Regulate & Rewire: An Anxiety & Depression Podcast

How STRESS MANAGEMENT Helps You Heal [Essential 8 Series]

• Amanda Armstrong • Season 1 • Episode 63

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Episode 63 - Essential 8 Series (Part 5)

At the heart of understanding and healing anxiety or depression through a nervous system lens is stress management and understanding the basics of stress physiology. In this conversation I share with you (what I hope is) a refreshing perspective on navigating overwhelming stressors. I'll reintroduce the "stress bucket analogy" and unpack it in a bit of a different way than we have before providing you with a tangible framework for understanding stress load and creating more capacity.

Stress isn't the problem, chronic stress is - let's figure out how to navigate that better together. Hit play to learn more!

Ps. Today's the day my book hits shelves and get's dropped off at your doorstep. I'm extending the pre-order bonus to anyone who purchases Healing Through the Vagus Nerve in the next 7 days.

Preorder --> head to the book page on my website to fill out that form --> keep an eye on your inbox this week!

📓 Download your Stress Management Workbook! - CLICK HERE

So here’s the 3 takeaways:

  1. There is no managing an unmanageable amount of stress, assessing and editing to some extent likely needs to happen. Doing that with third-party assistance and/or using your core values as filters can be really helpful in this process.
  2. You have to have room in your bucket before you can do the deeper work. 
  3. There are many paths towards more managed stress, the key is finding yours. My advice for that would be, start with what’s easiest, get support, and know that your environment and community influences matter.

Looking for more personalized support?

Website: https://www.riseaswe.com/podcast

Email: amanda@riseaswe.com

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Welcome to regulate and rewire and anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong. And I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here. Now let's dive in. 

Hey, friend, welcome to today's conversation all about stress management. Now, if you're new here, this is the fifth episode in an eight part series going over what I call the essential eight. So these are eight research supported habits that he'll and things that we help our clients optimize in a really personalized way inside our coaching programs at Rise As We. I also did a four part series talking about our stress bucket, I think those are episodes 37 through 40. And I will also link that conversation in stress management workbook that's attached in the show notes. 

Okay, that was a lot of things quick review, we're talking about stress management. today. We've talked about stress before, we're going to talk about stress again. And in the show notes, one of the things that you will find is a workbook that gives an overview of today's conversation, some worksheets that we'll talk about in a little bit, and a link to all the past conversations we've had around stress. And what I also want to preface this conversation with is if you found your way to podcasts like mine, you've also likely found your way to other mental health podcasts to self help books. And stress is a topic that comes up often. And my hope today is that this conversation is a little bit different not only to help you think about stress management in a new kind of multifaceted way, but also to gain some ideas on some really entry level places that you can start to decrease your physiological stress load on your nervous system. And we'll talk more about the key role of that and healing anxiety and depression in a few minutes. 

But before we get into the bread and butter of today's conversation, I do have a quick and exciting announcement that if you are a regular podcast listener, you're not surprised today. But today is the day today is May 7. And today is the day that my book is set out on shelves in your local bookstores today is the day that it is loaded onto trucks and dropped off at so many of your doorsteps. Today is the day that many of you are going to get to open her pages read her words lay eyes on the beautiful illustrations inside. And something that I shared in my Instagram caption for my book announcement post today is that I got the email to write this book, just one week after finding out I was pregnant. And I turned in the final manuscript just days before my son was born. And for those of you who aren't familiar with that story, this is a son that we conceived after a lot of loss and grief, uncomfortable circumstance. And I wrote a book about healing while I was very much navigating parts of my own healing. I wrote a book about hope, while I myself was clinging to it every day. And I hope that you can feel that throughout this book. Because I really believe that this book is different. 

There are a lot of amazing nervous system books coming out right now, I am so happy to see that this way of healing is becoming more mainstream. But this book is different. And what makes this book my book and now your book, different is the format. So this book is an illustrated book. And because of that it's different in the way it feels when you open it up to find pages printed in full color with beautiful illustrations. The way that it calls to you on a shelf or a coffee table to remind you that healing is still possible. It's different in the fact that it uses simple language and analogous teachings that allow anybody to pick it up, understand its contents and gain a new way of understanding and navigating their mental health. What you find with this book, Healing Through the vagus nerve is the book that I needed 10 years ago, before I'd ever heard about the nervous system or its role in my debilitating anxiety. And I wrote that book in hopes that maybe it's the book that you need. Now, if you haven't pre ordered this book, it would mean the world to me for you to do so. And I will link that in the show notes. If you preorder anytime in the next week. Make sure that you go to my website and you fill out the form on the book page, because I'm extending the pre order bonuses for one more week. And what those are is that you get access to this month's release class totally free, please join us, if you can't join us, I'll send you the replay. As well as the course I created a follow along course that gives you like 10, extra worksheets, videos of some extra thoughts I have after each chapter to really help bring this book to life in your healing journey in a real and personalized way. And you'll get access to both of those things, if you preorder in the next week, and go fill out the form on my website. So that's the only way that I know that you pre ordered. 

All right, we'll be done talking about the book, very exciting day in Amanda world. And shift into our conversation today on stress management. And I want to get us all on the same page with how I'm going to talk about stress and stressors by recapping my stress bucket analogy. 

So this is the analogy that we use to help our clients really understand stress, the different avenues in which they can engage in stress management, all of the different things that are creating a physiological stress load on their system. And even if you've heard me talk about this in the past, even if you are one of our current clients, and we've talked about this, stick around for this conversation, because I think there's a lot of value in hearing it talked about in a different way, often. 

So this with the stress bucket analogy, we all understand. So imagine a bucket for a second, we all understand that a bucket can only get so full before it's either overflowing, or it becomes too heavy for us to pick it up. Now, when it comes to this analogy, there are four primary concepts that I want to reiterate. Number one is the bucket component, I guess it's not a concept. It's a component of the analogy. So number one is the bucket. And this represents our capacity, what sometimes referred to as our window of tolerance, how much can we carry before we pass threshold. 

So threshold is the second component. And that's just the top of the bucket. So how much can we carry before our buckets starts to overflow. And when our bucket overflows, that's when we become symptomatic. That's when we start to see symptoms that we label as anxiety, depression. 

The third component is water. And that water represents two different kinds of stressors, we have our baseline stressors. This is the water in your bucket that you just wake up with every single day, I had a discovery call with someone who's going to be a new client of ours recently, who is also a listener of the podcast has some of this terminology. And she said, I just feel like I wake up every morning, and my bucket is full. So any amount of daily stressors, which is that second category of stressors that this water represents, cause my bucket to overflow. I'm a mom, I don't want to be this reactive, overwhelmed parent all the time, I need help getting that stress load down, I don't want to wake up with my stress by already full every single day. 

And the fourth component to this analogy is rocks. And these rocks represent triggers. Because I want you to think about a bucket that's gonna be half full of water. Your daily stressors may be put one drop at a time. But when something happens in your daily life that triggers you why we have such a quick, fast reaction to that. Think about dropping a big rock in a bucket that is going to quickly displace a lot of water. And when it comes to managing our stressors, there are kind of four ways that we do that. 

Number one is poking holes. So this is that reactive regulation. I noticed that my stress bucket is getting full. I know my somatic signs of being stressed out and here are the tangible tools I know that helped to de stress my system, could that be somatic shaking, could that be breathwork going for a walk calling a friend. So one of the skills that we talked about in that previous stress bucket series was poking holes. We're not going to spend a ton of time talking about that today. But these are just those reactive stress management tools. 

The second is removing water from your bucket. That's what we're going to talk a lot today about creating capacity, looking at what's contributing to the water load, so those baseline stressors that could be past trauma. A lot of what we'll talk about today is that's your physiology. So those are your daily habits. Are they helping your body be more healthy or are they stressing out your body and then your daily stressors How much you try to pack into a 24 hour period? What are the relationships in your life? What are the environments that you are a part of? How do those feel for your system? So what can we do to remove water either by getting more strategic about our daily life, so there are just less daily stressors are managing those better, or doing some of that deeper work to heal and lower that baseline stress amount. 

The third is deeper work that it takes to break down those boulders to reach your hand in and pull them out. \

And then the fourth, this is where people want to start, is how do I make my bucket bigger? How do I increase my capacity to handle more without being so dysregulated. And unfortunately, this tends to come after we've done the previous you can increase your window of tolerance, you can create more resiliency towards stress, so that you can carry a heavier load without it being dysregulated in your life. But if you are already living a life that feels quite dysregulated, quite overwhelming, quite stressful, we have to create capacity. Within the capacity you have, right, we've got to get that waterline down first, before we can do the extra work it takes to grow your bucket. 

Another analogy inside of the analogy, similarly, this isn't new, if you're a frequent listener, how do you build muscle? Well, you don't build muscle by walking up to a 300 pound barbell and trying to pick it up. That's probably going to hurt you. You increase your strength capacity by taking out or taking off enough weight, decreasing the load, meeting yourself where you are and slowly adding load over time and you train capacity. So that's that fourth approach of a bigger bucket. And we'll have a future conversation where we talk more about how to do that. 

And again, just to reiterate, today, we are really going to talk about number two, kind of assessing, editing, removing water removing some stressors from your daily life, because when you boil, understanding anxiety and depression down into one of its most basic concepts, it is this it is that symptoms that get labeled as anxiety, or depression are not spontaneous or unexplainable disorders, anxiety and depression or this activation or shutdown of your system are a natural result of an UN-manageable stress load. And what I love and what so many of our clients love about understanding it in that way, is that it makes room for acknowledging that sometimes the load is just too heavy, the dysregulation caused by a load that's too heavy, makes sense. And there's no amount of talk therapy or medication or other forms of support, that are going to help you find long term healing long term symptom reduction unless you also address the load, unless you're also looking at the stressors. And having a practitioner who understands stress physiology, who will strategically help you work through this process of how to manage not only manage stressors, but also how to boost your resiliency towards stress by improving things like vagal tone, like we talked about last week. That's so, so so valuable. 

And another reason that I love when my clients love understanding stress this way is that the stress bucket assessment can be really empowering for our clients, because it offers them more context and choice. And these are two things that our nervous system really needs to feel safe. changing habits, setting boundaries, mindset work, environmental changes, so many things that need to be part of your healing journey that need to be part of managing stress levels are its change. And our nervous system doesn't really like change, especially when it feels like it's already living in survival mode. And so when we can offer our nervous system and our mind the elements that it needs to feel more safe and more willing those things like context, choice and connection, the chances of successful change go up exponentially. 

And so when you can understand your the basics of your stress physiology, when you can put on paper like I'm going to invite you to do in one of the worksheets in the workbook and in the expanded conversation we'll have in just a few minutes each of these categories Is all of the things that you're carrying? Oh, life feels hard not because I suck or because I lack or because I'm less than life feels heavy and hard because it is. And I can see that on paper. And where this choice element comes in, is you get to look at that and say, Where would I like to start? And where I encourage a lot of our clients to look or the question to answer is, what's the easiest place to start. Because right now you have, hopefully, or theoretically, the lowest capacity you're going to have in this process, you're seeking out support and help because you're overwhelmed. Your stress bucket is full or overflowing every single day. So right now is when life is going to feel the hardest, when your capacity is going to be the least. So what are some really easy wins that we can collect? What are some really small ways that we can reduce your stress because even though small ways, guess what, you take a tiny scoop out of that bucket, you just gain capacity, even a tiny bit. But that's a little more capacity than you had maybe just enough capacity to take on the next hardest thing, or the next hardest thing or the next hardest thing. And what this process shows you is that you have multiple ways to step into your healing. Because so often, I think that we think that in order to see any progress in healing, we have to deal with the past, we have to dig into those dark, hard moments and experiences, we have to reach in and deal with those big rocks, those things that are triggering. And that work that deep work is a really big ask, it's a heavy lift from our mental and our physiological systems. 

And maybe I'll offer an extension to this analogy in this way, imagine that a bucket is full to the very top. In order to scoop out some of those baseline stressors that baseline water, you need to dunk in a ladle. Or in order to pull out one of those rocks that represents something that's triggering for you based on your past lived experiences, you've got to reach your hand in that bucket to grab it. What happens when you plunge your hand into an already full bucket, the water is going to run over the top. Doing this deeper work requires you to unpack old beliefs about yourself about the world the things that trigger you. And this may sound cliche, but when doing that deep work, it often gets harder before it gets easier. And it gets harder because you've always operated or for a long time you've operated in the world through certain conscious or unconscious lenses. And when you start to shift away from those that can feel really destabilizing. It can feel empowering, but also destabilizing until a new way of thinking or believing or being is really well established. And you need some capacity for that process to not overload your system to not overflow your stress bucket. Because when that happens, when we run over the threshold, it just reinforces to our nervous system, that survival mode that chronic stress is needed. 

I can't tell you how many clients have found us through conversations like this, who've shared things like yeah, I went to talk therapy or I did some trauma work and my symptoms got worse. I felt more anxious, I had more panic attacks, or I was never depressed before and I became depressed. And it's not that those modalities of healing are wrong. It's that maybe they came in the wrong sequence for you that there wasn't any initial capacity for that deeper work. And yeah, it overwhelmed the system. So in order to do that work well, we often first need to create capacity. And that's what I want to spend the rest of today talking about how to create more capacity, and there are so many ways that you can start to do this. 

So first I want to reference one of the worksheets that you'll find in the stress management workbook that I have linked in the show notes and it is the assess worksheet. And on that you will see six different sections. And I'll add a little PS here if you downloaded the initial worksheets for the previous stress bucket series. This assessment worksheet is a little bit updated, so you might want to check that out too. Now the six different categories are physiological stressors, mental load stressors, environmental stressors, technological stressors, a category of play and community predominate. As a mitigator, to stress, and then a category for this deep work or other things that you may not feel like fit in the categories. And I'm going to expand on each of these, with some considerations on shifts that you might be able to make in each of these areas. 

And I do want to note that I'm going to go through these pretty quickly. And generically, I wish that I could sit at this mic and say, here is a 10 step process that if you follow is going to help you manage stressors perfectly. This process looks a little bit different. For every single one of our clients, the category that they choose to start with looks a little bit different. So as you listen, just see what really stands out to you. And if at the end of this episode, you need to take a beat. Remember, you can listen to this episode as many times as you want. I'd love for you to join us in one of our coaching programs so that I can personally support you in this work. But also listen through this lens of okay, let me take a breath. What, what feels the easiest, what feels like the easiest place to start? what category do I want to take a look at first. And I'll give a little little bit more guidance and some thoughts on that as we go along. 

So category number one is your physiology. So this is predominantly made up of your daily habits that either contribute to increasing stress or reducing it. And I'm not going to spend a ton of time unpacking this here, because this is what this whole essential eight series is aimed at supporting you with things like how's your sleep, your breath, your movement, your nutrition? Reflecting on in what ways are your habits and what ways are my habits in each of these areas, mitigating stress, or contributing to it. And optimizing your habits and your lifestyle in some way, is a really great place to start. And so if you feel totally lost at the end of this conversation as to a starting point, I would invite you to go to that worksheet. And just fill out the physiology. And I give you also an example worksheet of okay, well what types of things should go in each category. And then look at that and say, okay, with all of my habits, what do I feel like is the easiest shift to make? 

Alright, category number two is mental load. Starting with awareness, because even just awareness of all of the things that you're juggling, it can feel really orienting. For so long, I was juggling a million different things in my head. And I never actually put on paper, what all of those things were or what went into all of those things. And when I finally did, not only did it help me see that there was just way too much, there was way too much. And I had to get clear on what mattered most because pretending like it all matter the same was crushing me. But getting all of that chaos out of your mind and onto paper can feel both. Like I said, validating, and strategic. So looking at this list of all of your mental load pieces, and asking yourself, What can I delete? What can I delegate? What can I do differently. And these are three questions I expand a lot on in the Edit episode of the stress bucket series. 

And this is a place where support can be crucial. Because when we are in survival mode, when we are living in this spiral of chronic stress, we lack access to curiosity, to creativity to flexibility, to see how things can be different. At one point, I remember I did this, I made a list of all of the things I was doing what went into all of those things. And I just handed it to my husband and I said I need you, I need you to look at this list and help me figure out what I can let go of, because I'm in such a rigid, like white knuckling everything space right now. But I look at all of these and they all feel essential. It all feels like it has to be done. And it has to be me. And so I need you to look at this list. What's your take on it? How can some of these things be let go of how can they be done differently? What parts of this are you able to take on for me right now. And that was really, really helpful. And if you're somebody who is listening who has a less supportive partner or no partner, maybe it's an option to sit down with a trusted friend, a coach or therapist, this is something that we do with clients often inside the membership and one on one coaching as well. 

And another way that you can oftentimes edit what's coming up in any of these categories is to really get clear on your core values. This is something that we go over with our clients and I think module six of our eight module healing program. Because when you are clear on your core values, it can be a filter for what matters most, what are the things that are most aligned with your top two or three core values? And anything that's not directly correlating or feeding into those core values? How can you let it go delegate it, do it differently. And that can really help sort out what matters most. 

Another category in stress management is environmental considerations. We recently spent an entire month inside my membership as a community focusing on and bringing awareness to the ways that our environments were contributing to our stress load, and what we could do about it. And I had the idea to gamify this, and I made like an environmental detoxifying and decluttering bingo card that a lot of our members used and felt really helpful because each of the squares was a small, specific task that they could choose to take on and just check them off throughout the month trying to get that bingo. Because research has made it really, really clear that our environment matters, that physical clutter contributes to increased symptoms of anxiety. So looking at your home environments, or your work environments, and even asking yourself the simple question of like, what can I declutter? And I don't take on your whole house right now. But what can I declutter and actually, where would be the easiest place to start? Maybe it's your socks. Maybe it's cosmetics, maybe it's that a single drawer. 

The other thing we talked a lot about in the membership. That month was detoxifying. And one of the things we had a long conversation with inside my membership were quote, fragrances, so I'm not talking about like essential oils or anything that smells the word fragrance on shampoo bottles, candles, glade plugins, perfumes, deodorant, it's everywhere, is a catch all term for a variety of different chemicals that are known endocrine or hormone disruptors. And so maybe one of the ways you try to decrease your stress load is simply by becoming aware of all the places that you are putting fragrance in your home or on your body, especially in regards to children's products. And you don't have to just throw everything away today, but maybe the next time you go to replace your shampoo after you've used it all. Finding one without fragrance or the next time you go to replace your laundry detergent or your deodorant is a way to slowly decrease the toxin load on your system therefore also decreasing the stress load on your system. You can also create a healthier home by simply opening your windows for some period of time every single day bringing fresh air in or having more houseplants if you are I happen to love houseplants it's like a hobby for me. But if it wasn't, I can't imagine in the season of motherhood that I would be trying to keep anything other than my two tiny humans and my dog alive. So maybe you're like houseplants are not for me, Amanda, but opening up windows. So just considering the role that your environmental surroundings play on your stress load. Because I think when we have this conversation around stress, a lot of times we're talking about the relationships in your life, your to do list your whatever. But our body's stress response is generic. And so the stress load that's coming from environmental toxins from visually consuming clutter from, you know, stressful relationships, it all builds in our system in a similar way.

Another category is technology. And this is another component of regulated living that we are going to spend an entire month in my community focusing on as well and I think just a couple months. But considering if you can do a digital declutter as well, maybe you unsubscribe from three junk emails a day or delete apps from your phone, turn off non essential notifications, reflecting on how much time you are spending with technology, because we are all or a vast majority of us are addicted to our phones. And it's because they're designed to be addicting. It's become common rhetoric to talk about smoking as being something that's so obviously addictive because of how nicotine impacts our brain. phones do the same thing. Social media does the same thing. It impacts our brains in an addictive way. And they become or they put us into this vicious cycle of reliance on these little electronic gadgets for amusement or more often, I think diversion from other stressors in our life and we We'll absolutely do a future episode on tech and social media, its impact on our nervous system and our brains. 

But for now, maybe what to offer you in this conversation is another analogy. This one comes from a friend of mine, David, he's the founder of an organization called Physiologie. First, and in a conversation he offered, he said, you know, imagine that you woke up one day, and you took a whole group of field mice, and you took them out of the field, and you put them into a laboratory. That was also a carnival, would you expect a behavior change or not a behavior change? Of course, these mice are going to change, you would expect them to be disoriented, distressed, and suboptimal, we took them out of their optimal environment, consider what might happen to these mice, his brains to their bodies to their stress in a week, a month, a year or a decade. And in a lot of ways, we are these mice, our children are these mice. So many of us our kids have been overdosing on technology since the day we were born, especially this current generation. And I love teaching and analogies, because people you and me even have a really hard time getting outside of our own realities. And I think analogies help us do that. And one thing I often think about, in part, because of my friend, David, is that so much of how we navigate our mental health, everything from diagnosing through the DSM, prescribing medication, even our concepts around trauma, and stress management. They all are rooted in research from a time before computers were in our pockets before six hours of screen time was normal before Oculus or AI. 

And when we have a lot of these mental health conversations, what we so often associate as trauma or with trauma, you know, what's that thing that happened that made me this way? And that's real and that's there. And those things happen and they change us. But what if one of the most traumatizing and stressful things that we endure, is being human in an inhuman environment, constantly overstimulated, over pressured, under nourished, under rested, socially disconnected in any meaningful ways. And that's so so much what this whole series in talking about each of these essential eight is about, it's about coming back to the basics of being human. And when we are deprived, or we deviate so far from those things. Anxiety and depression aren't disorders. They are appropriate psychological and physiological responses to an unsustainable and unnatural stress load. And this is at the heart this is at the core of what we do every day in our coaching programs, is to help each and every person we work with radically reorient to what we call anxiety and depression, understanding it through this nervous system lens. And then to step into more regulated living in a tangible and personalized way to step towards habits and relationships that nurture our nature of being human. This is at the core of Being Well. 

and to that next category that talks about kind of community and play. And another thing I want to add here is time in nature. A major mitigator to stress is simply spending more time outside. One study examined USB students who spent at least 15 minutes four or more times a week outside and green spaces, and found that they had reported higher quality of life better overall mood lower perceived stress. Another study found that increased exposure to greenness was associated with lower risk of depression. Another one found that nature decreases anxiety levels, dampens stress and feelings of anger. Another said that spending time in nature was linked to both cognitive benefits, improvements in mood mental health emotional well being. This isn't a surprise, this should make sense. We're putting the field nice back in the field. And so another maybe low lift place to start when thinking about stress management this way or taking an active role in healing anxiety and depression through decreasing this physiological stress load on your system could simply be to get outside more often, or looking into these other two categories of mitigating stress of play. When was the last time you played you did something nonsensical and enjoyable just for the purpose of enjoying it? Do you have a deep sense of belonging, a deep sense of community? 

One of the things that I think makes my memberships so unique is that yes, we have weekly coaching calls, we absolutely want to help you navigate the hard. But once or twice a month, we also have community events where we're not doing any coaching, we're simply engaging in a shared experience together. We've done watercolor classes, we do workouts together, we've been cold plunges, we've done show Intel or game nights, really creating this community of people that say, Hey, you belong, your brokenness is welcome here. It's a community of people who are all either currently or have struggled with anxiety or depression, stepping into healing in a new way. 

Now, the final box, you'll see on that worksheet is that deeper work, and like I've said, this needs to happen. But maybe that doesn't need to happen today, maybe we don't plunge our arm into a bucket that's already on the brink of overflowing. 

For some closing thoughts, I want to offer a quick thought on segments in regards to this conversation around increasing and creating capacity. We have worked with many, many clients where meds are have been part of their journey are part of their journey. And they have a role to play for many, many people in regards to how they might dampen the intensity of symptoms, theoretically, then giving you the capacity to step into a more root pause approach. But in my opinion, far too often, antidepressants anti anxiety meds are prescribed as the solution as the fix versus the thing to support the solution or to support the fix. Far too often they are prescribed without a plan to address getting you the support to look at and deal with the underlying issues that are creating the dysfunction and symptoms. This would be like a doctor, putting you in a cast for a broken arm without having any conversation around. Hey, what got you to the point of a broken arm? How can we mitigate that from happening again in the future. Also, here's our plan to take this cast off. And here's what to do in the meantime, and how to rehab it afterwards. And again, in my opinion, they're also often prescribed, far too often prescribed without the context, that research shows us the only helpful for about 50% of people who take them. So for the other 50% of folks who get prescribed meds who turn to them in moments of pain and find they don't work for them, or they make their symptoms worse, or they make them feel less like themselves. They're often left with a narrative that well, maybe I'm too broken to heal, it feeds this hopelessness, they're unsure where else to turn. And I know this because these are the stories that I hear in discovery calls every single week. This is a story that's part of my own healing journey, and so many of the clients that we serve. And so I will sum up my thoughts with this. If your symptoms are so severe, that you can't take any of these proactive steps towards healing meds might be supportive for you. But that can't be it, that will never be the whole picture to healing your anxiety and depression. 

All right. Well, let's wrap some things up. When it comes to stress management, a few things to remember is that you are never going to be able to manage an unmanageable amount of stressors. Stress Management is a multifaceted and dynamic process, potentially made up of minimizing stressors, cultivating more stress management skills, maybe even eventually training your system to have an increased capacity for stressors before you get pinged outside that window of tolerance. And it's also about making a conscious effort to rebalance the physiology of stress through those mitigating variables by increasing exposure to green space to nature, a sense of belonging, community play and rest. And this is going to look different for every single person and a sentiment. I'll reiterate is I wish I could sit here and prescribe you the perfect formula for stress management. It simply doesn't exist. resist each of these variables. Each of these various categories of stressors in your life will make this process look a little bit different for everyone. But the one thing that I can say for sure, plays perhaps the most influential role on managing stressors is your daily habits. It's the habits that make up your daily life that either nurture your nature or detract from it. The frequency of habits that hurt versus habits that heal, more regulated living is central to regulating your nervous system and healing anxiety, and depression. 

As you reflect on this conversation, or as you sit down, and you take an honest assessment of your stress bucket, look at that list, look at these things and ask yourself what's easiest, what would be the easiest thing to change your influence in a distressing way and start there, I cannot reiterate this enough, then move on to the next easiest and the next easiest. And at the very beginning of this, these things that you choose are going to feel trivial at first, just like if you were carrying a really heavy bucket, and if someone were to come up with a tablespoon, and just scoop a tablespoon of water out, you might look at them and be like, what was the point of even doing that this bucket is still so heavy, the stress load is still so high, but a tablespoon here, a cup here, another scoop over and over and over again. Eventually, you will look at that bucket and realize how much the water line has gone down, you will hold that bucket and be able to stand up a little taller, because the bucket will be lighter, slower is faster when healing your nervous system or trauma. And that can feel really frustrating. So if you are somebody looking to manage your stress better start with what's easiest. Or if you're one of the many, many therapists or other practitioners listening to this episode, help your clients help your patients figure out what the the easiest thing for them to be would and then consistently and gently and compassionately hold them accountable. And if for whatever reason, it wasn't as easy to make that shift as they thought, be willing to get in the trenches with them and strategically figure out well then where or how can we make that behavior change just a little bit smaller. And when that happens, celebrate it, celebrate with them, celebrate for yourself, because that also was gonna give you a little extra capacity to take on the next thing. Now, here are today's three tangible takeaways. 

Number one, there's no managing an unmanageable amount of stress. So assessing and editing, to some extent, are likely part of this process. And doing that with third party assistance and or using your core values as filters can be really, really helpful in this process. 

Number two, you have to have room in your bucket before you can do the deep work. So maybe just taking a look at the work that you are trying to do in your healing journey right now. And comparing that to the capacity at which you feel like you have to do that work. 

And number three is that there are many paths towards more managed stress. The key is in finding yours. And my advice for that would be to start with what's easiest, get support and know that your environment and community influences really matter. 

All right, last reminder, last reminder that today is officially booked launch day. I'm also throwing a virtual book release party tonight at 8pm. Eastern time, I would love for you to be there. Again, that link is in the show notes. The stress management workbook is in the show notes. If you haven't already, preorder the book and you would like to get access to this release class and my follow along book course for free. I'm extending that preorder bonus for one more week. Make sure when you preorder you fill out that form on my website. And I think that's it. Thanks for being here. Thanks for sharing my book this podcast with others for leaving your five star rating and reviews each one means so, so much to me. Take care. 

Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside Rhys, my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space or apply for our one on one anxiety and depression coaching program restore. I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes. Again, thanks so much for being here. And I'll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai