What's On My Mind - July 2024
What’s On My Mind
What’s On My Mind
Stress is Enhancing
This Month’s Health Challenge
Form a New Healthy Habit
What’s On My Mind
How you perceive stress matters - By Kyle Ligon
What if I had mislabeled stress as bad and in fact stress has actually been trying to help me all along?
There is a growing amount of research and momentum behind the idea that stress can actually enhance our abilities when we understand it and embrace it. This article is inspired by Stanford University’s free video series on Rethinking Stress - an intervention used in studies on how stress impacts our performance. I found this resource to be incredibly insightful and highly recommend it! To sum it up, after an intervention to help people rethink stress (like the video series linked above), performance under stress and how people experienced stress improved significantly.
Before I dig in deeper, I want to mention that in this article I am discussing the benefits of acute stress, which is different from experiencing stress chronically. Chronic stress is when people spend the majority of their days in fight or flight mode, constantly worrying about work, always in a rush, constantly moving from one highly stimulating thing to the next, experiencing lasting social anxieties, and spending a lot of time reliving the past or worrying about the future. Stress mobilizes resources in a way that benefits the current moment, but spending too much time in this state is a detriment to overall health and wellness. Although we want to make sure we are not exposed to stress chronically, this article is about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Stress exists to help us and the better we understand it, the more we can benefit from it.
Until recently, I had never questioned my preconceived notion that stress and anxiety were just hindrances I had to live with. To me, because I thought stress was bad, whenever I experienced stress before hard workouts, sporting events, presentations, or social gatherings, I would attempt to reduce my stress as much as possible, thinking the more stress I carried with me into these situations, the more I would be held back. I agonized over whether or not I would still be able to perform adequately with the stress I experienced. The game I played was to avoid and reduce stress as much as possible and hope for the best.
Because I didn’t understand the benefits of stress, I adopted negative connotations to the symptoms of being stressed. This then put me in a state where the potential benefits were squandered as I experienced stress as debilitating.
“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right. ”
Let’s look at how perceiving stress as inhibitory was a self-fulfilling prophecy for me. I believed feeling stress was negative and attempted to avoid it at all costs. When I inevitably did feel stress in my life, because I misidentified the feelings, I could mentally spiral. The feeling in my gut, a higher heart rate, sweating a bit, and turning a little red, were all perceived as evidence that my performance was impaired causing me further anxiety. I was hyper aware of any little thing that didn’t go perfectly and blamed it on feeling stressed, which would distract me from the task at hand and crash my confidence. The reality is my performances were negatively impacted not by stress, but instead by how I viewed stress.
I’m sure you’ve heard some version of a story of parents lifting cars to save their children. If stress was always debilitating, those stories wouldn’t exist. After learning about a Stress is Enhancing Mindset, I am more able to recognize that, like a fairy godmother, stress tends to appear when I identify something challenging that is also very important to me. I have learned that stress is not something to fear, but something to embrace. As I recognize the significance of a situation, my body prepares for the challenge by deploying and rearranging resources to maximize performance and learning. Yes, being stressed feels different than normal, but instead of feeling hindered, because I now know what’s going on in my body, I feel boosted.
Certain hormones can improve our reaction time, fitness, and brain function and can be experienced as a feeling in our gut, some tingling, and shakiness.
Increased blood flow improves performance by moving nutrients and hormones around the brain and body which is driven by an elevated heart rate, which can cause some redness and some sweating.
Stress increases our brain’s neuroplasticity, dramatically improving our ability to learn. This can be experienced as nit picking our performance and sometimes an out of body experience as we view our performance.
These feelings and symptoms of stress are not negatives, just simply what an elevated state feels like. Oddly enough, how someone experiences stress is a little bit like the placebo effect and the effectiveness of medication. Not only can placebo treatments have positive impacts on disease when people believe they are getting the real treatment, but incredibly, actual medicine proven to be effective can have little to no impact if the patient does not believe it will work (https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2023/01/powerful-placebo).
When we can connect the symptoms of stress to the positive benefits that accompany them, we can change the experience from one of spiraling hindrances to one of understanding that our body is optimized to perform, learn, and grow in situations that we understand are important to us.
Stress can even be a benefit hours, days, weeks, months ahead of time. Stress not only makes your brain more capable of learning, but feeling stress ahead of time can work as an opportunity to rehearse speeches, etc with the same hormones and stress symptoms that will exist on game day. Visualization in sports is actually incredibly effective, but only when athletes can imagine the scenarios and put themselves in the emotional states of those scenarios. They can then practice and gain experience with reacting the way they want themselves to during adversity.
The more experience we gain acknowledging and welcoming our stress states, the better we become at utilizing the heightened hormones and brain power available in important moments.
Embrace stress, it’s here to help.
This Month’s Health Challenge
Form a New Healthy Habit - By Kelly Dodds
We are halfway through the year, and New Year’s resolutions are likely nowhere on the radar. However, we are all aware of some habits we have that may not be doing us any favors– or may actually be detrimental to our health and wellbeing. Likewise, we often know things that we “should be doing,” but can’t seem to make ourselves do them. This month's challenge is to identify a current habit that you’d like to change, and/or form a new healthy habit that you know you would benefit from implementing. Then, make a SMART goal, an action plan, and take consistent steps towards forming this new habit [you can set up some free 1-on-1 time (5-10 mins) with coach Kelly to help with this process].
Habits are behaviors that we perform on a regular basis, and often don’t require too much effort or thought since we are familiar with them. However, when we are trying to form new habits, it takes much more effort to perform these new behaviors. Our brain uses ~20% of our total energy expenditure each day, and requires extra energy to learn and perform new behaviors– which is one reason it can feel difficult to perform new behaviors vs. when we perform on “autopilot.” The good news is that with practice (frequent repetitions over time), these new behaviors will turn into habits. Neuroscience research shows that new behaviors can become habits in roughly 2-3 months by “rewiring” our brains, though this time can vary depending on each individual and the difficulty of the new behavior. The more repetition, consistency, and feeling of reward from these new behaviors, the more hardwired these habits will become.
We are all goal-oriented, so being aware of our goals is key to understanding our behavior and how to modify it. When changing or implementing a new behavior, we are able to achieve our goals more effectively by making SMART goals. SMART stands for: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and has a Time-frame. SMART goals allow us to know exactly what we are trying to achieve and when we’ve achieved it. When setting a goal, include as many details as possible to allow you to focus your efforts better (Specific, Measurable), and give yourself a deadline to make sure you’re putting in enough effort to reach your goal (Time-frame). You want your goal to be challenging enough that it requires you to make an adaptation by rewiring your neural pathways, but make sure it is attainable– unattainable goals set us up for failure from the beginning.
Let’s say you are currently working out 10 times per month, but you want to make a habit of going to the gym more frequently to reach your bigger goals. An example of a SMART goal could be: I will go to the gym 16 times per month until Sept 30 (remember, habits take repetition, consistency, and time to form). This is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and has a time-frame. However, an action plan consisting of smaller (daily/weekly) goals would be very useful to ensure going to the gym 4+ days per week becomes a consistent habit. An action plan can include planning the days/time you are going to go to the gym that doesn’t conflict with your schedule, not canceling your gym plans for non-urgent conflicts that come up, making sure you have gym clothes ready and packed if you are going to the gym before/after work, and planning out meals so hunger doesn’t interfere with your plans.
Also, adding “cues,” pairing new behaviors with old habits, minimizing “roadblocks,” or combining actions with something rewarding will help the habit-forming process as well. Cues are things that prompt a specific behavior. Adding a cue could be setting an alarm on your phone to remind you to head to the gym or seeing your gym clothes sitting on your passenger seat. Piggybacking or replacing new behaviors with old habits can be helpful cues as well. For instance, if you typically head straight home after work, making a habit of going to the gym on your way home from work instead of going home first may prevent you from getting distracted and off-course; or maybe when you wake up and brush your teeth every day, that then prompts you to head to the gym. Another important part of action planning is to identify and minimize roadblocks that can get in the way of carrying out your goal. It’s ideal to find the easiest way to incorporate your new behaviors into your existing schedule. Finally, using a reward, such as a 2nd cup of coffee after finishing your morning workout or watching a couple episodes of a fave Netflix show on days you go to the gym, will fast track new behaviors into habits. I wouldn’t recommend rewarding yourself with “unhealthy” food– food is rewarding, but this can lead to unfavorable eating patterns… However, acknowledging (celebrating) your accomplishments when tackling a challenge, sticking with your action plan, and achieving your goals is well-deserved! Be proud!
Forming new behaviors does require effort and consistency, which is challenging - but challenge is necessary for growth, improvement, and adaptation so that we can optimize our lives and be more resilient to unforeseen challenges. However, we also want to set ourselves up for success by having an action plan that makes reaching our goals as easy and rewarding as possible.
This month’s challenge:
Identify a habit you want to change or a new habit you want to implement
If you are trying to change or stop a current habit, check out last months WOMM article on Breaking Bad Habits.
Make a SMART goal to change or implement this new behavior
Make an action plan (consisting of smaller actionable goals)
Identify and add cues - pair your new behavior with an old habit or set reminders
Identify and remove roadblocks
Reward your effort - pair your new behavior with something rewarding and feel proud that you accomplished something challenging that is good for your future
Interested in more nutrition information! Regardless of whether your goal is performance or fat loss, check out MovementLink’s full article series here: Lifestyle and Fat-loss Protocols.
