 In this episode of Mind Pump, the world's top ranked fitness health and entertainment podcast, we talk all about stress. Now, did you know that stress can be bad, but can also be good? In this episode, we talk about how to tell the difference between good stress and bad stress, and why stress is necessary for health, for growth, for strength, fat loss, and for basically anything that you want your body to improve upon requires a certain level of stress. Now, this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ForSigmatic. Now, ForSigmatic makes some of the best mushroom-based supplements that are out there. Many of these mushroom-based supplements are adaptogenic herbs that can help improve your body's capacity to handle stress, thus giving you better results with your workouts, helping you sleep better, and just feel better overall, even help you balance out your hormones. One of my favorite supplements from ForSigmatic is Cordyceps. I use it almost daily. Before I work out, I notice when I take it, I get better stamina and have better heat tolerance. Now, because you get listened to Mind Pump, you actually get 10% off any product. Here's how you do that. Go to ForSigmatic.com, that's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com forward slash Mind Pump, and use the code Mind Pump for that 10% off. Also, all month long, we've taken our two most popular fitness programs, Maps Anabolic and the NoBS Six Pack Formula, and we've put them together and discounted them heavily. Now, Maps Anabolic is a full-body muscle-building metabolism-boosting program. It's great for sculpting, shaping, and building the body. It trains the entire body. The NoBS Six Pack Formula is a core training program designed to bring out definition and shape to your abs and your obliques. Right now, and right now only, you can get both programs for one payment of $59.95. That's it. One payment and you get full lifetime access to both programs. That's normally $174. By the way, if you sign up for the programs and follow them for a full month and you're not satisfied, you get a full refund, so there's no risk at all for trying these out. In order to get both those programs at that price, go to mapsoctober.com. That's M-A-P-S-October.com. Hey, guys, I think we should do a podcast where we talk about stress, but not necessarily... Not in a stressful way, right? Not in the way that... And the health space does this really well, right? They'll take a topic and they'll go really, really hard in one direction. And I think sometimes they can misinform people because... And with stress, it's not necessarily that they're trying to misinform people, but I think the consensus is that all stress is bad. It's all you hear about. Just like inflammation. All inflammation is bad. Get rid of all of it. Stress is bad. Get rid of all of it. But we know that not to be the case at all. We know that stress is... It plays an important role in the body. We don't grow and adapt without it. You need it. Exercise, for example, is a stress on the body. When you look at... If you were to take somebody and take them through a workout, an appropriate workout, a good workout, one that's right for their body, and you were to test inflammatory markers and markers of stress, just based off of those tests alone, you would be... It would be very easy for you to look at it and deduce that this would be bad for you. That this is not good because stress just from that perspective looks bad, but it's not that simple. Stress does a lot of good things for the body as well. Well, that's why I think we should talk about the good versus the bad. Because this can be confusing. I get clients all the time that would ask this question. And for example, if exercise stress is good, then why not more of it? There's a fine line between what is good stress and then when does it cross the line. This is a good conversation. In fact, I was talking to Cassie the other day and she says this is a common thing that she gets asked on our back end as far as our customer service and people asking, well, how much should I push? Or what the guys talked about stress the other day? And how do I know if I'm doing too much of it or not enough of it? No, I think this is a really good conversation that we've touched on briefly in some of our questions that we've answered, but we haven't gone in depth all about stress and the good versus the bad. Yeah. And you, so here's a thing that you need, we need stress in order to get our bodies and our minds to improve and to strengthen. It's literally the first sign or signal that tells your body to change anything at all. And this has, this is anything, any kind of change. I mean, all change happens or growth happens from being uncomfortable. Otherwise, there's no reason to grow or to change. And this is true with stress as well. We literally need it without stress on the body. We would never get stronger. We would never improve our learning ability. We'd never grow as people. We'd never burn body fat, get more stamina. So you absolutely need it and avoiding all of it is not the answer to having too much bad stress. I mean, avoiding all stress would be what? Laying in bed all day, having no stimulus, having everything taken care of you and you just literally lay there. That is a terrible place to be and it can cause lots of problems. I mean, even you think of the hormetic effect and really that's just describing like in small doses, the body has to understand what kind of stress this is, whether it's something you're eating or whether it's hot or cold and how the body is going to be able to now navigate through that and to be able to kind of introduce it in a way where it starts to understand it, how to overcome it. That's all part of the training process that helps you to get better and to benefit from it. Well, our bodies just want to survive. They just want to survive. So if we don't ever stress them at all, then it's going to adapt in the other direction. It's going to do as little as possible to survive and get by. And so if we're not challenging it and stressing it to adapt and grow and strengthen and improve, then it'll adapt the opposite direction. Your body will only ever be a strong fit and resilient as it needs to be. It's never going to be more than that. You're only ever as strong as you need to be. Any more than that is a complete waste of energy and resources. And what tells your body how strong you need to be are these stressful signals. Non-stressful signals tell your body it's fine. That signal tells your body there's no need to change at all. Now the big problem, because of course there are lots of issues with stress these days, studies show that the wrong kind of stress or too much stress can do everything from shorten your lifespan to increasing your risk of cancer contributing to chronic disease, obesity, psychological and psychiatric issues. We know this. We've seen lots and lots of studies on this. This is why we're doing this episode. But I think it's important that we kind of break down the categories of stress, right? So you have acute stress, which is happens now tends to be short. It goes away also very quickly. And then you have these kind of low level chronic types of stress. And if you think about the types of stress that really bother you, like if you were to make a list of the stressful things in your life that negatively impact your life, they're probably all going to be under that chronic stress category. It's probably going to be stuff like, oh my relationship with my spouse or my job or I'm stressed out about finances or the future or I have this illness that's been with me for, you know, 10 years or this pain that's just won't go away. That's all chronic stress. And that's the kind of stress that wears you down. The acute types of stress, which exercise, if inappropriately is more like that, right? Like you go to the gym or you work out for that hour, it's acute stress. And then you stop and rest that stress signal is gone. Now your body's in the process of adapting. But those chronic levels of stress never give your body the ability or the time to strengthen because it's under it all the time. Yeah. And I think this sneaks up on people and they don't even realize how much they're carrying with them throughout the day because they've never really done an inventory of items that they experienced throughout the day and what really is stressing them out and what things they could, you know, either remove or replace with something in their lifestyle that won't keep this chronic stress that they carry, you know, that leads to problematic issues. So this is how white balance is so important. And balance means something different from person to person. But balance allows your body to be able to handle more and more stress. And there are strategies to do this. Okay. This is very simple. Number one, a fit, healthy body, a body that's fed well, a body that is trained well, appropriately, I should say, with the right amount of exercise, and that gets good sleep, can just handle more stress. So, you know, and I've said this oftentimes on the podcast, you want to put forward your best version of yourself, the one that is most likely going to be able to handle difficult things that come up, that's going to be able to handle life. And the fit, healthy version of you is part of that. If you're fit and healthy, and this, and this again, this is backed by tons and tons of studies, but it's also quite obvious. If you're healthy, vibrant, fit, and you have stressful things happen, you're going to handle it better than if you're not fit, that if you're not vibrant, and you're not healthy. Well, this also reminds me of what we talked all the time about doing as little as possible to elicit the most amount of change, right? So, if you're doing some stress at all, so it would only be considered a stress if you're moving outside of your comfort zone. So, my goal is to do- I'm so glad you said that. Yeah, I want to stress my body, but I want to do it just enough to- it's considered a stress, and I get the response from my body to adapt, change, grow, improve, but I don't want to overstress it so much that it has an adverse effect to it. And so, you know, when you kind of glazed over the acute stress versus the chronic stress, it almost sounded like acute stress is always good, and there's a bad side to even acute stress, which would be considered exercise too. So, I think it's important that we touch on that, and when we're talking about good and bad is even the good stress can become bad stress when actually not done appropriately. No, you said something really important that the stress is something outside of what your body is used to or what your body would perceive as normal. So, if you're- and we'll use exercise again as an example. If you're a fit person that works out all the time, a three-mile hike may not be perceived as stress at all. In fact, it may actually be perceived to your body as stress relieving. Now, if you took somebody who never exercised, who's obese, and you had them do a few-mile hike, that could become too much of a stress. Their body's capability and capacity to handle is just- it's overcome, and now it becomes a bad stress on that person. So, it's a very, very good point that you made because there's a huge individual variance. The good news is, you can change your individuality. You can increase your body's capacity to handle these things by controlling controllables. Exercise, diet, sleep, or the obvious ones that pop up that you can manipulate to improve your body's capacity. Here's the other thing about stress. It accumulates. All of it accumulates. So, think of it this way. Imagine you have a bucket, and in that bucket, that bucket represents your capacity to handle stress. All stresses. Exercise, lack of sleep, bad diet, a breakup with somebody you care about, a loved one that's sick, lose your job, your traffic, anything at all that could be that your body's perceiving as stress. You fill that bucket up every single time. It doesn't matter what it is. If that bucket is full, the next thing you put in there could be any stress. It could be something you think is good stress. You'll overflow and cause problems. And now your body's under that chronic stress kind of state. Just to kind of shut down. Starts to shut down. Stress hormones are elevated for too long. Your body starts to break down active tissue in an attempt to slow your metabolism down so that you have lower caloric requirements. Because remember, your body's thinking of survival. It's increasing your appetite. You're craving hyperpalatable food to increase your fat storage. That's a nice insurance policy. Your anabolic hormones go down because your body's like, we're not in a position to procreate. If you're a woman, your period can stop, or you could start to become irregular with a man. Sperm count goes down. Testosterone levels go down. And this is what happens when that bucket, your capacity for stress is overcome. And the goal is to be able to increase the size of that bucket. And there's many, many different ways to do this. So let's talk about good stress. And for the average listener, let's try and list characteristics that describe good stress. So they have a better understanding of what I'm doing to my body is good or bad for me. Well, first off, it tends to be short-lived. Now, the type of stress that's placed on you and your body can make it short-lived. But there's another part of this, which is how you perceive it. The way you perceive a stress can also make something that might be normally short-lived all of a sudden become a chronic type of stress. So for example, a workout could typically be considered short-lived type of stress, your workout for 30 minutes or so. Well, it's the same feeling of excitement and anxiety that they're like very much of the same type of response is just a matter of like how you're looking at it. Physiologically, it's the same, right? Excitement or anxiety in the body look the same if we were to hook up measurements to you and take your blood and look at hormones. They look the same, but it's a totally different mindset. The exercise example is another good one. If you worked out and it traumatized you for some reason, you're not used to the type of workout or whatever, now it becomes something that is no longer short-lived. Now you're thinking about that workout with that bootcamp trainer that hammered you so hard and you never want to go back. So they tend to be short-lived. They tend to be intermittent because short-lived stress done too frequently now becomes chronic stress, right? And this is back to Adam's point with the programming and this is why it's so important even if it seems that exercise is the answer to, you know, propel you forward. If you're doing too much and too much volume and too intense, it could definitely have the adverse effect. It's funny that we struggle with this when programming or when we're talking about fitness because it's the way we approach almost every other aspect of learning or getting better at in life. You just would never throw the whole kitchen sink at yourself trying to study or learn something, right? And Sal, you use the analogy all the time about learning a language. You would never sit down and try and learn another language in one hour intensely or every day for one hour intensely. How you learn or teach the body in almost any aspect is different, but yet when we go to working out, everybody always thinks the more is better. You mean the comparison of like doing seven hours on one day versus one hour every day? Right. Yeah, type of deal. You'll learn a lot better that way. Absolutely. So spreading it out, making it intermittent and short-lived, those tend to be characteristics of good stress. Here's a big one, good stress. A lot of it has to do with your perception and it becomes meaningful. I know people who've gone through some very terrible things in their life and whether it be, they fought cancer and they survived or they lost somebody or they went through a divorce, something very challenging, but when they come out of it, they reframe it as a growth period. Wow, I became a different person. This was very meaningful for me. It was very challenging, but it was also very meaningful. You know, it's funny, when I first met my wife, Jessica, she would call some type, she liked to do these adventure type trips that she would call type two fun. So in other words, when you're on the trip itself, it's difficult, it's challenging. Like these hikes that she would put me on were waiting through water and we're climbing the side of a mountain and I'm like, this isn't fun. She goes, it's type two fun because afterwards, you look back on it and you think- Create memories of it. How great it was. And she's totally right. It was meaningful, that type of, now if it was traumatic for me and afterwards I thought about it and I'm like, I never want to go anywhere again. That changes the type of stress and makes it a bad one, but making good stress tends to be meaningful to you when you think back on it. I feel like intentional falls in this category too. You intended to do that. You go into a trip like that with the intention to- You're not just reacting. Right. You're not just reacting or it's not just happening to you where I feel like when you look at bad stress, bad stress is something normally people are not trying to happen. You're not intentionally going after it. Dude, you're so right. Psychologists talk about the sense of control is really what it is. So here's a good example. Let's say you're at home and your hot water heater broke. You're now forced to take freezing cold showers. Now compare that to one day you read an article on taking cold showers and how healthy it is for you and you decide you're going to take cold showers. Same exact experience. You wake up in the morning freezing cold shower. One of them you feel forced. The other one you feel a sense of control. Which one is more likely to be a good stress and which one is likely to be a bad stress. So it's that feeling you can control is a big one and that's why I think things like diet, nutrition, and sleep, those are such good way, good stresses. What big part of it is I am choosing to do this workout. I think the cool part with that too is that you can reframe that as well. Like if you're in that situation where your water is off but you know you want to look at the outcome of it is- Totally. Maybe there are some benefits to this. You know maybe something great is going to happen as a result of this and it's totally different experience. Well it comes to mind right away. Think of a three-day fast. Imagine fasting when you know you have food waiting for you versus fasting because fasting in the forest. Total different stress right there, right? You imagine that like food ran out for the next three days. That feels way different than the three-day fast that I did before. Good stress also tends to leave you better off than you were before. I mean when you are experiencing bad stress you tend to think the opposite, right? This is making things worse. This is making me worse off than the way I was before. Whereas good stress you tend to think of it and look back as oh wow this is making me better. I'm feeling a lot better. I'm a better person as a result. Well and with that it's motivating, right? It motivates you to do more of it. Again it's back to that intent. Like I'm intentionally doing this because every time I do it I become a better person. Very similar to the story you gave with climbing the hill and wading through the water. It's like you may suck while you're going through it but you feel so accomplished afterwards and so that can be very motivating. It's funny too that you know it reminds me of studies that I've read on Buddhist monks and these are like experts at meditation, right? So they're really really good at centering themselves and perceiving the world differently than the average person and they were doing tests on these Buddhist monks where they were inflicting pain on them, controlled pain like shocks and stuff like that and then they were having the monks rate the level of pain on a scale of I think one to five and consistently the monks perceived the pain to be far less painful than the average person and a big piece of that had to do with just their mindset. Totally had to do with their mindset and how they chose to perceive it or how they trained themselves to perceive it. And the stem of that is control. It's like some things that you may not think you have control over to then figure out how to be in the right mindset to then gain some sort of control. It provides that feeling that I can make it through this. My body has a way, it's built in that I can figure this out. Well just talking like this makes me think too like man, why things like meditation or prayer or whatever term you want to call it, just being completely present and being aware of what's going on stress-wise in your life and the ability to reframe it, how powerful that can be as far as you could probably take something that could be argued as a bad stress and literally flip it into a good stress just simply by reframing your situation. So with bad stress for example, one of the characteristics of it is it's chronic. It's there all the time. Now it might not be super high level stress, but it's there and it tends to be there in the background. And you know a piece of that, if we go a little deeper into that, a lot of it just has to do with your own thoughts. This is why mindfulness practices which include prayer or meditation can be so effective because let's say you have, let's say work is tough. It stops the chatter. Yeah, imagine work. Work is stressful for you, right? You know, most people work eight hours, five days a week. That means that there's a lot of hours that they're not at work. Yet that stress carries with them when they're not at work because they're living in it in their own mind. Well, and think about all the things that we get ourselves caught into. So I've got my cable bill. I've got my cell phone bill. I've got my house bill. I've got all these crazy bills. And then I choose to live beyond my means and I am constantly living paycheck to paycheck on credit. And so I'm stressed out. Yet I have an abundance of things that people just 50 years ago did not have, but yet I'm chronically stressed out to make enough work and money to pay all these things, to have all these things. When in reality, I'm far better off without half of those things than people just 50 years ago. And so that's another one of those things that you've caused this chronic stress to yourself that isn't really, really there. Absolutely. Another characteristic of bad stress is you just view it as negative, right? So I'll use the example of exercise again. And this is just really, it's kind of along the theme of what we're talking about. If you are forced to get up out of bed and workout, let's say you're, I don't know, you're in a boot camp of some sort, you're a troubled team. So your parents send you off to some crazy military school and they force your ass to get up and do these crazy workouts and whatever. Your perception of those workouts is pretty negative. That's probably going to be a bad stress on you. But I choose to wake up every morning and work out really hard. And it's not negative at all. It's actually very positive for me. So your perception of your stress as being negative can tell you that it's a bad stress. Well, another example of that, and you talk about this a lot on the show is, you know, working out because you hate yourself. Right. You know, going in there and allowing that, that ends up being a really chronic stress when you go in and you're constantly hammering the weights, not feeding yourself reasons. Yeah. For the wrong reasons. When it comes from that place, even though you're doing exercise, a lot of times it can have an adverse effect. Oh, I, some of the, some of the people that I've worked with, clients that have hired me that have had some of the worst stress issues were the ones that worked out the most. They were fanatical about it, but not in a good way. Like Adam's talking about, they were really bad body image issues. They were more afraid of what, how they would look if they stopped working out rather than looking forward to the work out itself and the positives that it provides for them. Oftentimes their bodies reflected this type of chronic stress. Their bodies held on to body fat. You know, these are the clients that would come to me. I'm working out six days a week, Sal. I'm only eating this many calories. I don't know why I can't drop the last 15 pounds or I don't know why I don't look lean or why whatever. And it's like, okay, we got it. We got a lot of things we need to work with. And one of them is let's take this thing that you've made negative exercise. And let's see if we can turn it into something that is positive, because that is very much a characteristic of the bad type of stress is that negativity that surrounds it. It also, you know, it demotivates you. It kind of paralyzes you. You know, it's like, you know, it's like, imagine having to speak in front of your class. And rather than, rather than that being a good stress, we're like, Oh my God, I'm gonna get up. I'm going to speak in front of this class. And, you know, I get to showcase myself and this is challenging. I'm going to grow for this. Rather than that, it's a bad story. I can't do this. I can't speak in front of people. Oh my God, I'm so afraid. And you become paralyzed, literally freezing. This is one of those things. I mean, to that example specifically was something I had to really work my way through is you have one bad experience. You judge all the rest of them based off of the worst one. And to be able to get that negative self-talk out of that conversation in your own head is work that you have to put in to then repeat that same type of event and have a totally different outcome. And so it was very much dependent on the mindset to be able to kind of get through that and find your way back to making it into a positive. Right. Bad stress just leaves you worse off than you were before. It doesn't. It's not a signal for your body to improve and strengthen. It becomes a signal to cause your body to hunker down, try to survive, to hide within itself. And the reason why I think we're defining them this way is because there's such a wide variety and variance as to what could be good and what could be bad for some people. In some cases, the same exact stress for two different people. One person, it could be the right kind. It could be very good. And the other person, it could be very bad. Now some things to consider around this. We talked a lot about mindset. This is a huge one. It really is. Chronic stress tends to be, if I could really kind of characterize it, tends to be about our thoughts, about negative thoughts. It's usually not something that's happening to you all the time. You know what I'm saying? It's not like you're sitting in front of the chronic stress and it's in your face all day long. I could see that happening in some rare occasions. You're in prison or you live with someone that's really, really terrible in which case you should separate yourself. But usually it's just this, oh, I, you know, you're stressing about things. You're thinking about things that in that moment really aren't affecting your mindset. Working on mindset has a tremendous potential to increase your capacity to handle stress. You know, spiritual practices are huge with this. And it doesn't, you don't have to, you know, it doesn't have to be this metaphysical belief, although religious beliefs are very effective at doing this. It could literally just be meditation and practicing being present, mindfulness. A great book to read about this is A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. He talks a lot about being present in mindfulness and finding the peace in mindfulness. And you'll find when you do that, it gives your body a break in your mind a break from the chronic looping stress thoughts that you may be having. Well, what are some of the things that people can look out for so they can get an idea of like, okay, because here's where I find this conversation challenging is that when that fine line is of, you know, a good stress crosses over and then becomes bad stress. And how do we, how do we become aware of when that moment happens? How do I know that I'm definitely giving my body good stress? And then at what point does it go over to bad stress? And what are some of the signs that my body will tell me or I should look out for to indicate that this has now become a- Is this physical stress or is this, you know, mental stress that I'm carrying too? Are you, are you adapting and getting better is I think a good one. So if exercise, for example, what's the line, the difference between it being good and bad stress? One easy tell-tale way is I'm either improving or I'm not improving or even going backwards. So like, if I'm getting stronger and I'm working out and I'm improving my fitness, it's probably in the category of the right kind of stress. Well, I think that works for the mental side too, even what Justin's alluding to. Like, so, you know, a lot of times people, you know, they have failures and they dwell on the failure itself and you don't think about how you've improved as a person. That's now a new lesson, right? So how you look at a failure is the difference between it being successful or not, right? So if you have a failure or something didn't work out and you just beat yourself up about how you failed and it didn't work out versus, oh, wow, now I know that that's not the way for this. And so I'm a better person now because of that. So how you frame even that matters and how you come out. And so you can improve even on our failures and the mental stresses that you have too. Like, okay, I'm going through something really shiny. Let's use something, for example, that we've all probably experienced, a death in the family, like that's always stressful, right? That's nobody likes to lose somebody. But if you learn to look ahead of it, right, and learn to look at the positive things that have happened because of it, maybe it brought your family together, maybe you learned about taking your life, taking things in your life more seriously because you don't know how long you'll have it. If you learn to reframe that this awful situation that we can all agree nobody likes turned you into a better person, then it's a positive thing. If it lets you, if you feel sorry for yourself and you get stuck in the loop, it can become a negative stress. You got to give it meaning. Yeah, because it's, you know, when bad things happen and there's no meaning behind it, it's just a bad thing. When bad things happen and there's meaning behind it, that means that there's some positive. Now that you've attached. As weird as that sound, it's totally true and it's proven. Life, I'll go ahead. Yeah, well, I was just going to bring it back to like the, that whole the, you know, the mental and then the physical, I just see that in the demeanor, you know, in the posture that's something that if there was something that was a failure, you're really beating yourself up about it. Like a lot of times you're going to carry that in your body in the way that you interact with people, the way you sit, the way you stand. And it's something that if you, if you can catch yourself in that and really see yourself in your posture and how you're presenting yourself and then start altering it, maybe that's, maybe sometimes it's adjusting your body that's going to bring you back into a good mental state or vice versa. Well, I think that actually has a lot to do with why people do feel so good after exercise. I think that you, if you are like someone who's been down and that's a common advice, right? Like go work out. I think there's the mental aspect of improving yourself that there's also that low level stress, but then there's also the physical part of that of doing some seated rows and doing these exercises that hold you upright, right? Send all this blood and fluid into these muscles, you get all pumped up, your chest is up high, you stand upright. So there's that physical side of exercise that can help that point too. It tells your body, it's, you're actually sending a, because your, your brain perceives outside signals as well and reads them. And so let's say you're, you're feeling down or whatever and you get up and you kind of make yourself move and exercise. Now your body, your brain is, is receiving these signals. Oh, we're moving, you know, we're flexing muscles, we're being active. I guess we don't need to feel so down. It's like, have you guys read the studies where the people will hold a pencil in their teeth? I was just going to bring that up about like, because it emulates smiling, right? It forces you to smile. So the more you practice that actually try not to be happy after doing that. Try this experiment. I've done, I do this with my kids. So I was talking to my kids about how our outside demeanor can tell our inside, how it should feel. Just like our inside can tell us how our outside should look and feel, right? So if you're sad on the inside, oftentimes you'll display, you know, a frown or a sad look. But I told my kids, you know, you can kind of trick your body and send the signal in the reverse. And so that we were going back and forth and said, I tell you what, I said, I want you guys right now for the next 15 seconds to pretend laugh. And I guarantee you'll start laughing. And sure enough, they did. They did the fake laugh. And before they knew it, they started laughing for real. And now I don't know if that's, you know, a viable scientific experiment, but it did prove my point to the kids. Here's one, your life experience. This is something that I think you should consider in terms of your capacity to handle stress. So I'll tell a story. It's a good example. So our power went out not that long ago. We're here in California and, you know, notoriously, our energy here is terribly managed and we'll have these rolling blackouts, right? Well, they'll blackout certain neighborhoods or whatever. Because it's our fault. Yeah. Now I hate this. I cannot stand when this happens. When it goes out, I'm like, oh my God, I'm so pissed off. We got to worry about the food in the fridge and our phones charged. And I'm like, I don't know what to do. And now when the light's power goes out, Jessica is like, this is fun. Let's light some candles. Let's get some blankets. It's going to be like we're camping. We're having a great time. And so I remember I had this conversation with her. I'm like, why do you get excited when the power goes, I get so pissed off and anxious and you get all excited. And she goes, well, she goes, I grew up very poor and oftentimes our power was shut off. And my life experiences makes the power going out not that big of a deal to me. For her, she's used to it. It wasn't that big of a deal and she made the best of it. For me, my power never went out growing up. And so when it goes out, I'm like, I'm freaking out. Also makes me think of view Adam. Very few things will rattle Adam and stress him out. And he always harks it back to the way he grew up. And he's like, if I could grow, I handled so much stuff growing up that stuff thrown at me now is not that big of a deal. Consider that for yourself. So your life experience may make some things more stressful for you than other things, you know, physical labor is a good example. I could throw the most difficult, strenuous physical labor at someone like my dad. I could throw all kinds of stuff at him. And as although he'll get physically tired, doesn't really stress him out because the guy's been, you know, he grew up a poor Sicilian and then as an immigrant came here as a kid and your physical labor, he grew up doing it nine years old. So to him, it's not that big of a deal. Navigate through the whole thing. Yeah. For me, it's like my hands are hurting and I'm getting blisters and it's a totally different stress, you know? I mean, you've already alluded to spiritual practice again, but I think of it too. Like, you know, this because this happened not that long ago, Katrina and I are driving in the car. And this is why I think it helps, right? Because you believe that there's a greater purpose, right? So those that have some sort of spiritual belief, they believe there's a greater purpose in their life. And I was, we were heading off somewhere and, you know, we got stuck in traffic. So we're going to be late. And instantly the reaction to me is to be frustrated or pissed off. And Katrina always does this to me because it's not the first time this has happened in our relationship. And every time it wakes me up, right? And she's like, oh, I'm so glad we're running late. Like, I'm so glad we're stuck in this traffic. And I'm like, I look at her like sideways all the time. We probably were going to get hit in an accident or something down the road if we were on time, you know? It's a great way to look at it. No, it's, and it always makes me chuckle and smile and laugh and think, but it's like, I mean, who knows, right? And if you just had, and just that switch of taking something that feels so stressed out, we're going to be late. Oh my God, this could be, is it really going to be the end of the world? Actually, the end of the world might have happened if I was on time. I might have got hit by a semi if we were on time crossing the other path. So being able to reframe that makes such a big difference in how you perceive that stress. You know, you're actually bringing us to the next point. Studies show that your support network, I mean, you talked about Katrina, she's obviously strong support for you. Having a good support network can dramatically increase your capacity to handle challenging and stressful situations. Just having people you can talk with, people you feel supported by, you know, it's funny, you know, if I'm going to do something that I'm, you know, worried about or stressed out about, maybe it's a big podcast or, you know, interview, or maybe I'm doing, you know, at the, at the moment, I'm writing a book and I'll be stressed out about hearing my wife say the following, I got your back no matter what, immediately reduces my stress and fear around what I'm doing dramatically, automatically feel more powerful just from hearing those, those words. So your support network makes a huge, huge difference. And if you don't have good relationships around you, then maybe something that you might want to consider fostering, because it does make you far more resilient. One of the worst things, and this is something again, to kind of bring you back to what I've been kind of working on is just not internalizing all these things and running it through your own mind and trying to play it all out. It's really like discussing it and being open and it exposes things that makes you vulnerable. And so that a lot of times that's a deterrent for people to, you know, relieve themselves of all these, you know, internal problems and things they think they're facing by themselves. But if you can make it so you're not facing it by yourself and you have somebody you can fight in and you can tell them things, it's definitely that's a big weight that you're relieving. Now let's talk a little bit more about ways you can increase your ability to handle stress. The first one that comes to mind for me, this is an easy one. That's why it's the first one that comes to mind is to get better sleep, get good and better sleep. I'll give you an example. If I start to feel like I'm under the weather, I can almost always not get sick simply by going home and making sure I get really, really good, you know, eight to nine hours of sleep that night. Lack of sleep dramatically reduces your ability to handle stress. I could see this in my kids. My goodness, if my kids have bad sleep, my daughter will freak out the next day over stuff that's not that big of a deal. My son is irritable. I'll feel the same way. This is just a very easy black and white thing for yourself is if you just prioritize sleep, if you have a sleep routine, so an hour before bed, you turn off your lights or you wear blue light blocking glasses, you make sure you go to bed at the same time every night, wake up the same time every morning, give yourself eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, have a nice cool bedroom that's blacked out. Just doing that very simple black and white thing will make a big difference in terms of how your body can handle. I feel like part of the reason why that is so important is not just the sleep and the recovery piece, but it's just, and it's your next point, which is just being detached and doing something that's calming. Obviously, when you're sleep, you're extremely calm, but I just think that it highlights the importance of that today. I love, Katrina and I are really good about this where we get away from the house, because at home, even if we're off, it's not a work day, having your own business, one of the greatest things about it is that you have the luxury of doing it at your pace whenever you want. One of the drawbacks of it is sometimes it's hard to shut it off. It's always on your mind. It's always on your mind. One of the things that I have to do is just remove myself from the normal work environment or places that I would work at, which is home a lot of times. Us taking off, that's why we go to the beach all the time. When I go there, phone gets put away, we're in the moment. What that does for any sort of stress, whether it's good, bad, chronic in my life is unreal. What a difference. I get this full recharge every single time that I do that. Some people just don't put this in their life. They don't think they have the time for it. They neglect doing it. What they don't realize is that if they would learn to integrate that into their lifestyle, it would supercharged all the other times that they're on. Oh, dude, studies are clear on this, that when people have extra money to spend, they get way more out of experiences than they do out of things. In other words, rather than buying extra clothes, designer shoes, new electronics, saving that money and then going on a vacation or a trip like Adam's talking about, way more valuable. It's way more valuable. Those distractions or designer clothes or whatever, they don't really improve your body's ability or your mind's ability to handle stress, but getting away for a little bit makes a huge, huge difference. Yeah, I know this one's not on the list at all, but I really feel that people are just attached from nature in general. We're always trying to recreate that with white noise and noises and little tiny little gardens in their house and all this stuff. It's just this little artificial version of what's already beautiful and it's out there. Of course, sometimes it's not accessible for everybody, so I get that, but if you're just out there taking it all in, you're getting sun, you're in fresh air, a lot of times for me, that's why I feel small when I'm around big, huge trees. There's something to that, but it's definitely a calming de-stressor. Was it Jim Quick that we did the interview with that kind of discussed this? I can't remember who we were doing an interview with, but when they talked about, and I think this is such an important conversation and to your point, Justin, today is, we don't think about the red light, the honking horn, the notifications going off your phone, the fucking person screaming at the Trump supporter across the street. You get the no-mass person freaking out. You get all that counts to stress. If your entire day is filled with a bunch of short moments like that, even though it didn't feel it on your body, you're getting stress fired at you. Yeah, you're taking all that in, and I think we just have more of that today than we've ever had. Sure, we're not stressing the way our great grandparents did, where they're going to be able to eat or a war or some crazy shit like that, but what we've replaced that with instead of the big scare, the lion jumps out of the bush and almost kills a scare back in the 1900s, right? Now instead, we have this fucking constant hitting us all day long. Yeah, it's unplugging. Going in nature, I think part of the reason why it's so good for you in calming is because you tend to unplug when you're out in nature. There's exercise that I consider to be stresses on the body that push your body to adapt, and then there are movements and ways of moving that I consider to be calming. By the way, injecting calming exercise or movement into your routine doesn't necessarily mean it won't help you build muscle or burn body fat, because I know there's some people listening who are like, I don't want to waste time doing that. I have goals. Actually, if you use them to help balance your body out, they will actually help you build muscle and burn body fat. These things are mobility. Mobility exercise oftentimes is calming if you do it in a way that is calming. Yoga, static stretching, easy walks or hikes can be very calming. You're not out there necessarily getting a workout. In fact, you shouldn't be getting a workout if you're doing it for the calming reasons. You go out and you just take a stroll or do some stretching on your own in a dark room. You'll notice that that helps balance out some of those other stresses on the body that can start to accumulate. The next one, here's a good one, connect with people. This one, I know it sounds obvious, but I'm going to be a little bit more specific. Connect with people in real life. I think because electronics and technology has made it easy for us to contact people and to hear from people that we consider that connecting. I guess that can be better than nothing, but it still doesn't compare. It really doesn't. Yeah. And to those conversations, a lot of times you could be totally reading the conversation a different way than was intended in their delivery. There's always that part of it where you're trying to think for the person instead of just being in front of the person and you get it. You're getting all the body language. You're getting all the eye contact. You're getting their inflection. All these things, there's a lot more to communicating with somebody than just the words that are being spoken. It falls in line too with the unplugging and disconnecting from everything. When I'm sitting down and Sal and I are up at the Tahoe house and we're having a deep conversation about whatever, we're completely detached from all those other distractions where if you and I were texting on our phone, we're still receiving an onslaught of other things at the same time, which by the way, we're all very guilty of doing when we communicate with other people via text or via Facebook or Instagram is multitasking. And so something that is technically supposed to be really positive because you're connecting could actually be negative because you're also being distracted or taking on other stresses at the same time. Another thing you can do is learn to let loose a little bit. This one's a little bit more, I think, important for the super fitness fanatics or the tightly wound dogmatic exercises. Yeah, all I got, all I do is work or all I do is work out and I eat perfect all the time. And letting loose can have tremendous health benefits like, look, if you have a really bad relationship with food in the sense that you have to eat perfect all the time, everything has to fit your macros, everything. Sometimes just eating for pleasure. Boy, can that be a positive experience. Like, okay, this doesn't fit my macros, this too high calorie, but I'm sitting with friends and I'm enjoying a slice of pizza. Well, it's just really, it's just not punishing yourself all the time. Again, that's just going to reinforce when you're actually are working out that you're working out with the wrong intentions. Like I'm still somewhat punishing myself and I'm not allowing myself any of this pleasure and stuff over there without any flexibility, it just becomes tyranny. Right? This is where appropriate use of alcohol or even cannabis can come into play. Of course, with both those things can be abused and can start to be used to distract you from things in real life. But occasionally, I'll tell you what, you know, sitting with a group of friends, especially if you're a hardworking individual and you're always on point and everything's good. And now we're sitting around each other and we're enjoying a glass of wine and just relaxing and talking or having a glass of wine with your spouse and watching a good movie. That kind of letting loose can help balance out that, you know, that stress seesaw to where maybe it's too high on the chronic and too much stress aspect. Now I'm kind of letting a little bit steam off. I feel like the reason for that is because it helps you disconnect a bit, right? I mean, that's one of the things that... It disinhibits you. Right. So that's one of the things that I loved about cannabis. And that's why I think I became somebody who used it as I got older more than I did when I was younger. And that is, you know, to me, I'm not a big alcohol drinker, right? So to me, that's like my glass of wine occasionally where it's like, I got a lot of stuff going on in my head. I know that my body needs to decompress, needs to shut down for a little bit, needs to put all that stuff to the side and just relax. One of the easiest ways that it can get me into that state is by doing that. And so I think learning how to use it as a tool like that and then not abusing and letting it control and dictate your life is how you manage that from becoming and also stress itself. Right. Now there are herbs and compounds you can take that also that are known as adaptogenic. This is in the category of adaptogenic supplements or herbs or plants. And the reason why they're called adaptogenic is they've been observed in studies to literally improve and increase the body's capacity to handle stress. So in other words... Creates a bigger bucket. Yeah, exactly. So let's say you take somebody and you have them trained for two hours and we look at their cortisol and the stress response and all that stuff, then you have them take an adaptogenic, you know, mushroom for example, like cordyceps. Cordyceps is a good example. And you'll notice that the stress response is lower. Like their capacity has increased. Now these like all supplements, they will not replace, you know, having a good mindset and getting good sleep and a good diet. But when you add them to those types of things, they do have an impact. They do improve your body. You know, reishi for example, reishi mushroom can do this as well. It just increases your body's capacity to handle stress. I noticed for me personally, when I supplement regularly with some of these compounds, I can work out harder and get better results. My body can handle more exercises as a good example. And then of course we mentioned the spiritual practices. You know, this one's funny because I'll mention this one and sometimes I'll get DMs and people like, well, I don't believe in whatever. This takes many, many different forms. But the studies are clear on this. People who have a regular practice of some sort, whether it's mindfulness or spiritual practice or religious practice, they just handle stressful events much better. And I think it has to do with, and this is what all the articles I've read and studies I've read point to is that you just, it attaches meaning to things. And it gives a sense of purpose to difficult things. I think that makes the biggest difference of all. For sure. Look, Mind Pump is recorded on video as well as audio. Come check us out on YouTube. You can also find all of us on Instagram. You can find Doug, the producer at Mind Pump Doug, Justin at Mind Pump Justin, me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. Yesterday, I got a great compliment from, from Jessica. I was like, I was changing and she's like, you look thicker. It's like, wow, that's a great compliment coming from the thickness. I love that. Well, especially when our insecurity is that we've been skinny our whole life. So yeah, the thick compliments are great. She's like, your workouts working. You're looking thick. I was like, damn.