This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - 181 / Stress Less and Fear(Less) with Rebecca Heiss

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

I don’t think I’ve interacted with a single woman who isn’t experiencing stress at an uncomfortable and unhealthy level. I’ve become so used to being stressed that I’m not sure I even recognize it anymore. I need my Oura Ring to point it out for me, and I have taken HeyFreya’s stress test to get more insight into how my body is managing, or not managing my stress. I don’t think you or I were meant to live with this much stress! I’m joined by Dr. Rebecca Heiss, a stress physiologist who is dedicated to helping us overcome our instinctual limitations, so we can live with less stress and more happiness. Her research has been designated “transformative” by the National Science Foundation and it is waking up audiences around the world. As an author of the acclaimed book “Instinct” and a highly sought-after professional speaker, Rebecca has found her calling in helping others recognize the power of biological applications in their lives. Rebecca’s “fear(less)” message inspires hope and actionable insights to train our brains to work for us, rather than against us in times of change and uncertainty. Fear less. Not fearless. De-stress. Not distress. How about that? Like what you heard? Please rate and review  Rebecca’s Website: https://rebeccaheiss.com/  Fear(less) Adaptability Quiz: https://rebeccaheiss.com/self-awareness-tools/  Follow Rebecca on IG: @drrebeccaheiss  Thanks to our This Is Woman’s Work Sponsors: Visit  https://www.heyfreya.co/ and use promo code HEYWORK25 for 25% off the at-home stress test, Thrive multivitamins and other products - I use Thrive and Nourish daily! Head to https://ouraring.com/tiww - it has been the best wellness and self-discovery tool I’ve invested in. Instead of one-size-fits-all, it offers one-size-fits-YOU solutions and helps track your stress throughout the day (it also tracks your sleep, recovery, detects early signs of sickness, and can help predict your period)!

I am Nicole Kalil, and on this episode of This is Woman's Work, we're going to continue our conversation about a topic I believe we all know a lot about. You probably know it intimately, like I do, and yet somehow it's something we all know very little about, meaning it's something that we all experience but probably don't understand, or maybe that's just me. Today, we're going to talk about stress, again, and fear, and how being a woman impacts our stress and fear, and how our stress and fear impacts being a woman. We're gonna talk about being fearless and fearing less, how stress is hurting us,

how stress can actually help us. And we're gonna throw in a little bit about the Barbie movie just for fun. At least that's my plan going into this conversation, but we'll see where it takes us because I've let stress run the show too often in my life. So I'm not going to let it happen here. We're going to go wherever we go. And I'm going to trust that it'll

be exactly as it should be because my guest today is epically good. And I think we could cover stress and fear every week for a year on the show. And maybe we'd begin to scratch the surface. So here we go. Our guest, Dr. Rebecca Heiss, is a stressed physiologist who is dedicated to helping us overcome our instinctual limitations, the ancient, often subconscious fears that hold us back from our optimal performance and our happiest lives. Her research has been designated transformative by the National Science Foundation and is waking up audiences around the world. As an author of the acclaimed book, Instinct, founder and CEO of the Leadership 360 Review

mobile application, IQity, and highly sought after professional speaker, Rebecca has found her calling in helping others recognize the power of biological applications in their lives. Rebecca's fearless message inspires hope and actionable insights to train our brains to work for us rather than against us in times of change and uncertainty. Rebecca, thank you for being here. I want to first ask you where fear and stress overlap or intertwine, because I'm assuming they're different things, but they feel very linked. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thank you so much for having me, Nicole. I'm super excited to be here. You know, fear and stress are absolutely intertwined. I don't think you have fear without stress. And typically you're not stressing without some fear. Fear, I think I separate out fear as

the way our brain processes stress. Stress, I think of as the physiological response that our body is having to something that we are afraid of. So that's the kind of separation that I give them. I'm sure there's a more scientific definition, but that's how I like to think about it. No, that's great. And so that leads me beautifully into my next question is, how do we tell the difference between maybe the more biological fear, stress versus where fear and stress might be a mindset, a choice, a limitation or perception, like what we can't do anything about versus what we can do something about? That's a great question. So I typically talk about stress as three different

forms of stress. The first one I call automatic negative thoughts. Those are the things that exist in your head that like, you're going to be rejected. You're not enough. You're not worthy. You're going to fail. Those are automatic. They're ants, right? They're these creepy crawly ants that just invade our brain space. And we actually have more control over those than we recognize. And they're automatic. So, so here that first, right? That, that is happening automatically because it's something that kept our ancestors alive, but today is preventing you from fully living. So that's the first type of stress. The second one is something that's outside of our control. I call these kind of the daily, the daily deal breakers, right? It's the email, the flood of your inbox, the pings, the dings, the in-laws, the travel, the in-laws, the travel, my life, right? The kids, you know, it's, it's, it's all the things that you're juggling.

And then the third type of stress is that punctuated stress, the stuff that's not the day-to-day, but those phone calls that you get that really change your life or change the trajectory, the interrupters as it were. And those, those are the things that I, I think, you know, we can set aside and say, okay, there are some things that I have control over, the stories in my head, those automatic negative thoughts that, again, there's a lot of overlap between all of these stressors, but there are things't necessarily have control over, but we can control how we respond to them, right? Like the analogy I always give people is like, you're strapped into the roller coaster in life, right? You may not want to be going over that ledge. And it's like, no, no, no, not COVID. No, I don't want this. Or love me, love me, love me. Why doesn't that person love me? I don't get it. You're strapped in. You don't get to control the ride, but you

do get to control how you respond to it. You're strapped in. You don't get to control the ride, but you do get to control how you respond to it. And I think that's the essential piece that sometimes we miss. And the cool thing, I'm just going to jam her on for a second because I get really excited about this. The cool thing is hormonally, we're releasing the identical hormonal cocktail when we're under fear and stress and anxiety as we are when we are excited. So you think about like when you're really excited, your heart is pounding, you're sweating, your mouth dries up. You're like, ah, I can't wait. And when you're under stress, your heart is pounding, you're sweating, your mouth dries up. You're having the same physiological experience in the body.

The difference is how you're interpreting it. So that's a key factor in whether or not you're going to have an adventure or an ordeal throughout your days. So the automatic negative thoughts that we all have reminds me of one of my favorite quotes. It goes something like, you can't prevent a bird from flying over your head, but you can prevent it from building a nest in your hair. And it's that sort of like, yes, the negative thought, you can't prevent it. It's coming in. But what you do with it once it's there, how long you let it stay and take up space is the choice. And I love and I'm so glad that you said that. And it's really the same body response.

We're trying to teach our 10-year-old that, that your body doesn't, it's the same whether it's excited or nervous. So you get to decide what to do with that. Okay. Let's talk about how stress might be harming us. I want to talk about how it might be help or how we can use it to help us, but let's start first with how it might be harming us. Yeah. So this is kind of the old storybook of, you know, I can tell you a thousand ways that your stress is harming you. It's going to lower your immune system. So you're going to get sick more frequently.

It actually ages you faster. It shortens your telomeres. Those are the tips of your chromosomes that begin to unravel. So you're literally unraveling your very being through stress. You actually can have brain damage as a result of stress. So your IQ declines. There's all kinds of really nasty effects of stress. This is the most interesting thing I want to share with you, though, because, you know, I think we focus a lot on all of the distress, right, the bad stress.

But if you look at the stress performance curve, so think about, think about an upside down view or a normal curve. And if you have performance on the Y axis and stress on the X axis, if you have nothing to do, if you have no purpose in life, you have, you know, you're a trust fund baby, you don't have to get out of bed every day. Like you have nothing to do. You also have very little stress and very low performance. And you don't have a very meaningful life on the other end of the curve, right? If you're like distressed, like completely out of, out of whack, you're also going to have very low performance. And people say, well, how do I get to that middle part? And I think this is the key with a little bit of stress that you stress that good stress, you're actually getting to higher levels of performance.

People say, well, I would love that, but I spent all my time over here in the distress piece. I'm like, well, hang on, time out. Think about an Olympic athlete. Do you think they're under really tremendous pressure and stress? I would say they're all the way over on the furthest part of the curve. The difference is they've trained their brain that stress isn't necessarily bad. And what we see in all these incredible scientific studies is that that dip in the curve, that distress where all those negative health

things I was talking about happen, they don't have to happen. It's how we think about stress, not how stress is actually aligning in our body or how much we have of it. It's how we think about stress, not how stress is actually aligning in our body or how much we have of it. It's how we think about it. So I'll share one quick study, which is that we looked across a large swath of the United States and asked people, like, what brings purpose and meaning to your life? And the number one correlate was stress. I'm like, oh, we screwed this up. We did this wrong. We're not being very clear. Let's do it again. Stress, oh, we screwed this up. We did this wrong. We're not being very

clear. Let's do it again. Stress, again, it's the past events, the current amount of stress that you have in your life. And even the future anxiety and worry about stress was the number one correlate to a purposeful, meaningful life. So thinking about stress in a way of like, oh, this is meaningful to me. This must mean something to me. This is a barometer of how much this means to me rather than I'm going to fail, I'm going to screw up, I'm going to tell that story, actually shifts us into this adventure mindset rather than having all of those negative effects of the distress that I think we get into. Yeah. So that's interesting. As you were talking about the Olympic athlete, of course they have,

you know, high, high degrees, but I had that thought of, I wonder if they see it as part of the adventure or if it's excitement. So how might we begin to practice reframing our experience of stress so that it, you know, you gave some ideas there, having it give some insight into, oh, this matters to me, or this must be important. Any other, I don't know, tactical tips that we could- Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So I want to give you my T minus three technique. All right. T minus three, it's really simple. And this is based on a ton of data. So don't let that simplicity fool you. The first step in T-minus

three is actually to acknowledge the stress. I think so often we're like, we're trying to get rid of it or trying to not think about it. I want you to set a three minute timer and actually stress out of your gourd, write down all the things that are going to go wrong, allow your thoughts to spin out of control. And I say three minutes specifically for a reason. So our stress response is really built for three minutes of screaming a reason. So our stress response is really built for three minutes of screaming terror across the Savannah. That's it. That's what it's built for, right? You're getting chased by a tiger. And after those three minutes, you're dead or you've outrun the tiger one or the other. That's like, you've done it. You've survived. So I need you to

allow your body to go through that physiological moment of, of I'm being chased by a tiger, right? Stress out of your gourd for three minutes. And again, the reason that, that so often this fails is that people push it aside and they don't, they don't allow themselves to experience it. And so I'll ask your listeners right now, like, don't think about pink elephants. Of course, of course you're thinking about pink elephants when you try not to do it. Right.

So give yourself that three minutes. Okay. After those three minutes and I'll, I'll give you a little bonus bonus. If during those three minutes, you're, you're running, you're walking, you're moving your body because you're at a heightened physiological state. Your heart is already pounding elevated even more outrun the tiger as it were. Okay. After that step two, take two physiological size. Now a physiological size. I know everybody's like, Oh, just breathe. Right. That's the best advice you've got. And I'm like, yes. And people don't value it because it's free. So I am going to tell you, like, if you have to charge yourself to do it, to make it valuable, do it because physiological size are the number one thing

that we've found in the laboratory to reduce cortisol, your main stress hormone, instantaneously. So a physiological sigh is this. You're breathing through your nose as deeply as you can. When you get to a point where you can't take in any more oxygen, you're just going to sip in through your mouth. Those little extra bits to really, really fill up your lungs. You'll count one, two, and then release through your mouth. So I can go through exactly what that's doing physiologically if you want me to, but what you need to know is two of those. And I guarantee you, your listeners right now, if you do it, you're going to feel a shift in your body. It's pretty incredible. And then the third step, the final piece of T

minus three is to get curious, ask a question, any question. It doesn't even matter. I have a whole list of questions that I can give you to start, but it doesn't matter if you ask, like, I wonder why the ceiling is always painted white, right? Like that's a question. That's fine. What I'm asking you to get curious, why I'm asking you to get curious is that curiosity and fear cannot coexist. It is so important to recognize curiosity and fear cannot coexist. There is literally no, no brain mechanism that allows the two things to exist together. It's because when our brains were evolving, right? Nobody ever had a tiger charging at them and went, huh, I wonder, I wonder how fast it's coming.

It doesn't allow, your stress response won't allow for that to happen. So what this does is it allows you to kick yourself out of fear if you're just willing to pause momentarily and get curious. Hey, listeners, are you feeling overwhelmed by stress? I'm guessing the answer is yes, because, well, I don't know a woman who isn't. Hey Freya is just what we need. You can actually measure your stress with their easy to use at home stress test and manage it with their Thrive supplement. Thrive is more than just a multivitamin. It's packed with essential nutrients and powerful aptogens to support your stress response and overall wellbeing. It's made specifically for

women and I've been taking it for three months now and can feel and see a difference. Even Jay's noticed I've been less stressed. It's that obvious. It's time to thrive, not just survive. And here's a little something to get you started. Our exclusive promo code, HeyWork25, will get you 25% off your purchase. That's right, 25% off. Use the link in show notes to head over to Hey Freya's website and don't forget to use HEYWORK25 at checkout. Your journey to a stress-free life is just a click away. More on the topic of stress as we head back to the show. So my regular listeners know that I am obsessed with curiosity. Like it is one of those things that I undervalued for way too long in my life. And like I'm practicing it on a regular

basis. So I love everything about the T minus three, but that very specifically, I think is a good tactic. And I like that you said too, that it can be curiosity about anything. I think, especially as women, we think it needs to be big in order for it to count or meaningful. Like what's the purpose of life as opposed to like, why did I choose that pink color? So thank you for that. Yes. I mean, the first, the first question I always ask is, is it a tiger? Like, is this literally a life and death situation? Will I die if I make the wrong, no. Oh, okay. Because our brain is like, this is irreversible. You'll never be the same. Everything is reversible except for death. Like that's, that's the reality. So yeah, take some pressure off. Okay. I have to ask you about, you have on your website fearless, but that less is, so I interpret

that as the difference between fearless and fear less. Let's talk about that. Yeah, Nicole, you nailed it. I'm so glad that you picked up on that. So I'm not an advocate for being fearless. I think fear has a, yeah, it has a place. There's a reason to be scared when, you know, it's nighttime and you hear footsteps behind you. Like that is a good thing for your body to respond to that fear. Fearing less as I talk, like the parentheses around the left is about being calm, becoming conscious and cognitive of those fears. And to say, is this something I should be fearing? And I hate to use the word should even, but is this, is this a valid fear or is this one of

those automatic negative thoughts? Is this, I'm going to get rejected. Nobody will love me. I'm not, I'm not enough because those fears aren't valid. So my job as as I see it, is to help people fear less, but not ignore fear. Fear is important. Yeah. Yeah. I also think the messaging of fearless makes a lot of us feel like when we experience fear that there's something wrong with us. And we do that thing that you were saying earlier, where we just dismiss it or push it aside versus allowing us to experience it. Yeah. Okay. I have one more really practical practical tip on that. And that has been transformative in my own life. I, I, I use something called a disaster diary to help me manage some of these, these stressors. And when I have a big decision or I think something's going to go wrong, or I write down

in my diary, like how I ethically am going to fail. Right. And then I close it and I come back. I set a timer to come back the next day, the next week, the next month and the next year. And I just, I've left some space because one or one of three things happens either. It's an absolute disaster. It goes exactly as I, as I thought it would. It's awful. And I learned something, which is incredible. And then I can dictate like, oh, here's what I learned. And here's how I'm going to do it differently next time. And I didn't die. And none of the things that actually I thought people were going to judge me for that, you know, I learned that. Or nothing happens, right? Or it turns out better than I expected.

And all of those things help me build on that brain chatter that says, oh gosh, this is going to be a terrible, terrible thing. Because when I look back a year from now, I'm like, I can't even believe I was stressed about that. I'm sorry. Anyway, yeah. What I love about that is it begins to have us think about that voice in our head as a perspective, as opposed to the truth. And I think that so often we interact with, I call it our head trash, but we

interact with it as if it's, you know, our inner knowing or some sort of truth teller and how often that's not the case. And when, what I like about a practice like that, I'm definitely going to start doing myself is it gives you evidence of, okay, it was just a perspective. It was just a voice in my head. It was just the worst case scenario that my brain defaults to, but it's not the truth. It's not the be all end all. Yeah. I actually named that voice and I'm sorry for any of your listeners. I have any loved ones by this name, but I named him Chad and Chad is my protector. Like he's, he's super nervous about everything. He's kind of miserable.

I'm like, Chad, thank you. Okay. I appreciate you, Chad. I actually, I pat myself on the head of your listeners. I can't see this. I'm ridiculous. I pat myself on my head. I'm like, thank you, Chad.

I hear you. I know you're trying to protect me. This is not what I need right now. And just being able to have that conversation with your fear or your chat or your negative answer or whatever, I hate those terms, but pick a voice, pick a name because then it is just a perspective. It's not you. It's not a deep knowing. Yeah. I love that. I think I would have to pick Dick, short for Richard, for my voice because sometimes it's Richard and it's protecting me. And sometimes it's just a dick. Just a dick. Yeah. I hear you. I hear you. I have to ask,

are there any biological or sociological differences around how women experience stress or what triggers it or versus any of the other genders? I'm so glad that you, I'm so glad you asked this question because it is a really important one. And the reality is we're still really far behind on how, on the research on how women respond to stress because it wasn't until 1990 that we actually started looking at women in research, like in the stress research, which drives me absolutely insane. We only looked at male responses because that's who we're experimenting on. And so we assumed that everything was fine for all of the genders. This is just how everybody responds. No, incorrect. Turns out women respond to stress 70% of the time with a freeze response.

So we've heard about fight flight. A lot of people haven't even heard of freeze and freeze physiologically. You know, it looks often like this, just, you know, sitting completely still. And there's a whole spectrum of, of how, of how the freeze response occurs in, in women. And it occurs in men too, but predominantly women. And what ends up happening is you can get completely immobile in your body. You can't move, or you can't speak, or you can speak and you can move, but it's a, it's tends to be a 10 and befriend response where you smile. Um, and this is incredibly dangerous and incredibly important to understand that this is physiological. You actually are not controlling this. It is your brain's evolved tendency to escape a dangerous situation. And when we think

about this and we put this in the context of evolution and behavior, it makes a lot of sense. Like women, and I'm not trying to insult us, but like we tend to be physically less dominant. So fighting their way out of a, out of a predator situation, not ideal. We tend to be not as fast, especially as men. Right. Um, so running away, probably not a great option. So what's the best way to survive, for example, a sexual assault? Well, try not to die. And that can look like a freeze or a smile. And, and unfortunately what ends up happening in a lot of, I'll just use sexual assault as an example. A lot of these cases, women are freezing. They don't understand why they didn't. Cause they've only been trained to punch, to kick, to fight, to scream. And they're like, why didn't

I, I don't understand why I didn't. And then they have this secondary victimization of themselves by themselves, which is which is a real shame. And we're not training men to understand what a freeze response looks like. And so a woman may smile and nod and that's consent. And that's a big problem. So sorry, I didn't mean to go off down that tangent, but I think it's so important to understand. It's so important to understand. We just did last week an episode on menopause and stress. And similarly, it's like there's so little or long standing research being done. And a lot of it is new and it's, it's to your point, if we're not aware of it, then we, as women, when we experienced it, don't understand it and, and go into blame

often or shame and men or other genders aren't understanding how to interpret. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, it is wild. And especially in this case, men are, men are designed by evolution to be sexually over perceivers. So they think women are into them a lot more than they are. So in this case, you know, a woman who's frozen and smiling, that's, that's a really, that's setting, that's setting all genders up for disaster. So I think the more we talk about it, and especially the more we talk about it as women to release ourselves of that blame, shame, guilt, this is normal. This is normal. And it's sad that that's our response, but it's normal. So allow yourself that grace. Okay. I want to ask something. I'm not sure I'm going to word this

very well or frame it, but it's something around, you know, when we talked about stress being a contributor to your productivity and meaningful work and all of that, I do think there's an element that maybe it's more of a woman thing where we say yes to things that we don't really want to be saying yes to, and we commit to things or whatever. And that triggers stress, but I'm not really sure how to reframe that as like a good thing. Any thoughts or tips? Yeah. Yeah. My thoughts or tips are before the stress. Actually, maybe the way to think about this is first of all, I'll say no is a complete sentence. You do not need to justify or, you know, explain why no, no is no, no, sorry. No, thanks. Thank you. Not even sorry. Just thank you. No, I have other obligations.

I I'm a big fan of Jomo, which is the joy of missing out rather than FOMO. Oh my gosh. Well, yeah. Sign me up for that. I would like to be treasurer or vice president or whatever, because that is FOMO club. Yeah. Because the reality is either you're experiencing a stressor now or you're experiencing a stressor later. And so that's the thing that we have to keep in mind is like, I'm going to experience the stress of saying no right now, which is, which is stressful, especially for women, because we somehow, and again, this is a lot of cultural conditioning as well as biological conditioning. We feel like we have to serve everybody all the time and be people pleasers. And so it can be very stressful to say, no, this isn't an alignment. However, if you do not say no, then

you're going to add stress later on. So it's a, it's a either now or later. I often will ask myself, is future Rebecca going to be happy with this decision? Because if I would not say yes, right now to doing this thing immediately, I'm not going to feel good about it a week from now when it's scheduled. So it's a, it's a, thanks so much for your consideration. That means a lot. I appreciate that you, you consider me for this opportunity. I just, I can't take anything I'm more on now. Thanks. Yeah. I feel like it's this, okay. If I'm experiencing stress, but I can turn it and see how it's excitement and anticipation and adventure, then that's awesome. But if my stress

very quickly is tied to resentment, then that's probably the biggest sign I should have said no, no. And again, think about it. If, if this is going to be exciting for somebody else, you're actually, you're doing a favor to somebody else to open this opportunity for them when you say no. So I think, you know, consider that possibility as well. Great, great perspective and reminder. Okay. I cannot let you go without talking about the Barbie movie. And I know it might not totally be related to our topic today.

It totally is. Okay. I'm going to just share my opinion and, and, and I'm open to whatever yours is. I didn't really love the movie. I wanted to like it. Everybody told me I was going to like it. It had moments. There were a couple moments where I was like, okay, yeah. And then the rest of it, I just really did not like, okay. So now your perspective. Okay. So I don't want to, I mean, we can, we can do an entire podcast on this. So I do want to understand more about like what parts you, you didn't like. Here was the thing. I, I came home and I was like, that was cute. Like that was okay. They,

they hit some things and, and like, yeah, there was some, there were some moments, but over the course of a couple of days, here's what began bothering me. It was the Kens. So the Kens had no power. And I'm not talking about the traditional power that we typically recognize, the deep friendships, the connectedness, the hallmarks of feminine power. There was none, right? They're flaccid. They're completely flaccid. I'm all friends of everything, well, for the Kens. And so to me, I was like, oh my gosh, is this, this isn't a celebration of feminine power. This is a celebration of masculine power, which is fine. Like we should, we should cheerlead women into positions of all gender power, but we haven't done the same. If we haven't done the same for the Kens, if we haven't cheerleaded men into positions of feminine power and recognizing the value and worth of hair taking and tending and befriending

community and like these traditional feminine roles that undercuts everybody so I don't know to me I I had some I had some deeper issues with the with the Barbie movie but um yeah that was my take I love your take and I'm gonna sit with that a little bit longer because I don't know that I've really thought what much thought into or like how to articulate my feelings I just I remember thinking I often say I don't advocate for women at the expense of men and I'm not advocating for the feminine at the expense of the masculine it's that and there was something in the movie that didn't jive with that commitment that I had. So that was it for me. It was like, okay, well, you can switch the biological sexes,

but then you've just switched the biological sexes. This isn't, it was power to me was the problem there. And just, yeah, so we can dive deeper. I actually just gave a 10 X on, on exactly that. So that's coming out in the next few months. I saw that you did that. And I was like, oh, I need to ask her. I know it's not totally on, but it ended up being kind of on topic. So, okay. Um, if you are listening, you absolutely need to connect with Rebecca, go to Rebecca heist.com. She has a fear less adaptability quiz to see if your stress mindset might be holding

you back on her website. I highly encourage you take that. We'll put it in show notes. Rebecca, thank you so much for being here today. This was a joy. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Okay. I'm going to wrap up our time together by acknowledging that I don't think I've interacted with a single woman or maybe even a single person, but I mostly talk to women. So I'm gonna stick with what I know that isn't experiencing stress at an uncomfortable or unhealthy level. I've become so used to being stressed

that I'm not sure I even recognize it anymore. I need my aura ring to point it out for me. And I've ordered, hey, Freya's stress test and I'm definitely doing Rebecca's adaptability quiz to get more insight into how my body is managing or not managing my stress. I've dropped the links of all of those products and recommendations in show notes if anyone else is interested.

But because like so many things, stress can be a strength and can be used for good. But when taken too far, it can become our biggest obstacle and barrier. It can literally kill you. And I don't think you or I were meant to live like this. I don't believe overburdened, overwhelmed, anxious, irritable, and afraid should be part of our everyday experience. Fearless, not fearless. De-stress, not distress.

Because that is woman's work.