stressed out

We lose over $300 billion a year in productivity due to stress. What we lose in quality of life is much harder to put a figure to. 

We don’t know what we are missing in terms of lost opportunity costs. A work team that is burnt out is not likely to be the first to jump on a new opportunity or create one. A family who is stressed out that takes a vacation is likely to neither renew them nor fully allow them to enjoy their time together. 

The stress response, as a survival mechanism, is a reactive response.  Even chronic stress puts you in a place where you are reacting and not creating. If you just worked your second 60-hour week and your son has a soccer tournament through the weekend, do you think you will be fully present for it? Or maybe you and your partner are attempting to find the time to sit down and design your new house. You finally find the time, but you are exhausted – how creative will you be? How much fun will it be? 

Stress tends to put you in a mode where you are attempting to just keep up and not mess up. You are more likely to be planning from a position of covering your butt versus creating what could be the next breakthrough. 

Some Solutions 

Don’t buy into stress. I am not saying deny it. You need to acknowledge it and its effect on you. However, you don’t need to accept a life  ruled by stress. Often, you may find yourself in an environment where there is an assumption that this is the way we do it, a place where stress rules. 

Stop focusing on what you don’t want - focus on what you do want. When you learn to ride a motorcycle, one of the first things you are taught is  not to look where you don’t want to go, but look where you want to go. Your bike will follow your eyes. Your behavior follows your focus. If your main concern is simply survival, you will do just that.. As your focus shifts to generating a full spectrum of success, your survival and your stress around it may handle itself. 

Make a commitment to your health and success. Use the information and resources in this blog to break out of the state you are in with stress. Being more productive is being less stressed. France is known as a laid back country. Not only do they drink their wine, they also have one of the shortest work weeks in all of the developed world. Yet, they are one of the most productive, more productive than the United States. 

A huge step occurs when you set boundaries that yourself and others respect. Start saying “no” to what takes energy from you and “yes” to what gives you energy. Make a conscious decision about the long hours of work; don’t just do it because everyone else does it. Are you willing to work those long hours to make partner? Is being a partner what your really want? Ask your head, and ask your heart. 

Just as a cost in business needs to be balanced with more income, so does more stress needs to be balance by receiving more rejuvenation. After your long and hard two weeks, your mind and body needs time to renew. It might mean vegging-out for the weekend or going fishing. Balance your expenditures with your rejuvenation. 

Take the long view. I once had someone tell me that as he matured he would ask himself: When I am an old man sitting on my rocker on the porch – would I be glad I chose a particular decision? 

Reducing stress is not reducing risk taking. It may be taking a different kind of risk. Takerisks that allow you to be different and invest energy in areas that will produce long term gains in health, wealth and happiness.

Let’s get honest. Are you really just a little overweight? By 2030, according to a Baylor University study, 100 percent of U.S. citizens will be obese by current standards. For many, being overweigh is stressful. For others, stress is a significant cause of extra weight. It’s stress that holds the key to shifting this paradox.

To understand the importance stress plays, we need to understand that it’s a survival response that’s always activated. To survive, we either do fight or flight, so we need quick energy – sugar. We crave survival food under continuing stress. Simultaneously, our bodies are shutting down other functions such as digestion. Complex adjustment of body functions makes us crave foods that we should not eat.

Then there is the culture we live in, which shows anorexic models, and movie stars that have lipo-sucked every once of unwanted fat. If that’s not enough there is Photoshop morphing of humans into super humans. These unreal images create huge stress, particularly for our young girls, to the extent that they are experiencing puberty earlier than ever and getting plastic surgery to be perfect. These images become subliminal. Then we are consciously blind – we don’t realize we are seeing them. They linger in our unconscious, drive us to spend our money on merchandise to be beautiful, and stress out about our imperfections.

Whatever we may stress about will impact our bodies. Often the influence will effect the disposition of our fat. A new study will be based on the phenomenon that stress creates a pot belly. Because of the hormone released under stress, pot bellied people develop a more dangerous fat, a visceral fat that lies between the organs.

Fat is a symptom of stress. We can continue to treat the symptom as we have for the last 50 years or we can shift to treating the cause. There are external factors, such as the media, which we can’t change. More powerful and more immediate are the internal factors, our response to stress. After 30 years of working with clients and students who often sought my help for addressing the cause of their weight, I can say often reducing stress will take weight off and create a body that you will inherently accept.

Here are 8 approaches to losing weight through reducing stress. Some of what I discuss may not be comfortable to read. My goal is to assist you in escaping your stress, not making you feel good.

1. Leave survival behind. Begin to understand the power of stress. Fighting stress and its response (craving survival foods) is a losing fight. You are going up against your biology and genetics. You are hardwired to survive, so stop trying to repress a natural behavior. Focus on taking yourself out of the survival state.

Another view is to realize you are stuck in post traumatic stress. The body is experiencing trauma when stress is not actually present. You need to unwind tension and unlearn stress behavior. Your body will transform itself when this occurs.

About 15 years ago, when I had a clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, a woman came in asking if I could do for her what her friends claimed I did for them. I told the woman that if she lost her chronic stress and learned to not recreate it, after several months she probably would be thinner. She saw me for ten weekly sessions. Her body changed some, but we both agreed it was not transformed.

Six months latter, I saw a very attractive woman in a black dress at the end of my long hall. Not until I was close to her did I realize it was my former client seeing someone else in my office. I told her I did not recognize her. She said few months after finishing with me she started dropping pounds without dieting or exercising. Her parting comment was, “this is the body I always wanted, but thought I would never have.” It was the body of an unstressed woman.

When we release old stress, we learn to not recreate it. The cellulite women often complain about disappears. The fascia (the connective tissue which is also scar tissue) that holds the stress also holds fat. When the stress is released, the fascia is released and the fat can dissolve away.

Be aware of when stress or tension is going into your body. Then breathe and express your feelings. These two simple behaviors will change your life.

2. Challenge your beliefs. What are your unconscious affirmations? What are your mantras that you keep repeating? These internal voices become self-fulfilling statements. For example, if you tell yourself and others “I am fat,” you will continue to be. I am not suggesting the opposite, that you go around staying “I am thin” when you don’t believe it. There is a middle ground that allows for change. This ground is where you stand in the present experiencing what is true while holding the possibility and intent of change. For example, you might say to yourself – “I am losing weight.”

As you begin to accept being overweight, along with the corresponding emotions, you hold the in you mind the intent of being your thinner self. At first, your mind will want to escape to the old patterns of denial, self-loathing and setting unreal goals before it settles in a place of acceptance. This acceptance can then lead to creating a vision of what you want while still maintaining the experience of your negative emotions. The juxtaposition of acceptance and goal setting may seem counter-intuitive, yet it in this space you create an opportunity for something new to occur.

3. Give up unreal images. What literal and metaphorical images do you focus on? Do you have pictures of thin bodies on your fridge? Or are you looking at magazines with “perfect bodies?” When we put what we believe are unreal goals in front of us our minds say, “Who do you think you are, you are not that person and never will be.” These inspiring images backfire. They reinforce our self-loathing and repeated failure at losing weight.

Making the shift from seeing these images as a finite state to a process can enable change. Rather than saying “I am that image,” try saying to yourself “I am in a process of becoming my own person who shares characteristics of that image.”

The mind will know when something is not true and it will, on some level, fight back. Hold images and use affirmations that are possible.

4. Lose the secondary gains. These are behaviors or even illnesses we create to achieve indirectly what we believe we can’t get directly. In other words, if you were not getting something out of being overweight you would not be overweight. We all have some self-defeating behaviors. I certainly have had my share. I can remember allowing kids to pick on me because I convinced myself that was safer than standing up for myself

There was a book a woman wrote 30 years ago, I think it was “Fat is a Feminine Issue.” If it was, I can’t find it. Her thesis was that women (the corresponding can be true for men) acquired fat to keep men away. Dealing with the fat was supposedly easier than dealing with the possibility of a relationship. The author challenged her readers to address their issues around relationships as a means to losing weight.

My challenge to you is to act as if your fat had a purpose beyond reflecting the bad diet you may consume. If your fat was saying something, what would it be saying? Who would it be saying to? Are you angry with someone, even yourself? Are you attempting to get attention from someone?

The first step to meaningful change is to admit were we are and that we need help. This often is the hardest step. Frequently much of what we have avoided comes home to us. When I began to admit getting bullied was more about being afraid to take a stand, I started to develop the courage to say no to the bullies. What amazed me was that I did not have to prove it them as much as to myself. They stopped picking on me when I stopped cowering.

5. Your body is your ally. So often, we approach diet and exercise from a forcing prospective. We deprive, punish and generally coerce our bodies to conform to our wishes. We can produces change – but at what long term costs? The constant binges of exercising and dieting train our bodies to not find a healthy set point

You body is like a kid. It will constantly fight back if forced to do things it does not want to do. As we know, an angry kid will find a way to get back.

My intent here is not to give specific advice about a diet or exercise program, but to encourage you to find programs that are not forcing your body. Seek out programs that support your total health. Of course if you have not exerted your body in 20 years there will be some discomfort initially. At some point, the discomfort should shift to more ease. If it does not, you are back to the paradigm of punishing yourself for not being thin.

I suggest starting easy. Even if it is a yoga class, start with the lowest level of a beginning class. If you do not like what you are doing or are hurting yourself, fine a new teacher or a new activity. A slow walk in the woods can be more enjoyable and healthier for some than going to the gym and running on a treadmill.

Just watch kids play. A child can run around all day. She is not exercising; she is playing. I encourage you to rediscover your play.

6. Step out of double binds. These are mental and relationship traps we put ourselves into where there is no way out. It has been said, “The only way to win at a child’s game is not to play.” Once you are trapped in the maze of the damned if you do, damned if you don’t, you lose.

One double bind I have seen around weight is “I can’t have a loving relationship until I lose weight.” This person is always trying to lose weight to be loved, giving the message to his body that he does not love himself. As I was saying, not loving yourself makes permanently losing weight very difficult.

7. Let others do your work. We often make change of any kind harder than we need to. Being a lazy kind of guy and enjoying being a rebel, I saw getting help as a way to further my cause.

One huge way to shift the fat thing is to have others address the issue directly. Good bodywork can crack open new possibilities for losing weight. Bodywork releases chronic and acute stress and tells our bodies that they are being loved through the gift of receiving someone’s attention. Having someone else’s hands touch places that we are ashamed of brings acceptance to those areas.

Find groups that support the outcome, not the problem. This helps spread the load. So many illness support groups support the problem, not the healing. On a few occasions, I have been asked to speak to different support groups. Virtually everyone in the audience was more committed to commiserating about their shared problem then learning about the array of possible means to alleviating it.

My suggestion is to find a group that supports its members being successful, healthy or just happy. Not to find a group that talks about losing weight or being thin. Yes, there are the diet programs — groups that have success in assisting their clients in losing weight. I am encouraging you to step beyond them to organizations or groups that encourage generating a fulfilling life. If you’re interested in some of these organizations, write a comment expressing your desire and I will get back to you.

8. Enroll your mind to transform your body. Being the advocate for mindfulness, I can’t do this post without mentioning mindfulness for transforming fat. By now, everyone has come to accept the mind-body connection.

Having your mind be your ally sounds simple. Achieving this takes some work. Essentially, you begin using your awareness to witness what is occurring. Witnessing is not judging, evaluating or criticizing. It is just being an observer. When you see that picture of a thin body, you observe your response. What is your first thought? What does your body do? What is happening to your breath? These are just questions to get you started. As you develop this skill, you will not have to ask. Your body/mind will bring to you its response.

In the last 20 years, mindfulness has taken off. There are excellent courses that I no longer teach, but others do. Mindfulness works – there is a growing body of research that supports the efficacy of mindfulness. The prior study on pot bellies is organized around teaching a group of women mindfulness. “Weight loss is not the goal,” said Daubenmier, the lead researcher. “But we are thinking we will find a reduction in the visceral fat, which is really important. We’re looking at breaking that stress — eating link.”

In the development of mindfulness there always has been mindfulness eating used as a natural means to enhance the practice of mindfulness. The added benefit of mindfulness eating is that it can shift your eating habits while increasing your eating enjoyment.

Success lies in not treating the fat, but the cause to why the body choose that expressions of stress. Liposuction and stomach stapling will reduce your fat, but what will reduce your stress? I advocate that you view being overweight as a sign that you are stressed-out. Start with admitting that maybe your fat is stored or unexpressed stress. Then explore ways to remove stress from our life and your body. You can create the body you always wanted and sustain it.

Many years ago, I saw a man in a black t-shirt with “Know Fear” written across the t-shirt in white. I said to myself, “Yes!”

Some say fear is the mother of all emotions. This is true. When you think about the other emotions such as sadness, anger and worry, we often feel fear about experiencing them

Fear triggers the autonomic fight or flight response. Fear can save our lives. Fear can also ruin our lives. When stress is not released while it is being experienced, the stress, tension and behavioral patterns collide to create a constant state of fear. We usually do not experience ourselves as being continually afraid In most senses of the word we are not. Yet, in the background of our unconscious and in our bodies, the effect of fear is accumulating. Neurologically, the reptilian brain, or as some like to call it, our lizard brain, becomes the ruler.

We may know this when a new situation occurs and we feel an emotion that we wish not to feel. It could be that we are just speaking on the phone and our friend starts speaking about walking home at night alone. The next thing we know, we are tense. We may be emotionally experiencing fear, supported by the fact our heart and breathing pick up. Our mind tells our other parts to cool it – he is only telling me about walking home.

What our mind does not realize is that our unconscious and our body were triggered in some small way to re-experience an incomplete or unsuccessful prior event. As we become aware that we are experience something unpleasant, we become afraid.

I know for myself that these subtle moments of fear can occur numerous times in a day. Sometimes I attempt to ignore them, sometimes I make some deal with myself to come back to them, and other times I take them on. When I address them in the moment, I continue doing what ever I was doing as I experience the emotion I am afraid of experiencing.

In those situations when I allow the moment of an unpleasant emotion just to be in my mind and body, I may experience an increase intensity of the emotion. Inevitably, once the intensity increases it subsides to a place more relaxed than before the awareness occurred.

Knowing fear, as you know hunger, thirst or any body urge, frees us. When we begin to accept fear, even irrational fear, we begin to free ourselves from a huge cause of stress.

What to do

Ok, you get the concept, but you are not convinced it is that simple. Let’s try an experiment. The next time your spouse starts going off on that ridiculous issue, listen, and feel what is occurring. I am not speaking about your thoughts, your counter arguments. I am talking about the emotion behind your breath being restricted. I am talking about that tightening in your stomach. The clenching of your jaw and those images in your head of you standing up and yelling “shut up.” I know these irrational feelings are not typical. Nevertheless, we both know that something is happening, often disproportionate to the situation.

You have a choice now. You can proceed has you always have, check out, and talk to yourself. Or, you can step into knowing the fear (or call it resistance) to experience what is behind these sensations. In this one moment, you must decide if you will allow the fear to direct you back to your well adapted coping behaviors, or if you will allow the fear to be. If you choose the door to the fear, it is scary. You can’t be sure of what will be revealed.

Assuming you practice this act of courage, of opening this door and feeling fear, or any other emotion, there will be a moment when it will get intense. This moment is frequently a split second. As intense as it may feel, your partner will not know you are having your mystical experience. He or she is too involved in his or her process to be aware of your shift in consciousness.

Developing this practice of knowing fear sets us free from fear. “No fear” only puts us in a state of denial and opposition. Knowing fear permits us to become neutral around fear. We evolve to a place where fear is our ally. Fear becomes honored for what it was meant to do – save our asses.