The Mindset Mentor - Make Stress Your Friend

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

Not all stress is the same. In this episode, I’ll break down the three types of stress and show you how to make stress work for you instead of against you. By identifying the kind of stress you’re experiencing, you’ll learn how to respond effectively. Stress isn’t the enemy—it’s how you harness it that counts. 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 episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. And if you're out there and you want to learn how to set, plan, and achieve your goals for this upcoming year, you can go ahead and download my free ebook that covers exactly how to do that at goals2025.com. Once again, goals with an S, 2025.com. Today, we're going to be talking about how to make stress your friend. We're going to talk about stress.

And I want you to understand that not all stress is created equal. Not all stress is the same. When you zoom out and look at stress, there's actually three different types of stress. So there's one that's called eustress, there's hypostress, and there's hyperstress. So we're going to cover all three of them and basically teach how to master the three of these so that you internally and externally can be a better person. Before we do dive into each one, let's talk about just stress in general though. Stress is a psychological and physiological response to things and situations that upset your personal

balance in some sort of way, your internal balance that you have. It takes us out of that calm, centered, balanced feeling. And so stress itself is not bad. It's something that is extremely natural inside of the human body. It's something that helped keep our species alive. And stress in the mind and in the body is the signal basically that something is not right. Something needs to change. It has benefit to it. It wouldn't exist in us if it didn't have some form of a benefit. But when stress gets out of control and it becomes chronic stress, then it can start to become a problem. And so when you're faced with a challenge or threat in some sort of way, our bodies will figure out some sort of way to prepare to respond to a challenge or a threat. And this response can be

physical, it can be mental, and it can also be emotional as well. It is also just important to note that stress is in the brain as much as it is in the body. So you're working with both of these together. And sometimes the stress can come from the outside world. Like for instance, if you're running from a bear in the woods, well, that is a external thing that is happening to you that is causing you to be stressed physically and also psychologically. So you're not going to have to think about it. You're just going to go into stress, fight or flight. I need to get these heightened feelings, heightened thoughts, heightened perception to make sure that, fight or flight. I need to get these heightened feelings, heightened thoughts, heightened perception to make sure that I don't die. And so when this happens, the brain

sends distress signals to the adrenal glands, which then release adrenaline and cortisol into your body. And these hormones prepare your body for what's called fight or flight response. And so your heart rate increases, your muscles will tighten, your blood pressure rises, your senses become much, much sharper. And this basically increases your strength and your stamina. It speeds up your reaction time. It enhances your focus. And it basically prepares you to fight something, the stress or whatever it might be, or to flee from it. And so nowadays, what's interesting about it, though, is whatever I just described to

you very rarely actually happens. You don't run from a bear in the woods very often. You don't have somebody breaking into your house and tying you up every single day. Those are things that would be external stressors. Nowadays, most of our stress doesn't come from the external. It comes from inside of our minds. Something happens externally outside of us, but the way that we perceive it and react to it in our minds

is what actually causes it to be something that's stressful. So it's not necessarily what's happening outside of us is what I'm trying to say, but what we think about what is happening around us and outside of us. The way that we perceive a situation can determine whether or not it's a stressor. That's what's the interesting thing about it is you could take two people, have the exact same situation happen to them, and one of them can become stressed out about it. So it is now a stressor for them. And the other one does not become stressed out. So it's not a stressor for them. So for example, maybe speaking in public, for some people that can be absolutely terrifying. And for other people, it can be absolutely exhilarating and they love it. You know, I could give you a very simple

example. You could be sitting at your desk and you hear bing and you look at your computer and you see that your boss sent you an email. That can immediately send you into stress and nothing has actually happened outside of you. The email did not stress you out. What you thought about the email, the story that you made in your mind about what the email could mean and what could be happening in the future is what is actually stressing you out. Your mind has created something from seeing your boss's email pop up in your email box. And stress can basically manifest in many ways. It can manifest in anxiety, in irritability, in depression, in muscle tension, in fatigue, in raised heart rates, just to name a few, and many other ways it can show up. And it can lead us to feeling overwhelmed,

moody. It can lead you to being agitated. And so that's basically stress itself. Now let's take stress and let's put it into three different categories because there are three different types of stress. The first one is called eustress, which is basically aka the positive stress. Then this term was coined by endocrinologist Hans Selye and it's derived from the Greek prefix eu, which means good, and eustress is often short term and feels exciting. So eustress can be many different things. I'll give you a few examples. It could be riding on a roller coaster. It could be the rush after delivering a really great speech. It could be achieving a personal goal of yours. It could be working out. That puts stress in the body. It could be that heavy

lifting and the way that you feel after. It could be going for a the body. It could be that heavy lifting in the way that you feel after. It could be going for a long run. It could be challenges with growing a business. It could be many different things. And so this stress enhances your motivation, your focus, your energy. It's also followed usually by this feeling of accomplishment that adds to overall life satisfaction as well. And so what we want to do is try to create more eustress inside of our lives. How do we create more of it? Is we actively seek out discomfort, actively seek out things that will challenge us and get us out of our comfort zone. You feel eustress after you get out of your comfort zone and you do something new and you challenge yourself. And so what's recommended is that you challenge yourself often. Don't do the

same thing every freaking day. Even if you don't succeed when you do these challenges, it feels good to know that you actually tried and you did something new. When I had Dr. David Sinclair, who is the head of longevity at Harvard on my podcast years ago, he said, what doesn't kill you literally makes you stronger. And so that's a good example of like eustress is actively seeking out that discomfort, knowing that it will mentally, physically, emotionally make us stronger. And so very simple, just do new things. Your brain and your body respond positively when you go on new adventures and you try new things that you've never done before. And so that would be eustress. There's another type of stress that's called hypostress. And so hypostress is the stress of understimulation. It happens when you have too little stimulation or too little

challenge or activity. And it leads to this feeling of restlessness, of boredom, of lack of excitement. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. And so eustress is from stimulating yourself by doing new things and being different and challenging yourself. Hypostress is basically the exact opposite of that. It is not trying to do something different. It's not enough stimulation. It's the same thing every day over and over again. And I'm sure many of you listening have been there before.

I've definitely been here before where I have a job that doesn't fulfill me and I'm doing the same thing day in, day out, day in, day out. I remember my last job when last time I worked for somebody, I felt like I was like slowly withering away. And that would be the example of just, yeah, the feeling of just hypostress, just not even enough stress for your body. So if you've ever done something over and over and over again, every day looks like the last day, you start to feel like you're going crazy. Maybe a good example too, maybe you're in between two jobs and you have a month off in between. And so you don't have any plans. You're like, I'm just going to watch TV. And you watch TV and you eat some food and you do it Monday and then Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday by Thursday.

I'm going to go fucking crazy unless I do something different. You're going to start to feel like you're going crazy. This is an example of hypostress, which shows you that you actually want to get up and move and do something different and have some sort of challenge. We were built to be challenged and to grow from those challenges. So you can feel hypostress when it's just the same thing day in, day out for days and weeks and months and years. And if you've had the same job for seven years and you feel like you're just withering away, it's this lack of engaging stimuli. It's this lack of growth. It's like my very first manager at the sales company I worked at when I was 19 said, you're either green

and growing or you're brown and dying. Hypostress is that feeling of like, I'm brown and dying. So hypostress can be the most challenging out of all of these because it often goes unrecognized. It's not the intense, overwhelming feeling of being stressed. It's kind of like the subtle nagging sense of dissatisfaction, of restlessness. And it can happen at monotonous jobs or unchallenging routines or staying in the same patterns in a relationship that you've been in for years. Or it can be long periods of inactivity. And so the consequences of having this hypostress for too long, you can actually start to have decreased motivation and drive. Your creativity starts to go down. You start to feel kind of uneasy inside of your body.

You have lack of excitement for life. There's just this general sense of unhappiness. I remember when I was working the job that I really didn't want, the last one, and it was just the same thing day in, day out, every single day. It was this feeling of almost like as if the saturation of life had just been kind of turned down and everything was just like black and white instead of like vibrant. And so this can actually make people seek stimulation in unhealthy ways. So really risky behaviors like driving really fast, reckless, skydiving, trying to find some

sort of way to get their adrenaline pumping. They can go to also substance abuse, something that will make you feel alive again. You know, for me, I think this is what happened to me when I worked jobs that I hated was as soon as Friday came and I was off of work, it was time to rage all freaking weekend. And it was the only thing that made me feel alive again. I also think it probably had to do with the fact that I wanted to numb my feelings of the dread of having to go back to work again and do this job that I hated. But it was like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I felt like I was just like slowly withering away. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I was like, let's go because I need to feel some sort of aliveness. And so if you feel like you may be dealing with hypostress, do something

new. Stop doing the same shit every single day. You were meant to experience life. Like you are here on this earth to experience life. Do something new. Try new things. Create a bucket list. Plan a trip in two months to go somewhere. Work out more often. get moving, like try new hobbies, challenge yourself, get out of your comfort zone in some sort of way. And so that's really what the second one, hypostress, looks like. And then number three, the third form of stress is this type of stress that we all know, which is hyper stress. It's when stress tends to overwhelm you. And so hyper stress is too much stress, either day in, day out, really a whole lot of stress or in the mind as well. It's this feeling that maybe, maybe I'm being pushed beyond what I can handle in some sort of

way. And it leads to this overwhelming sense of stress. This is what most people think of when they think of stress. And physically, it can lead to being exhausted. It could be headaches. It could be muscle tension, many other type of ways. Many other type of ways it could show up in your body. Psychologically, it can lead to anxiety, irritability, depression, among many other things as well. And so hyper stress can lead to decreased productivity, too much worrying, burnout, not wanting to do anything because it's too much going on. You just want to shut off. It can be overthinking. It can be paralysis by analysis. And so it could be juggling really

high states deadlines at work. And you're also dealing with personal issues and you've got other stuff going on with your family in another state. It's this feeling of like you're being pulled in too many directions, and you really don't have the adequate resources, maybe externally or internally or both, to cope with being pulled in so many directions. Maybe it's not enough feeling of rest. It's too much at work, too much at school, it's financial problems, it's relationship conflicts, and they all stack on top of each other. And so when you look at this type of stress, let me give you some tools on how to manage hyper stress. Because a lot of people nowadays have hyper stress. And once again, it's not from usually what's happening externally outside of them. It's usually the response internally to what is happening outside of them. And so one thing that I recommend for people is learning to get it out of your head and onto a piece of paper. Learn to write it all down

and plan it all out as much as you possibly can. See if you can, you know, delegate it if it's at work. See if you can plan it out. If it's in your relationship, can you have an honest conversation? You have to realize that everything is figureoutable. And sometimes when you just take it out of your head and you put it onto a piece of paper, you start to be able to figure out what the next best thing is for you. So that's the first thing I recommend. The next best thing I recommend is to make what's called a stress journal. You can have a piece of paper that you're bringing with you. You can have a mini journal that you're bringing with you. You can do it on your phone in your notes tab if you want to. Whenever you feel stressed or overwhelmed,

write it down. And the reason why is because this simple act will start to make you more aware of what thoughts or situations or people make you stressed, which then helps you start to plan out how to avoid those things or how to change those thoughts or change the situation or not be around those people. And so really, a lot of times people are not aware of the situations or the people or the thoughts that make them stressed out. And so they don't know how to change it. They just feel the feelings of being stressed out. And so when you feel those feelings and you put them down, you start to notice some patterns within yourself. And as you notice those patterns, you can learn to plan or

to avoid certain situations. So that's number two is to make a stress journal. The third thing is to work on soothing yourself. I talk about it all of the time in the podcast. One of the best ways to do this is through breath work. You can also do it through meditation. One way that's really good that I recommend for people, I learned this a few years ago and I started doing it because I have a gym at my house is working out and in the breaks, the 60 second rest that you have in between sets, you get

yourself into a really high, you know, when you're working out, you're getting there, you're lifting really heavy. And then you have the 60 seconds of rest, put 60 seconds on your phone, close your eyes and try to calm your body as much as you possibly can. And then once you go back and your 60 seconds is up, lift again as hard as you can or run or sprint or whatever it is you're doing. And then when you're done with that set, put on 60 seconds. Again, you close your eyes and you breathe and you try to calm yourself down. And what you're doing is you're actually starting to train your brain and your body how to stress and de-stress and stress and de-stress. And it becomes a habit of something that you actually learn to do better once you find yourself

into a stressful situation. Another thing that really helps this as well is ice baths. Ice baths really help you learn how to calm down when your brain and body act like you're going to die. calm down when your brain and body act like you're going to die. And you can literally start to train yourself into calming down in really high stressful situations. So that's another way to help you out as well. That's number, what is that? Number three. Number four is to try bouncing and tapping, which is literally just like bouncing up and down, like for a minute, two minutes, just letting your shoulders fall and letting your entire body just kind of move. And tapping is where you can take your open hand or close fist and you hit every part of your body. So you start at your calves and you go up your calves, you go up to your legs, you go up to your hips, you go to your chest,

your arms, your back, anything that you can touch, give it some tapping. And it allows your body just kind of get rid of the the stress that's left inside of your body you know if i look at like my dog my dog when he is very excited or very stressed he does this yawn as if his jaw is about to detach from itself and he like shakes and it's just real quick and it's just a way for him to just release the extra energy. We as humans sometimes need to release the extra energy. And so bouncing and tapping can really help with that as well. And then the last one, which is one of my favorites as well, is humming. And so when you do a deep breath and you hum,

so you just... That humming, that movement inside of your throat stimulates the vagus nerve, which is a key part in turning on your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your calm nervous system, calm, rest, and restore. So if you do six deep breaths in through the nose, and then you hum as long as you can, in through the nose, you hum as long as you can, it will calm you down way faster than you can imagine. And so those are some ways to kind of deal with hyper stress. But really what I want you to understand is hyper stress, hypostress, eustress, none of them are bad. It's just you have to understand that there's different types of stress. You have to be able to now understand when each

type of stress pops up and also how to learn and grow from it and how to get yourself out of hyper stress whenever it becomes too much, how to get yourself out of hypostress when it becomes too much, and then put yourself into more eustress so that you have more fun and get out of your comfort zone a little bit more as well. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on the Instagram stories, tag me at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. Once again, if you want to get my ebook on how to dominate your New Year's resolutions goals, go to goals2025.com. Once again, goals with an S, 2025.com.

And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.