Everyone online keeps telling to reduce stress, meditate, breath
work, touch grass. Here's the truth, you can't
meditate your way out of a shit job, toxic boss, or an empty
bank account. I was at my lowest, obese,
unfit, stressed, drinking too much, The Odd Couple are
naughties if you know what I mean.
It wasn't removing stress that changed me.
It was adding the right kind of stress.
Because stress is energy. And when you understand how it
works, then you can push harder, go further and turn things
around. And in this podcast, I'm going
to share my story and share psychological tricks that we can
use to regulate stress levels and help us perform better.
So first, a quick introduction. I'm Terry and this is the
Rockman podcast. After turning my life around
through challenges and goal setting, I gained A perverse
interest in the psychology of performance because ultimately I
discovered it's all in your head.
And for the last five years have been putting this into practice,
even setting world records for the world's largest GPS drawing
of a cock and balls. Yes, that actually happened.
But also becoming an award-winning fundraiser and
challenge athletes and creating my own online running and
fitness challenge platform, Rockman, which helps people find
their motivation again, prove themselves and reclaim their
edge. And if you want to know my
favorite 31 mindset strategies for performance, there's a link
down below. You can download it for free, so
let's dive in. Firstly, before we get into the
story, we need to understand exactly what stress is and why
it's important. It's essentially just your
body's response to stressful situations and pressure or small
amounts can be motivating, chronic or overwhelming.
Stress can actually have negative effects on your body,
your mind, your emotional state and everything in between.
It can cause a range of issues from irritability and moodiness
to burnout, sleep problems and even illness.
It can even increase the risk of premature death by 30 to 50%.
But it all comes down to the hormone cortisol.
It's often referred to as the stress hormone because it's
always released in response to stress.
But in reality, it isn't a stress hormone.
It's your rhythm hormone. It sets up your daily curve of
energy and alertness. It's not evil, it's just ancient
performance tech. And your problem isn't high
cortisol, it's often misplaced or mismanaged cortisol.
Cortisol is like your chief operation officer for stress and
performance, and its job is to prepare the body for action and
focus. Think of a car When you flip it
into sports mode, Cortisol is what primes it for action.
The spoiler pops out the steering Titans.
The suspension stiffens. In humans, it mobilizes
resources, it raises blood glucose, it increases blood
pressure, it regulates mood and focus.
Your body is ready for action and ready to perform.
The thing is, we only have one response for stressful
situations and pressure. It is this increase in cortisol.
It doesn't matter if you're being chased by a pack of rabid
wolves or you get a shitty text off your boss.
It's all the exact same cortisol response.
Your body's getting ready for movement, fight, or flight.
But just to finish off the car metaphor, let's see what happens
when cortisol is poorly managed. Obviously problems arise when
your body response is turned on for prolonged periods of time,
just like if you keep a car in sports mode for prolonged
periods of time, even when you're driving just to the
shops. The brakes, the hydraulics, the
suspension is all going to wear out and you're going to end up
fucking the engine. That's exactly what happened to
me. My body was redlining 24/7 and
it's the same in humans. Chronic stress levels can smash
your energy levels, ruin sleep and affect your mood and focus,
and wreck your health. See, you can't meditate your way
out of a shit situation. You do it by taking control.
You have to attack the stressors.
I was once working for, for this high profile fitness brand.
Mention no names and it was a fast-paced job, high pressure,
lots of hard work. I really enjoyed it, it was
really good fun. But I had pressure from my boss
constantly. And now we're not talking just
in work, it would be when I left work as well.
I'd be getting taxes at 10:00 PM midnight, threatening my job,
picking me up on things I may have done like a typo in a post
or something like that, or a heading on an e-mail that you
didn't like. It was constant pressure and I
couldn't escape it. Even when I would go home in my
evenings, on the weekends, it would still get to me.
I would still receive these aggressive texts and messages.
I don't care who you are. You could be Bruce.
I'm hard David Goggins for all I care.
Excess can never endure. And it was after about two years
when this started to really affect me.
I started experiencing anxiety and burnout.
And it wasn't because I couldn't handle it.
I mean, everyone can to a certain extent, but I wasn't
getting those rest bites. I wasn't being left alone.
I wasn't being able to recharge and reset ready for the next
day. The pressure was constant, often
kept up late nights, 3:00 AM, four AMI couldn't sleep and over
a period of time it took about two years.
And that is when the pressure really started to affect me with
anxiety burnout. I could see myself getting I'll
if this continued. And I think I actually had my
first panic attack. It was only mild.
It was actually when I took my missus away to propose.
It was supposed to be a lovely weekend and we're there and I'm
getting ready to bend down on one knee and I get a text from
my boss about a small typo in an e-mail.
But it wasn't just calling me out on it, it was to the point
where they were threatening my job about it.
And I had this mad feeling of being overwhelmed, like a tunnel
vision sort of getting the sweats on.
My body just couldn't take it anymore.
What was supposed to be one of the happiest times of my life,
getting down on one knee and proposing to the the girlfriend.
It became one of the worst. But as I say, when you're in
situations like this, meditation, breath work,
touching grass, smelling the flowers ain't going to do shit.
The only way to overcome problems like this is to attack
them, change them, and remove them.
It might be a conversation that you keep avoiding, the gym you
keep skipping, or the budget you've never looked at.
Every time you face one, your stress response recalibrates and
gets you stronger. You have to change your
situation. And So what I did was I knew I
needed to get out of the job. I couldn't quit.
I had mortgage and bills to pay, so I couldn't just quit.
So I set out a plan I need. I needed a new job and I just
took action. This meant updating my CV,
getting out there for other jobs, going to interviews and
eventually and quite quickly, I managed to secure another job.
And the pleasure I had in going into work the next day and being
pulled into the office to talk about a YouTube headline that he
wasn't happy with. Sat there, get berated and I was
sat there with a smile for the whole thing.
Because at the end of it I produced my letter of
resignation. And you should have seen the
picture on his face. It was worth it just for that.
But also don't get me wrong, I am still friends with this boss
today, Can you believe it? He is a good man, he was a good
friend, he was a brilliant friend.
But it was the pressure he put on me as a manager which ended
up leading me to burnout. See, you can't do all this wanky
Wellness shit to get yourself out of a stressful situation.
You have to take action. And sometimes stress can be a
fantastic catalyst for change. It's called the region beta
paradox. It basically means the bigger
problems often get solved quicker.
And therein lies the paradox. Because you'd often think that
smaller problems can get solved quicker, but it's the bigger the
problem which causes the agency and urgency to get those
problems solved. And I got to a point where that
problem had to be solved. But this also so explains when
stress isn't stressful enough. You will put up with a crappy
boss, you will put up with a crappy job for much longer
periods of time when you should have left a long time ago.
And stress can be a fantastic catalyst for that change.
See, it's not all bad. Now, there are obviously other
forms of stress, say like bereavement or a relationship
breakdown or a bout of illness. And these are very different
because you can't just instantly get over them or you can't
instantly fix them. What I see a lot of people do in
those situations when the rug's been pulled up from beneath them
and they sort of lose that foundation for living or the
reality in which they live in has been massively shifted.
A lot of the time you will see these people get drawn into
endurance challenges. How many people do you know have
done marathons or challenges in honour of someone that they've
lost in their lives? It gives people a foundation to
living again. It gives people a structure from
when the rug has been pulled from beneath their feet and
they've lost that structure. Goal setting can be a good way
to actually get yourself back on track, but if you can change
things then you first need to audit what is making you
stressed. Find out and I'm sure it's going
to be pretty easy to identify the stressor, but find it what
it is and then make a plan to change it and then action that
plan because if you wait around for it to fix itself, it may be
too late. You may go down this path of
burnout. And often when we're stressed,
we can actually see comfort in activities that actually make
that stress worse. I'm talking about sort of
substance abuse, alcohol, food, nicotine.
And this is what I did, which ended up leading me into the
worst state of physical and mental health I'd ever been in
my life. So working a full time job.
I also had a side business as a graphic designer.
This meant that I was working 9:00 to 5:00, coming home,
having a bit of dinner, and then working from sort of seven till
10 doing graphic design work. And there is a pressure with
this because there's always deadlines to hit.
There's always work. And I never got that time to
sort of unwind and rest again. And this would lead me onto the
weekends where it was my time to actually let loose and let off
some steam. And I found this with heavy,
heavy binge drinking, takeaways, poor food, smoking, and even the
old recreational, you won't be happy at the end of the day and
actually find some enjoyment in your life other than working
from bloody 9:00 to 5:00. So you reward yourself with
these activities. But these activities are all
stress enhancers. These are all considered
stresses upon your body and then your body response to it.
Is it by increasing that cortisol again, flipping your
body into sports mode, raising blood glucose, increasing blood
pressure? You're alert, you're on edge.
You can't talk about managing stress when you're necking 6
coffees a day or 4 Red Bulls. These all have a taxing effect
on your body and mind. And I wasn't getting any rest on
the weekend. I would just roll back into
Monday. I'm back into the stressful
situation of work, and this abuse of all the substances and
food and nicotine ended up leading me to become obese,
unfit, and deeply, deeply unhappy.
And if I continued on this path, I knew I probably wouldn't be
here anymore, whether that's through health complications or
through getting to a point where you no longer want to be here.
But I knew what to do, I knew how to sort it out.
It's pretty bloody obvious. You've got to cut all that stuff
out and you've got to concentrate on your health.
But even that was a stressor to me because it was the hard
decision, the easy one was to go down the pub and go drinking
again and again. The stress and the pressure got
too much and it was again a catalyst for change which gave
me the boot up the ass to go and seek something, something with
more purpose, something that would help me get out of this
hole. And that's when I signed up for
my first challenge. It was a white collar boxing
fight and in that period I didn't smoke, I didn't drink, I
didn't take drugs, I ate clean, I ate healthy, I lost almost 3
stone and got into the best shape of my life again.
It's just about taking action stuff.
All the bloody Wellness woo woo crap.
It's about taking action, setting yourself a goals, giving
yourself a plan to escape this and get through it and we all
know how to do it Come on it's it's obvious, but it's about
taking that first step and making a change.
Why is this important to what we're talking about today?
Because it's not all about the wanky woo woo shit.
You can't bloody meditate your way out of a stressful
situation. It's about taking action.
If you're interested in setting yourself goals, setting yourself
challenges, this is one of the main reasons why I set up
rockman. It's an online challenge
platform where you can take on weekly running into fitness
challenges around your everyday life.
We've all got busy lives this way you can slot in and fit in
and you can do it in the comfort and safety of your own location
gives you purpose. It gives you motivation every
single week to go out and push your limits and prove something
to yourself. If you want to find out more
about that, there's a link in the description below.
And we talked about how we can get control of stress.
But how can we harness stress to increase performance?
We can actually use psychological mindset strategies
to actually get better and managing stress and dealing with
the stress that we're under now. Here's how you can actually
control stress to increase your performance.
Now physiologically, there is no difference between excitement
and stress. The only difference is in your
mind and how you think about it. Heart rate spikes, breathing
quickens, adrenaline floods the system.
Your body's saying right, let's go.
But the only difference is how you interpret it.
It's what's going on in your mind.
If you couple that physiological change with negative thoughts,
then you're going to get anxiety and this is going to cause you
to choke and freeze. Hence the term fight, flight or
freeze. It's the same chemistry, just a
different mindset. And there's been research done
on this with athletes. Those that see stress as a
performance enhancer will let it do exactly that.
That should show better focused, increased blood flow and faster
reaction times. You see, a small dose of stress
narrows your focus and sharpens decision making.
Too much or seeing it as a danger shuts your brain down.
That's why people can get road rage when they're driving.
When you're stressed, which is what driving does, because
you're concentrating, it narrows your focus.
And then when someone cuts you up, that's when you get the
peaks of rage. What you need to learn to do is
to relax your brain. Relax that cortisol response.
When you're relaxed, you have a bigger frame of vision.
You can see more, you can react better, you're more relaxed.
It's like when you're learning a new skill, say like the guitar.
You can get stressed when you keep fluffing up the same old
song. But as you get better, you learn
to relax. It becomes more natural.
You enjoy it more now. To manage your negative
emotions, you can use tools like reframing, humor, positive
thinking. The best one I find is
reframing. You've got to think about it
when you're in the bedroom and your wife gives you a tap on the
ass and then you think, Oh my God, I didn't sign up for this.
But if you reframe it in your mind as foreplay, now it's
changed. Now all of a sudden you're
leaning in ready for round two. You're kinky bastards.
And I did this recently when I was given a talk at the Love
Trails Running Festival about my world record.
Cock and balls run. The stakes were high.
It was very important to me that I got it right.
I wanted to be invited back again, but there's also going to
be a massive crowd judging me on what I deliver and what I say.
Now I've got massive imposter syndrome when I'm standing on
that stage, but I reframe the goal in my head.
I was completely happy with falling on my ass with it.
For it to go an absolute shit show, for people to not laugh,
for people to not enjoy it, for people to think it's rubbish.
And by doing that, I reduce the stress of the situation because
if that happened, then I was ready for it.
It was what I sort of expected anyway.
But because it relaxed me, I actually spoke better, performed
better, and I hope delivered a good talk.
And it's the same with mental toughness and mental resilience.
Mental toughness is dealing with the stress and the pressure in
the here and the now, but mental resilience is being able to go
again tomorrow and the next day and the next day.
And the best chance of doing that is by reducing use cortisol
levels is by using tactics like humor, reframing positive
thinking to bring down your body's cortisol response.
It gives you that time, that respite to regroup, recover and
get ready to do it again. It's going to give you the
longevity. And what's the best way to get
that rest in and recoup? It's with sleep.
Sleep is so important. It's where you get your rest.
And when you're fully charged on cortisol and stress to the
eyeballs, that's the thing that's going to get wrecked the
most. How many people have sleepless
nights, waking up at irregular times?
Sleep should be your number one concentration, especially during
stressful times. You know when people tell you to
sleep on things when you're emotionally charged?
Don't send your ex-girlfriend up text, don't send your boss that
e-mail because they know a good sleep is one of the best ways to
recover from stress and when you wake up, you're no longer
stressed and you're going to think differently before you
send those messages. If your cortisol rhythm is all
out of whack, it can fuck your sleep up further, driving you
further into the hole. Now it sounds obvious, but you
need to wind down in the evenings, avoid stressful
situations, relax, watch some TV, read a book.
And this is where you can use tools like the meditation and
the breath work so they're not completely useless.
But this is where they can be utilized.
Calm your mind, avoid all substances that spike cortisol,
alcohol, nicotine, caffeine. And also try to avoid training
in the evenings. Exercise also spikes cortisol.
Your body's going to be buzzing. It sounds pretty obvious when
you say it, and I'm sure you all know anyway if you.
But if you can get that rest in and get a good solid sleep, it's
just going to help you deal with the stress and the pressure for
the next day. But cortisol can also help us
wake up in the mornings. We all have a natural cortisol
level, which sort of spikes in the morning and then tapers out
them throughout the day. If you're waking up sluggish and
you can't get out of bed, it means your cortisol is all out
of whack. Your cortisol should spike in
the morning, not at midnight. So good sleep and a strong
morning routine can reset that natural rhythm.
Otherwise your stress curve flips and you start every day
already exhausted. You need to lean into natural
stressors to wake you up with vigor.
Natural sunlight helps you wake up, it spikes the cortisol
levels. Get it as much in as early as
possible. Hydrate, drink some water, do
some light exercise like a walk or some stretching.
And they too say in the research to avoid caffeine for the 1st 90
minutes. Apparently caffeine blocks.
Adenosine is one of the neurotransmitters that builds up
during sleep, and in the morning it's at its lowest.
So caffeine actually hasn't got anything to block.
They recommended waiting an hour or two so your coffee hits
harder and longer, but personally, I'm going to have
that bloody morning coffee. I do not care.
So we don't always have to stick to the science on this.
You do you, you do you. See, cortisol isn't the enemy,
it's the engine. You just need to learn how to
Rev it and when to let it idle. When you control your stress,
you control your mind. When you control your mind, you
can endure or anything stress build every strong person that
you admire. Learn to use it and it'll build
you too. And don't forget, if you want to
practice managing your stress, we'll give you a focus or
something to work for. There's Rockman, my online
challenge platform link in the description below.
And don't forget, if you want my 31 favorite mindset strategies
for performance, there's a link in the description below where
you can download that for free. Thanks for watching.
I hope you got some value out of it and I will see you next time
on the Rockman podcast. Thank you.
The.