Stress Isn’t the Enemy | How Fathers Can Use Pressure to Grow

Stress can either control us… or sharpen us.

In this solo episode, Oscar talks about the pressure his family is navigating during a major transition and how stress impacts fathers, marriages, and daughters more than we realize.

A conversation about emotional shutdown, resilience, stress inoculation, mindfulness, and teaching our daughters how to handle pressure in healthy ways.

00:00 Solo Episode Kickoff

00:41 Family Move Stress

01:38 Remember What You Prayed For

02:23 Stress Can Sharpen You

03:45 Tools to Manage Stress

05:18 Stress Inoculation Mindset

06:15 What Stress Reveals

07:04 Teaching Daughters Stress Skills

08:08 Community and Getting Help

08:50 Wrap Up and Stay Growing

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Welcome to the Daughter Podcast, where fathers become everyday heroes in their daughters' lives. Grow, evolve, and lead with love. Here's your host, Oscar Pinya. Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Daughtered Podcast. Oscar here, your local growing girl dad. Today, after a long time having a solo episode and just doing some thoughts by Oscar. Again, it's May. I believe it's like mental health month, but June is in men's mental health month. Again, I don't think we should uh put it into one month, but nevertheless, it got me thinking about stress. And the Pena clan over here has put on a few pounds of stress lately. We are on the cusp of a relocation, a move, uprooting our family, uprooting our life, and going somewhere else. Um, along with, you know, living life. The girls are going to school, they're ending their school year, and their stress, right? Because friends and social circles and those types of things that now have to get uprooted and start it over. Same with my wife and I and her friends and and people that we meet. And I think it was getting to all of us in the family, the stress you started to feel the air heavy, people snapping, um, just being short. And I was not able to sleep uh several nights, but one particular night, and I thought about our sponsor, Villal Hunt. And I was wearing a shirt, and this is the beauty of what they do. I was wearing a shirt, and I forgot what shirt I was wearing, but the back of the shirt said, Remember, this is what you prayed for. Now, cautiously I say we don't necessarily pray for all this stress, and I'm sure you all don't either. However, we do want to better ourselves and to do cool things and new things and so on and so forth. Those are added stresses in our lives. And so that conversation got me thinking about the stress that we're experiencing and really turning it to a positive. Is stress controlling us, or can stress sharpen us? So that's really where I started to think. All right, cool. Let's just take this in a positive manner. We know the old um dad cliche, which I just mentioned to my daughters several times this week, you don't make diamonds without any stress, but it's although again it's might it might be cliche, it is true. You you need that stress to create something unique and beautiful. And so maybe we use it that way. We start looking at what stress can do to us when we allow it to take over, right? The the shortness, the constant, unstopping brain that continues to move when you want to sleep and rest. You know, for some of us men, we start to like emotionally shut down, we get quiet, we want to not bring the stress home, but man, I don't know about you guys, but my girls can see it. My wife can feel it, and it always brings up conversation. If we stay in that state too long, we start talking about enough cortisol that it starts to make us numb, and then we start to really get into survival mode, and in that survival mode for fathers is not good. Or we can allow that stress to train us and give us trigger points to say, well, I'm feeling a certain stress. I need to do X. For me, it's exercise or go outside, uh, sit down and leave everything that I have to do for a minute and just have a conversation about something completely different with my daughters or my wife. Writing uh checklists down, like what do we need to do and releasing some of that stress into paper, which allows us to really start to get organized, which we know that disorganization is stressful. Also, if we're really aware of it, we can use it to teach us to slow down before reaction purposely, because you know you're stressed, because you know you're at a heightened level of uh cortisol and and uh stress hormone, and I think it's the same one. But being that aware allows us to really zero in and really think about how our reaction should be in almost every moment. And it's kind of silly that we have to wait to be super stressed, but I found that that is helpful for me. Understanding the context of the situation makes me have to slow down, period, because I feel myself getting shorter or I feel myself getting more frustrated faster. And so that's something that that I started to really think about. And the more and more I thought about it, it was well, is this stress so horrible? And if you ask my wife and I several times, we may say yes, but in reality, it may not be. If you've done anything hard in your life that is stress inoculation, you are trying to get yourself to a point where you teach your body how to react to stress. That could be a way for us to use stress positively. I do not by any means want to say do not get help if you have stress that you need help with. This is a major point, you know, that we talk about in our military careers where we need to make sure that we are fit physically, mentally, uh, emotionally, spiritually, so on and so forth. So all the pillars of fitness are in there, and stress is obviously a huge part of that. Stress reveals a lot of different things. It reveals what matters to us, it reveals where we may have overloaded, it reveals what we may be avoiding because we know that avoidance isn't a solution, it just grows. That stress level is there, that weight is always there. If we don't control that amount of stress that we have, all these things that it could reveal tend to get lost and almost makes us um unable to see those things clearly. So, all this talk to say manage the stress how you manage it, find ways to ensure that the stress is being used to your advantage, if not at the very moment, towards the future. For us dads, use it as a teaching moment and allow your daughters to feel the stress. Don't try to erase the stress, don't try to prevent them from the stress, but allow them to feel it, allow them to name it, and then help them find tools to manage it together. They'll know that they're not alone, they'll know that it is possible to manage stress in any situation, they'll learn to be calm and to be more mindful of what's going on, and hopefully they'll learn to be that person that others go to when they need help managing their stress. It's a couple months of stress awareness. I say we use them, we become aware of our stressors and how we can manage them. And I would encourage you to help other men become aware of those stressors and help them manage it as well. And as always, if you need more help than average, reach out. Find a community like the Daughtered Podcast community, find a community out there. There's plenty. If you have if you don't know of any, reach out to me. We can find you some. But I can tell you that community, a group of men working through their stresses, working through their growth, is extremely helpful to give you perspective, to give you experience that they have, and if anything, just to hear you out and let you know if you're uh falling off to the right or the left. I hope this helped a little. I know it helped me to think through some things, and I thank you for letting me pontificate on here to work my thoughts through. If this resonated with you at all, if you got anything out of this, I would ask that you follow the show, follow us on Instagram, follow us on social media, um, send us feedback, send us ideas for what you want to hear, what I haven't talked about, and what can help other dads out there to keep on growing. Because as I mentioned, we are still growing and we want to do that all the way to the grave. I appreciate y'all. I'll see you all next time. 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