How to Manage Stress When It Feels Overwhelming [Podcast]

Welcome to the Kokoro of Health and Fitness podcast, where we cover topics about the mind, body, and spirit to help you become a happier, healthier, and ultimately the best version of you. I’m your host, Joe Miller, owner of Kokoro Health and Fitness, a small group and personal training studio located right here in Atlantic Beach, Florida.

Today’s topic is how to manage stress when it feels overwhelming. I will cover why it’s important to manage your stress. How to identify some stressors? And lastly, I’ll give you some ways for you to combat your daily stress.

* Quick disclaimer before we get started. This channel is for informational purposes only. Our goal is to help create a stronger, healthier, happier community of mentally, physically, and spiritually fit individuals by providing information for discussion that has helped us and our clients both personally and professionally. If you are in need of immediate help at this time, we recommend that you seek a medical professional and not rely on advice from some random dude on the Internet.

Before I move on to our first topic, here is a story about why I can tell you how to manage your stress.

In a former life, I was in the United States Navy for eight years. During that time, I traveled the world, and experienced high levels of stress, and sleep deprivation, all that while having to make sound decisions to make sure that the job got done correctly and nobody got hurt. After I got out of the military, my wife and I traveled the country in our self-built van for two years straight and every night having no idea where we were going to sleep next. And then now we have started our own business. And that is a beast on its own.

The reason I tell you this story is because I want to connect to you, person to person. We all have our stressors. And I just wanted to share a little bit with you about the high levels of stress that I’ve experienced and the ways that I’ve overcome them and how I’ve helped people to overcome their stress.

Why is it important to manage your stress?

Let’s move on to the first topic. Why is it important to manage your stress? I want to talk about two things the physical effects and the emotional effects.

Physical Effects of Stress

The first one is the physical. Losing body fat is way harder. So if you have a health goal that involves losing body fat, the higher levels of stress you experience without being able to manage it appropriately, the more difficult it’s going to be to lose weight.

Next, your sleep quality goes down. When your sleep quality goes down, your entire life suffers. There are several studies out there showing the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation on and having poor sleep quality.

Another area is that your likeliness for longevity decreases. The more you’re stressed out and the less you manage it appropriately.

Then, of course, just overall negative health effects. Stress literally leads to sickness. If you don’t know how to manage it properly and you don’t have healthy ways to deal with it.

Emotional Effects of Stress

Then some of the emotional effects you’re going to feel. You lose all your happiness and you will find that you have a lack of joy and the little things that used to bring you joy because you’re so stressed out. It’s not that those things aren’t fun anymore. It’s that you aren’t handling your stress well enough so you can enjoy life and all you feel is all those little stressors and pressures just pushing down on you.

Another thing that happens in your emotional state will be self-sabotage. You’ll start spending money in places that don’t serve you, trying to make up for those stress or feelings.

Another thing you’ll start doing when you’re overly stressed is negative self-talk. You’ll talk yourself down, even if it’s something that you’re very good at, that you know you know how to do. If you’re super stressed about it, you might say, I suck or I’m not good enough. Any of those things start happening a lot more when you’re highly stressed.

Then another thing on your self-sabotage would be a lack of self-belief. The more stressed you are, the more you feel you can’t do what you need to do. And that lack of self-belief alone is a very detrimental effect.

Then another area that will happen in self-sabotage is if you’re highly stressed, you may be projecting that onto your relationships and straining them for no reason at all other than your stress.

Those aren’t all the reasons that you should be managing your stress, but they’re pretty good ones. If you have negative physical health effects, you strain your relationships, and you have self-doubt… Those three alone are a reason that you need to start managing your stress better.

Identifying what is causing your stress

Before you can manage your stress, you need to identify what your stress is. Identifying what is causing your stress is a critical step on the path of managing your stress.

I recommend that you write down or create a flow chart of the categories that I will be covering in this podcast. This will categorize your stressors and shape them in a way that will help you understand them. Sometimes the things that we actively engage in every day are only surface-level stressors, and there is a much deeper problem below that that you might not even recognize.

This is a method that I’ve personally used in my own life. I’ve used it to help friends, family, and clients. When you write it down, it really shows you exactly what you need to look at because we can think up here all the time, but putting it on a piece of paper and actually getting eyes on is a very good way to identify what you’re actually stressed about and what your focus is on. Because sometimes what your focus is on isn’t the thing that’s really bothering you.

Stress Categories

Let’s move on to the categories. The basic categories that you want to identify are work, home, relationships, and self.

Types of Work Stress

The first category we’re talking about is work. The two areas that I wanna talk about are the physical and the emotional effects of your job. Physical stressors can be standing all day, sitting all day, being on your feet, and swinging a hammer all day. It doesn’t really matter. What I want you to do is identify what areas at your job are physical stressors and how they make you feel next. The emotional stressor is finances. Is your job covering your lifestyle? That’s a very important thing you need to figure out. Then another emotional stressor could be the environment of your job. What are your coworkers like? What is your boss like? Are they uplifting people or are they constantly negatively speaking to you?

Types of Home Stress

The next category we want to write down is the home is your home organized? Is it clean and is it in disrepair? The more cluttered and the more chaotic your environment is, the more cluttered and chaotic your brain is.

Types of Relationship Stress

Next, move on to the relationships. What are your family relationships like? What are your friend relationships like? And do you have a significant other? Getting those three relationships in order is very important.

Types of Self Stress

The last category, we’ll move on to the self. Your body image. Are you happy with it or you’re not happy with it? What’s your capability? Can you do all the things that you want to do? Then how is your overall health? How is your mental health? Do you find that you swing very quickly through emotions or that you’re more even-keel than your physical health? Are you sick all the time or are you healthy? The next one is your thought patterns. Most of the stress that we have in our lives, we are creating in our own head.

Those are the basic categories that you want to identify. So the work, the home, your relationships, and your self, all of those in a flowchart. And you start annotating down what areas are stressing you out. And if you’re unsure where to start, just simply start writing down the things that you do: Yard work. Housework. That boss, I don’t like them. That boss, their great. Man, my back hurts every day at work as I sit all day. My home is unorganized, it’s not clean. Write all of that stuff down. If you’re unsure where to start…

Ways to Combat Stress

Now that we covered a bunch of categories, I want you to write them down and then you can start noting the areas that stress you. Let’s talk about ways to combat stress, like the whole meat and potatoes of this thing.

One word is all you need to combat stress, and that is discipline. Discipline is earned by repeatedly doing tasks that serve you in a positive manner. Creating discipline in yourself will not only help you combat stress, but it will also help you de-stress the people around you.

Now moving on to the ways to combat stress.

Morning Stress

The first way to combat stress is to take control of your schedule. Now, work. I understand that you do not actually control your schedule for the most part, but you do control everything you do outside of work, what time you get up for work when you get ready for work, and what you take to work. You can control a bunch of different factors.

Now you need to figure out what habits you can stack with your job. So food prepping. If you find that you’re running out of time and that you never cook and you always eat out. While it might be a good time to food prep because eating out is way harder to get in good shape and lose body fat. Whereas if you have cooked food at home and you know exactly what’s in it, you can prepare the correct amounts. So this way you can meet your physical goals.

Consider is hitting the gym before you go to work. It is more difficult to work out in the morning because you feel a lack of motivation, and you’re tired, but it is also very difficult to work out in the evening because you cannot predict what the day has in store for you. You may have all the good intentions on a Monday morning like I’m going to go get it at 5 p.m. I’m there hitting the gym and then a horrible day at work happens and then somebody gets sick and you have to go take care of something. Now you missed your day in the afternoon, whereas if you started work at 630 in the morning, you could have just worked out at 5 a.m., and been done, and know that as soon as work’s over, no matter what life throws at you, you can handle it and you’ve already taken care of yourself first. If your self is taken care of, you are more capable of taking care of other people.

Instead of stopping for coffee every day is to buy nice coffee and get a coffee pot that can go on a timer. You grab your cup on the way out the door. That saves you time, and every little bit of time you can save in the morning is just a little less stress.

Lay out your clothes ahead of time. It is a very simple, yet effective way to de-stress your life a little bit.

So what we’re doing by doing some food prep, hitting the gym before you go to work, scheduling your coffee pot, and then laying out your clothes ahead of time is we’re eliminating four decisions and stressors that are going to impact your life. The more small stressors you can eliminate, the less overall stress you’ll have.

The last thing would be to remove any unnecessary stressors. Are there extra steps that you’re taking that you don’t need to be taking and you’re not really sure why you do it? You just kind of do it because it’s a habit. Eliminate it. The way to identify that is the flow chart that we talked about earlier. Now that we talked about work, let’s move on to some things you can do in the home to combat your stress.

Home Stress

Taking control of the schedule of your bedtime and your wake-up time. This kind of coincides with the work thing, but even on the weekends. If you want to get the most out of life using the weekend as an excuse to “catch up on sleep” doesn’t really work. Now. It is understandable if you are sick, your body needs rest and recovery time, but if you just “don’t feel like it”, that’s not the same thing. Every time you just don’t feel like it, then you don’t do it. Then you later stress about that day and how you run out of time. You created stress just because you didn’t feel like waking up, whereas if you had just gotten up, and did the thing you need to do, you wouldn’t be stressing about it.

The next thing you want to consider is scheduling your leisure time. If you preplan your leisure time, once you get to that point in time, you then can fully embrace that leisure time.

The other thing you can do in the home would be to remove unnecessary stressors. Do you have clutter everywhere? Do you have things in your home that you don’t use and you’re not sure why they’re there? Get rid of them. If it’s not serving you and it’s just in your home and you look at it and it bothers you just a little bit. Get rid of it. It’s not serving you. It’s not doing anything beneficial. I promise you in a couple of months, you’re probably not going to remember what it was. Just eliminating that clutter from your life. Creating a more organized home is going to eliminate stressors.

Physical Stress

Now let’s move on to how to combat your physical stressors. Eat food that serves you and your goals. Eating food that makes you feel like shit does not serve you. So eating fast food all the time, drinking sodas, drinking energy drinks, consuming excess alcohol, all of those things don’t help you. They hurt you. They give you that temporary boost, but then long term, they just mess you up. The Western diet is awful because it’s fast, it’s heavy, and it’s very, very calorie-dense but not nutrient-dense.

Another thing you can do to combat your physical stress is to regularly exercise in a way that serves you and your goals. So think about what you have that are physical goals and find a way to work out to do that. If it’s just general health and fitness three circuit training days a week that are your full body would be the way to go. Then stretching every day and just being a little more active.

Another thing, to combat your physical stress is if your job is very laborious or if you’re sitting all day. Those things are different, but there’s still stress. Sitting all day can create pronation in the shoulder is cause lower back problems, tight hip flexors, and weak glutes. Working a physically demanding job all day with repetitive motion, of course, beats your body up.

Learning a new skill to maybe go to a different industry might be the saying that you need. Start looking up those different industries. And once you find one that sounds interesting, start looking up what it takes to be in that industry. How do you work in that industry? What are the hours like? What are the physical demands? You can look all of these things up. If you do it methodically, you might understand that, Hey, I really do want to switch, or you might find out that actually, it’s not the job that’s really bothering me, it’s all the other areas… It’s the home instead of the work.

Another thing to combat your physical stress would be to get the right tool for the job. If you can buy a singular tool that eliminates a lot of physical stress by taking a five-hour job and turning it into a five-minute job, sometimes it’s worth just buying the tool. Now that we covered a bunch of ways to combat your physical stress, let’s move on to the emotional stresses and how to combat them.

Emotional Stress

Is your work environment the problem, or are you projecting? Sometimes it’s not actually what’s going on externally that’s bothering us, but what’s going on up here… Figure out if it’s your job that’s really stressful or it’s yourself projecting your own stressors onto your job. How are your finances? Are you living within your means?

So you have said job. Is the job really stressful because it doesn’t pay you enough? Or do you spend too much money? Do buy frivolous shit on Amazon all the time. That is completely unnecessary. That doesn’t actually serve you, but it brings you that little blip of joy. If that’s the case, then maybe stop buying outside your means and take a spreadsheet or a flow chart, whatever you want to do, and write down every single thing that you have bought for a whole month. You’ll be disgusted at how much you waste money on. We covered the work thing for emotional stress. Let’s talk about the home.

If your home is neat and orderly, it will cause less stress. If it’s dirty and you’re sick all the time, that is a physical stressor, which then can create an emotional strain because you don’t know why you’re sick all the time. Nobody likes to be sick. It’s not fun. So by being neat and orderly, cleaning your home, and then taking care of all the repairs as they come up and as you need them to be done, that eliminates the emotional stressors because now you don’t have to worry about it. That’s just one last thing that’s going to be on your mind, and if you have less things on your mind, you can focus more on the present and exactly what you’re doing at the time. So taking care of the things in the home is extremely important to combat your emotional stress.

Relationship Stress

Now let’s move on to combating the emotional stress of your relationships. This one’s a big one because we all have them, whether or not we think we do. Do your relationships serve you and do you serve your relationships? Getting rid of toxic relationships in your life is very important, but the first step to getting rid of toxic relationships is to identify if you yourself are toxic When you’re hanging out with your friends, do you bring up things that get a rise out of everybody of negativity? Or do you provide encouragement and happiness with things that you talk about? If you are the one always bringing up the negatives, you’re the toxic one. If your friends are always the ones bringing up the negatives, they’re the toxic ones.

Now, that doesn’t mean you have to eliminate your friends. What that does mean is to start being less toxic yourself by not talking about all the things that are negative, instead switching to the things that are positive. That’s not denying the fact that negative things happen, but what it is, is just focusing on the positive things. Where you focus is how your life will be.

If you focus on things that are happy all the time and things that bring you joy and the positivities in the world, you will be happier. If you constantly focus on the negative things in life, the things that make you upset, that really get you riled up in the chest and you don’t agree with, you will just be a miserable person.

Then another thing to consider in the relationship, do activities together that are healthy and bring you joy. Another thing to think about in the relationship is, you didn’t pick your family, but you can pick your friends and you can pick your significant other. That is extremely important to understand. Family loyalty, I do believe is an important thing, but if your family is constantly bringing you down, telling you that you’re not worth anything and everything you try to succeed at they just talk down…  You did not get to pick those people, so you don’t owe them loyalty.

Friends, you get to choose this. The saying goes, “if you have five friends that are smokers, you’ll be the sixth”. If you have five friends that are successful, you will be the sixth. So choose people that lift you up instead of bringing you down.

Next thing, your significant other. I’m not going to give you a ton of marriage advice but the biggest thing I will tell you for a significant other: communicate, communicate, communicate. Open up the lines of communication and express how you’re feeling in a calm, concise way. If you do not do that, you will create problems where problems aren’t even existing because most problems are just miscommunication. That will eliminate stress in itself. It’s uncomfortable at first, but once you get used to it, as you start communicating at a higher quality level, your communication skills go up and they are less stressful to then communicate and relay your points.

You will build your relationship with them. Relationships aren’t like the movies where it’s just this perfect little thing happily ever after. Relationships are built. That’s enough of that but it is very important to take those hard looks to truly understand and combat your stress.

You need to know, am I doing it or are they doing it? Am I serving the relationship? Are they serving the relationship? Choose the people you spend your time with carefully.

Internal Stress

The last category, which is very important, is the self. Arguably, this is the most important category because you’re the only one in here now. Your body image, that’s the first thing. Do you like the way you look when you’re naked in the mirror? If you look at yourself and you’re not entirely happy with what you see, maybe shut off the Instagram. It’s an image they want to present to the world. It’s just not reality. So keep that in mind that some of your negative self-images may be because you’re comparing yourself to the people that you see on the Internet. I promise you, when you stop comparing yourself to others and just focus on the things that bring you joy and that serve you, your life is going to be way less stressful.

So some small steps that you can take every day to combat the stress of body image would be to take pride in your appearance. If you look disheveled all the time, you’re probably disheveled all the time. Take the time to groom yourself. Don’t dress lazily. And then another thing that’s a small step, quite literally, is walking with your chest out and your head up, posture can dictate your mood. If you hold yourself up, you will elevate your mood. Next, your capability, challenge yourself regularly to improve yourself by creating a small physical stressor consistently that builds your body up. Your overall physical stress will go down. So making yourself more physically capable is a way to combat that stress.

Next, let’s talk about your health. Ways to combat stress for mental health will be to meditate in some form or fashion and be present. Do something that brings you exactly in the moment. If you’re thinking about the past or the future, you’re not really living. The past is just emotional responses to something that’s already happened that you’re remembering and mulling over in your head and probably creating stress over for no reason at all. And the future are things that have not happened yet. Why are you worried about the things that haven’t happened yet? Be focused on the present.

Another step that you can take to help your mental health is eliminating your negative self-talk. If you are constantly telling yourself you are something you will eventually become that something. This was something that I struggled with as well, because as I was getting to what I call the pit of despair, negative self-talk started increasing. Saying, “I can’t remember this” or “I’m not good at this”… Constantly saying those things will increase the likelihood that you will become those things. If you want to remember people’s names more, stop telling yourself “I can’t remember names” and just focus on remembering their names.

After eliminating self-talk is, acknowledge your achievements. Tooting your own horn out loud may not be the way to go, but at least acknowledge when you accomplish something. So many people I know just refuse to acknowledge when they do something awesome. If you’ve always wanted to do a barbell squat and the day you finally achieve one, celebrate that. That is an achievement. Celebrate your achievements. That doesn’t mean celebrating them with things that don’t serve you like, “Hey, I finally did this awesome workout, now I’m going to go get drunk”. That doesn’t really serve you, but rewarding yourself with maybe a delicious meal that fits your nutrition goals, it may be at a restaurant you really wanted to go to, that would be rewarding yourself and acknowledging your achievement in a way that serves you.

Moving on from that, the emotional into the physical eat in a way that serves you eating good quality, whole food makes you feel better. And if you feel better, you’re less stressed. Drink water. Water should be the number one thing that you’re consuming. Not coffee, not tea, not soda, not alcohol, not energy drinks, water. Then exercise, physically challenge yourself on a regular basis. That will create less stress overall in your life. It can lead to mental benefits as well because if you go and do this physical workout, you can feel accomplished for that day because you just accomplished something very difficult. It was challenging both physically and mentally, and you achieve that every time you go in and knock out a workout. That is an achievement.

And if you’re unsure how to exercise, it’s not really a problem anymore. You can go on YouTube, you can check out some of the videos that we have. I show you what to do and tell you how to do it. It’s very straightforward. Now, if that’s not your thing, find small group training or personal training and learn how to do it. The only person that’s in the way of not exercising is you.

Those are some of the ways to combat stress. We talked about work, the home, your relationships, and yourself. If you organize all of those things and you create that discipline in your life by continually making small steps in a direction that serves you, you will be less stressed. It does take time, but the more you commit to it, the better results you have.

Conclusion

In summary, stress is a silent killer. Learning how to manage your stress properly will improve your physical and emotional health.

Now you have the tools in your life to identify the stressors and combat them with a methodical approach to help you become less stressed and achieve your goals. It is important to take small, consistent steps every day. If you wish to be a better version of yourself and have a better life with less stress, do not worry about everything at once. Be like the tortoise and not the hare.

Now I have linked an article below called Psychosocial Stress and the Change in Weight among US adults. I encourage you to read it. It has some very interesting findings. Stress is a major factor in the lack of health in America and around the world. So taking more control of your life and eliminating unnecessary stressors will create a healthier and better life for you.

That’s it for the podcast, guys. I know it’s a lot of information at once, but in a nutshell, take control of your life. If you take control of it and you focus on being present, you will eliminate unnecessary stress, you will be happier, and you will be healthier.

Thank you for joining me on the topic of how to manage your stress when it feels overwhelming, If you found value in the information presented, give us a like subscribe and share this with a friend who may benefit from this as well. If you’re a local to the Atlantic Beach, Florida area and you would like to make positive changes to your health and fitness, check out our app, Kokoro Health and Fitness on the Google Play and Apple Store  or KokoroHealthAndFitness.com. There you can sign up for your seven-day trial to experience fun dynamic full-body circuits in small-group training. If one on one is more your thing, we also have you covered with personal training sessions as well.

We hope you have a great day. Remember that happiness is a state of mind.

Today’s topic is How to Manage Stress When Life Feels Overwhelming. I will cover why it is important to manage your stress, how to identify your stressors, and lastly, I will give you some ways for you to combat your own daily stress.

Social Links

Article Links

Psychosocial Stress and Change in Weight Among US Adults https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2727271/

This channel is for informational purposes only. Our goal is to help create a stronger, healthier, happier community of mentally, physically, and spiritually fit individuals by providing information for discussion that has helped us, and many clients, both personally and professionally. If you are in need of help at this time we recommend that you seek a medical professional and not just rely on advice from some random people on the internet.