‘Stress is a killer’. If I only had $100 every time I heard that statement, perhaps I would now sip cocktails on a tropical beach somewhere.
The modern lifestyle curse of stress plays out in different ways in different people, and we know there is a physical and mental aspects to stress.
Some common symptoms of stress are sleepless nights, and or panic breathing, especially for those of us who suffer panic attacks.
Fatigue, headache, chest pains, and high blood pressure are no doubt many of the symptoms that Sam Bankman-Fried is currently experiencing no doubt. Perhaps the people duped by him are experiencing these symptoms, too?
Having worked in several multinational corporations throughout my life in both the pharmaceutical and food industry, I know about nighttime chatter. That voice in your head that runs the worst-case scenario through your mind at 2 am.
Or that sinking feeling you get when one of your projects has just hit a hurdle, or you left out a crucial detail on something, but you realize it at 3 am.
Rather than climbing the walls or doing the backstroke in a pool of sweat in your bed, there are some mental tricks we can use to calm ourselves.
Unlike Anthony Robbins, I don’t believe that the physical drives the mental. I believe our minds are primary and drive the physical.
Yes, we can make ourselves feel better when troubled by going for a peaceful walk, burning up nervous energy, or breathing deeply. These things can help, but I have found that getting my mind right first is more helpful.
There are some techniques that can assist with quieting that nighttime anxiety so that you can sleep easier.
Third Person Self-Talk
Adopting a third-person distant self-talk strategy can take a lot of the emotion and negative energy out of the negative thought loop you experience.
When you talk to yourself as if you are advising yourself about your problem, you immediately take the emotion out of it and start looking at it more objectively. Emotion clouds our judgment. When you look at things as an outsider, you will have a different perspective and solutions will be easier to identify.
Time Travel
Thinking about the problem in the future and if it will matter in the future, say in a year’s time or even in a few months’ time, if it will not matter then, then it’s highly likely you have magnified the problem in your head at this moment.
Bite-Sized Chunks
How do you eat an elephant? One mouthful at a time, when you break your crisis down into bite-sized chunks and focus on the most crucial small and manageable aspects first you can make progress and it helps you prioritize your action and removes the stress because you now have steps to follow.
Demote Yourself
Many times, the things we worry about are outside of our control, and if we cannot control them, then why are we worrying about them?
Social media and the news cycle keep us locked into fear and keep us informed about every aspect of everything that is going on in the world, and when you see the evil and the shenanigans going on, we think we need to do something and then we realize we hold no sway over whatever is being served to us to make us angry, so we worry about stuff we cannot control.
Demote yourself from thinking you are running the universe and focus in on what you can control and those nearest you.
By narrowing your focus, you will be a lot less worried and a lot more effective.
Recap
Step away from your problem by addressing it as if you were someone else giving yourself advice, and take on the third-person persona.
Time travel away from the problem and then ask yourself if it is something that will impact your life a week, month, or year from now
Bite-size the problem into snack-able portions and focus on what you can control and what is most important first.
Demote yourself from the king or queen of the universe and focus on the things that you can control in your immediate sphere of influence, shrink your world and do what you can control, and don’t worry about the stuff that you can’t control even if it makes you angry, anger is a distraction.
I hope this assists those ‘warrior worriers’ out there…
