The first episode of my podcast series Mindset Mastery came out today!
I spoke to social and emotional learning consultant Jocelyne Chirnside about good and bad stress, exercising our brain, the difference between bullying and conflict, and how we can reframe our thoughts to live happy and healthier.
Here is an excerpt from the show where Jocelyne talks about the effects of stress to our mental and physical health and ways to manage it in our everyday lives.
You can listen to the full episode here.
“There’s new research that says that stress can actually be good for us. The difference is how we perceive it and how we deal with it.
I’m a big contender to say that we need to manage our stress and view stress as our friend, not as our enemy.
We are all are carrying much more than perhaps our ancestors did in terms of juggling priorities. But if we can shift our mindsets to see that stress is our trigger, and recognise what it is that we need to manage in our life.
When we don’t manage stress we have this rush of cortisol and adrenaline through our bodies which can have quite long term effects. In the short term it can kick us into action, but long term, the mobilisation impact it has wears us down.
It wears down our immune system, it wears down our digestive system, it stops our brains functioning effectively. The prefrontal cortex isn’t able to reason and process effectively, and we lose our ability to be creative. Longterm, it can reduce our immunity leading to chronic illnesses.
There is quite a lot of research on the neuroscience of stress and how our brains process it in a way that initially is toxic. It can put you into a spiral of really negative, destructive thinking such as, “I can’t deal with this. It’s whelming. I’m going to fail. I’m not good enough;” all those negative thoughts that follow stressed emotion.
We can have over 60,000 thoughts a day, and scientists have put microbes on our brains and they’ve found that 80% of our thoughts are toxic, which is pretty scary. And 95% of those are the same thoughts we had yesterday.
We have patterns of thinking, which actually have emerged from a very early fundamental age – the formative age. I believe that if we want to deal with stress, we’ve got to really think about what is it that we’re thinking about ourselves, and about the situation. What is it that we can manage, and what is it that we can’t manage?
Actually unpacking our thinking and starting to reframe things from “I can’t, it’s too hard,” into, “I can do it, I can do this,” or “I will” statements.
It’s also helpful to have someone that you can unpack those difficult thoughts with and be vulnerable to.
There’s been quite a lot of research done to suggest that when we’re overwhelmed, going and doing an act of kindness and doing something good for someone else releases dopamine and endorphins, that make us feel good.
So what we’re trying to do is counter the negative stress hormones and release the positive, healthy hormones. Being kind releases good hormones, and it stops you from being so focused on your problem.
The other thing that can release the good hormones and reduce stress is when we just stop for a minute and think of the things that we’re thankful for. It’s a bit of a discipline when we’re overwhelmed, but simple things like the sun shining today; yesterday it was gloomy, and being productive was really hard.
Today I’m thankful the sun’s out. Just little things like that, actually start to change our pattern of thinking from negative, which is toxic, to positive and helpful.
And the other thing that it’s really important in stress is exercise. I try to do a minimum of 15 minutes, which is really achievable. My goal is an hour, but that’s not always as achievable.
But just to do 15 minutes of movement to get away from the computer, get off the sofa, that again releases dopamine that makes us feel good.”