Ted Talk 176: How Stress Is Stopping You From Living The Life You Are Meant To Live (And What To Do About It)

Podcast Transcription: How Stress Is Stopping You From Living The Life You Are Meant To Live (And What To Do About It)

Ted Ryce: Welcome back to another episode of the Legendary Life podcast and welcome to another installment of Real Talk Friday. Now, today is going to be something that can literally change your experience of life. Now, I talked about a subject recently where I claimed this, and today we're talking about another super important concept, that goes way beyond theory. This gets right down to how we experience life and more importantly, well, equally importantly, how we go about achieving our goals, whatever those goals may be. 

If you are listening in for the first time, welcome! What we do here is we break down science-based information on how to prevent disease, lose fat and live a longer legendary life. On Real Talk Fridays, we have more of a conversation and that's what today's going to be about. Although I will have a more science-based episode on today's topic, I just wanted to share this with you because it's been something that is on my mind a lot. 

It's also something that again, if we can wrap our heads around this concept and more importantly, put it into action in our daily life, we're going to get more out of life. We're going to be more present with our loved ones. We're going to be more capable of handling the ups and downs that are inevitable in everyone's life.

What are we talking about here? We're talking about stress. Now here's the thing. People pay lip service to stress and stress management. People will tell you, in fact, I've been guilty of this too. Hey, you got to manage your stress, but what the hell does that even mean? What is stress? Why is it such a big deal? Why should you care? 

Now what I want to tell you from being in the business of helping people get in better shape for 23 years now, we're almost 23 years now, is that I see most people's problems as a stress management issue. Has very little to do. I mean, do you really need someone to tell you that you're eating too much or that you eat too much junk or that you drink too much alcohol or any of the other things that you do that you know you just shouldn't be doing them?

You should be doing other things. You should not be scrolling away on your phone. You should be taking care of the things that you need to take care of. You shouldn't be binge watching those Netflix or like me right now I'm watching Apple TV, “For all Man Kind”, the second season, incredible show. 

But you know you should go to bed and that, you know, if you stay up watching the series, just because you're so engaged in the moment, that when you wake up in the morning, you're not going to be as effective, but it feels really good to do these things. It feels really good to scroll on this social media, at least when you're doing it.

You're like, oh yeah, that was great. Or maybe it doesn't feel so great, but you feel compelled to do it. What I want to tell you is this, it comes down to managing stress. Let's talk about this a little bit. What is stress to begin with? Well, we're going to talk about your autonomic nervous system a little bit. 

Again, this is going to be more of a conversation and less of a scientific breakdown episode where I really talk about this stuff in depth. I mentioned studies, but first thing you should know is this stressor can be real or imaginary. What's a real stressor? Well, let's say that you're driving. Because most of us are back driving. Someone runs out in front of your car and you've got to slam on your brakes to hit them. 

You're all freaked out. “Oh my God! I nearly hit that person! They're crazy. What's wrong with you? Get out of the road!”, all those thoughts that come up, your muscles are tense. Your blood pressure spikes, your heart rate spikes, your eyes widen, your pupils narrow. That's the stress response.

But human beings, we have something special compared to animals or other animals and that we can stress out about, oh, am I going to be able to pay? I can't believe I've taken out this 30 year mortgage. Will I be able to pay it off? How can I sustain this for 30 years? Oh my gosh, what's going on with COVID, is the world going to fall apart?

We get stressed by ruminating. It's really important to understand stressors. We can have stressors that are real. There's also other things, like if you over exercise, that's the stress.

There's stressors that are real and they're stressors that are imaginary, and humans are unique in this way where we can imagine ourselves into a stressful state. On top of imagining it too, we can also watch shows for example, something that's really hot right now. I don't know if you've noticed this. If you watch as much Netflix and Amazon or Prime video, and can't say this about Disney, they're pretty good with managing their content as being more family oriented.

But a lot of other streaming services. Like for example, there's a show on Netflix called The Serpent. If you've been listening for a while, you know that I lived in Bangkok. I lived in Thailand. I lived Poo Kat and Chiang Mai and Bangkok. I lived there for over 500 days, nearly two years.

I spent two years in Southeast Asia. The majority of that time in Thailand, because the food's amazing. The massages are amazing. I trained Thai boxing which it was just a super comfortable place compared to other places. I haven't been there in a while. You know, it's been the quarantine and everything. I saw this show, actually someone told me about it.

I started watching it and it's about some sick dude in, I think the seventies, I don't even remember, because I stopped watching the series very quickly, but he was living in Bangkok and he was drugging and murdering people. I wanted so bad to watch this show because it reminded me of Thailand.

But as I was watching it and how he would lure people, and this is just in the first episode, I didn't even finish the first episode. It raised my stress levels because I don't want to see people drugging and getting drugged and murdered. But it's a super hot thing. Now, in fact, it's so cheap. It's like cheap meaning, you know, I think a comedy is really hard to write, a really good comedy, like Horrible Bosses. The first one at least was super funny. It's really hard. It's really rare to get movies that make you laugh. You know what I mean? Or series that make you laugh, but it's so easy. 

You just tell a terrible story about kidnapping or murdering and terrible stuff. Mexican cartels, whatever. It's just easy because it just naturally just hits us right in the negativity bias in our brains. Why am I saying that? Well, murder documentaries and murder series are really hot right now. We can cause stress or watching politics and we can cause ourselves stress. Now here's what I want to shift to.

How do these stressors, what do they do? How do they get inside us? How does the outside get inside? Well, we have what's called an autonomic nervous system. You probably know it as your fight or flight system, and that's only one fight or flight response, and it's really fight, flight or freeze. That's only one side. 

There's also the rest and digest side. We have two sides to this nervous system of ours. This is the nervous system that kind of trains us how to conduct ourselves through life. Sorry, I'm stumbling over my tongue here, as I try to speak English, I've been in Brazil so long speaking Portuguese, or at least learning, doing my best to speak Portuguese.

We have this autonomic nervous system, this fight, flight or freeze response, and it gets trained. How does it get trained? Well, childhood, if you have experienced abuse, if you were five years or younger, according to the research, you have a more triggerable stress response. 

That makes sense, trains you for the environment. If you grew up being physically abused or even worse, sexually abused, guess what? You need to kind of be on edge to protect yourself. Does that resonate with anyone? Where if you grew up in poverty, I mean, people don't get it.

It's like some of the people who are in United States who really struggle, who grew up in poverty. We know the situation in the United States, a lot of people in poverty, immigrants, African-Americans because of the history of the country. They're running around, people who grew up in poverty.

Again, this doesn't have to do with skin color per se. Although, you know, we can talk about the people who mostly grew up in poverty in the United States. But anybody who grows up in poverty in a dangerous neighborhood, you're going to be more on edge. Why? Because you live in a violent place, you gotta be ready. You gotta have that hair trigger.

I can't think of the expression right now, but you gotta be ready to spring into action quick. The world is not a safe place for you. Same thing with a kid who is abused, regardless of any sort of social inequality, if you've been abused, it doesn't matter, if you grew up in a rich home, upper middle-class home. 

Another thing is that we go through events in our life that cause post-traumatic stress. My brother was murdered. I did have abuse actually under the age of five. I'm a little bit more triggerable. I've had to work harder to deal with stressors in my life. I haven't worked as hard as I probably could have because stress gets to me more easily. Also, although I didn't grow up in poverty, I grew up in a upper middle class income.

Both of my parents were attorneys. There were both alcoholics. They were both neglectful. Stepmother was sometimes abusive. There was constant stress from that. Then my brother was murdered when he was nine years old. The part that I'm talking about here is that you grow up and you can have a traumatic event. 

People go to war. Very interesting, by the way, who develops post-traumatic stress syndrome and who does it? Two men go to war, or women these days, right? Whatever. But we'll just stick with the men analogy. Two men go to war, both come back one has PTSD, the other one doesn't. Why? Well, they found that childhood abuse predisposes you to having PTSD. Why am I telling you this right now, in case you're wondering, you're like, what is this talk about?

I didn't go to war. I wasn't abused when I was five. I did grow up a bit tough.” But listen, what I'm trying to say, regardless of whether these exact situations matter for you - by the way, I think abuse is much more common than so many of us want to admit to, or talk about, child abuse specifically. Because a lot of our parents called it a discipline, gotta beat your kids. 

I didn't deal with that one thankfully, but got to discipline them, discipline the kids. Some of you might be like, well, you know, my parents love me. They hit me. But it wasn't really child abuse. Look what it all comes down to is this. You go through events and they sensitize your nervous system. The more sensitive your nervous system is, the more you're going to be inclined towards behaviors that soothe your nervous system.

Why do you think people do drugs? You think it's just because they like cocaine so much, or like heroin so much, or like alcohol so much? No. We're all trying to do things, to calm ourselves, to make ourselves feel happy or sometimes not to make ourselves feel happy, but to get rid of negative experiences, negative feelings, not negative experiences, feelings, let's say negative feelings. 

What does alcohol even do? It adjusts your brain chemistry. You feel stressed. Long day at work. You have a drink. Is it because you love the taste of wine or scotch so much? I'm one of the few people who actually likes the taste of alcohol, but doesn't drink it. Because I don't like the effects, but I like marijuana instead.

That works with my brain chemistry better. Anyway, the point is this, if you are drinking alcohol regularly, if you are smoking marijuana or doing any other type of drugs regularly, what you're really doing is you're shifting your brain chemistry. And it's caused by stress. 

Let's get to the most abused. I'm saying this tongue in cheek right now, but the most abused anxiety, drug: food. Now I'm kind of kidding. There's quite a bit of a controversy in the scientific circles as to whether food addiction and drug addiction really are that similar.

 But of course, people get addicted to sex. People get addicted to gambling. Those don't involve any exogenous substances. The point is this, my friends. We all have things that we want to accomplish in life. Maybe it's have a family, make money, get in better health, maybe all three, maybe just two, most of us want all three. 

We want financial freedom. Be able to go do the things that we want to do. We want good relationships with our family, with our friends, with our partner, with our children, we all want to be in good health and it takes work to have good quality relationships. It takes work to have good health. It takes work to be successful in your career. We put effort into these things and for most of us we're only good at maybe one of them. Some of us aren't good in any unfortunately. That's terrible.

I don't mean it's terrible like I'm pointing the finger at you and say, you're terrible. I'm saying how sad, how unfortunate. I would say if you're in that position it's because of stress. It's because of what you've been through. It's because one of the things, we talk a good game about the government or at least a lot of people talk a big game about the government, and how they're just a big mess.

One of the worst failings of school besides taking out Phys Ed. I don't know what the state is. I do not have kids. I don't know what this state is of public schools, but I've been told Phys Ed is not mandatory, like it used to be, and you don't have like the other things like art or music. I grew up in music class.

We don't have those things for our kids. Even when we did, we didn't have a course on like, hey, this is how you manage your emotions. This is how you manage your stress. Because that's what we're really talking about. How do you manage emotions? Do you see how many people are just flying off the handle? How many people are upset at the political situation or upset at the coronavirus situation?

They think people should be doing something differently and we're all in the same boat. We're all a mess. It doesn't matter. From the person on the street to the president of the United States, whoever that person might be at the time, just all a mess, all trying to figure out the best way to live our lives, all trying to manage our emotions and do the right thing and all struggling to make it happen.

Have I painted enough of a picture here? The question is, okay, well, what do we do with this information? If stress is so important, if understanding…, if all these factors contribute to our experience of life and our happiness in life, how do we go about, what do we do with this information? That's something I've been thinking about a lot. The first thing I want to say is, you gotta be aware of it. I mean, I've interacted with some people on social media and it was so obvious that they were super triggered, super angry. It's hard to talk to them. 

They got mad at something I said. They felt attacked by something I said, like I was saying it to them personally. I've been that person too. I got triggered online and started an argument. Can't think about the situation, but I'm guilty of it too. I think most of us are. Many of us, whether we have social media accounts or not, we're struggling to do the things that we need to do. Stress knocks us out of our game, folks.

What does stress do? Again, this comes back to, you gotta be aware of it. Stress makes your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that has all the goals, your identity. For example, I'm Ted. I run a coaching business. I've got a podcast. I help people with their health. I've got big goals for my business. I want to help more people. We're at a hundred thousand downloads per month. I want to hit a million downloads. Not just hit the number, but I really want to make an impact. I've got all these goals.

I want to help more people. I've got specifics that I want to do, but that's the overall, you know, without going into detail, I want to help more people. That's the prefrontal cortex talking. Then we have, our amygdala, the source of our threat detection system. It's not the source of our stress, but it's the threat detection system in our brain.

You've probably heard of it. The amygdala it's super popular to talk about. What happens when the stress comes on? Well, knocks out your prefrontal cortex. In other words, all those things, regulating your emotions, where does that ability sit in your brain prefrontal cortex? I believe it's the lateral prefrontal cortex. What about your goals? Which one to accomplish? Lateral prefrontal cortex.

What happens when the stress gets too high? Knocks out the prefrontal cortex, more activation in the amygdala, more triggerable, more likely to reach for food or alcohol or whatever other substance or whatever other behavior, porn, sex, gambling. The substances or behaviors are important, but it has more to do with this internal thing, the internal drive, the compulsive behavior.

What are you taking away from this conversation right now, as it applies to you? How often do you get knocked out? I'll tell you recently, I'm an another place right now because I was staying in an Airbnb and the dude didn't pay his power bill.

I was staying in a luxury hotel. The second best hotel in Brasilia. First best hotel is on the same property. This one, he didn't pay his power bill. Power went out, still can't go back. Well, I mean, unless I want to not have power. Had to get another room. I still have stuff to do. Luckily, I'm a mature enough to say, hey, listen, I'm really kind of struggling here. I'm a little bit off, but you know what? My life is pretty good. I love what I do. I've got money in the bank. I'm safe in that way. I just joined a coaching program. That's going to help me even grow more. A business coaching program specifically for people like me, who we're in the fitness business. 

I've got a lot of things going. I've got to get over this. I'm just feeling a bit low right now because having a setback and also because of my history. It's a little easier to throw me off my game, stress wise, because I've had what many would call a tough life, but it was hard. Didn't come that naturally, it took work. 

I had to go to the gym. I had to do some self-talk and here I am finally recording this episode, which is one of the things that I've got to do today. It's not to make excuses to say, hey, listen, I've had a really hard life. If I don't do my work on time, that's the reason. If you have a boss, probably isn't going to like that so much, probably not going to have a lot of sympathy or empathy for you. 

Well, they may have empathy. Maybe because so many people go through this, and have gone through a lot in their lives and they just don't talk about it. But the point is we've got to understand ourselves, we got to know ourselves, we got to see our patterns. We all work in patterns.

What are the patterns that you have with stress? What are the things that trigger you to eat or to do that behavior that you wish you could stop, but it keeps coming back? You know, it's interesting. Just one more point here. Then I want to shift gears a little bit. Most of what I study to help my clients comes from the addiction literature. Things like the transtheoretical model or stages of change model. How habits of ours are laid down in our brains.

Habits aren't just like, oh, I've got a nervous habit, I bite my nails or I smoke cigarettes or whatever, twiddle my thumbs or my leg kind of goes up and down. My leg fidgets when I'm nervous. It can also be how we respond to triggering events. Another idea, because I'm doing a course right now in cognitive behavioral therapy going through course to understand it better.

Because behavioral medicine, that's what I'm most interested in. People are still arguing about carbs and talking about biohacking. That is so superficial for me now. It's important. I didn't say it's not important. How many calories you eat. How many times do you exercise per week.  All that stuff's important. The sleep, hygiene, all that stuff is important.

But when dealing with clients, the number one thing besides teaching them to do, is a behavior change. I'm doing this course in CBT and they mentioned different things and it's really heavily influenced by health and healthy behaviors.

But one of the things, that was interesting is that he was talking about the person, Jason Satterfield, by the way, it's called cognitive behavioural therapy. It's one of the great courses. If you're interested in checking it out, probably most of you are gonna find it a bit too dry and boring. But for me doing what I do, it's just, I'm fascinated, but he talks about overcoming trauma. 

One of the things they talk about, or he talks about, Dr. Jason Satterfield, is he talks about how one of the ways you can tell someone's getting better with what they'd been through, the traumatic events that they've been through, whether that was something in their childhood or something more recent, is can they tell the story or can they be exposed to things that remind them of that trauma and still maintain emotional composure or not?

If you can, it's okay. But it just means you've got more healing to do, more work to do. I'll give you a real concrete example here. I used to, when I was in my twenties, I remember watching a movie. My brother was kidnapped and murdered was big news in Miami. It was a movie, right? It was made into true crime stories, several different ones. 

When I used to watch movies, in my twenties that talked about kidnapping a child and killing them, it used to fuck really me up. I was angry. I wanted to go to drink alcohol. Actually, I wanted to smoke weed afterward and maybe drink too. Because I did drink a bit more in those days or maybe both.

I wanted to do something or maybe go work out. But that workout, even if I chose that thing to do that was healthier. Exercise is better than smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol in terms of health benefits. But I would do it with such an intensity that was too stressful. It was damaging me. In fact, I got a lot of injuries from it that time. 

Fast forward to now where I've done a lot of emotional work on myself, I've dealt with a lot more than I used to. I can watch a movie like that, although I probably wouldn't choose to do it. I'm less triggered by it. In fact, if it does make me cry, I look at it as a cathartic experience instead of being re-traumatized by the movie. Does that make sense? I can cry about it. I can think about my situation and cry and get out some of emotions.

Awareness is key here. Because if we want to change your behavior, if we want to change ourselves, it starts with awareness. It starts with realizing that we're not in some chaotic mess of a life, that there are patterns here that get repeated over and over and over. But humans are creatures of habit. If you feel like you don't have them, it's just because you're not paying enough attention. 

What are those patterns? What do you have awareness of right now? What could you get even greater awareness about? What would be an aspect of your life that you could get greater awareness about, that would help you move forward and achieve what you want? Awareness, that is the key. Let's talk about the second key here. there's a great book. One that I've talked about before it's called The Body Keeps the Score.

The idea here, again, kind of like, like I've already stated at the beginning of this episode is we go through things in life, our body keeps the score. Our body keeps tabs. What did you go through when you were a kid? When you were a young child? What else did you go through in life? Your body keeps the score. It has memories. Those memories affect your nervous system. 

`For example, what did you eat two weeks ago for dinner? Can you remember, but where were you when 9/11 happened? If you're American. Even if you're not American, you may even remember 9/11. I don't know about you, but I remember exactly what I did. I remember going to work. I remember getting to my first client, I remember sitting down and watching TV with them instead of training them. I remember leaving and driving to a friend's house, listening to Howard S`tern on the radio. I remember that in vivid detail and I could keep going.

I'm sure you do too. How is it that you can't remember what you did two weeks ago? Ate for dinner two weeks ago, but you remember 9/11, so well, what you did and where you were. I bet you, if you were in New York at the time or lived in New York at the time, or had family in New York, you remember it even more. That's an example how our body keeps score.

Thankfully it keeps score of the good things too, but those bad things because of the inherent negativity bias in our brains, that probably really saved our asses and prehistorical times or in historical times too I'm sure. The more dangerous times we think we're living in such dangerous times in the US. It's really not. Seems dangerous because are shoved in our face via social media, a few seconds after it happens, someone posts a video of it out of context, you think it's real dangerous.

But in the past, people used to die by violence a lot. Anyway, our body remembers. Our bodies keep score and it's in our nervous system. It's in our brains, it's in our nervous system. What's the answer then? We'll talk therapy is what a lot of people will say, right? Well, you go to therapy to help deal with this. Certainly that is something important, but that is what you would call a top-down approach or what, maybe not you, but cognitive, I don't even think cognitive, actually neuroscientists would use top-down versus bottom-up, top-down approach. 

Let's talk about it. Let's talk about the feelings. Let's talk about what happened. Let's talk about our cognitions, our thoughts, our beliefs around what happened, and let's maybe do some cognitive restructuring to test our beliefs, to see if our beliefs are really rooted in reality or rooted more in fear and are in our experience instead of in fact, and that's important, it can help.

 I've been in therapy for a while now, but what's even equally, if not more important is that we have corrective emotional experiences. Have you ever tried affirmations? You know, what's interesting about affirmations? Because it's something that's very popular in the self-help world. Affirmations. 

Oh, you're amazing. You're rich. You're going to be rich. You have amazing relationships. You can do all this self-talk right. People talk a good game about mindset, about affirmations, about self-talk, but it doesn't really work so well if you haven't noticed. In fact, they've done some research with affirmations and it's shown that only people with high self-esteem actually benefit from doing self-affirmations, positive self-affirmations. The people who struggle more with self-esteem, in other words, the people who really need help it doesn't work for them. Because they don't believe it. if you fit in that category, what do you do?

Well, again, you can do some work with a therapist, cognitive behavioral therapy, or there's acceptance and commitment therapy. There's a bunch of different styles of therapy. They're helpful. But one thing that Bessel van der Kolk, he's Dutch and his name is tough to say, he's the author of The Body Keeps the Score. He talks about how corrective experiences.

For example, you may have feelings of rage, of helplessness, of sadness from what you've been through in life. It makes you more on edge. Maybe you get more angry when you're triggered. Maybe you get sad when you're triggered or maybe you're like me. I can go either way. What he was saying is you need more experiences in your life to counteract those experiences. 

For example, if you have feelings of helplessness going in doing something like lifting weights and getting strong and lifting weights, or maybe doing a power lifting competition or doing a martial art that can really do a lot for you. In fact,  I was physically and emotionally abused by mentally ill mother when I was under five years old, three or four. One of the things that's really helped me is doing martial arts. Now for you, maybe it's something different. I don't know. But what I'm telling you is, the things that we, and I would even suggest this to you, the things that you're afraid of in life, that's the therapy. 

Being comfortable with those things or forcing yourself to go through the discomfort, to get comfortable with those things. That's the therapy. For example, you're definitely afraid of heights. For a lot of people when I shared that I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane to do skydiving, the cliche jumped out of perfectly good airplane. People are oh my God, I would never do that. 

Well, why wouldn't you do it? You get in your car. You're afraid you're going to die? You get in your car and you drive, don't you? That's the most dangerous thing most of us do. You don't think twice of it, or if you're overweight or obese and you got heart disease in your family, or diabetes in your family, you don't think about that so much. 

Doesn't freak you out. You still are stuffing your face with the things that you shouldn't. You're not exercising enough. It doesn't freak you out that much. Even though, you know, you should change, but you won't jump out of a plane or do something else that's scares you. The point is this, there is no getting around the work.

One of the most powerful things that you can do or seek out those things that you're afraid of. Some of us, it's not you know, I've done scuba diving with sharks, with bull sharks. I've jumped out of planes. I've done some cavern diving, but sometimes it's just like trusting another person or having a conversation and being vulnerable with a person. 

That's the uncomfortable thing that you need to do. Trusting a person. So many people are afraid of doing that. A lot of emotionally damaged people out there so I understand, but it's not everyone. It's people you can trust. There's good people in this world. A lot of them people. For some of us that doesn't have to do with like, oh, fighting and doing martial arts or anything like that. It's maybe accepting touch. I remember I had a client, I suggested her getting a massage. She was like, oh, I hate it when people touch me.

You hate it when people touch you? What is that? It feels amazing when people touch you. Like a skilled massage therapist? You hate it when that happens? That's a sign for growth folks. I want you to think about this.

What was your big takeaway from today's episode? What did you get out of it? What will you do differently? What do you need more awareness of? What is it that you need to address in your life behaviourally? What do you need to go after? What is the thing you're afraid of? Haven't said this in a while, but I love this quote so much. What is the cave that you fear to enter that holds the treasure that you seek.

That's where the next level of life is for you, my friend. 

That's it for me. Have an amazing weekend and speak to you on Monday!