Episode 74: The Truth About Stress

We often talk about stress like it's something that is caused by a job, a project, a holiday, or other things outside of ourselves. Today I'm sharing what actually causes stress. (Spoiler alert:  it's our thoughts.)  Understanding the true case and source of stress can help you manage it more effectively in the moments that you're feeling it, and also help you gradually create less of it in your life over time.  If you're looking for a completely stress free life...sorry this won't help with that, but tune into this week's episode for some gems on how to effectively deal with stress and face it when it comes along.  :)

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Full Transcript:

You're listening to the Think New Thoughts podcast with Emily Ricks, episode number 74, The Truth About Stress.

I'm Emily Ricks, and this is Think New Thoughts, a life coaching podcast to help you find more joy in your relationships. In each episode, I'll share a simple idea that will help you see things in a new way so you can love God, your neighbor, and yourself more deeply than you ever have before. If you're ready to literally change your mind, I think you'll like it here.

Hello, my friend. How are you? I want to start off today by sharing a podcast review that came in this week.

This is from Melissa. She says, I've really enjoyed listening to these short podcast episodes every week. They are so applicable and really allow you to think about some behavior patterns you might have.

Emily has such a sweet sounding voice and is so easy to listen to. So thank you, Melissa. Thanks for taking the time to leave that review.

And I'm glad to hear that the episodes are helping you gain more awareness about your patterns. So you guys, I would love to get three more podcast reviews by the end of February. So if you've been enjoying the podcasts and haven't left a review yet, you are cordially invited to do that this week.

And I would be overjoyed for you to be one of the three people who helps me reach that goal. Thanks for helping me share these ideas with others who can benefit. All right.

Today's episode is called The Truth About Stress. I want to share with you what actually causes stress. Spoiler alert, it's our thoughts and how knowing that can help you manage stress more effectively in the moments that you're feeling it and also help you create less of it in the long-term.

So the cause of stress, you know, it's interesting because we usually talk about stress. Like it's something that's caused by things outside of us. We say things like, I have a really stressful job.

The holidays are so stressful. This trip is stressing me out. It's so stressful to be in charge of this big event.

Being a parent is so stressful. And this kind of language assigns the stress to the job or the event or the circumstance rather than to ourselves. The job is the source of stress.

The event is the source of stress. The kids are the source of the stress when we talk like this, but this is a disempowering way to think because if you believe your stress is caused by things outside of you and you want to feel relief from stress, which most of us do, you're going to be looking for a solution that's in the future. And that involves getting rid of the circumstance.

I would be less stressed if I could quit my job or once the holidays are over, I won't be so stressed. Or once I'm finally done planning this trip or this big event, or once my kids are older. So if you believe that the thing outside of you is causing your stress, then relief from stress will also have to come from outside of you and you'll have to wait until the future.

You'll have to get rid of the external situation that you believe is creating your stress in order to feel relief. And this mindset, it can feel true because let's say you felt really stressed during the holidays. You probably felt relief from that stress once the holidays were over.

And so then you conclude, Oh yeah, it was the events and the shopping and the gifts that were causing my stress. Because now that they're over, I don't feel stressed about those things. But the truth is the actual cause of a feeling of stress is the thoughts that we're thinking.

Now I'm not saying stress is all in your head because when you think stressful thoughts about your circumstances, you will definitely end up feeling that stress in your body. When you feel stress, your body will release chemicals into your bloodstream. And these chemicals cause your heart rate to increase.

Your breathing might become quicker. Your muscles will tense, your blood vessels will constrict. And so after you think stressful thoughts, which create the emotion of stress, then you will feel stress in your body.

Stress is real. It's experienced in the body. It's not just all in your head, but it's not created by external circumstances.

It's created by the thoughts we think about those circumstances. A job in and of itself isn't stressful. A job is neutral.

It's just a job. It's not good or bad. But my thoughts about my job aren't neutral.

My thoughts will create feelings of excitement or passion or boredom or dread or stress. That's all created by how I'm thinking about it. And two different people could have totally different thoughts about the same job.

One person might experience high stress and the other person way less stress or even none at all. Planning a big event isn't stressful. The event itself and the planning of it is neutral.

But my thoughts about the event can be stressful. If I think thoughts like, Oh, there's just so much to do. I have so much on my plate.

If I worry about all the things that I think are going to go wrong. If I imagine that people who will criticize me, if the event is a flop, then I will feel stress in my body as I'm planning the event. Also, if I think thoughts like this is going to be amazing.

I love collaborating with other people. As we plan this, if I have a vision of what I want to achieve with the event, and I stay connected to that vision and focus on what will go right and how this event will benefit others, I could probably feel excitement and passion and motivation, maybe a little stress at times, but way less depending on the thoughts that I'm thinking as I plan. Do you see what I'm saying? This is what I learned at the life coach school.

And the more I really pay attention, the more I believe that this really is the truth about stress that I create it with my thoughts and that nothing outside of me is inherently stressful. I bring stress to it with the way that I think about it. So let me share with you an example of how this is true.

Something recent from my own life. So you can see how the source of the feeling of stress was my thoughts about the circumstance and not the circumstance itself. So the other day I was driving to an eye doctor appointment.

I don't wear glasses or contacts or anything, but I'm type one diabetic. And a lot of times elevated blood sugar levels can cause problems with your eyes. So it's recommended that I go see the eye doctor frequently so that they can check and see if I'm having any of those problems.

Okay. So I'm driving to the eye doctor. The GPS the night before said that it would take about 18 minutes to get to the appointment, but I knew it would take longer than that at eight in the morning.

So I decided to leave at 8 20 AM for a nine o'clock appointment that had said it was 18 minutes away. Plenty of time at eight 20, the GPS said about 29 minutes to get there. Still plenty of time to be early, to not be rushed.

That's how I like it to be when I'm driving to an appointment, it was rush hour. There was traffic more than usual. And then like way more than usual.

And things were going really slow. And then I see the red bar on the GPS that says there's an accident. And then has this ever happened to you? You start to see the estimated time of arrival for your place that you're going get later and later and later because of this accident.

And so then I watched as this number climbs up to nine Oh five, nine 10, nine 15. And I started to feel stress. I was like, no, I hate being late.

I don't want to be late. This is my first time at this office. It's going to make a bad impression.

And then I started thinking about an experience I had at a different doctor's office where long story, but I had a miscommunication with my son. I was picking him up from school to take him to an appointment and we were off about the times and we ended up arriving late to this appointment. I believe we were like 12 minutes late and they're like, well, our policy is after 10 minutes, we don't accept you.

And so they turned us away and we couldn't be seen. And so I'm thinking about that and I'm like, they're going to turn me away. And then this is going to be such a waste of time.

And doctor's appointments are a waste of time. Anyway, I don't even have problems with my eyes, but because of diabetes, I have to go. And anyway, I was thinking all of these thoughts.

It's so lame that that doctor's office made me reschedule back two years ago. That was such a dumb policy, blah, blah, blah. My mind is completely running away as the stress I feel in my body increases because I'm fueling it with thoughts of frustration about being late to the appointment and all sorts of other thoughts.

So the accident begins to clear after a while I make my way past it, but I've still got 15 to 20 minutes of driving left and I'm definitely going to be late to this appointment. So I have the idea to call the office and let them know that I'm going to be late. And hopefully if I call ahead, right, then they're not going to turn me away when I get there.

But by now I'm on the freeway and I realize I don't actually know the name of the office because it's my first time going there. I have their address and I could look up the name and phone number online through my insurance provider page, but I don't have access to that right now. And it's not really safe to try to look up while I'm driving on the freeway.

So I try using Siri and she's not understanding what I want. She's not giving me the number that matches the address that I have for this eye clinic. And so I realized like, I'm not going to be able to call them.

And I feel stress, more stress, more stress, because I'm thinking thoughts like they're probably going to turn me away. And if they do, that would be such a waste of time. And I should have left earlier because I hate feeling stressed.

I hate being late to stuff. So that is all happening in my mind as I'm driving. I'll tell you a little bit more about how I chose to approach all of that in a minute, but eventually the GPS says arrived and I can't tell which building it is yet.

And I'm driving around. I see a bunch of signs telling me where I can't park and none telling me where I can. And so I'm circling around trying to find parking and experiencing more stress in my body.

Now let's just pause and look at this for a second. What was the cause of my stress as I was driving to this appointment? It was the accident that made me late, right? That's what caused my stress. It was the accident.

Well, maybe it was the awful parking situation. That's what was causing me stress. Or how about it was the appointment.

I mean, doctor's appointments are distressful. Driving in traffic is so stressful. No, none of that is true.

The cause of all my stress was my thinking in that situation. Do you believe that if this seems outrageous to you, consider this. What if we put a different person into that same situation, driving to a doctor's appointment and seeing the arrival time on the GPS creep up to 15 minutes late.

I know some people who would not feel stress in that situation because they wouldn't be thinking the same stressful thoughts that I was thinking. And if you flip this, like for example, I love performing. I love singing solos in front of large groups of people.

I don't feel stress when I do that. I feel excitement. I think it's fun, but I know a lot of people who would think very stressful thoughts if they were about to sing a solo in front of a large group of people and they would feel stress in their body in that situation because of their thoughts.

Not because performing in and of itself is stressful. It is for some people. It's not for some people.

The thoughts create the stress, not the circumstance. And I know people who don't feel stress while trying to find street parking in a tight space like my husband, because he has different thoughts than I do in that situation. Okay.

So eventually I arrived at the appointment. I apologized for being late. The ladies at the front desk were super nice.

They didn't send me home, which I was very thankful about. I got my eyes checked. There's nothing wrong with them.

And I made an appointment to go back next year. So all's well that ends well, right? But let's talk about two more things in context of this driving to the eye doctor situation. I want to share a couple of ideas of how you can approach stress when you are feeling it, and also how you can make intentional choices to create less stress for yourself in the future.

So in the moment in the car, when I started to feel my stress level rising, let's look at what happened there. I did not like that feeling of stress that I felt in my body. As I started thinking thoughts of being late and not wanting to, and all that frustration.

And I did not like the feeling I had when I imagined them sending me home for being late, like I had experienced at a different office one time. I did not want to feel that stress or that frustration because those emotions don't feel good. So my default response was to resist feeling those emotions.

That's what I did without thinking. So unintentionally, I started looking for ways to sort of scoot that emotion onto something else like, Oh, I should have left earlier. Then I wouldn't have to feel this.

I can blame my past self. It's my past self fault that I feel stress right now. That's me resisting the feeling of stress, trying to get out of feeling it.

And that felt pretty helpless since I can't go back in time. So then I also tried, okay, well, next time I'm going to leave earlier, or I'm going to schedule an appointment that won't have me driving during rush hour. But really I was still just trying to get out of having to feel the stress that was in my body at that moment.

Like, okay, let's go in the future. We'll fix it there. And then I won't have to deal with it right now.

But that didn't really work either because focusing on the past and what I should have done or on the future. And what I should do next time didn't erase the stress I was feeling in that moment. And the same thing kind of happened when I was trying to call the doctor's office and then ultimately couldn't get the phone number.

I was like, Oh, I should have put their number into my phone before I left. Next time I'm going to do that. Right.

Still trying to rescue myself from the current stress. So once I realized that I was for sure going to be late and that I couldn't call the doctor's office, and then I couldn't really solve it by going to the past or going to the future. I started to do some self-coaching, which always begins with awareness.

I took a couple of deep breaths and I invited myself to notice what I was thinking and feeling and doing. I was living out a totally unintentional model, creating more and more stress by the way that I was thinking, and then resisting the stress by trying to blame it on things outside of myself, or try to blame it on myself in the past or fix it by something I was going to do in the future. And eventually I was able to sort of see what was going on and I could chuckle a little bit and admit it like, Oh, I see.

I'm trying to get out of feeling this stress, but the chemicals are already in my bloodstream. I created this with my thinking. And if I don't accept that, I'm just going to keep layering on frustration and resentment and anger and all sorts of additional emotions on top of this stress.

So as best I could while I was driving, I'm like, you know what, let's just lean in and accept that this is what I'm feeling right now. I can't change what time I will arrive at this appointment. It is what it is for today.

What I can do is keep driving and I can notice what I'm creating. I can take responsibility that my thoughts are creating what I'm feeling in my body right now. So I accepted the stress as a reality and noticed it.

It was tight in my chest. My heart was beating fast. It felt hot in my cheeks, but I just allowed it.

I took responsibility for creating it. And then I started to notice what the thoughts actually were. And this is what can be really magic.

As you allow emotion, when you fully allow an emotion and you stop resisting it or avoiding it or trying to get it to go away, then you can listen to what the emotion is telling you. And it's telling you what you are thinking. So as I was driving and leaning into the stress I had created with my thoughts, I noticed more and more thoughts.

I noticed thoughts about not wanting this morning to end up being a waste of my time. And I noticed how thinking this created a lot of stress and I didn't try to change the thoughts. I just acknowledge them like, wow, pretty attached to my time.

And I can see the benefit of that. Like a lot of times I make really intentional choices of how to use my time because I don't want to waste it. But also I can get really possessive about my time and hold onto it as something that's mine and that I own.

And that creates stress for me in moments like this. Interesting. So as I was driving and noticing, I could be kind of fascinated with myself.

Like, huh? Yeah. I see how that creates stress. I noticed some thoughts of self-pity around being diabetic and all the facets of managing my blood sugars and ordering supplies and being on hold with insurances and pharmacies and finding eye doctors and going to extra appointments.

And I didn't try to change any of these thoughts. I just noticed like, yeah, I can see how that creates stress for me. So the stress chemical was still there still vibrating in my body, but I was able to forgive myself, able to say, oh yeah, I created this stress with my thinking.

And also it's okay. It's just chemicals in my body on my way to a doctor's appointment. I can feel this it's uncomfortable, but it will run its course.

So as I filled out the paperwork at the appointment, I took lots of deep breaths and allowed the stress to make its way through my body. And it did not feel good. It felt tight and hot and pinched and very uncomfortable.

And also eventually it made its way through. So coaching yourself in the moment that you feel stress isn't meant to erase the stress. It's not going to give you immediate relief, but it will bring awareness and a certain type of acceptance that actually feels a lot better than piling on resentment and resistance and frustration and blame on top of stress.

And then if I want to manage my stress for future appointments like this, I can make intentional choices. Like I can plan to leave earlier. I might choose to put the phone number of the office into my phone before I leave.

I might choose to schedule it at a time that might have less traffic. Like I could do these things to potentially lower my stress level for the future. And I can also go deeper into some of the categories that I noticed of my thoughts, and I can cultivate some new beliefs about my time and who it really belongs to about my diabetes and whether I want to view it as a burden or a blessing, maybe some new thoughts about driving and parking and how I want to think about those things.

So the goal isn't to become a person who never feels stress. The goal though, is to become a person who understands where stress actually comes from and knows how to meet it. When it shows up in that car ride, nothing outside of me changed.

I was still going to be late. Traffic was still there. The parking lot was confusing and I actually still felt stress in my body, but I did experience a shift in my willingness to notice my thoughts and allow that emotion and take responsibility for what I was creating instead of fighting it.

And from that place, I had a lot more calm and clarity than I did when was blaming the accident, the office, or my past self for my feelings of stress. The truth about stress is this. It isn't created by your circumstances.

It's created by your thoughts about those circumstances. And that might sound confronting at first, but it's actually incredibly empowering. If circumstances caused stress, we'd have to wait for the world to change before we could ever feel better.

But if our thinking creates stress, then relief is in our own hands. You don't have to eliminate stress from your life to live well, but it can be really helpful to understand it, allow it, and remember that you are not powerless inside of it. So here's my challenge to you.

The next time you feel stress well up inside of your body, I want to invite you not to fight it, not to argue with it, not to blame it on anything outside of you. See if you can just notice it, choose to feel it, and see if you can get some awareness of the thoughts that are creating that stress. If you're in a place where you can write, jot down some of the thoughts.

If you're on the fly and you're in the middle of a stressful situation, make a mental note of what some of those thoughts are, and maybe reflect on the situation later, and see what you can observe and notice as you look back on it. And if it's the same thoughts that are creating the same stress day after day for you, you might want to make some CTFAR models and explore what other thoughts are available that you could choose to think. Change always begins with awareness.

So see what you can notice this week in terms of your own stress and what really causes it. All right. Thanks for joining me today.