224. Feeling Stress is Optional: Strategies for a Healthier Mind and Body with Dr. Robyn Tiger

In a world where the pressures of modern life can lead to overwhelming stress and disconnection from our true selves, the journey toward stress management and holistic well-being becomes essential.

In this episode of Health Bite, Dr. Adrienne Youdim welcomes Dr. Robyn Tiger, a lifestyle medicine physician and trauma-informed mind-body expert, to discuss her transformative journey from a traditional medical career to embracing holistic health practices. 

Dr. Tiger shares her personal struggles with stress and chronic symptoms, and how she discovered the power of mind-body techniques to reclaim her health and happiness.

Who is Dr. Robyn Tiger?

• Lifestyle medicine physician with a focus on stress management
• Founder and CEO of Stress Free MD
• Trauma-informed mind-body expert
• Advocate for integrating holistic practices into traditional medicine

What You'll Discover in This Episode:

• The impact of chronic stress on physical and mental health
• How Dr. Tiger transformed her life through yoga, meditation, and lifestyle changes
• The importance of recognizing stress as a contributor to various health issues
• Practical tools for managing stress and enhancing well-being
• The significance of self-reflection and behavior change in achieving a healthier life

Why This Episode Matters:

If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed or struggling with stress-related symptoms, this episode offers valuable insights into how to take control of your health and well-being. Dr. Tiger's story serves as a powerful reminder that it is possible to reclaim your life through intentional practices and self-care.

This episode will help you:

• Understand the connection between stress and chronic health issues
• Explore effective strategies for managing stress in daily life
• Embrace the journey of self-discovery and transformation
• “Feeling stress is optional.” – Dr. Robyn Tiger

Connect with Dr. Robyn Tiger:

Website: www.stressfreemd.net 

Instagram: @stressfreemd

Ways that Dr. Adrienne Youdim Can Support You

• Join the Monthly Free Mind-Body Workshops: Participate in engaging mind-body practices designed to help manage your stress response. Register here.
• Sign Up for the Newsletter: Stay updated with valuable insights and resources by subscribing to the newsletter. Sign up here.
• Freebie alert. Register for our monthly free MindBody Workshop and receive a downloadable guide on emotional labeling to help you manage your emotions effectively.

Connect with Dr. Adrienne Youdim

• Website :https://www.dradriennespeaks.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dradrienneyoudim/

Transcript

Adrienne Youdim

Hi friends, and welcome back to Health Byte, the podcast where I offer small, actionable bites for greater physical, mental, emotional, and professional health and well-being. I'm your host, Dr. Adrienne Youdim. I'm a triple board certified internist, obesity medicine, and physician nutrition specialist. And I've learned in working with patients for 20 years that good nutrition is not just about the food that you eat, but all the ways in which we can nourish ourselves, mind, body, and soul. And this week, I'm so grateful to have with us a special guest, Dr. Robin Tiger. She is a lifestyle medicine physician. She is also a trauma-informed mind-body expert and founder and CEO of Stress Free MD. And I think a perfect person to speak to in our present times. So thank you, Robin, so much for being here.

Robyn Williams:

Thanks for having me and happy Earth Day. Today's Earth Day.

Adrienne Youdim

It sure is. We're recording on Earth Day and so it really is perfectly aligned and you are really the perfect person, I think, to speak to this conversation. As a physician, you know, it's interesting about physicians because number one, I think we can relate to all the personal and professional stress that people experience. Our training is certainly grueling. So we understand the stress from Mark and life situation. We also understand the mind-body connection and the fact that this stress when left unchecked harms us in many ways, mind and body. But I think the most interesting thing about us, Robin, is that despite all the knowing, there's very little doing in this regard, right? Like we don't heed our own call in terms of managing our own stress and well-being. So I'm curious, Robin, if you can just start and tell us how did you break out of that mold and what got you interested in starting this journey?

Robyn Tiger

Yeah, well, yeah, full disclosure, everything you said is true. Whether you are a healthcare professional, whether you are not a healthcare professional, whether you're an everyday human, we are everyday humans. And yeah, it's very, very easy to get kind of into these bad behavior patterns, right? And part of it is because we just weren't taught. We just don't know. So some of it is we kind of know better and others we actually, we just don't know. We don't know. But for me, well, the saying goes, make your mess your message. Make your mess your message. I haven't heard that.

Adrienne Youdim

I love that though.

Robyn Tiger

Yeah. Yeah, so when you've got a mess and then you figure it out and you clean up your own mess, what could be more wonderful than sharing how you helped yourself so you can help others? And essentially, that's what happened to me. I, several years ago, I'm going to say, wow, 15, 20 years ago or so. At that time, I was married, still married, but married with two then young children working as a radiologist. And if I'm honest with myself and I start to think back a little bit further, the symptoms that I started to develop over time probably really started to come about when I was a resident. And I started to develop all these symptoms which seemed really disconnected. Like nothing seemed to make sense to me. I had these migraine headaches, which I never had before with vomiting. I had tinnitus, which is like that ringing in your ears. I experienced vertigo, which isn't just dizziness. It's like the whole room is like spinning around just from a little bit of a head turn. my gums were bleeding, which like, what does that have to do with anything? When you're an internist, right? So now you're starting to think about all these things and trying to put it together. My body hurt all the time. Like no matter what I did, my body just hurt so badly. I feel like the Tin Man, right? Like where I just, I couldn't move my body and I I felt like I needed oil, like oil, oil, oil, you know, like in the Wizard of Oz, right?

Adrienne Youdim

Yeah.

Robyn Tiger

And I had really bad reflux, so that's that burning chest pain that you may experience if you know what reflux is. I couldn't digest my food, like no matter what I ate, my belly would distend, I would get pain, I couldn't, diarrhea, constipation, my bowel habits were like all over the place. I was getting sick a lot. I noticed I was always, quote, catching a cold. Couldn't really seem to shake that ever. And I had a really scary symptom, Adrienne, which are known as paresthesias, which for everyone listening, that's this numbness, tingling feeling in my hands, in my feet, and the left side of my back. And of course, my doctor brain was like, you have a debilitating neurologic disease because Like, what else will be causing this? And so this didn't all just happen over like one day. I mean, as I mentioned, several years it was like symptom, I'd go to see a doctor, I'd get a pill. We call it a pill for an ill. I have a symptom, I go to a doctor, I get a pill. Or I'd get a procedure. Or I would be sent to some kind of therapy. So at one point, I have a whole pile of pills. I'm taking all these pills. I'm feeling worse than ever, and I'm not getting better. And I'm going to PT, OT, acupuncture, massage therapy, chiropractor. Um, you know, you name it. And I started having like bad thoughts, like bad thoughts, like, I just can't take another day like this. Like, I don't, I just don't want to be here. So nothing was planned, but it was just that I was suffering so much. I thought, Oh my goodness. Like, I just, I just don't want to be here. It's too much. And I had lost three physician colleagues and friends to suicide. And so that really scared me. And I started to see myself, you know, kind of heading down that path where, you know, I just was so unhappy and so much pain and discomfort. And I was suffering so much physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, all the things. And on the outside, I looked perfect, right? I had this amazing husband. I had two incredible kids. I have this gorgeous house. I have this job as a doctor. I'm married to a doctor. I've got this nice car. All the things, right?

Adrienne Youdim

All the check boxes.

Robyn Tiger

All the boxes were checked. I had everything. Everyone thought that we were just like the perfect family. But I was like dying on the inside. And so I thought I really need to start looking outside the box of traditional Western medicine, which is amazing. Okay, so we're both Western medicine trained physicians, we both believe in medicine, we're both probably very grateful for Western medicine, and there's more. There had to be more because I wasn't getting better. And so I was already training, overtraining for races. I was running. I was working out all the time. Too much, actually, really was my vice to a fault. I was eating what I thought was a pretty healthy diet at the time. And I'm thinking like, what else should I be doing? You know, what else is out there? And that's when I started hearing about other things such as yoga, such as meditation. Coaching came later, which I thought all those things were like, kind of for those weird people down the hall, you know, at the gym, behind the door, wearing strange clothes, listening to weird music, putting their bodies in strange upside down twisty shapes and Like, that's not for me. I'm an athlete. I don't know what those people down there are doing. But I kept hearing about this, hearing about this, hearing about this. And I didn't know what else to do. And so there ended up being this yoga 101 meditation kind of series about five minutes from my home. And it was being taught by an anthropology professor from the local university. And so my doctor left brain, the egotistical part of my brain was like, she's got to be credible. Right? Because she's not some Molly Moonbeam weirdo. Like not only does she teach here, but it's actually her studio and she's a professor. So I felt a bit safer. than my mind had thought previously. And so after seeing this advertised lots of times and after getting my next door neighbor who's a nurse on board. I signed up for this thing. And Adrienne, I remember that first day, like, it was just yesterday. I remember being exhausted. I was so tired, right? I just, I mean, I was so tired all the time. And I can't tell you how many cases I read, how many biopsies I did, how many procedures I did. I came home. I fed my kids, I bathed my kids, I hand them my husband with one eye open, I'm driving down the road to be at this class at 7.30 at night the whole time saying, why am I doing this? I could be emptying the dishwasher, folding the laundry, I've got to prep for my patients tomorrow, I want to read to my kids, what am I doing? But I went. And tail between my legs, eyes down, one eye open. And I have to say that at the end of that very first class, I felt calm. I wasn't tired. My body didn't hurt. I was clear in my mind. And my whole world changed. And so that was the very beginning of realizing that there's more than what we learned in medical school, and that we can help ourselves by learning how to feel better in different ways than we were ever taught.

Adrienne Youdim

Yeah. I have lots of questions, but I have to check off a doctory question in my mind before I can get over here. Because you had so many symptoms, some of which are quite alarming. So for example, your gums bleeding, there was no organic cause for that. There was no diagnosis that they uncovered for the fact that you had bleeding gums.

Robyn Tiger

 No, so what I didn't mention was I went to a neurologist, right, for the paresthesia and the headaches.

Adrienne Youdim

Yes.

Robyn Tiger

And I went to a periodontist after my dentist for the gums who kept injecting antibiotics in my gums, kept saying, you know, you're all inflamed, you have all this inflammation in your gums, kept injecting antibiotics in my gums. Wow. You know, so every doctor I went to had me get procedures and so on.

Adrienne Youdim

kind of specific to their world, to their realm. So they saw me as a symptom, right?

Robyn Tiger

So like this, like, like the horses with their blinders on, right? They just saw me as the symptom. And so that was the treatment. I was getting treatment for all these things. So with the gums, it was antibiotics. What I came to understand, Adrienne, was that I had so much inflammation in my body. I had so much cortisol, so many stress hormones that were going haywire. I had so many cytokines, that inflammatory markers, right? It was the inflammation that was being caused by the chronic stress, which is the diagnosis that everyone missed and that I eventually was able to make. It was the inflammation that was causing all these symptoms. And once over time, I started to learn more and more tools, and we can even talk more deeper in that all of my symptoms, every single one of them went away. All of them. It's amazing. And I've since, yeah. And I've since seen several, several clients with bleeding gums and peristeges and all these kinds of things. And I'm like, you're, you know, after you get checked out by your physician, if everything else is okay, you know, guess what? It could be from stress and every time it has been. So to answer your question, inflammation shows up in our bodies in so many different ways.

Adrienne Youdim

And this is such an important point to, I think, hone in on. Number one, I never want to be dismissive, right? So like you alluded to, we should always make sure that bleeding gums or what have you doesn't suggest something organic that can be dealt with, you know, I want to say quickly, but you know what I mean? Diagnostically, I guess, therapeutically. And I know, you know, even in my book, Hungry for More, where I describe patient hungers, many of them presented with symptoms like tinnitus and ultimately, you know, or the ringing in the ears, like you said, and ultimately, there wasn't an organic cause. So I think it's important to highlight that stress that we dismiss, so many of our professionals, so many of our mothers, they dismiss, you know, stress as, oh, I'll deal with it when the kids grow up. but there can be really tangible consequences, really important and debilitating consequences. So thank you for sharing that. Okay, now that we got that out of the way, there was no platelet issue for your gums.

Robyn Williams:

There was no platelet issue. Yes, we are.

Adrienne Youdim

Now that my Western doctor mind has been stewaged. So now I want to know what what happened in that class do you think in that yoga class that you immediately because of course these things they call them practices because with practice right you start to see benefits and that's actually the another important message i think for listeners because a lot of us you know high achieving professionals we do look down on these practices as like willy nilly or voodoo or i'll do it later we we're very dismissive But then if we give it a chance, we do find that just breathing, yes, in fact, does do incredible things for our bodies. But what did you experience in that one class that made you so certain, that was so transformative for you?

Robyn Tiger

You know, as I described, I went in exhausted with body pain and mindful of junk, you know, and I came out feeling calm, awake, clear, relaxed in my body and my left brain My doctor brain was like, what just happened? And this is a time when we didn't have computers. We couldn't use Google, Dr. Google, right? We had actual books. And so I remember staying up really, really late and starting to look through all my books to try and figure out what was going on and then going to the library and doing research. and seeing that there is tons, even back then, of medical literature documenting the benefits of, as you say, these practices. Just like medicine is a practice, right? Everything we're doing is actually a practice. And that what has been happening physiologically is that I was able to turn down what we know to be the stress response, which is part of our nervous system, our autonomic nervous system, and turn up the relaxation response, which is the parasympathetic nervous system. And when we have chronic stress on board, there's this imbalance of these two components of our nervous system. And our stress response is like putting your foot pedal to the metal when you're driving, right? And so we get to start putting the brake on and learning how to put the brake on and even that out. We don't want a car that only has a brake that works, and we don't want a car that only has a gas pedal that works. But when we have chronic stress on board, we're using that gas pedal way too much, and that causes a lot of stress hormones to be circulating, a lot of inflammation in our body, and it can show up as all different types of symptoms. And the thing is, as you mentioned, we don't want to be dismissive. We want to make sure that all of your symptoms get checked out appropriately. And we want to recognize that up to 90% of the symptoms that patients, us, report to our primary care physician or healthcare professional for are secondary to chronic stress. Research shows up to 90% So that is huge. That is huge. And so it's really important to recognize that. And then to understand that, well, even if you're like, I can deal with that, so what? I've dealt with these symptoms my whole life. I'm strong, can deal with it. We need to understand that chronic stress is the direct cause of the top chronic diseases in the world. Hypertension, which is high blood pressure. Diabetes type 2. heart disease, stroke, cancer progression and growth. And it's even associated strongly with dementia, right, which there's so much talk about these days. And it shortens your lifespan, it actually makes your you live shorter life because it shaves down these telomeres, which are the protective ends of your chromosomes. So that is why we need to start focusing on relieving our stress.

Adrienne Youdim

Yeah, absolutely. And I know we're going to get into some of the tools. So I'm curious, if we stay in that moment in time, what did you do? How did you change your life as a result of this experience that you had?

Robyn Tiger

Yeah, so it was really lots of layers of learning. And it started with my first, just the realization about what was happening. And then I was very excited about it. I was very excited to find, wow, okay, my brain is being satisfied because there's medical literature. And I want to dive deeper into this. So what do we do when we want to learn something? We get certified in it. So it started with me going into a yoga teacher training certification, not thinking I was going to teach anybody anything, just because I wanted to help myself even more. And it was there that I learned about the field of yoga therapy. So for those of you listening, a yoga teacher requires a 200-hour base level of training. A yoga therapist requires at least 1,000 hours over a three-year period. And so that was like, oh, I can doctor in a different way. Like, I can help people with their symptoms and their illnesses in a different way. And so after I became certified as a yoga teacher, I went on to become certified as a yoga therapist and then chose some additional areas that I wanted to focus on, including trauma, including stress, including people with cancer, and our military, and arthritis, and all these different areas. And it was there that I experienced meditation, which again, I thought was no way. That's for people sitting quietly for long periods of time, uncomfortably saying weird things, making sounds. I mean, my brain, like your brain may be thinking this, but when Harvard researchers come in and show you functional MRI images before and after meditation, and I'm sitting there. in my yoga therapy training in Kripalu, Massachusetts with these Harvard researchers showing me before and after, my mind was blown. Okay, so that's when I got into meditation and then I spent another three years becoming certified in iRest, which is a specific type of meditation which we can get into. Then the coaching piece, right? We're learning to work with our thoughts. So as I became more and more able to work with my own body and teach others, I wanted to work more with my thoughts. And that's where that life coaching piece came in to really understand how to work with our thoughts and how to help others do the same. And all the while, well, then there are all those other pieces, right? There's nutrition and exercise and sleep and so on. And that came when I was connected to the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. There was a physician who was a board certified lifestyle medicine physician. I'd never even heard of this before until I moved here to Asheville. And when I heard about it, I got so excited because I said, wow, this really feels like my home. And they brought me on as faculty, wanted me to really start to focus on that stress pillar, which we can talk more about. and to co-author the Board Review Manual for that section. So that's really been my journey, really learning, helping myself, becoming certified teaching, learning, helping myself, becoming certified teaching. I just keep adding those layers to my own personal growth, my own personal well-being and self-care, and then adding that to what I can help others learn as well.

Adrienne Youdim

Yeah, that's beautiful. So you kind of gathered this menu, so to speak, of options. And so I'm curious for someone who's listening to this right now and feels like, yeah, I can benefit from all of this, or I can benefit from something and maybe not know what or how. Is there a way that, is there like a ladder approach to how you offer these, or how you recommend that people take advantage of these sorts of practices? How do people go about initiating this in their life?

Robyn Tiger

Yeah, well, the very first thing is recognizing that you want to, and that you wanna make a change. And that's really the most exciting thing. And that's the hardest part, is being able to say, you know, I'm not where I want to be not feeling how I want to feel and I want to feel better and I want to live healthier and I want to live healthier longer. Right. So that is actually the hardest step. And once you've said that, that's the hardest part and that's done. And so after that, because we understand there are many facets as you talked about in your introduction, right? There are many facets to our being, all of our layers of our being, and there are many components. So we can think of ourselves and all of our behaviors as a wheel with spokes on a wheel. And in order for that wheel to work properly, all those folks need to be working properly. So we can't just say, oh, I'm going to go do some breathing and work on my stress without focusing on moving your body. without focusing on eating healthful, eating pattern, right? Without focusing on connecting with others, without focusing on your sleep, without focusing on being aware of your escapes and not choosing those escapes, without focusing on all of these components, right? And getting outside and connecting with nature. What I do when I have the privilege of working with people is I actually have assessment. There's a really short assessment that people fill out. And then we both get to identify where each spoke in your life falls, how strongly you feel about how well you're doing in each area. And then we can figure out where we want to start.

Adrienne Youdim

Yeah. like meeting yourself, you know, where you're at and, and where it feels most exciting, you know, which one of these spokes as you, as you mentioned, are calling to you. I think, you know, you mentioned the, the awareness piece or the, the deciding pieces being kind of the critical piece to, to starting to make change in your life. And I agree with that. I also think it has to be said that, um, that these things, do take time. And part of the decision making, I think, has to include permission for giving time to do the things. Because just to say, I want my life to change, or these things sound interesting, to me, it falls a little bit short. Because we have to recognize that, yes, it does take an investment. But the flip side to that is that when we do, we actually buy back time, right? We save time because we are more efficient and collaborative and intuitive and all those, uh, you know, beautiful things. So you actually gain back time. But I think a lot of people get stuck where they know they need to make a change, but they're kicking that can down the road because they're waiting for the right time. And I think we just have to at some point recognize like the time is now.

Robyn Tiger

Yeah, the time is now. Okay, so wait, I don't know that everyone's listening, but I have this little card. Now is the right time. And I actually got this back in like, was it 20, maybe 2012 or something when I started my yoga therapy training. It was in the card shop and I saw that and I was like, Now's the time and I've had it for over a decade sitting here on my desk. And, you know, just like you said, I frequently will hear, I don't have time. And I look at person right in the eyes and I say, you're right. And then they just look at me and I say, because you don't have time because what you're doing right now is actually taking time away from your life. And then it's like, You realize it. So it's true. If you don't have time, you don't have time. You don't. Now's the time. And a lot of these things that we're talking about, Adrienne, are things that you're doing anyway. You have to eat, right? So you can eat a little bit differently depending on how you're eating, right? You need to do these things. These are things you're doing anyway. So we can weave them in to our everyday activities. We can layer them with what we're already doing lots of times so that we're not taking time away from our already busy lives. And sure, if you have an hour, an hour and a half, and you can go take a full class of something, that's amazing. The truth is these tools that we learn, these behaviors don't have to take that long. It could be a matter of seconds and it could be things that you're already doing that you just need to do a little bit differently. And I think that teaching people how to create effective behavior change is something that I spend a lot of time on before we even get into all the different specific pillars is getting into creating effective behavior changes and how do we do that? And what is the stepwise way to do that?

Adrienne Youdim

Yeah, I think it's also important to note that you don't, um, I always say you don't have to be perfect in order to be effective. The body is so darn giving. It's like, um, I don't know if you saw this, you probably did Robin that the article that came out, um, it was like last night slash this morning where they showed that this was on the heels of the weekend warriors. So there's a series of articles. research articles that came out about people who exercised on the weekends, one or two days, as opposed to being daily exercisers. And so they found that, oh, these people have the same reduction in cardiovascular disease, the same reduction in dementia, the weekend warriors, that is, as compared to people who are exercising every single day. um they just the new study just said that they actually live longer as well like equivalent to people who are exercising daily and then this other newest article showed that people who walked at an average pace or a brisk pace as compared to a slow pace Average paced walkers had like a 34% reduction in irregular heart rate or arrhythmia. So it's like, I mean, when you read studies like this, you're like, wow, like the body really wants to conspire in your success. Like the body really wants you to live well. And so it will take anything you can give it and it will work with you.

Robyn Tiger

Yeah, and literature shows that, Adrienne. Literature shows that anything you do is better than nothing. So yes, we have these parameters about how much you should be exercising, what kind of exercise you should be doing, how many days a week, all these things. But the truth is, anything you're doing is better than doing nothing, or doing more is better than what you were doing before, and it's enough. It can be enough. You do make changes.

Adrienne Youdim

Yeah. So let's speak to the piece of the knowing but not doing. You were about to go into how we make lasting habit change. And so I imagine some of these ideas and practices are not novel to people. We know, and yet. And yet there are barriers, including time, but there's other barriers. So I know this is not a like a five minute conversation, but right. It's like it's like the meat of the matter. I know. But can you just speak a little bit to how you approach helping people maybe just even like harness the mindset of habit change. What are some pearls or some tips that you find are salient when you speak with patients and clients?

Robyn Tiger

Yeah, so for example, New Year's, right? People make these resolutions, which are so finite. And Forbes tells us that over 80% of them don't come into fruition, right? They just don't. And so when you just have an idea in your mind, like, I'm going to eat better, I'm going to lose weight, I'm going to work out more, I'm going to sleep more, you know, and so on. But there's no really specific rhyme or reason to it. and you're not even getting to the root reasoning behind why you're doing that thing, there's a high percentage that it's not going to happen, or it's not going to happen to the extent that you want it to. So just setting a goal in itself is really the last step of creating the behavior change. So we need to go back to the beginning. The beginning, step one, is identifying the behavior change that you want to make. So really getting clear on what that is. So maybe it's sleeping more, maybe it's eating better, whatever it is. The second step is getting really honest with yourself. And we actually look at the trans-theoretical model of change. And there's different steps. And we don't need to go through them completely, but we get in there and we say, Are you really wanting to do this thing? It's called pre-contemplation. You're like, eh, I'm not really actually, you know, I'm not really wanting to do this thing. Contemplation is like, well, I'm thinking about doing this thing in the next six months. And preparation is like, I'm gonna do this thing within a month. Action is, I've been doing this thing for, you know, less than six months and things are actually happening. And then maintenance is, I've been doing this for more than six months and it's actually working. And I said I wasn't gonna get into it, but I think it's better for me to explain it. And so we need to actually define the thing. Okay, I wanna sleep more. Okay, we'll just take that one. And then going through that, like where are you in those areas? Like get really clear. Is it something you're like, eh, I don't really need to do that? Or I'm gonna do that, but maybe in the next six months or in the next month and so on. So you need to decide like where you are there. And the next thing is asking yourself, how important is this thing to me really? How important is the thing to me really on a scale of one to 10? 10 being the highest. And research shows you need to be at least a seven. And if you're not at least a seven, then we need to do some life coaching and mindset work to figure out why you're not at a seven. And can you get to a seven? It could be that someone told you, you need to sleep more, but you don't really care about it. It's not really coming from your heart. Or it could be the next step where you ask yourself your confidence level. How confident are you that you can actually sleep more? Again, on a scale of one to 10, 10 being the highest. If you're not a seven or higher, it's not going to be successful. You got to pause. do a little coaching, identify your thoughts around this, figure out why it's lacking confidence, and see if we can alter that to get you to at least a seven. After you've gone through those first four steps, The fifth step is where you create the goal. And we can use different types of ways, like SMART goals you may have heard of, specific measurable, and so on. We can create goals in a very specific way, very structured way. But a lot of people, Adrienne, start with that goal creation, but they haven't done the foreground work. They haven't done the work ahead of time. And that leads you up to failure. You need to be clear in what you want to do. You need to be at least in the preparation stage where you're gonna do this thing in the next month. You need to be at least a seven in confidence and in importance, and then you can get really clear on your goals. That is why they succeed.

Adrienne Youdim

Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I think it's also a hopeful message because I do believe that a lot of people when they are goal setting, they do feel like it's important or they do intend wholeheartedly to make change, um, but then they get, uh, you know, roadblocks somehow. And so to acknowledge that there are very specific factors like level of readiness or level of confidence, which is a almost subjective, bright thing that can be, that can be changed, that can be modified. by just acknowledging or doing some detective work in terms of where those thoughts or feelings of confidence are coming from. Then it gives a little bit more structure and teeth to goal setting that I do feel like can seem a little bit like fluid or, you know, like not grounded, right? Not tethered. And that throws people off.

Robyn Tiger

Exactly. I mean, I think of it like this. Has anyone ever bought like Ikea furniture, you know, and you open it up and there's like all these pieces or anything. Now, if there was no instructions in there, like how would you even put that thing together? Right. You're probably not going to. Right. So the thing is we need instructions. We need an instruction manual. We need structure and we need that in terms of our creating our behavior change as well.

Adrienne Youdim

Yeah. So as we kind of get close to the end, I'm curious about a phrase that you use frequently, which is stress is optional. And I think a lot of people right now would throw in the towel on that. What do you mean stress is optional? There's chaos. The news is insane. There's so much uncertainty. Jobs are on the line. I mean, there's so much going on. How is stress optional? Can you speak to that a little bit?

Robyn Tiger

Yeah, so stress isn't optional. But feeling stressed is optional, right? So stress is gonna happen. There's gonna be stuff happening. There's stuff happening in our immediate world. There's stuff happening in the world further out. There's stuff happening in our own brains, right? Our brains are telling us things consciously and subconsciously. So the stress itself isn't optional, but feeling stress is optional, which is the name of the book that I wrote, Feeling Stress is Optional, right? So, you know, feeling. So, and that's because you can use tools from all the different things that we were talking about to mitigate, to decrease, to relieve the feelings of stress. And you can use them to prevent you feeling stress if you know you're going into a situation ahead of time that's going to be stressful. Maybe that's a meeting at work, a difficult conversation, something with your family. If you know that you're going into something, you can pull tools out of your toolbox to help you get to that place of calm, to help that stress response and relaxation response come into balance or homeostasis before. But you can decrease and relieve the feelings of stress. once they're showing their ugly face with tools. So feeling stress is optional, but stress, well, that's gonna happen. We can't make that not happen.

Adrienne Youdim

What would you say to the person who feels maybe that I should be feeling stress, right? Maybe people feel guilty for not engaging with everything that's going on or feeling like, well, you know, these are the times and like, it sounds, You know, it sounds silly to not feel stress. How would you address that? Because I do feel like there's this... There is this difference between, and I even can recognize it in myself, you know? There's a time when, you know, being in training or, you know, all the studies and like you, married while I was training and then having kids. And so to think about not having stress, just that notion was absurd. Like I had to have stress. I had to think all the time. I had to try and get myself out of this, What are those Chinese finger toys, right? You know what I mean? The people who are listening to us won't see us. And I do think that there is also this level of maybe guilt and burden of not feeling stress.

Robyn Tiger

Can you speak to that? Yeah, so two points you're talking about here. So one is that not all stress is bad. Okay, so there is eustress. E-U-S-T-R-E-S-S, you stress, that's the good stress. That's the falling in love stress. That's the me coming to talk to you on this podcast stress, right? That's good stress. That's the stress that helps us when we're working on a project, like you mentioned, getting things done, you know, whatever it is. That's okay. There's new stress, N-E-U-S-T-R-E-S-S, that's neutral stress. That's the stress where you're like, yeah, I heard that thing's happening really far away, you know that it's not a good thing, but it doesn't affect your everyday life. And then there's distress, D-E-S-T-R-E-S-S. Distress, D-I-S-T-R, yeah, distress. Distress, D-I-S-T-R, right. Which is the bad stress, okay? And that's what we want to de-stress. That's what we want to get rid of. That's the bad stress that we're talking about. So number one, all stress isn't bad. Some stress is good. And we need certain amount of stress, just like we're talking about that nervous system component. We can't just have the brake pedal on all the time. We need that balance. We need our stress response to be on. We need our relaxation response to be on. Now, we can hold space for all of the emotions. I'm in Asheville, okay? We had a horrendous hurricane that has wiped out a large part of my town. There are a lot of people here still without homes, without jobs. We have fires, just like you had fires. We had all these fires two weeks ago, and we just had another one the other day, right? There's all this stuff going on right here. Smoke, you know, come out of your house, there's just like all this smoke, right? You can be calm in the chaos. You can recognize that this is not okay. You can feel sadness, you can feel frustration, you can feel any emotion, and you can still be calm and keep yourself as healthy as possible during it all. But you don't have to feel stressed, because that stress is what's causing disease. which causes illness, which is shaving years off your life and stealing your joy. So we don't need to feel guilty about not feeling stressed. We can acknowledge the emotions that we have with respect to a particular situation. We can hold space for it all and still have the joy.

Adrienne Youdim

Yeah, that is a great clarification. Thank you. And I think know, at the end of the day, we appeal to, I'm going to say people like us, but maybe I should say people like me. But you know, like the, the classic, like American, the type A person, the doer, the striver, by saying that, even if you don't give yourself the grace of wanting to protect your own health and well-being, right? Like even if you're dismissing that in the moment. Whatever it is that we're aspiring to do, whether it's to be of service to the people around us who are in catastrophic situations, or even in service if we ourselves are experiencing something catastrophic. We can't act from a place of clarity when we're stressed. We can't come up with the necessary solutions of how we're gonna keep ourselves and our children and our companies and our organizations and our teams safe and sane and well when we're in this stress storm that is literally impacting our cognition and our volition and our body's health and wellbeing. So there's a work argument for, right, a case for managing our stress.

Robyn Tiger

Yeah. And I try to think about it more as preventing and relieving it because managing it is like, yeah, we're like kind of saying, come on in and just be here. You know, versus like, no, I'm going to mitigate you. Like, I'm going to crank you down. I'm going to turn that down. And if you think of it as a responsibility to yourself and the people around you, who you care about taking care of yourself, turning that down, and you know, One needs to be around. I know I want to be around for a long time. I want to chase my grandchildren around someday. Right. Yeah. So don't let stress rob you of your joy, of your health, of your wellbeing, of, of your longevity.

Adrienne Youdim

Yeah. I think that's a great place to stop. Robin, if people want to know more about what you do here, your, uh, about your book, about your offerings, where can we find you?

Robyn Tiger

Yeah, you can find me on my website, which is www.stressfreemd.net. You'll see information about the book, which is also on Amazon. I have a podcast called the Stress-Free MD Podcast. I do coaching, I have online programs, and I lead retreats. The next one is back in Africa in January.

Adrienne Youdim

Wow, incredible. Well, it's been such a pleasure to speak with you. Thanks for all of your your expertise and for your stories, sharing your personal story. It's been really a joy. Thank you.

Lucas:

Thank you so much.

Adrienne Youdim

And for all of our listeners, thank you for being here again this week and If you feel that somebody would benefit from this message, I know many would, please share with somebody that you love and head back over to our podcast wherever you listen so that you can rate and review and help us share this message. Thanks again, and I'll see you next week.