 One of the things that's difficult about stress is the, when you're under chronic stress, it becomes difficult to see it in yourself and it becomes difficult to remember who that person was who wasn't stressed out, you know? So I think in terms of resilience and stress management, a lot of it is around trying to keep yourself out of that red line area, right? Because once you cross, it's like once you cross this certain threshold of chronic stress, it can become much more difficult to ramp yourself back down. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. I'm curious because you guys have a really big platform, like do you experience that? Do you have to like tune things out? Oh, absolutely. Anytime you put your voice out there, your perspective, there's going to be people who don't agree even with the most mundane of all takes that we have. And some in our audience don't agree with the tone of our voices or the way that we interview our guests. And it's interesting because everyone has a different style and the way that we choose to bring on guests is we wanna hear more practical information that the audience can use and Johnny and I are penultimate learners. We're constantly learning from our guests. So for me, it's an opportunity to get an hour to actually learn how I can personally grow and of course, share that with the audience. And there are other interviewers that will take different styles with the exact same guests that we have on. But we've learned over the years that if you get too hung up on the hate, well, you're never gonna hit publish. You're never actually going to put something out there, realize that it just comes with the territory. And even Joe Rogan talks about not looking at YouTube comments for that exact reason. And I wanna add to this, the easiest thing to recognize and understand is people are always gonna dig into the most obvious thing. So I have a rock and roll haircut. That's what they go in on. I have a voice that is unique. That's exactly what they go in on. So anything that makes you different or makes you unique, that's what they drill in on. And that's the one, those are the things that you have to lean on that make you special, that make you different, that show your unique approach to things. But yet that is the exact thing that they wanna hammer on and take from you. So over time, I guess you just know, like these are the things, this is what's gonna happen. Yep. Trying to get used to it. You get a nerd to hearing the same stuff. Well, a funny little anecdote around this exact thing and I think will be interesting to the audience in a number of ways. Part of bringing you on the show was my own issues with stress over the summer and stress really got the best of me and I ended up working with one of your therapists at your clinic and he did this exercise with me. So if you take a piece of paper, you draw two lines on it, you make three sections on the piece of paper. He rattled off a list of things for me to put in one of these sections. So at the very top of the piece of paper, the left most box is completely in my control. The right most box is completely out of my control. The middle box is the gray area. And we went through a lot of prompts, but the one that he gave me is people like me. Is that in my control, is that out of my control or is that in the gray area? I think many who listen to this show would assume that I would put that's completely in my control in the left hand box. Some listeners would say, okay, AJ, that's in the middle based on what we've learned and I actually put it in the right. It's completely out of my control. I can put my best foot forward and I've learned in 15 years of being on the show that I could deliver what I think is my best performance and people are gonna hate it and people aren't gonna like me for reasons that are completely out of my control. And coming to terms with that, in the beginning caused me a lot of stress and a lot of pain and anguish. Of course you want people to like you. Of course you wish you could have more control and agency in getting people to like you. And even with all the tips and tricks and secrets we have our guest share that Johnny and I have worked on our communication, our presentation, I put it in that right most box because even with my best efforts on my best days, there are people listening to this who are clicking to the next episode, going into iTunes and giving us one star and that's out of my control. And I understand that now and it doesn't cause me stress anymore. So it was a very profound exercise to go through to realize how am I orienting my life? And the last prompt he asked me was, where would this have been five years ago or 10 years ago? Would you still put it in this right box? And I said, no, actually I probably would have put it in the left box. I would have said it's in my control. Of course I want people to like me and I can control them. But that's a fallacy. We don't have that level of control in the way people perceive us. And when you start hitting publish, you start putting things out publicly. You learn that lesson rather quickly. Yeah, yeah. Well, I appreciate you talking about that. I mean, so as you're talking about that, like people liking you and you being in or out of your control, I have this like internal reaction like, ah, like this is so hard to talk about or something, you know, because it's, I think it's really deep for all of us. Like we want to be liked and we recognize that there's a lot of upside to that. And so we spend the first half of our life, you know, all high school all the way up through there, through there, figuring out how to be liked in a lot of ways. Like what are the things that if I do them, people are gonna respect me, girls are gonna like me or whoever, you know, like that's a really important part of growing up. And then at a certain point in your life, you have to be able to step away from that and think about, okay, how do I be true to myself? How do I find what I really have to offer and trust that if I'm able to do that and put down those old strategies that I'm gonna find my way into the right parts, the right places in my life, the right career, have the right friends, the right partner partners, you know, like those, those are all the fruits of doing the work to figuring out who you really are. And it's difficult, man. It's hard. It is, and it can be stressful. And part of what Johnny and I have shared on the show is our upbringing, being blue collar in nature and both of our dads telling us to work our tail off and be stubborn and keep outworking people. And unfortunately that stiff upper lip, that work ethic can lead to you not managing stress well. And I had a brief hospital stay a few years back because of blood pressure and stress. Even with that warning signal, I just started taking the meds, listened to my cardiologist and just thought, oh, I'm not gonna worry about the stress component, the mental health component. And then things piled up in the past year from having to change the business, remove all of our in-person training, which is something that Johnny and I absolutely love doing and having a crossroads of, well, what are we doing as a company now with COVID? And that stress just piled high. And I was fortunate enough that my fiance, Amy, recognized the warning signs and said, hey, I don't think you're managing stress very well, but internally I didn't know that I was really managing or not managing it. I just took it as, well, that's what happens when you work hard. Like this is just how life is supposed to be. It's supposed to be stressful. So if you could help our audience recognize some of these warning signs that maybe they aren't managing stress as well as they think they are, and those opportunities that maybe you should seek some support and some help. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. Yeah, so one of the things that's difficult about stress is when you're under chronic stress, it becomes difficult to see it in yourself and it becomes difficult to remember who that person was who wasn't stressed out, you know? So I think in terms of resilience and stress management, a lot of it is around trying to keep yourself out of that red line area, right? It's like once you cross a certain threshold of chronic stress, it can become much more difficult to ramp yourself back down. So it's not so much about having strategies to use in the moment when you're really stressed, although we can talk about those too. I think overall what we're trying to do with our clients is help people put together a lifestyle, a series of behaviors, you know, make consistent decisions that are gonna help them stay out of that red zone, right? You asked about how can you recognize when you're there. I mean, I think if you're noticing that you're losing your appetite for one thing, you know, if you're not sleeping, like these are physiological markers, right? But like if your physiological physical health is not where it should be, I think that's the first thing that you should notice. And for a lot of people, sleep is a big indicator of clients who say that, you know, they can only get a good night's sleep when they're on vacation from their job. Well, that's a good indication that you're experiencing chronic stress, right? So that's a big one. I think noticing the way you react to people, like, you know, how combative, how irritable can you be? You know, when you're under chronic stress, you are unable to censor yourself, right? You're unable to inhibit those responses that are not necessarily helpful. And we see that like there's a good physical reason for this, right? There's a good biological reason for this. If you think about like the fight, flight or freeze response, right? When an animal is under stress, animal is stressed out, you know, they're gonna be looking for the exits, like that's the fight response or the flight response. The freeze response, you know, feeling overwhelmed and unable to respond, you know, just get small and kind of freeze up, that's a defensive response. And then there's the fight aspect where, you know, you get combative and irritable and kind of like test you with people when you're really stressed out. So these are all indications that you are an organism, you are an animal who is experiencing stress and there's a cascade of physiological responses that are leading you to have behavioral tendencies that are different than they would be when you're at rest. The problem for human beings, right? Like we're not just, you know, rats or something, right? Like the problem for human beings with being under stress, aside from health consequences, because I would say that's a whole other thing that there's a lot of misunderstanding about that. What I'll talk to clients about and try and help them understand is that like the problem when you have chronic stress like this is that you can't show up and be the person that you wanna be. You, most of us wanna show up and be someone who is patient and who is kind and who is able to access that charitable empathetic parts of ourself, right? But when we're stressed out, we can't do that. We can't be creative, like that's the other thing. If you look at an animal who is in a very relaxed state, they have a lot of like behavioral, a big wide behavioral repertoire is how you would talk about this in behavioral psychology. They can do a lot of different things. Once that animal gets very stressed out and scared, you know, they're just looking for the exits or whatever it is, very narrow in terms of what they can do and what they can focus on. We live in a world now where we need to be creative to live our lives. We need to have access to like creative thinking. And if we're always in a place of like, okay, how do I just get through this? How do I get through this? How do I get out of this? We're not going to be able to live the lives we want. It's definitely demonstrated through Maslow's hierarchy of needs. When you have those basic needs set and you're feeling good, then your brain has the freedom to start looking at other areas. What things can I make? What things can I do better? Where can I improve? What can I do now outwardly to help other people now that we are taken care of? And I think the other thing that you mentioned there and to be able to understand and see the warning signs before it gets too heavy is having a good base of how you feel when you're at your best and to live in that lane for a while so you know when you're off of it. And when you know, oh, something is up. I'm not at 100%. I'm a little blurry today or something's not feeling right. I'm a little off because without that, if you live a life that isn't structured and you're perhaps dependent on or doing a lot of drinking for myself and I used to smoke cigarettes, like these things don't allow you to reach at your height, at your best. So it's difficult to gauge whether or not you're off or not. And that makes it easy for stress to compound and then overwhelm you. I agree, like those things will cloud your judgment and again, the more stress you're under the less good your judgment's gonna be, right? Cause you're probably not sleeping as well and eating as well and things like that. So having practices that will lead you back to that person and give you, I always think of like, if you've ever been to Swampland or like a lake or something, they have that depth marker coming up and it says like the water is at like five feet, whatever, when you have practices like meditation, for example, or exercise or journaling where you're gonna do this thing every single day, no matter how you feel, it kind of acts like that marker where you can go, like I'll have days where I sit down and meditate and I'm like, I feel fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. And then like 10 minutes later, I'm like, you know what? Like, Jesus, I'm like super anxious today. Like I didn't even realize that. And then once I see it, I can kind of go, all right, what's going on today? What about, you know, and I like walk through it and then I can show up to the meeting or the call or whatever and be much more centered and not get hijacked because we all know that feeling of getting hijacked where you're just like, oh my God, why did I say that? I did not realize I was that irritable or whatever.