Recovering from Stress and Embracing Wellness: Tips and Techniques for a Balanced Life

Stress and overactivity are not just buzzwords, they're a modern-day epidemic! Are you feeling the weight of a fast-paced life?

"Stress is caused by being here and wanting to be there".
- Eckart Tolle

I've personally felt the strain and understand the challenges of maintaining balance amidst the chaos. This episode is all about unraveling this twisted pattern and finding your center. It's a deep dive into how you can recover from stress and overactivity. 

Imagine transitioning from a time-bound awareness to timeless awareness! It's not just about clock-watching, it's about finding peace in every moment. This episode reveals how simple practices like grounding, decluttering, making wise food choices, can help restore equilibrium. Did you know that even a massage or foam rolling can help rebalance your mind and body? Through such practical activities, the benefits include improved sleep, increased energy, and a calmer state of mind - a welcome respite from our busy lives. 

Self-care isn't just a luxury, it's a necessity. We explore techniques that can help you relieve stress, from brisk walks and calming music to affirmations and focusing on the breath. Dive into this journey of self-discovery and learn how to create a sanctuary within yourself. We'll also discuss how to build resilience and share your wellness journey with others. It's time to take care of your mind and body, and inspire others to do the same. Tune in and step into a life of balance, peace, and wellness.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

In this episode I share with you how to recover from stressful situations and overactivity. Our culture really has adopted stress as a normal way of living, but it doesn't have to be that way and I want to share with you some principles and strategies to help you find your centre again and again. Stay tuned all the way till the end. Enjoy the episode. Hello and welcome to the James Grant from Polka SuperSoul Model Series where I help you tune and tap into your natural state of wellbeing. We all go through periods of life where there's so much activity and a lot of stress can be the result. Maybe it's a move, maybe it's a break up, maybe you're changing jobs or maybe you've just had an intense period of overactivity and stress going on. Life happens and sometimes stress does occur. Overactivity certainly occurs, but it's essential for your body and mind that you return back to your state of equilibrium time and time again. Otherwise, you're just programming yourself to be in a fight or flight mode more of the time and you often take and make choices that aren't good for you when you're in that state of being. So all too often the mind can feel pulled in different directions from overactivity, from people's demands or even demands you may have placed on yourself, or maybe it's your boss, or maybe it's your spouse. Wherever you feel like you're being pulled, it's really important that there's one thing that you do Come back to your center time and time again, and the stress that one feels when there's a lot of overactivity is palpable. I sure know that and I'm not perfect, but what comes from that is, the stress creates a fight or flight mode which also causes entropy in your cells, which is essentially aging. When you're in that stress mode, you're in a state of time bound awareness, meaning you're running by the clock, meaning you've only got so much time. Now a lot of people live there and that is a lack mentality and you need to switch and enter a state of timeless awareness, which means you're infinite, you're unlimited, you're coming from an abundant mindset. Now, that takes time to be able to master, but I want to share with you some ideas how you can begin to fall back into your center again, start tuning and tapping into your natural rhythms and start to experience life from a new position, a new elevated perspective, rather than in this time bound awareness where the stress occurs, where you're putting much pressure on yourself. You have to be the deciding. You have to intervene on stress when it happens and you can only do that with taking extremely good care of yourself. Recently, I just helped my mom move back to the UK after having looked after her for three years straight since my father died.

Speaker 1: 2:54

If you've been listening to my story at all following this show, I always like to be candid and open about my experience because when you let people in that, then it's really easy for us to be able to relate. And I really hope that one or two of you, or even several of you, can relate to this because, even though it might not necessarily be exactly the same, we all feel similar emotions. We all feel high emotion and sometimes we feel that stress or we feel that anxiousness or worry or wherever you are on the emotional scale. As long as you have some tools to be able to come home to yourself time and time again, then you're just going to perpetuate a chemical imbalance in your body. You're going to perpetuate a stress reactive response which is never conducive to enjoying great health and well-being. I think one of the reasons why I've been blessed to be healthy and well for a long period of time is because I use these habits and I implement these ideas time and time again.

Speaker 1: 3:53

I would never share anything on this show or podcast or any of my interviews that I don't do myself, because that creates a lack of integrity. Everything I share is something that I do and I'm hoping that as you listen to this show, you can extract a few ideas that you can implement for yourself, because unless you interrupt those stress patterns, you're just going to create them time and time again. I know from my previous life, when I was drinking and had toxic habits, that I would reach for things to try and create some sort of relief, but it never really helped me in the long run. It only perpetuated that negative cycle, perpetuated this loop of lunacy that I've referred to time and time again on several past episodes. So I want to help you come home to yourself if you are feeling stressed, if you are feeling overactive and you've had way too much on your plate, because it's only when you interrupt those stress patterns that you can start creating a new pattern.

Speaker 1: 4:55

So what I want to do is I want to share with you some really logical ideas. Some you are going to know, but I'm still going to state them clearly, but some you won't know, and so I want to be a little bit more specific. But my intention is to give you something that is so incredibly valuable that you can take away and apply. But it's only your application that will give you the results you truly seek, which is your own personal state of peace and balance. Again Now, it might take a week or two, but try and apply some of these ideas and notice how much better you feel, and notice what happens, because as you start to reduce the resistance in your life, reduce the stress, what happens is that flow of wellbeing starts to flow down through your body and through your mind with a sense of ease, with a sense of freedom, with a sense of tranquility. Again Now, it might take a day or two or even a few days, but as you do it, you're gonna feel better and better. So here are some ideas, some which you will know and some which you won't, but I'm gonna list them anyway and the reasons why.

Speaker 1: 6:00

So, number one you've got to sleep a little bit longer. Try and get to bed earlier and try and get between eight and 10 hours of sleep. I always recommend having an eye mask or being in a blackout room, because that's actually shutting down the light that goes through the optic nerve, creating more melatonin in your brain, allowing your body to go into a deeper state of rest. So try and get in a blackout room or at least have an eye mask when you sleep and sleep a little bit longer, because when you're sleeping you're actually releasing resistance from your day and that helps you reset again for tomorrow. So try and sleep a little bit more with an eye mask.

Speaker 1: 6:38

Number two hydrate and try and abstain from caffeine and alcohol. Caffeine and alcohol creates spikes in the blood, which also creates more acidity. Now your body needs to be a little bit more alkaline right now, because stress is like an acid inside of the blood. So you wanna be able to hydrate more to create a more even pH level in your bloodstream. Another thing you can do with hydration is have more supergreens so that your body is less toxic, or should I say less acidic, so it finds its way back to that pH level of seven. And you can do this by buying litmus paper and testing it out on your tongue to see where you're at. And I've done this before and I've noticed that when I've been stressed out, it always looks a little bit more orangey red on my saliva so you'll know how well you're doing by doing the litmus test on yourself, and you can buy those easily on Amazon. But one of the best ways to do that is by having more green juices in your life, particularly during this period, so you can bring your body back into balance. Because when your body gets into balance it's easier for the mind to find balance again, which means you're releasing stress.

Speaker 1: 7:50

Number three increase your magnesium levels. For me, just having done a move, I remember going to bed like the other night, thinking God, my glutes and my butt was just so tight from all this moving in my shoulders and I thought to myself oh, I need to really roll this out. But what I didn't realize was until I jumped in the sea and I started having a lot of magnesium from pumpkin seeds in different foods. Pumpkin seeds and nuts and seeds contain a lot of magnesium, but also you can get magnesium spray, but also the sea contains a lot of magnesium. So I was doing like all three and I noticed within a day my whole body had found this new state of relaxation and energy. So increase your magnesium levels, particularly during times of intense stress, because your muscles start to cramp up and tighten up.

Speaker 1: 8:39

Number four next thing is also increase your iron levels. Now, I talked about this a little bit with the super greens drink or drinking greens, but your iron is directly related to the amount of energy you've got in your body, and you get iron really from leafy greens. Some people have it from meat, but I'm completely plant based, so I always like to get it from plants and leafy, large leafy greens contain a lot of iron, like spinach, like kale, like cabbage. These types of leafy greens will be great for upping your iron levels and increasing the levels of energy. The other thing I'd like to say is as well is for your kidney health. Your kidneys are your filters, and when you're low in energy, your kidneys aren't performing as well as they could do. Now, I'm not a nutritionist, but I've studied this and applied it myself, and one of the things I noticed that gives me a lot of energy when I'm low on energy is eating beans, and beans look like the shape of your kidneys and what they're actually doing is Beans are creating a slow energy release inside of your body which is gradual, and that's incredibly good for your body and allowing more energy, because beans contain a lot of sunlight when they're absorbed and they're growing and they're growing process. So add some beans into a diet as well.

Speaker 1: 10:01

Number five grounding and earthing. Now this is huge and I'm a massive advocate of getting out bare feet or lying on the grass or lying on the beach or wherever you can in nature and just reducing the static that you're picking up on a day-to-day basis. The static you're picking up being around electromagnetic frequencies or just being out in the world and having your shoes on means you're not connected to the earth. And as soon as you get connected to the earth, studies have shown, scientific studies have shown that it reduces inflammation and inflammation is one of the main causes of heart disease and problems inside of the body. So as little as 20 minutes a day just being on the ground, getting in contact, some level of your skin touching the ground, is gonna ground you and reduce inflammation and reduce that static charge. And when you're stressed you're in the head, but when you're grounded you get back in the body again. That's why when we go on holiday we love to go to places of nature, usually because intuitively we know that our bodies crave that reduction in inflammation, crave that sense of equilibrium again.

Speaker 1: 11:13

Number six gonna declutter your environment. When you declutter your environment, you're decluttering your mind, and when you're stressed out, your mind is highly cluttered and there's so much activity. So you've got to be thinking what can you simplify in your life? Where can you declutter? It's literally every week I go to a charity shop and take bags of clothes or old sheets or pillows or whatever, and trying to release the past, release things that I no longer need. So look in your environment. Where can you declutter? Where can you simplify your life? Because this is gonna reduce stress. It's amazing that when you go to sleep, your subconscious mind is always wide open and when you're looking at your environment and it isn't clean, it isn't spacious and it isn't tidy, it clutters the mind and I feel so happy that I've moved into my new place and it's clean and it's open and it's spacious and it's bright. It means that my mind is focused in clear, because when I was packing boxes and seeing clothes everywhere when I was in the move, I was like, oh, this is way too much, which was causing me stress, and I didn't realize how important it is for me to have a clean, simple, beautiful looking environment, because I want my mind to reflect that. So think of that when you're trying to reduce and eliminate stress in your life. How clean is your environment?

Speaker 1: 12:37

Number seven you've got to make wise food choices and you've got to learn to incorporate at least 12 fruits and veggies a day. Now a lot of the world are eating processed foods, but what our body really craves are natural foods. So if you can get about 12 fruits and veggies in a day, you're doing really, really, really well. And one of the easiest ways to do that is to get a blender and start putting loads of stuff in there, because the food isn't so much what you're eating, it's what you're absorbing. And if you're eating lots of food that's highly processed or packaged food, then that's the energy that you're putting into your body, which means your output of energy into the world of productivity is way lower. And if you want high productivity, it means you've got to have greater energy, and one of the fastest ways that we all know is to have healthier, more organic, natural foods. So use that as a benchmark.

Speaker 1: 13:33

Am I getting 12 fruits and veggies in a day? You might make it some days and you won't others, but if you've got that benchmark, then you're going to realise you're going to have way more energy and when you do, stress will be easily managed or challenges will be easily managed and stress will be a thing of the past. You need to take extremely good care of yourself and you've got to do it by realising what you're putting inside of your body. So be mindful of that 12 fruits and veggies a day, because the fibre will be amazing and the fiber will be amazing for your gut and a healthy gut will create a healthy body and also with that, you're going to absorb more nutrients. I know somebody recently had a really difficult problem with their digestion and they hadn't gone to the loo for like four days, and that's because the stress is so stored in the gut. Our gut is our second emotional center and it's a very powerful shackle we need to look at. And if you're not passing your bowel movement through, it's because you're holding on to so much tension in the gut. So you've got to be mindful that what you're putting inside your body is essential for finding the equilibrium from restoring balance.

Speaker 1: 14:43

Number eight if you can get a massage, because the tension is stored inside the shoulders, inside of the body, this is logical. But if you can't get a massage, get a foam roller and these foam rollers are amazing for ironing out all the knots inside of your body, that fascia muscle, which is just above your actual muscles. When that's released and you're rolling on that, it's releasing all the stress that are knots inside of your body and you can do that yourself. And I found the other day when I was moving I was like I had so much stress I found and tightness in my hips and I was rolling them away and at the end it was painful. But I realized I was like, wow, this is so relaxing, this feels so good for me and you can too. There are always affordable ways in which you can eliminate and find balance again and find my way as a great one. Number nine highly recommended something I swear by a little dash of lemon juice in your water every single morning, because that cleans the gut as well, and when you've got a happy gut, your system's working really well, so that water with lemon in it, with lemon drops or fresh lemon, is actually creating electrolytes and those healthy electrolytes flush the body of out any toxicity. So get yourself a lemon water every single day, particularly first thing in the morning, but I actually tend to like quite a lot of lemon water with most of my drinks throughout the day.

Speaker 1: 16:12

Number 10, you've got to make time for solitude. This is an episode within itself. If you are not spending time by yourself or making time to be by yourself, even if you're a parent, or even if you're a corporate leader, wherever you are, you've got to take time out for you to be with you. And if you've constantly got music on or you've constantly got the tv on or you've constantly got some Netflix show in the background, you're never actually switching off. You need to be in silence every single day, and every time you're in silence, you can start listening to the conversation going on inside your head, which will begin to slow down, because all too often we want to fill the void of our life, the challenges, with something, just so that it stops. But it's only when you're in silence that it will begin to stop, that you can begin to actually sit with yourself. We need to relearn how to sit with ourselves, and one of the ways that I like to do that is be in meditation every single day and just sit on a chair and gaze at nature, gaze at something beautiful in the garden or gaze at the sea, whatever works for you. But that's what I like to do and I'm often so inspired from just taking that time out just to be with myself, and when stress is powerful, I do it at least twice a day. Give myself 40 minutes of complete silence every single day and it's amazing how much better I feel and how much better I sleep as a result. It's far deeper, and also the green lights that you get as a result of sitting in silence and being with yourself.

Speaker 1: 17:57

There are so many distractions in our world and in our day from people's demands on us, but you've got to afford that time for you to be with yourself, because otherwise you've got nothing left to give number 11. You've got to be gentle, particularly with your movement. Now, when you've got hyperactivity going on and there's a lot of stress, a lot of people think, oh, I need to punch it out or do some boxing. I've seen them work with people who are high corporate people and I noticed that they want to do taekwondo. Well, they want to do some punching and that's to try and relieve the stress. But what actually they need to do is learn how to do the opposite, to calm down, to center, because there's way too much fire going on in the belly Now. Fire is great for action, but if you've got hyperactivity it means you can't wind down. So learning how to do gentle stretches and gentle yoga is really powerful. And so I've got this gentle stretch that I do every single day, and when I need to ramp it up and I need to be more energized, I get out the jump rope and I do some cardio. Or now, when there's hyper stress and hyperactivity in your life, one thing you've got to learn how to do is stretch, because when you're stretching you're releasing the tension inside of your muscles so that it's not being stored. Imagine you're opening yourself up to new opportunities in life by having a little stretch every single day. And one stretch that I love to do every single day is the asanas in yoga, and another thing I love to do is the five to bends. But these gentle, easy movements allow my body to open up and eliminate stress.

Speaker 1: 19:37

Number 12, you've got to take brisk walks. Walking is so good for the body and if you're not going to run, you're not going to do any heavy exercise. Walking just is going to just fill your body with lots of air and lots of oxygen. Very logical. And five minutes, particularly after your meal times. It's great for your digestion Because, remember, stress is related to the gut and when your gut, or your center, you're out of your center, it means your second chakra, which is where your navel is, it needs an extra bit of TLC. So walking is going to bring more fresh oxygen in and cleans your system energetically.

Speaker 1: 20:11

Number 13, one thing I love to do when I'm trying to reset my energy and restore myself back to a state of balance again is listen to like calming music. If you listen to music with words, what it can often do is take you on a different tangent and allowing your mind to go off on one, and that can create more stress. So music without words is really powerful. If you want to find your equilibrium again and you're a music person, and if you're a visual person, having beautiful images that are very peaceful on your screensaver is essential for your well-being. Sometimes we can be agitated by looking at pictures if you're visual, so try and just put peaceful pictures in your environment so it can soothe your nervous system. So right now I've got a picture of a beautiful beach on my screensaver just as an anchor for me to come back to my center time and time again to relax.

Speaker 1: 21:06

Number 14, your mantra. You've got to have a little mantra when you're experiencing a lot of overactivity and stress, and one of them is it's all coming together perfectly. Just say that stuff, it's all coming together perfectly, it's all coming together perfectly. The amount of times I've said that and it just makes me feel more relaxed. Another thing which I love to say as a mantra or an affirmation is it's going to be all right. It's going to be all right, it's going to be all right, and I know that just saying that to myself soothes me. It soothes my mind from going off on a tangent and feeling our balance. And you can too. And there's another affirmation that I really like which is a bit of a rhyme. It says calm and centered, quiet, and still I love myself and always will. It's a really beautiful thing that you can say, and rhymes are very easy to slip into the subconscious. I'll say it one more time Calm and centered, quiet, and still I love myself and always will.

Speaker 1: 22:05

And when we're stressed out, often what we find is that we're not loving ourselves or we're not loving life at that moment in time. So we need to honor our heart again, and your heart is essential for your well-being, and when you're stressed, you're not honoring yourself, you're not accepting yourself, because you're only accepting the stress that's going on in front of you. I know that when I was looking, moving everything the other day, I was like, oh, I know what I know, but I'm feeling this, and so I would be saying these little affirmations calm and centered, quiet and still I love myself and always well, it's going to be all right, it's going to be all right, it's going to be all right, it's all coming together perfectly. These little statements weren't nothing major, weren't nothing specific, but they just made me calm and centered and relaxed, and that will help you as well. But you've got to apply them.

Speaker 1: 22:59

Number 15, take a hot bath. Hot bath will release the muscles from tension, which is amazing. But if you're wanting to finish on a high, you've got to hit the cold and get in the shower for like up to a minute cold shower, and that will invigorate you and will invigorate your system, giving you more energy. That shock cold at the end of a nice warm bath will really make you present. I don't like having cold showers. I don't like the cold, but what I always love to do is start off warm and finish cold. So I'm uncomfortable because I know that the extremities of both the temperatures allows me to become present. Number one, to relax to start with, and then number two, to shock my body into present and start releasing those feel good chemicals and brown fat that comes as a result of being able to expose yourself to the cold. And number 16, last but not least, the breath.

Speaker 1: 23:57

Always come back to the breath. When you're stressed out, you're not thinking about the breath. When you're stressed out, this hyperactivity the only thing you're thinking about is the task you're trying to achieve at the moment that you're probably failing at. I know that I was failing the other day with my emotional reaction to all the things I was doing and I was just like just come back to the breath, come back to the breath. So I'm just looking at one thing I can do that's right in front of me, do that to the best of my ability and once that's finished, find the next thing that I kind of want to do and do that to the best of my ability and just do it that way, because stress always happens as a result of thinking we've got too much to do and too little time or not enough money to do this, or you can't control this, or you can't control that outcome. The only way you're ever going to control any outcome is by taking care of yourself and managing that, because that is something that you can manage.

Speaker 1: 24:55

So one of the breath exercises that really works for me is about seven and a half to eight breaths a minute and it's breathing in for three and exhaling for five, and I'll just do it with you now. Breathe in for three, one, two, three and exhale for five. One, two, three, four, five and just that simple rhythm of breathing in for three and exhaling for five, the exhale being longer than the inhale. It's releasing a lot of carbon dioxide from you, and that carbon dioxide is old air so you can allow in a new air. Essentially, what it's doing on an energetic level is releasing toxicity, simple but really profound.

Speaker 1: 25:42

But notice all of these little ideas and see which ones work for you. I do all of these, but maybe that's too much for you. But if there's any inspiration here or any of these ideas, apply them and notice how much better you feel or how much more equilibrium you feel as a result of trying to implement them, because we're not taught this in school, which is why I love to try and share this with you, because these are the things that I had to find out over the last two decades and apply by myself to go what actually works to maintain a great level of health, happiness and wellbeing and peace of mind, because challenge is gonna happen whether you like it or not and you're not always gonna get everything right. But as long as you've got some ideas and some tools to put into place, you'll surprise and delight yourself that you can come back to your center and restore your own state of wellbeing and empower yourself and enhance your life experience, because that's important that you take your own health and wellness in your own hands to the best of your ability. I'm all about prevention rather than cure, and all of these things that I've shared is helping you prevent yourself from going way too off the mark and getting into some kind of real health challenge. And if you can be close enough to your center and apply some of these things that I shared with you today, then you're gonna notice how much better you feel.

Speaker 1: 27:09

You've got to give yourself the gift of self-care.

Speaker 1: 27:13

You've got to give yourself time to soothe yourself from perhaps a period of massive activity, hyperactivity, hyper-stress.

Speaker 1: 27:23

Sometimes it takes a week, sometimes it takes two, but you've gotta learn how to take care of the mind and you've gotta learn how to take care of the body. And I've shared with you some ideas in today's episode. And if anything in this episode has inspired you and enlightened you, please share it with me and let me know what's worked for you, because your success is my success, because I wanna see you thrive and I wanna see you enjoy great happiness, health and wellness, and when you share your stories with me, it makes me feel so proud that I've been able to assist you on your journey so that you can do that for others, because what the world needs is more health, happiness and wellness, and that's all in our own hands. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and if you have, give me a thumbs up, let me know. And if you are on any of these listening platforms, please leave a review, because your review is really help the algorithm. Until the next episode, I wish you a wonderful week ahead and green lights all the way Build.