, you call 988 and immediately goes to that number. But the number of people who are calling the suicide hotline year over year is up like three to 400%. And so that being said, obviously there's a bunch of different circumstances and life stories and things happening in people's lives. But I think a lot of people, if we could lower our stress and we could lower our anxiety, everything would just feel way better with all that's happening in the world right now.

Right? The first thing that I want you to understand, though, about stress and anxiety is that they are, I don't hear many people talking about, I don't hear anybody talking about this, is I think that they are normal parts of the human experience. What do I mean by that? When you are feeling stressed out or you're feeling anxious, it is a message coming from your body trying to tell you something. It doesn't mean that you're broken. It doesn't mean that you should judge yourself. There's nothing wrong with the system. It's your body doing what it's designed to do. Your body can't like raise its

hand and be like, hey dude, gotta talk to you. Can I tell you something real quick? The way that it communicates with you is through feeling. Feeling is the language of the body. And so the way that it can tell you, hey, what you're doing is not what you should be doing. Hey, you should be doing something a little bit different. Hey, this is not what you're supposed to be, the path that you're supposed to be on. It's doing what it's supposed to be doing. It is your body's means of communication with you. So you can go, oh, I don't feel very good. Why don't I feel very good? And then you can start to work out stuff from there. So, you know, your body's identified in some sort of way, a threat, and it's heightening its senses that it needs to take on that threat. It's the body's way

of talking to you. So don't judge yourself. You're not broken. The only place where something could be wrong is in your thinking in this situation. Now let me take a step back because every time I talk about anxiety and I say that it comes from the mind, I get a lot of resistance. I'm not talking about depression, even though statistically 61% of people that are on depression medication actually are not depressed in any sort of way. They are misdiagnosed. That is the statistic. Yeah, 61% of people are misdiagnosed with depression that don't have depression. What I'm talking about stress and anxiety, stress and anxiety specifically end up coming from the thoughts that you have. I had a friend, I got really pissed off when I found this out a couple months ago, but when she was in college, she had a bad breakup with her boyfriend. She went into

the doctor because she was sad for a long time and her mom's like, you should go talk to the doctor, like the family doctor, not a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, any of that stuff. The family doctor said, what's going on? She said, my boyfriend and I had a really bad breakup. He goes, go ahead and take this medication. He gave her depression medication that she was on for four years until one day she's like, wait, why am I still on this? Like it just became routine for her. That happens a lot. And so I'm not saying anything wrong, you know, anything bad about doctors. I'm just saying that a lot of people can work through their mistakes and their own minds and things that are going on in their life sometimes if they are able to bring down their stress, bring down their anxiety and try to work through those

things on their own. So I want to bring that up before I dive deeper into it. Anxiety and stress are not signs that the body is broken or something wrong. You know, it's your body doing what it needs to do. So you've got to listen to it and you've got to take a step back and you've got to think to yourself, what am I doing right now? Is there a threat? Is there a potential threat? If there is, the body's doing a great job of telling us that there's a threat. You know, what are you focusing on? What's the majority of your brain power going towards? Is it, you know, fast forwarding into the future and thinking of all of this potential danger that's coming up in the future? Probably. Or are you in the present moment? And I've said this question a few times. I put it on my Instagram. This seems to really

help people out. like I get messages all of the time when people Actually use this when they're starting to feel very anxious and you got to ask yourself this question Right now am I safe? Right now am I safe? You need to show your brain and your body a resounding yes Because you can say am I safe? Yes, but I'm so worried about my bills that I have to pay next week. Okay. But right now, in this moment, this very second that

I'm in, am I safe? A lot of times, 99.9% of the time, you're like, yeah, I'm safe. That alone allows your nervous system to calm down because it doesn't have to focus on a threat because there is no potential threat. And so you need to prove it to your brain. You need to prove it to your nervous system that, hey, you know, you are okay. And so that's the first thing that you need to do. Step number one is to ask yourself the question, am I safe? Okay. Step number two is to stop identifying with it. Don't identify with a feeling. Stressed out and anxious feelings are feelings. It's not who you are. You are not stressed. You are feeling stressed. There's a massive difference between the two of those. I am stressed is an identity statement. I am feeling

stressed is basically like a passing cloud. In this moment, I have a feeling and it's passing me by and eventually the sun will be back out, right? You are not anxious. You are feeling anxious. And so you've got to understand to not identify with something that is not you. If you've never heard this before, it doesn't seem like a huge thing to say the difference between I am anxious and I'm feeling anxious doesn't seem massive, but to your nervous system, to your brain, to your body, it is massive. Because if you say I'm feeling something, feelings are fleeting. You could feel really happy right now and then get into a car accident and you could be really freaking pissed in 25 seconds, right? That can happen. That's a feeling. Feelings are fleeting, which is fine

because if I'm feeling anxious or I'm feeling stressed, it's just going to pass me by eventually. But if I am stressed, if I am anxious, that is me actually saying part of my identity. I am this person. No, no, no. You're not. You're not broken. And you can work through it. So step number two is to stop identifying with it. Remove yourself from that and say, yeah, that's just a feeling. You know, if you look at the clouds up in the sky and, you know, say it's raining right now outside, you don't go, oh my God, it's going to be raining forever, do you? No. You know that eventually the sun will be back out. That's exactly how it is with the feeling of stress, the feeling of anxiety is you know that the sun will be back out.

But when you say I am stressed, I am anxious, it's like you're never going to get out from under that cloud. So that's step number two, is to stop identifying with it. Hey, do you know what NAD is? I didn't before, but trust me, you'll want to hear this. NAD is found in every single cell of your body. It's responsible for creating energy and regulating hundreds of cell functions. But NAD declines as you age.

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Step three, I talk about this a lot because it's so important, is to breathe. 60 breaths in through the nose, out to the mouth. When you breathe out through the mouth, make sure that you're breathing out like you're breathing out through a straw. Your exhale should always be longer than your inhale. When your exhale is longer than your inhale, it actually slows your heart rate down. So in through the nose, out through the mouth. I have a family member who had a mini stroke a week and a half ago. A TIA is what it was called. And he was in the hospital for four or five days and his blood pressure was not going down. It was not going down. It was not going down. It was not going down. They couldn't figure it out. And I swear to you, this is actually a true story.

So what I did was I went online I had this intuitive hit of like hey I bet you could probably lower your blood pressure through breathing so if you have high blood pressure hopefully this helps you I went and actually started researching it turns out it is actually a fact there's studies around it and I found a YouTube video a woman put out about how to lower your blood pressure through breathing. And he was averaging about two weeks ago when he went into the hospital and had his stroke around 170 was his heart rate, 170 over something. I don't remember what the over was, but it was 170. He's been doing breathing exercises that take four minutes, four to five times a day. And within 10 days, it went from 170 to 115. And he's like, the thing

that I've been doing is what I was telling him is focus on your breathing and then focus on your thoughts. Focus on what you're thinking about. If you're having the stroke and you're feeling anxious, I get it, but you've got to think good. Think great thoughts. I'm going to be healthy. I'm going to be safe. I'm healing. I'm doing better. Over time, 10 days, literally lowered it. This isn't just him. If you look at the YouTube video, there's people all in the comments, lowered my blood pressure from this to this, from this to this, from this to this. And there's so many people that say it. So when I say, make sure that you just breathe, it seems simple. But the very first thing that happens whenever your state changes, first thing to change is your breath. And so if you want to change your state, get ahead of your state by

getting into the breathing first. Your breath will change your state. So if you feel anxious, you feel stressed, immediately go back to the breath. Okay, so that's step number three. Step number four is to become self-aware. Don't try to think your way out of an anxiety attack when it's happening. When emotion is high, logic is low. When you are in it, accept it and breathe. I've had an anxiety attack before, one time before in my life. And I remember as I was coming in, I was going through it. I was like, okay. I remember freaking out at the beginning and I was like, okay, I just, I'm here. I just need to breathe. I just need to accept. I need to breathe. Eventually this will pass and just breathe through it and make myself understand. It will eventually come to pass and you become more

self-aware. And then after it passes, if you do happen to have that, or you do have like massive stress, breathe through it, allow yourself to come back down and get to somewhat of, you know, normalcy, a little bit of home back down and get to somewhat of, you know, normalcy, a little bit of homeostasis, and then ask yourself, why did that happen? Why did that happen? What am I focusing on? And what you come to realize is that a lot of times, most of the time, it's because there were some thoughts around something that brought it up. A lot of the times it's something that we're

thinking, we're fast forwarding into the future and thinking of something that could happen or something that we can't control. And actually, that's what's making us anxious or stressed out. It's not just the fact that, you know, that thing's coming up, but the fact that right now I can't control that thing. And a lot of us, myself included, I'm trying to be a recovering controlaholic, want to control everything. We don't want there to be any variables. We don't want there to be anything that we're not in control of. And so when something is in the future, we're not in control of the future yet. It is not here yet. That can cause a lot of stress. That can cause a lot of anxiety. Also, if you look at all the stuff that's happening in the

world right now and you're watching the news you have to realize just to take a step back there's always bad stuff happening in the news there's always bad stuff happening we have 7.5 billion people almost 8 billion people there's bad apples out there but what happens is the news can take the 20 worst things that happen in the world out of the 7.58 billion people that we have in the world and show it to you. And it makes you feel like, you know, we're going to hell in a handbasket, but it's literally like, what about the other, like, I don't know, 7.4 whatever billion people. I don't know. I can't do the math of minus the 20 people out of that. But you look at it and you're like, there's a lot more good that's happened in the world. It's just the news doesn't show the

good. But if we're looking at those things of, oh my gosh, this is happening in another country, and you get stressed out about that. One of the reasons why you can be stressed is because you cannot control that thing that's happening in another country. And you definitely can't control other people. And so you've got to bring it back and say, okay, what am I stressing out about? What am I focusing on? I'm focusing on this thing I saw on the news. I'm focused on this person that says I'm focused on this. And you bring it back and say, what can I control? Like, what can I control right now? And a lot of times you realize there's only a few things that you can control. And if you just focus on those few things that you can control, you start feeling so much better. So what can I can control right now? After you feel the

stress and anxiety, you start to bring yourself down, you breathe through it, you find out that you're safe, then you ask yourself, hey, how can I make myself feel better right now? Like right now in this moment, I want to make myself feel better. Do I still have whatever bills coming up that I don't know how I'm going to pay next week? Sure, maybe you do. But how can I make myself feel better right now? And stop taking yourself out of the present moment and putting yourself into an imagined future, which most of the things that we imagine don't happen in the first place. Psychologists have found that 85% of what we worry about never happens in the first place. The other 15%, a large portion of that ends up being way better than we thought it

was. And so statistically, 97% of what we worry about doesn't happen anywhere near the way that we're imagining it to be in our mind and ends up being way better. And so you realize that means that 97% of the things we're worrying about either never happen or end up way better than we thought they were going to be. So why don't we figure out a way to stop worrying so much, to take a step back and to be like, what can I control right now? How can I make myself feel better? How can I make myself relieve this feeling of anxiety and this feeling of stress and bring myself back to the present moment so that I can be better right now and then better into the future. So that is a four-step process to dealing and lowering your stress and anxiety. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram

stories and tag me at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And I'm going to leave it the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.