 Question is from Solomon Roskin. What are the best ways to deal with stress? You know, when you look at the studies on stress and you look at effective techniques, there's a lot of different things that are out there that can help people deal with stress. But there's one thing that probably will make the biggest impact on how you handle stress. And this one thing I'm gonna talk about has been echoed in many practices that span the world. Some of them are found in religious practices, others in philosophies. And that is how you accept or you try to fight your current situation, okay? So I'll give you a good example. I was reading this book, the book with Dr. John Gottman and he talks about the stress of having a child, that how that'll stress out couples quite a bit. In fact, you see divorce spike after a couple has children. However, the couples that accept that their life will never be the same, the husband that accepts that he's not gonna just have sex whenever he wants, the wife that accepts that, she just can't go out to dinner all the time, that they accept that they're having a child, life is never gonna be the same as it was before. The stress doesn't bother them. Now it doesn't mean that they're not stressed, it just means that they're not fighting it. You know what I mean? It's like this, it's like, imagine if you were sad and then you were sad that you were sad. You know what I'm saying? Like, wow, why am I sad? And it makes you even more sad about being sad. It's like a spiral of things. So one of the number one things with stress is just whatever your situation is in, you have to, acceptance makes a big deal, makes a big difference. Like, okay, well this is just the way it is right now. Right now, I'm working this many hours. Right now, I'm handling all these different things. I need to just accept it and that reduces the pain from the stress significantly. It's something you can apply, anybody can apply. We suffer more in imagination than we do in our minds. It's all about reframing, right? That's the first step too. Now obviously there's things that you can do, I think in your daily practices that can help mitigate this, but all of them really go back to helping you reframe your thinking. That's with the meditation, the getting good rest, like all of it just helps you have better, clearer thinking about what's going on in your life. And it's the ability for you to reframe what's happening to help out the stress. And the thing that's helped me and that I share with people that I think is done wonders for clients that I've discussed this with and even applying it to my own life is that it's just looking at all stress that I deal with, whether it be work, personal life, whatever. They're all challenges and they're all difficulties. And the greater the challenge, the greater the difficulty, the better it is on the other side. So learning to look at it like, yeah, okay, it's a stress right now. When I break through the stress, I adapt or get over it, the reward is more rewarding than what the stress was. And the greater it is, the greater the reward on the other side, which is how you handle the bigger, harder ones, right? Cause everybody, and there's no such thing as big problems, only problems that we make big. So when you have these like life altering things, deaths in the family, these hardships with work. Jim Quickian, did you like it? Hey, you know what, the pure, it took 45 minutes for me. Oh it worked, there it is. I dropped you some Jim Quick Stoicism in there. Yeah, it's shit dude, it does work. It takes my body 45 minutes. A little bit longer. Yeah, a little bit longer. That's what it is, take a little bit longer to get there. It's a longer, more beautiful brain. Right on, Organify, yeah. I think too, like just taking an inventory of what are the potential stressors going on with you right now. Sometimes it's good to acknowledge it and you don't realize where it's all coming from sometimes. And I know that, you know, I went through a period where it was just, I was trying to take on like way too many things at once. And then not realizing where my deficits were, which then stressed me out. Cause then I wasn't contributing to those things that I needed to contribute to. And then, you know, just looking at all these things, prioritizing, and this is a lot of where you see like, you know, these TV shows where they come in and they have somebody like clean your house. Like, let's organize everything. Let's get rid of, let's be a minimalist. Let's get rid of all this stuff. Cause you don't need it or, you know, like there's practices like you'd mentioned with meditation. There's ways, there's tools out there for you to be able to handle certain components of this, but it always revolves around your mindset. And the thing is like, you're going to face adversity constantly. So it's about like learning how to adjust and to be able to, you know, be in a calm state of mind. Yeah, I think a lot of the reason why people feel so stressed nowadays is because, cause there's a bit of a myth out there that, you know, it's the stressful times we've ever lived in human history. And, you know, we're just so much stress. Stop watching the news for a while. Yeah, okay. That's actually not true. Okay, it's not true. Talk to your grandparents, you know, they had all kinds of crazy stress. Money was way tighter. People would die from diseases. Like rickets. They would lose children. You know, it was, it's actually objectively the least stressful time ever, yet we feel more stressed. I think part of the reason why we feel more stressed is because we think we're not supposed to. We think we're always supposed to be happy. We're always supposed to have what we want. Whereas when you talk to, you know, and it's one of the reasons why I love training people in advanced age, I would talk to them about these kinds of things. And they'd tell me, you just accepted it. That was life. That was just the way it was. It's the resistance to the way things are that causes much of our stress. When you look at like people like Wim Hof, who teaches people how to tolerate the freezing frigid cold water that they'll jump into, one of the things that he teaches you to do is just accept the fact that it's cold. You're not fighting it. You're not resisting it. You get in, you accept it. You acknowledge it, and then you calm your body and deal with it. That's right. And the defense of all the millennials that are freaking out over all the stress that we have is this, is that what I think we have is, I think we have more low level stress than we've ever had. I think that we are so attached to our phones. We're so attached to our email. We're so easily connected to so many other people that influence our lives and our mood. And, you know, just because it's not a lion jumping out and trying to eat us, type of stress, or someone dying of fucking scurvy in our family, like because it's not a stress like that, it's just low- You have family pirates. It's this low level stress that they're constantly getting. And I think it's the compounding effect of that, that when, oh, when something happens when you're at home or something that's a, you know, maybe not like a lion jumping out at you, but a much higher elevation, I think it feels like it's so much more because you don't realize when you're scrolling through Instagram and you think you're just liking photos and looking at what your friends are doing and really what you're doing subconsciously is comparing yourself to them and where you're at and get validation. Yeah, why am I not on that trip? Why am I not on that trip? Exactly. This life sucks. That life looks great. Exactly. And so you're already framing how you're going to look at this obstacle or challenge you're gonna have maybe five hours later in the day. So I scroll through Instagram. Now I didn't think of that scrolling through Instagram as a stress, but it most certainly was because subconsciously I was comparing myself to all my friends and feeling bad about myself and where I'm at currently in my life, even if it wasn't like a major focus, it happened. And then I get to work and I'm emailing back and forth and I get an email from somebody that is a disgruntled employee or disgruntled customer service issue and now I'm dealing with that. And then I go home and then my wife drops some serious news on me. That's like a real fucking stress in our life. She lost her job. Now I'm alone gonna have to support whatever. Now that's a real fucking stress, but because you had all that low level shit, I think it's the combination of all of it that makes that seem so fucking paramount. It is. And again, I really think the big, and there's a lot of different things you could do. Exercise, be healthy. It makes you more resilient to stress. You could structure your life so that you have some downtime. You can learn how to meditate, maybe prayer, because it's another form of meditation, right? That gives you a sense of meaning and purpose. That's all very important, but at the very top of it, really is just not resisting and accepting reality, because reality is in front of you, right? Things are happening. You have a job, you have bills, maybe you have kids. And that, if you're in resistance to what is real, you're at war with reality. That's stressful. That's gonna make life real hard. I remember one time I was in the car with the kids and with Jessica and we were driving, I think we were driving to my cousin's house and it was taking forever. There was a traffic jam. We were in the car. It was a two-hour trip. It took us like five hours to get where we were and I was so angry and irritated, just like driving in traffic will do that to a lot of us. And I remember Jessica, we were talking, she goes, why are you so stressed out? I'm like, because we're in the car and I'm so pissed off or whatever. And she's like, well, what is it that's bad? I'm gonna get there. She's like, okay, what do you wanna do when we get there? I wanna be with everybody. She's like, you're with everybody now? You know, I thought, you're right. We're all in the car together. We're just gonna go somewhere else and be together. And it immediately changed how I felt. Immediately I thought, oh yeah, I'm with everybody now. We're all in the car. Let's all just hang out just like we would when we got to our destination. That reframing of life and where you're at. And again, this book by Dr. Gottman talks about this. He says, the couples that succeed with children are the ones that accept that life will not be the same anymore. The ones that have that struggle are the ones that struggle with the fact that it's not like it used to be. And I want it to be the way it was. It's not gonna be the way it was. Well, yeah, when you start living in the past or thinking too much in the future, it's as present as you can get. And that's why breathing and these techniques, they help you to be conscious about what's right in front of you. And to just disregard all that stuff.