Creative

Foundations TRANSCRIPT

SONIA SIMONE

7 Ways to Beat
Stress and
Overwhelm
7 Ways to Beat Stress
and Overwhelm

Sonia Simone

Sonia: Welcome everyone, to 7 Ways to Beat Stress and Overwhelm. I am Sonia

Simone, and I am all about finding ways to work with a little less stress, have
a little more fun, enjoy the time you spend on the planet, so that’s what we’re
going to be talking about today.

We are going to introduce something a little bit new, which is, in the middle of
a session we’re just going to take a few minutes for a break. That lets you stand
up, stretch your legs, focus your eyes on something that’s not your laptop, and
do some hula hooping or jumping jacks and just get the blood flowing. It’s an
important stress relieving technique, and it’s something that we’re going to start
doing just to let everybody clear our heads.

Stress can be a friend

Stress. We all want to beat it. Every time of year, certainly holidays and then
January is a prime time for stress. The thing about stress is, we use this term

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very generally and rather vaguely. There are all kinds of stress. Stress is a very
imprecise word. There’s toxic stress, and then there’s actually very beneficial
stress that makes you more focused and helps give you the clarity and the
motivation to do really cool things.

I would invite you to check out the work of a woman named Kelly McGonigal.
We’ll give you a link to all that in the playback. She has both a TED Talk and
a book about making stress your friend, and she has a lot of different tactics
and ways of thinking about things, and ways of framing your stress. But the
overarching theme is that the way that you react to stress has a lot to do with
how your body processes it.

Actually thinking about stress differently can create measurable differences in

health outcomes so that people who think, “Well, yeah, I’m stressed, but that’s
just a natural part of doing something that’s really meaningful.” Those folks have
fewer negative health outcomes than the people who say, “I’m drowning in
stress, and I think it’s killing me.”

Today we’re going to talk about how to make stress your friend, but also work
with it in a healthy way instead of letting it be a bully and beat you up.

Action is the antidote

Most of the time, the antidote to the discomfort, and even the pain, of stress,
is action. I would say 85, 90% of the time, depending on your circumstances,
doing something will cause that needle on your stressometer to get out of the
red, to go back to something that you can manage. So taking any action at
all, even something that seems pretty small will often just release the pressure
on that valve and neutralize the stress where it gets to the point where it’s
counterproductive and you’re not doing anything.

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That’s one of the key takeaways I want you to think about is, if you’re stressed,
the wisest thing to do is to figure out, “How could I take a small action to
move toward solving that gap? That conflict that’s creating the stress?” Very
often, you can’t believe how relieved you can be, and we’re going to talk about
specifically how to do that as we go on today.

Except when serenity is the antidote

Now, there is an exception to this. Remember, I said maybe 80%, 85% of your
stress, action is the antidote, but we always have to remember the Serenity
Prayer. This is the cornerstone of AA, and in a nutshell, it is, “Dear higher power,
please grant me the courage to accept what I can change.” That’s the taking
action part. “The serenity to accept what I cannot change,” and that’s what this
is all about.

There are things you cannot do anything about. Larger circumstances, the state
of the economy, the state of the democracy, the horrible weather that you
might be dealing with right now. There is no action you can take that will really
make a measurable change there.

If you don’t have an action that you can take, you have to try and seek that
serenity and just remind yourself, “This isn’t one of the things I’m able to take
action on right now, and so I’m going to have to try and find my zen, try and
find my peaceful place, and maybe shift my attention to one of the things I can
take action on.” Then the last part of the Serenity Prayer is, “And the wisdom to
know the difference,” which is a big deal.

So we’re going to talk about specific techniques for managing, improving your
stress, and taking it from that toxic kind to the more healthy kind.

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#1: Get it out of your head

Probably the number one strategy, overarching strategy that you want to work
for is to get all of that busyness, and thoughts, and anxieties, and to-dos out
of your head. A great deal of the stress we’re going to be talking about today
is about managing your responsibilities, about commitments that you have
accepted. “I will produce this piece of work on this deadline to this standard
of quality.” You have accepted that commitment. “I will keep my kids alive and
get them dressed every morning and make sure they get to school.” That is a
responsibility, a commitment you have accepted.

When you try and keep all of these in your head, that creates stress in and of
itself and that’s the kind of stress that does you no good. It’s totally useless,
and it acts a little bit like your computer when sometimes you have something
called a memory leak where some process is running in the background, and
it’s just calculating, and calculating, and calculating, and you don’t have any
memory on your machine to do anything else because it’s all being consumed
with this meaningless process that doesn’t need to be done.

Keeping a bunch of stuff in your head instead of getting it into a system works
very, very much the same way. You’re draining your creative battery. You have
like a short in the system, and if you just make that one switch, that in itself
will often release a tremendous amount of energy that you can put back into
actually doing something about the things that you care about.

Trusted system

Your first area of focus, if this is the kind of thing where you’re just having a
running conversation in your head about, “What I have to do, when I have to
do it, who do I have to make happy with the level of quality that I’m reaching
with this piece of work? What am I going to do about that? What decisions am I
going to make,” you need a trusted system.

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This is, I think, I got this wording from David Allen. David Allen wrote a great
book called Getting Things Done, and I’ve made a teeny tiny bit of fun of it in
the past because it’s one of the systems that can become something where
you just spend all your day managing your productivity system and none of
your day doing stuff. That’s a common thing that happens to people who get
interested in getting things done, but it is a good book.

He has some good ideas. Some of them are going to show up today, but you
need to create some kind of system to capture all that junk that’s running
around in your head, and then you can relax about it. You don’t have to have
that background process saying, “Don’t forget to do this. Don’t forget. Don’t
forget.” That process will be shut down. It’ll be shut down, because you don’t
need it anymore. It’s in your trusted system. A trusted system means you have
to look at this every day that you are going to be working on responsibilities.

Now, if you take Sundays completely off, which is a wonderful, or Saturdays

or Tuesdays, which is a wonderful practice if you have at least one day a
week when you just do not do responsibility stuff, you don’t need to check
your system that day. That’s fine, but check it every single day that you have
responsibilities, because otherwise what happens is, that process has to boot
up again, because it knows you might not check the system, and so it’s got to
run in the background saying, “Don’t forget to do this. Don’t forget to do this.
Don’t forget to think about this.”

A trusted system can be digital, or it can be physical. After years and years of
trying out both, I now have a bit of a hybrid, and you can do this whatever way
works for you. I have a physical book that I write things down in. That’s the
capture system. It’s where my daily to-do lists are. It’s where my notes are for
things like conversations I have about developing a product, or ideas I have for
developing a new course, or content ideas for blog posts. I just write them all
down in my book.

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That physical act of writing just seems to spur some good creative energy
for me, and I’ve really found it productive. I like writing in my little book. I like
seeing it fill up, and I like doodling in it. You have to like your system, so if you
don’t like your system, your system will probably not work for you, because
you’ll avoid it. Then I use a digital resource for things like applications that help
me stay on track. We’ll be talking more about those next week when we’re
going to be talking about building your own productivity system.

So applications, and also any kind of reference. If it’s something I have to keep
as a reference, I just throw it into Evernote. Evernote is not the only option, by
any means. Some people love it. Some people feel kind of meh about it. I’ve
been using it long enough that I’m perfectly happy to just keep using Evernote.
Again, once it’s there, I know where it is, and I do not have to worry about how
to find it, where to find it, where to look for it. It’s just in Evernote. I have to
search on a couple of words or phrases, and I know it’ll pop up.

Journaling

Now, another thing you can do to get all of this running conversation out of
your head, sometimes it’s not about your to-do list. Sometimes it’s about an
issue, or a problem, or a challenge that you’re not sure what the next step is.
You’re not sure what you’re going to do about it. It’s a little too big for that, or
it’s complicated, or you’re waiting on something from someone else.

One of the features of my trusted system is that if I have a problem like that, I
just sit down and start scribbling about it. This is something that professional
writers almost all do, but lots of us, right, benefit from this kind of thing.
Journaling about your values. That’s a hugely beneficial exercise, so if one of
your really strong values in your life is ... Let’s say it’s freedom. Freedom is a key
value for you. You need to feel free. You’re not good with constraints. You want
to live a life that is free.

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Take some time once or twice a week and maybe write a paragraph about
freedom, or about family, or about fun, or patriotism, or faith, or security.
People are afraid to put security on this list. They think it’s not okay. Right?
They think, “Oh, that’s ... I’m not supposed to value financial security. That’s
shallow.” It’s not shallow. It’s normal. It’s smart. Security is one of your values,
write it down and just write a paragraph or two about it. That, again, it gets the
background chatter out of your head, really can give you a tremendous amount
of energy.

Gratitude journals, are also very, very well shown to have super positive anti-
stress qualities. A lot of people write lists. “I’m grateful for these five things every
day, three things every day.” Something that the research maybe supports being
a little more effective is, write a paragraph about one thing that you’re grateful
for.

For me, when I do gratitude journaling, every day it’s like, “I’m grateful for my
kid, because he’s awesome, because I really enjoy my kid.” It’s more beneficial
to write a paragraph about what is it today, specifically? His sense of humor, or
the way he looks at the world, or he’s just funny, or what is it? I keep them all
together. I find that that’s easier than trying to keep track of umpteen skillion
different things, and so I’ve got the whole thing in one physical book, or again
you can have it all in Evernote. You can have it all in OneNote, or any tool that
you like. Google Docs, frankly.

Mindfulness

Another aspect of getting that running conversation out of your head is

mindfulness. Mindfulness is very hot right now, which is kind of hilarious,
because mindfulness practices and traditions have been in play for like
thousands of years, but everybody’s thinking about mindfulness right now.

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Mindfulness meditation even a few minutes a day can be very beneficial. One
of the reasons that mindfulness helps with this anti-stress, getting things out of
our head is, it is simply practice in setting aside the running conversation, what
the Buddhists call monkey mind. Just saying, “That’s fine, but we’re going to just
set that down for a few minutes and focus on something that’s here right this
second. My breathing.”

It could be a beautiful garden. It could be an image. It could be whatever it

is. It could be a word that you’re meditating on, a prayer if you are a religious
person. Mindfulness is really about working when you work and playing when
you play and resting when you rest. A mindfulness practice can be very, very
useful in helping you to get this running conversation and just calm it down so
it’s not using all your energy.

Compartmentalize

Then finally, something that I would suggest, and this almost seems counter to
mindfulness, but it’s part of the same package, we have very complicated lives,
and if you try and do everything all the time at the same time, you end up with
kind of a soup with too much weird stuff in it. Like a soup made out of pickles,
and fruitcake, and kimchi. It just gets a little like, “I’m not sure about that.”

Designate specific times for things, especially things you don’t want to do. If
you’re not that crazy about maybe writing your blog post, it’s not like the thing
... Maybe you’re nervous about it. You feel you’re not good at it. We will be
addressing exactly that in a future session coming up very shortly, but if you’re
not keen on it, then work on it every day at 10:00 AM.

Just every day, five days a week, every day that you’re at work, you’re going to
work on creating your content and just 10:00 to 11:00, you know that’s what
you’re going to do. You block it off. You don’t accept meetings, and overtime.
For one thing, you’ll get much less stressed about that blog content, because

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it’s always done. It’s always ready. You’ve always moved forward on it, and
you’ve done so much of it that you’ve calmed down that anxiety about not
being good at it or not knowing what to do.

If you’re stressed about your finances, set aside specific time to think about
it and specific time to work on a solution. Maybe it’s starting a side hustle, or
maybe it’s just something as simple as working with budget software. When
you have time set aside and you have a plan for action, the stress gets to be
something you can manage instead of something that’s just overloading all of
your systems.

#2: Cuddle more

All right, this one comes actually straight from Kelly McGonigal’s book. I did not
know this, which is that we all know about fight or flight, right? We have stress.
We have adrenaline, and we have cortisol. Those are our stress hormones, and
they give us a lot of energy, and they can make us a little bit aggressive. That
is a stress response. You see a sabre-toothed tiger, and you get lots and lots
of adrenaline and cortisol in order to run away from the sabre-toothed tiger,
or possibly to pick up a big rock and fight it off if running away is not going to
work for you. That’s fight or flight, and we all have heard of that.

Fight or flight is not the only physiological response to stress. There are
other physical things that can happen when you get stressed out, and one of
them that happens all the time, but we’re just not as aware of it, is something
psychologists call “tend and befriend.” What that is, is a release of ... I have to
get this right, because it always sounds like the addictive painkiller, but oxytocin
is sometimes called the cuddle hormone. It’s the hormone that gets released
when you hug somebody. You release oxytocin.

Oxytocin not only is very nice, makes you feel very, very lovely, it also has a role
to play in physically protecting your heart from stress. If your response to stress

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is, “I am really stressed out. I need to connect with the people who care about
me, get a hug, talk it through, and pet my dog until I feel better,” that’s actually
having a physiological response that is protecting your health.

Kids, spouse, dog, whatever you’ve got, find somebody who would like to hug
you and get some hugs. The more kind of physical connection like that that
you can get into your life, very literally the healthier you’ll be, so it ... We think,
“It’s good to get a hug. It feels great,” but it’s actually also good for your health,
so that’s not a bad, if you’re into making resolutions or improving your habits,
getting more hugs is an underrated resolution.

Thank you so much to Clare Garrett for finding this very, very sweet picture,
which I feel like I’m getting a major oxytocin release just looking at this little
puppy. So sweet.

#3: Take mini breaks

Another thing that happens, so if we are stressed and we are action takers,
and we know that action is the key to helping move us out of the stress state,
it’s very tempting to sit down and grind. So, “I’m going to sit in my chair at
eight o’clock, and I am going to grind the work out until 2:00 or 3:00 in the
afternoon and just make it happen. I’m not going to let myself get up. I’m not
going to let myself do things.” This is hugely counterproductive. The quality of
your work will not be very good. The quality of your thinking will deteriorate
rapidly, and your health will take a major nosedive. It’s important to take little
scheduled breaks regularly to just let your body refill the well, just a little bit.

Many of us know about the Pomodoro Technique. That’s where you set a timer
for some period of time. It could be 20 minutes, 15 minutes. Different people
like different periods of time, and that’s your focused work time, and then you
set a timer for 10 minutes. It could be more, could be 20, and that’s your break
time.

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You cycle through focused work and then taking a break, and if you’re not
doing this today, or if you have that tendency when things are a little bit
dire, and your to-do list is really depressing, and we’ll talk about that in a few
moments, and you have a tendency to grind, it’s taking you longer. It actually
takes longer to grind it out than it does to do the work in these cycles of focus
and rest, focus and rest.

Your timing on that is really going to be up to you. There are recommendations

out there on the web. You can find many, many of them, but really you’re
going to want to experiment. I know people who are wildly productive on a
20 minutes work, 20 minutes rest cycle. That seems kind of nutty, but it really
works for some people. It really depends on who you are and then the kind of
work you do. Cycle between working and resting.

When you’re resting, some things you can do, you can get up and stretch.
That’s a good one. You can focus your eyes on something that’s far away. This
is not just good for your vision, and it’s also good for your mind. We get kind of
a tunnel vision when we’re just looking down at our work, looking down at our
work, we never look up, we never take in the world around us.

Maybe you do a little mindfulness mini-break. Maybe you just take 10 conscious
breaths in and out, 10 breaths. Do you think that’s so trivial it’s not going to
do anything? Huge improvement. Huge improvement in your stress level, and
your clarity of thinking, and your perspective. Breaks are here to help us get
perspective as well as to keep us from dying of all kinds of horrible diseases,
and get a few steps in, walk around a little bit.

Let’s take a break!

To that end, we’re going to take a mini-break just to do that right now. I would
encourage you, if you need a refill on your tea or your coffee, just go ahead and
get up and look for that. I’m going to take a few steps around my environment,

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get the blood flowing a little bit, get my clarity going, have a few sips of my tea,
and then we will be back here in five minutes.

Hey, there. Welcome back. I hope you did get up and stretch and do a few
things, and get yourself refocused, reconnected, relaxed, reminding yourself
to put a little space around your day, put a little space around your work, give
everything a little bit of time to breathe.

#4: Find the purpose

We’re going to start up again with the fourth stress management technique.
I touched on this a little bit earlier, and that is to find the purpose in your
stress, find the meaning in your stress. Stress that comes from being stuck in
something without meaning is extremely toxic.

If you’re in a situation you can’t control, and there’s no meaning or purpose

to it, you will find that kind of stress can be very debilitating. But whatever the
situation might be, if you are able to sit down with your creative human brain
and find meaning in it, the stress will become less of a danger and more of a
motivator.

Stress can and does significantly boost performance, so if you think about that
nervous excitement if you ever give talks or do other things that make you a
little bit nervous, performing in sports for example, that nervous excitement
gives your brain a cocktail of chemicals that give you focus and motivation. It’s
kind of like natural caffeine.

The values exercise

I mentioned this earlier when we talked about your trusted system and
journaling and some of the things that you can do, which is the values exercise.

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This is, again, to list out values that are important to you. These will tend to be
words. They’re often abstract, or if they’re not abstract, then they have a lot
of meaning attached to them. Faith, family, connection, contribution, justice,
fairness, joy, passion.

Take some time today, maybe take some time, write down and just capture
the ones that are just leaping to mind and take some time today and write
a paragraph about one of them. It doesn’t matter which one, and it doesn’t
matter what you write. You can write about why security is important to you or
why your relationship with your family drives you, or how faith manifests in your
life, or what you would like to do with your desire for contribution.

This is very much about awareness. Again, it’s about mindfulness, and it’s
amazingly well supported by science. This has been studied a lot. They call
them affirmations, which is different from self-health affirmations. “I’m good
enough. I’m smart enough. Gosh darn it, I shouldn’t have done those things I
did.”

Mindfulness is about, and affirmations in this sense, is just about recalling a

value that’s important to you and keeping your attention on it for a couple of
minutes. It has all kinds of benefits. It’s very energizing, and one of the things
that it will often do is, it will help you find the meaning or the purpose in
something stressful.

Very often, you’re stressed out because something matters to you a lot. Maybe
you’re stressed out because you are launching a new side business, or you’re
launching something new in your main business, or you’re working on a big
creative project at work that you really believe in and you’re stressed about it
because it matters. Finding the purpose will, again, help frame that stress in a
way that’s healthy and beneficial and energizing instead of demotivating, and
flattening, and harmful.

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Shrinking your to-do list

Fifth way to reduce your stress, and you’re going to roll your eyes, but shrinking
your to-do list. This is not necessarily about finding a way to have less stuff
to do, although sometimes it is that as well, but really most of us are running
around with to-do lists that are insane, and they’re not ... They’re more insane
than they need to be.

You really do want to think about, “Is there something on this list that I just, that
no one should do? Is this busy work?” Very, very often we have things on our
to-do lists, and we do them because they’re comfortable, we know how to do
them. It’s kind of a way to feel like we’re working for 20 minutes, but they aren’t
very important. Do you have things like that on your list that, honestly, if you
just didn’t do it, no one would care? Do you have things that really somebody
else would be more appropriate to do them? Do you have things that they’re
of value, they’re good, but they’re not the most important thing, they’re not the
thing that’s going to move you toward that big, purposeful, important goal?

A friend of mine who is, she’s an organizer, like she’s the kind of person who
comes to your house and cleans your closets and your office, she taught me
many, many years ago every day to put three items, three to-do items on a
Post-it. Don’t get like a wall of Post-its. Now it’s like Post-its come in super
huge sizes, so let’s not do that. Just a small Post-it, the regular-size Post-it, and
write down three things that you really must do them today. You will do them
today. These are the things that are going to change the big stuff. These are
the things that are going to move the needle, as they say. It doesn’t have to be
three. It could be one.

My friend Clay Collins, who founded Leadpages, a really sweet guy, I remember
him writing once that he can only really do one major thing a day, like that’s
just how his brain is. He just, that’s who he is. He started this super successful
company. Why? Because his one thing a day, he makes sure it matters. If you

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do one thing, what goes on your Post-it? Now, it doesn’t mean that’s all you
do today, because you probably don’t have that freedom to only do your three
most important things, but if you put them on a Post-it and you put them
where you can see them, and you focus on those things and get them done
first even if you’d really rather not, things start to move, and you find yourself
working on less busy work and more meaningful work.

There is an app called Momentum, and it makes your home browser screen ...
I don’t know if it works in browsers other than Chrome. I use it on Chrome. It
makes it your one priority item for the day, so it gives you like a really beautiful
picture, and then it says, “What’s the most important thing for you to do today?”
You write it in, and it just keeps that on your browser, so every time you open
a new tab to go do something you probably shouldn’t do, it’s right there. If you
find it helpful, I found it very helpful for a while. Now, I just like to look at the
pictures.

Someday / Maybe

The other thing you can do with your to-do list is put some items on a list
called Someday/Maybe. This, again, is just ripped right off of David Allen’s
Getting Things Done. It’s one of his more useful tactics, in my opinion, and it’s
based on the understanding that you can do it all if you really decide you want
to, but you cannot do it all right now, so take ...

This is great for the projects that, these are the kind of things that do tend to
stay in our heads, because we really want to do them. I really want to work
on my book. I want to work on it. It’s important. I think about it every day, but
realistically, the next 60 days, it does not fit right now, because I have other
big, juicy, interesting, creative things I’m working on, so it goes on a list called
Someday/Maybe. These are things you can put them in any place in your
trusted system. I happen to put them in Evernote, but you could also put them
in your physical book.

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Now, if it’s not a maybe, if it’s a, “No, this needs to get done, but not now,” that’s
when you move it to your calendar. That’s when you take some notes, get a
start on it, maybe take an hour or two to kind of do a little bit of legwork, and
then park all that somewhere you can find it and put a note on your calendar.
Find the notes for the book and write the first page, and you’re going to do that
60 days from today. That’s another way that you can use Someday/Maybe to
shrink your to-do list, and many of us have things on a to-do list that have been
there for months. Are you going to do them this week? Either yes, or let’s park
them somewhere else and come back to them when you have more focus.

Future self

Another way to just think about this Someday/Maybe, think about reducing
your stress level is, think about your future self. Think about you in the future,
whether the future is 60 days from now or a year from now, five years from
now, 10 years from now, so before you park the project in Someday/Maybe,
see if there are some five-minute tasks that you could get done now that would
just give you a running start when you come back to it. I happen to have future
self time scheduled. I have it every day at three o’clock, and I spend about 15
minutes doing things that I will thank myself for later.

For me, this is always the same thing and has been for years, which is working
on like my receipts and things for my taxes. I hate doing it. It’s boring. I hate
it. I hate it. I hate it. So I just work on it for a couple of minutes every day, and
when tax time rolls around, it’s not dire. Because I’ve had years when it’s been
insanely horrible.

What could you do every day? It’s not painful. It’s simple because you’re doing
it now. If you wait on it, it’s going to be painful. What could you do to make
your future self a happier person? This is a huge stress reliever if you can get it
moving. It takes a while to get these kind of habits implemented, because they

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don’t have an immediate payoff, but if you can get it moving, even if it’s small,
this is one of the ones that has a massive, massive stress relief component to it.

Smaller habits

Related to that — I preach this all the time — anything you ever see from me
on productivity or getting things done is talking about making smaller habit
commitments. If you think that you want to get more fit, I mean, that’s a really
good thing to want to do, all of us should move around and feel good, so
you’re going to say, “I am absolutely, without fail I’m going to run eight miles
every day, or two miles, or 10 miles,” or whatever it is, and you don’t run it all
now.

If you’re a normal person, this will not work for you. If you are my husband, this
does work for you, but he is not a normal person. He ran two marathons the
first year he started running, and then he permanently messed up his feet, so
now he can’t run, and he has to bicycle. Smaller habits. It’s not how he’s wired,
but smaller habits would have really helped him and helped his body approach
running in a healthier way.

If you can do something daily for five minutes, and if you can’t do it for five
minutes, do it for 30 seconds, that makes the habit friendly. It makes it not
scary. You’re not having a complete brain hijack of like, “Oh no, now we have
to exercise. Ugh.” You don’t really put it off, and if you do put it off, you just do
it right before bed, because it doesn’t take any time. Little, teeny-weeny habits,
a fantastic stress reliever if you have stress that’s caused by something you are
not doing. Cleaning your desk, or cleaning your house, or not getting enough
exercise.

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#6: Move a little more

Speaking of that, you guys knew I was going to get to this, if you want to
talk about relieving your stress, getting some more movement into your life
is so proven. If there was a drug that could do for your stress level, for your
longevity, for your daily feeling good, for your ability to do stuff like play with
your kids or go out in the park and play catch, just a very moderate amount of
exercise every day, it would be on the front page of every newspaper for the
next five years. It has unbelievable benefits, and the reason we don’t do it is, we
make the habit too big.

We make these huge resolutions to do these super, “I’m going to do a CrossFit

workout a day, every day, six days a week.” You’re going to do it twice, and
then you’re going to be like, “That’s just,” the third day you’re going to be like,
“No. A) My quads are in such a bad shape that I can’t go downstairs, and B), just
no. There is no C. Ugh. I don’t want to do that.” No bashing on CrossFit, but
CrossFit is great when you already have some movement and you want to kind
of take it to the next level.

One of the best things you can do is walk more. “Walk more” means walk more
than you walk now, so however you define that. A pedometer. Again, tons of
evidence that if you just have a pedometer and you know how many steps you
take a day, you will take more, because you’ll say, “Whoa, that’s not very many.”

I love my Fitbit. It gamifies the whole thing. You definitely don’t need it, but if
you’re the kind of person who likes games, then the Fitbit can be a great way to
just motivate yourself to keep kind of ... Because you’re trying to beat your high
score. Right? I also, because I am juvenile, play Pokémon Go.

Typically, if it’s not horrible cold or horrible hot, I’m out every day, and I just
take a while to go catch Pokémon. I know that’s juvenile, but you know what,
I take at least two walks a day, not counting all the time I play with the puppy,

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so it’s fun. It makes it fun, and I look around too, and I get fresh air, and I talk to
people, and go watch the kids play in the park. It just gets me out. It’s that thing
that gets me started.

There are phone apps that’ll track your walking. You can do jumping jacks.
You can dance. You can do a hula-hoop. It’s very beneficial to do a little bit
of strength work, so that’s like not necessarily going to the gym and lifting
barbells, although I love barbells, and I have one in my house, but a couple of
push-ups a day. If you don’t, if push-ups are hard, and they will be, if you don’t
do push-ups, then they’ll be hard. You can do them against the wall. It makes a
huge difference in how you feel.

If you are a person who can do chin-ups, hey, a couple of chin-ups a day and a
few push-ups a day, and then a few walks, you’re going to feel amazing. Then
from there, if you want to start running or CrossFit or something, that’s cool
too, but you don’t have to. The biggest bang comes from just the moderate
daily, move stuff around, use your body. Your body loves that.

Again, going back to our breaks, get up regularly and get some steps. One of
the things the Fitbit does do, the new ones at least, is if you set it up this way,
you’ll get a prompt every hour that you tell it to just get up 10 minutes before
the hour and walk around for 250 steps. Really a helpful reminder to just not sit
there and let everything kind of pool and congeal in your body. It’s so bad for
you.

Sitting all day is horrible for your productivity, is horrible for your stress level,
and it’s horrible for your health, so just move a little more, and you don’t have
to go crazy. You can actually create physical stress on your body by over
exercising, and sometimes people do. You do not have to do all the crazy stuff
we see people do on Facebook. Just get out there and develop a moderate
moving around habit. You will feel a billion times better.

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#7: Connect with your community

Then the seventh one is, and I forget this one all the time, I think it’s a hazard of
working from home, but for example, I’ll get crazy stressed about something,
like some project that I’m trying to make happen, and I can’t see it. I can’t see
the path. Jessica Abel and her wonderful book called Growing Gills about
creative productivity; she calls it being in the dark forest of a creative project.
You’re just wandering around. You don’t know what the next step is. It’s very
uncomfortable. I have called this “crossing the desert.” It’s the same idea. You
don’t know where the next water is. You don’t know. It’s just sand as far as you
can see. You’re not sure which direction is the right way. You’re uncomfortable.

When you are in this spot, if I talk about it with a friend, with a colleague, or
a mentor or coach, all of a sudden all that horrible stress is gone. I still don’t
maybe know exactly the right direction, but a lot of times, talking about it, you
figure out, “Well, this is a direction. Let’s go in this direction. Let’s see what
productively comes out of this direction.” Just speaking about it to somebody
else helps you realize, “Oh, now that I’m saying that out loud, I realize
something that’s so obvious that I’ve just been totally overlooking.”

Again, you just have that human connection. It’s so helpful. It’s such a stress
reliever. It goes back to the tend and befriend. It’s a way of approaching
your stress to get some human help and encouragement and a little bit of
cheerleading.

Carrying your stress and your worries by yourself, it’s just, it’s too hard, and
it doesn’t really do you any good. Talk with your friends. Now, try and find
friends who understand the thing that’s giving you stress. If you’re stressed out
about parenting and you’re talking about this with your friends who don’t have
children, you will become more stressed, because they will have stupid advice.

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The same is true for business. If you’re stressed because you’re trying to start a
digital business on the side, and you talk about that with normal people, they’ll
be like, “I don’t even know why you would do that. It just sounds like it’s giving
you a lot of stress, and I don’t know, do people really make money? I mean,
that just seems kind of ... I don’t get it.” That’s not going to help you. You’re just
going to feel worse, so talk to people who understand the difficult thing you’re
trying to do and who won’t say dumb things that will just make you want to ...
Be very aggravated.

All right, that’s our seven ways to relieve your stress. We can kind of recap these
for you in the playback notes, so you can just have them available to refer back
to. If you have any questions, suggestions, maybe you have your own stress
relief that you found really works well for you, let us know.

Next we’re going to be talking about creating a productivity system that works
for you. Instead of trying to get something off the shelf, or out of a book, or
from somebody’s course, we’re going to talk about putting pieces together so
you can create a system that really is tailored to you. Then from there we’re
going to move on to content processes so you can get content done more
efficiently and you don’t have that dread of writing your blog posts or getting
your podcasts done.

Then after that, we’re going to talk about content strategy kind of 101. How
the pieces fit together. How do all the pieces of a content strategy fit? Your
email, and maybe whitepapers, and blog, and podcast, and what’s everything
supposed to do? How does it work together? So you can see, maybe you have
some gaps that you might want to fill.

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