CONTROL STRESS – WITHOUT TALKING ABOUT MEDITATION

I’d been working my balls off for a few weeks now. I loved the feeling of adrenaline every day as I smashed things off my to-do list. But I wasn’t too crazy about the 4 hours of sleep a night. However, I was getting more done than ever before. I mean, what’s not to like about those levels of productivity? This was back in the days before my adrenals gave up, when I was flying high on a heady mix of cortisol and adrenaline thinking that I was just a high-performance human. But oh, how little I knew.

It was about this time when I was talking to a friend who expressed concern at my hectic schedule. “Maybe you should just slow down a bit, breathe, maybe try a bit of meditation… you seem really stressed…”

Immediately I felt my blood rise. “What the hell did she know? Meditation! I mean what the hell?”, I thought. She wasn’t a biohacker, a performance coach like me, she didn’t do the 100’s of little things I did every day to ensure I could do all this. I knew exactly what I was doing and I was going to prove it to her. “I’M NOT BLOODY STRESSED” I yelled at her… slammed down my coffee cup (the 6th of the day) and stormed out to smash some more tasks off my to-do list.

Now before I reveal the true levels of my stupidity, we have to understand what stress is. Whenever I look at the body, I tend to break it down into two separate components: Hardware and Software.

Whenever something places our hardware under threat (real or perceived) it drops into ‘fight or flight’. Now the fight or flight response is the most hardwired response in our biology. We share it with lizards and it hasn’t changed in millions of years. Stress is just our modern way of saying fight or flight. The problem? Most people see stress ONLY as a mental thing, a software thing.

Your boss shouts at you. You get caught up in traffic. You can’t pay the rent this month. Because it’s seen as a software problem, most solutions focus on software solutions or interventions.

Meditation, breathing, go for a walk, do something relaxing. The problem with software solutions? You have to think about them. Now I don’t know about you but when I’m super stressed and someone comes and tells me to meditate, I’m as likely to explode at them as I am to actually listen to their (actually very good) advice! Reprogramming your software also takes a lot of effort. Just like in real life, programming software is a hard and long task, taking many, many man hours. Changing our thought patterns or programming interrupts us to stop our spiral into a full-on meltdown, is often the same.

However, stress isn’t just a software problem, many other things place strain on the Hardware:

Noise
Junk light
Crappy diet
Not enough or too much exercise
Parasites or viruses
Lack of laughter and human contact
Toxins
Parabens in beauty products
Pesticides
Plastics

The list goes on and on.

And the body only has one response to stress…fight or flight. So rather than look to upgrade the software if we instead first focus on the Hardware, we can have a different result.

Now just like a computer if we put in a faster CPU (core processing unit), not only will the computer immediately perform better but we can run the software much faster, allowing much more bandwidth for other programs to run concurrently. It’s also much easier to simply slot in a new chip and once it’s done, it’s done.

So, if I’m dealing with someone suffering from stress or anxiety…the first place I start is with the biological causes of stress, the hardware. By reducing stress on the underlying hardware, we can give a person much more resilience as we reduce the amount of baseline stress the body is under on a minute-by-minute basis.

Think of stress as a cup. If you were totally stress-free the cup would be empty. Each time your boss shouts at you, or you get cut up, or you eat food which doesn’t agree with you, or you sit in front of a computer for hours, or you use soap full of chemicals…in short, each time you force your body to do something which causes it to work harder than it wants to… a little bit of liquid gets added to the cup. Now the body has its own system for emptying the cup…but as we add more and more liquid to the cup this system struggles to clear the liquid fast enough. Think of the remaining empty part of the cup as your resilience to stress. It’s how much more stress you can take before things start to go wrong. Once the cup overflows you start to have real problems.

By improving the hardware, we increase the size of the cup whilst also increasing the efficiency of the system which empties it, meaning more resilience to stress. But the real advantage of treating hardware is that rather than requiring thought to implement the resolution, (like a software solution) upgrading hardware often only requires a simple lifestyle shift to reduce the amount of stress the body is coming under. And when the shift is made it’s there for life.

For example, a starting point for dealing with stress might be to look at what deodorant the person uses. Bear with me I’ve not gone mad! Most deodorants contain a load of chemicals which force the liver to work harder to detox. In other words, they place the liver under stress. So, by simply changing the deodorant a person uses to one that actually helps the body we can immediately lessen the amount the stress the body is under. Doing this requires no more thought than remembering to pick up the right deodorant next time you’re at the shops. No fancy techniques, no mind games.

Now am I trying to say that you can cure someone suffering from being stressed out and anxious by changing their deodorant? NO. Stress and anxiety are a death by 100 cuts, of which deodorant is just one small cut…but if we can make enough small shifts and eliminate enough of these cuts, we can eliminate stress without ever needing to meditate… But what you’ll find is that as you start to reduce stress on the Hardware, you have much more bandwidth for Software solutions such as meditation, breath work and mind games, which are important in their own respects as well.