What Would Life Be Like If You Were Unstressable?
Every day when we wake up, whether we are ready to or not, the world is going to challenge us in unexpected ways.
The school calls because your kid is skipping class.
Your partner isn’t making a change to help out more and you’ve had enough of it.
Your boss wants you to complete a report on a subject you know nothing about. And expects it done YESTERDAY.
We don’t have to dig very deep in the memory banks to think about pandemics and global instability shuttering our doors and keeping everyone closed away and isolated.
A cold sweat forms just thinking about it. We’ve been put through the wringer these last couple of years when tensions were already high enough.
There’s another way through for us though.
Imagine waking up tomorrow feeling UNSTRESSABLE.
This chaos isn’t going anywhere. That’s a fact of life.
But you are in the driver’s seat of how stress affects you.
And if you don’t feel that way yet, you are about to.
Becoming Unstressable is your path to freedom from stress ruling over your life.
It’s a program based on you leading the way because everyone has a different stress story to tell.
Over the next 6 weeks, we will be exploring stress management and recovery that is aligned with suiting your needs and unique stressors specifically.
We all recognize the feeling of dread when something is wrong, the pit in our stomach when life just becomes too stressful and all we want to do is hide under the blankets and never get out of bed.
But the first step forward begins with your desire to change. And as the realization has awakened within you, you can take action to put together a plan that will completely re-wire your experience of stress.
Together we will be exploring the many ways that stress pops up in your life and learning how to manage these different stressors more effectively.
You will take the ideas about your starting point and explore where you want to get to and what your Unstressable life looks like.
And through the work we do in the course and the plan you build along the way, you will have a roadmap by the end of the 6 weeks for how to work through anything that stands in your way and threatens to leave you feeling overwhelmed and burnt out. For Life.
Ready to take that first step?
Click the button to learn more about Unstressable today.
Managing Holiday Stress To Enjoy More This Season
Making the holidays less stressful
The holiday season is upon us once more and with it comes much holiday cheer but also many challenges.
I want to help make life as stress-free as possible so that you can rise to the challenge of those experiences that you actually want to be able to have.
Managing stress successfully is all about recognizing your own situation but there are a few considerations that'll help us all with the stress that tends to come at us around the holidays.
Watch this as a video here, or continue reading below.
Make a basic plan for the holidays
I know everyone doesn’t love being a planner and having everything in their life mapped out but a little preparation can go a long way when entering a more stressful season.
Financial Stress
Look at your gift list and space those purchases out over the next four weeks if that helps you to experience less financial strain. By planning ahead and spacing gifts out over multiple paycheques it won’t put as much pressure on you.
I go so far as automatically scheduling a savings account to drip deposits throughout the whole year so I really don’t have to think about it by the time Christmas comes around. I just look at what I have saved and create a budget for all the gifts I’m wanting to give.
Social Stress
Plan your social engagements for the holidays if you are more introverted and find that all of the interaction drains you.
While attending holiday parties may not be as negotiable, you can look ahead to incorporate more me time or recovery time in there to balance it out. Take care of yourself as well with a little more me time and attention to your deep health. With that being said, this time of year is extra special for getting together with friends and family so look at the upside of those get-togethers and cherish them.
It seems like those gatherings are becoming less frequent. And we can all use them, especially after the last few years of experiencing more social isolation.
Planning To Get More From Your Vacation
If you have a vacation coming up, taking time to plan it out for yourself or with whoever you’re travelling with can enhance the experience that you have.
Humans are funny and often don’t even take the time to appreciate the rewards of our hard efforts.
When you are sitting on the beach basking in the sun and listening to the ocean waves and you catch yourself thinking about the next thing instead of appreciating where you are at here and now, it's a part of human nature.
The lesson we can take from this is to actively plan your vacation, think about it, and talk about it so that you also get the positive feelings of something to look forward to as you make that last push at work before the holidays.
Avoid Burning Out At Work
This is a stressful time of year at work for most of us too, and to enjoy this holiday season beating burnout is important.
Join me on this free lunchtime webinar hosted by the Peterborough Chamber of Commerce on how to beat burnout in the workplace.
What Stress Management Techniques Are Most Effective?
Our ancestors lived in a world much different from our own. A world where behind every bush a predator could be waiting for them. The slightest snap of a branch could mean trouble. To fight or to flee was instinctual and prepared us for moments like this.
It sounds stressful thinking about it but these incidences happened acutely and typically didn’t pervade every waking minute.
What happens when our ancient threat detection system gets immersed in the world we face today?
Escape versus Approach Techniques
When it comes to managing stress, we all have our own default methods that we lean into. But there are definitely some techniques that are more effective than others.
Knowing not only what types of stress affect you the most, but also how you should manage your stress is what’s going to help you to feel the best and recover better.
So let’s talk about understanding your deep health assessment and where stress is affecting you the most.
We’ll also touch on forms of escape versus approach techniques for stress management and what the best long-term solutions are for dealing with what’s bothering you.
Understand Your Deep Health and Stress Assessment
Sometimes we have a really great grasp on what’s causing the most stress in our lives but it can often come as a surprise or not be exactly what you think it is.
When you develop an awareness of the different dimensions of your health, that is your Deep Health and the stress that is intertwined with each of those dimensions, you’re better able to pinpoint your sources of stress in any given timeframe.
To do this, you want either look at the wheel with the six Deep Health components and rank or draw out how stressful each aspect of your health is right now.
Alternatively, if you need further guidance and understanding, you can fill out the Deep Health Assessment and Questionnaire which will ask you a series of questions about each dimension and give you an overall score. The areas you score lowest in correlate with which dimensions are currently most stressful to you. I will include a link down below to do the deep health assessment for yourself.
Now that you have some answers to what direction your stress is coming from mostly, you can start to strategize ways to better manage that stress.
There are lots of great ways to manage stress and recover so that you feel better but all solutions are not created equal and will depend on your sources of stress. Sometimes a hard workout at the gym is just what you need to reduce mental and emotional stress but if you‘re already dealing with a lot of physical and environmental stress, the additional strain on your body and crowded and loud gym may not help you to adequately recharge.
Should You Run, Or Stand and Fight?
When most of us face stressors in our lives, just like our cave-dwelling ancestors, we turn to one of two solutions to cope with them. We choose to escape from them in ways that allow us to avoid what we’re dealing with, or we can approach and work on handling it directly.
Usually, avoidant techniques feel like the easy short-term solution and sometimes they can be constructive if it allows us to step back and get a better perspective or find a place of safety to start from before we deal with whatever we’re facing.
Ultimately though, the more that we practice and use approach solutions, the stronger our resilience to stress and ability to manage it will be.
Approach and Avoidance Techniques for Stress Management
So how do you practice these approach solutions to your stress? If this isn’t your default method of stress management and you do tend to avoid anything that feels threatening, it will be helpful to start slowly and with anything that’s not too intimidating for you. If mental stress is affecting you because you’ve been putting off having a conversation with your boss about something important that needs to change, this might be much harder if you’re not used to approaching and handling your stressors directly. Maybe in this case, depending on the timeline, you could start by approaching that mental stress through a meditation technique, to get control of your thoughts and even practice visualization of the crucial conversation you need to have. That way you can build up more resilience before tackling those bigger stressors.
We can do this for every type of stress that we face. There are approach and avoidance techniques in every dimension of deep health.
And if you’re trying to do a complete reboot on your system because stress seems to be coming from every direction, you should try floating.
Float therapy is one of my favourite recovery methods and is uniquely effective at reducing stress because how it can help us to recharge in all aspects of our deep health. The quiet and dark comfort of float tanks eliminates environmental and physical stress while also allowing us to go deeply within to approach and work on our mental, emotional, and existential stressors. And the solitude of the float tank is also the perfect reset for social stress. So if you haven’t tried floating before or it’s been a while since your last float and you’re feeling stress build up again, I can’t recommend floating enough.
Find Your Flow
Fight or Flight or Float?... Managing The Stress Response To Your Life
When your threat detection system goes off and your spidey sense starts tingling as the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, how do you respond?
Do you fight or do you flee?
We are all familiar with the feeling that floods in when we become aware of a threat in our surroundings.
Heart rate skyrockets, breathing becomes rapid and shallow, we get that tingling sensation as our blood flows from our core to our limbs to mobilize us for action to escape this threat.
While much less common today, this autonomic response to stress or threats was instilled to protect us from the jaguar hidden in the jungle only given away by the subtle sound of a twig snapping or the need to sprint after the deer to feed your family as it tries to get away.
When our sympathetic nervous system is engaged, we are in full-force action mode to handle anything in our way.
Working opposite to our sympathetic response is the relaxation response known as rest and digest. It helps to keep stress levels in check and takes over when we feel safe and secure. With this parasympathetic activation, our breathing and heart rate slow down and as blood can return to our core, our digestive system becomes more active again and we’re also more likely to be sexually aroused.
There are important functions to both sympathetic and parasympathetic responses in our bodies and we depend on the ability to engage in fight or flight to deal with short-term challenges.
The problem that we face today is that stress has become a constant in our lives. The kids are late for school, then someone cuts you off in traffic, so now you’re running late to get to work and you get chewed out by your boss.
And this is all before 9 am while guzzling down a stimulating pot of coffee.
Our days go by like this constantly and even if we try to stay positive, that threat detection system is used to working subconsciously to protect us.
Even before the booming threat of the pandemic, stress levels were already on the rise, especially in cities where there’s a constant din of noise, motion, and interaction keeping our nervous systems buzzing. Everybody says that they’re stressed and in a constant state of avoiding overwhelm and having to deal with COVID hasn’t helped anyone.
Finding ways to unwind and get our bodies into the relaxation response is one of the best things we can do for our physical and mental health. When the term “relaxation response” was first coined by Herbert Benson, he came up with a protocol for practicing relaxation and eliciting the response.
The original steps for the relaxation response look very similar to a beginner practice of mindfulness and that’s because Dr. Benson is often credited with familiarizing his Western audience with meditation through rebranding it as the “Relaxation Effect.”
Meditation is a tricky thing though because despite rebranding it or rephrasing the concept, most people don’t know how to get started with meditation in a meaningful way that feels like something positive.
But that’s where float tanks come in.
Most people are curious to try out the float experience and to escape from the world in the nearly complete way that only floating can allow for.
It’s not surprising given the many studies that have found floating in a float tank brings on the relaxation effect as well as the benefits that come with that. And this is in part due to how many people describe floating as a sort of training wheels for meditation. It’s like your mental filing cabinet where your brain is able to turn down the noise and sort out the thoughts that tend to swirl around uncontrollably.
People coming in to float notice in real-time the benefits for reducing stress, improving mood, and also helping to increase focus as you return to the outside world.
The float tank environment is the perfect place to turn off that stress response that is ever-present in our lives today. It’s a safe and comfortable space to engage our relaxation response and let go of everything.
Depending on how you like to float, you can completely tune out from all the stimuli that are normally present and keep our fight of flight response actively engaged. You get to choose calming music or blissful silence and the comfort of lights if you don’t want to immerse yourself in complete darkness.
The next time that you feel you're fed up with life and ready to lose it, instead of running away from your problems or getting into an argument, give yourself a time-out to engage your relaxation response. Or even better, treat yourself to a float and relax every muscle in your body while your brain gets to have a complete rest as well.
The Secret Behind How Floating Dissolves Your Stress and Reduces Anxiety
There’s an incredible amount of pressure put on us from the choices we make each and every day. Not to mention that we are also in the midst of a global health crisis. It’s clear that the stress we face daily can cause a lot of health problems. Many of us recognize the commonly associated physical problems like heart disease and high blood pressure, but stress can also weave its way into presenting as mental health issues like PTSD, depression, and eating disorders.
Most of us can feel the need to recharge and provide ourselves with some of the self-care these days as the world seems to spiral out of control. We want to turn to any solution that may help but there’s always a bit of skepticism when it comes to alternative wellness practices and whether they are as helpful as they claim to be.
Floating is no exception to this.
So let’s dive into some of the science on floating to see just how beneficial it can be for reducing stress.
Float Therapy and Stress Reduction
Dr. Justin Feinstein is one of the most well-known scientists studying the effects of float therapy in his custom lab setup at the Laureate Institute of Brain Research. In a recent Tedx Talk, Dr. Feinstein shared some of his study results about the effects of floating on stress.
The effects were incredible.
Every single person who participated in the study experienced some amount of stress relief. Furthermore, most of the participants saw a significant reduction in their stress levels that lasted for more than 24 hours after just a single float session.
If there was a pill you could take that would allow you to be stress-free for the whole day, who wouldn’t want that?
Floating to reduce stress may be more time-involved than just taking a pill but the benefits of it seem to be even more significant than most anti-anxiety treatments.
And just as importantly, there’s no concern about interactions with other medications or other negative contraindications. It’s one of the safest and lowest risk wellness practices there is.
Get 20% Off Your First Float at Flow Spa
Dr. Feinstein isn’t just studying the effects of floating on people with normal, everyday stress though. He’s looking at stress-related illnesses like PTSD, depression, and anxiety, and finding that the individuals with the highest levels of stress before floating experience the greatest benefit from the treatment. Everyone who floats returns to a baseline level of relief, which means floating will bring you down to a similar level of relaxation as those people who always seems to be as cool as a cucumber.
What’s The Secret Behind Floating?
So the next big question is how does it work? Do we really just lay in the dark and let our minds clear out our thoughts for an hour or so?
This does seem to be the key to it all.
It’s difficult to find the effects of the solitude of floating, where we can’t be bothered by the outside world, anywhere else. Our minds and bodies slow down dramatically, our brains enter a state similar to dreaming, and this all gives us the ability to recharge more quickly.
Before float tanks took over as the most effective and relaxing way to experience this solitude, a psychologist named Dr. Peter Suedfeld did a lot of sensory deprivation research in the 60s and 70s by placing people in completely dark rooms in isolation for 24 hours. The term he used for this was REST (Restricted Environment Stimulation Therapy).
Dr. Suedfeld created a paradigm shift in the scientific community on sensory deprivation. Before this time it was only thought of as torture, as a result of incomplete research and questionable methods performed by researchers that would prime the subjects for a bad experience before the experiment even began.
By keeping the subjects at ease and making the process simple for anyone, Dr. Suedfeld found that participants actually enjoyed the sensory deprivation experience.
Over the years, Dr. Suedfeld found that the benefits of REST carried over to many areas including addiction treatment, helping with autism, enhancing creativity, and reducing stress.
This research was the foundation for the future of float tanks and helped scientists, as well as the wider community, stay open-minded to the benefits of floating and reducing stress.
Since these early days, we’ve come even further in seeing the light that shines in the darkness of sensory reduced environments. You don’t need to spend a full day in the darkness to experience the benefits, a single float session can provide similar benefits.
In his Tedx Talk, Dr. Feinstein comments on how we as humans aren’t designed to be constantly plugged into looking at screens, listening to the cacophonous noise of the city, or sitting under the glare of fluorescent lights all day. We also aren’t supposed to constantly let our minds go wild thinking about our to-do list and everything else that we cram into the 24 hours of our day.
Even if we enjoy having a full and vibrant schedule, these things can wear us out and add to the stress of our daily lives. Taking a break is our chance at hitting the reset button, and as we’ve seen, floating has been proven to be one of the most effective ways to do that.
Here's How To Make It Simple To Connect To Your Breath More Regularly Throughout The Day
Your boss just adds another stack of paperwork to your desk. Your phone buzzes with a news release that piles even more stress and anxiety on your plate.
Much of the world we live in today is completely stressing us out.
One of the simplest ways that we can feel better is through checking in with our breath more regularly throughout the day.
The reality is that most of us do not breathe well or check in on the status of our bodies regularly enough and it leads to a whole range of issues from higher stress and anxiety levels to compromising our immune system.
Training yourself to breathe differently from what you’re used to can be a great challenge. Something that we do 25,000 times per day is deeply ingrained and requires a lot of conscious effort to adjust.
How To Breathe Properly
It sounds silly to have to go over this until you realize that the majority of people have terrible breathing patterns that lead to issues like higher stress levels and weakened immune systems.
When we properly breathe we engage our diaphragm which allows us to breathe more deeply and counteract the sympathetic nervous system that stresses our body and makes us sick when chronically activated.
When we are tense or in an anxious state we breathe just into our upper chest, often taking the air in through our mouths. This activates the sympathetic nervous system and can keep us in a chronic state of stress, eventually leading to illness and burnout.
A proper breath for calming our nervous system is taken in through our nose with the exhale being longer than the inhale. This allows for a more proper exchange of carbon dioxide to oxygen in our bodies. With the frequent practice of calm breathing, we become more effective at managing our stress levels.
Calm breathing induces the activation of the parasympathetic nervous system for greater relaxation.
4-7-8 Breathing For a Calm State
Dr. Andrew Weil has come up with the 4-7-8 technique as an easy way to extend that exhale and drop you into a calm state. To use the 4-7-8 technique, focus on the following breathing pattern:
Empty the lungs of air, breathe in quietly through the nose for 4 seconds.
Hold the breath for a count of 7 seconds.
Exhale forcefully through the mouth or nose for 8 seconds.
Repeat the cycle up to 4 times to significantly reduce anxiety levels.
So let’s talk about how we can connect with our breath more regularly throughout the day to create stronger patterns for healthy and calm breathing.
These practices are built around the habits that we already have in our lives which will simplify the process and make it highly intuitive and automatic to complete with no added effort.
1. Set Up a Phone Alarm
The first strategy that you can use is to set up trigger alarms in your phone, or if you have a smartwatch, use an app like Breathe to remind you multiple times per day to check in on your breath. It’s a good idea to start with at least 3 or 4 times per day. So you could have your alarms set for first thing in the morning or just after breakfast time, late morning or early afternoon, after work, and before bed. Experiment with whatever times of the day are most realistic for you to practice catching your breath and calming it down for a minute.
2. Anchor It To Other Habits
Another way to make checking in with your breath more automatic is to anchor it to habits that you already have. This is known as habit stacking. As an example, you can spend a minute slowing your breathing through your nose each time you finish washing your hands after going to the washroom.
Another habit to stack to is anytime you refill your water throughout the day.
We all have unique habits but think about what habits you have every day that can serve as a starting point for checking in on your breath.
3. Certain Times of Day
Just like creating a trigger alarm for your breathing, the other strategy around the time of day is to simply create a hard set rule for yourself that you will check in on your breath at certain times of the day so that it becomes ingrained as automatically when you will practice. This could include times like during your morning commute, at your lunch break, or before you get out of your car and head back into the house after work.
4. Phone Wallpaper
The closest thing to getting the word “breathe” tattooed on your wrist without having to go that far is to create a wallpaper for your phone that has the word on there as a reminder. This little trick can help in addition to the other strategies above but is not as salient so I would suggest that you add this in addition to the other ones instead of depending fully on it.
It can serve as a nice little trick reminder for you though and once you’ve already started working on the habit, every time you see the note on your phone it may help you to also question what purpose you are checking your phone for so that you’re also approaching your devices with more mindfulness.
It Takes Time To Make The Change
Just as you’ve been breathing in your current pattern for a very long time, you won’t automatically start breathing like a meditation guru overnight so be patient with yourself and work on this consistently for a couple of months. You’ll slowly start to see changes in how calm you are and your overall stress levels.
Self-Care for the Selfless Supporter: 4 Tips for Preventing Burnout
The overwhelming sense of indulgence in doing things for your own sake may feel like a waste of time but it makes you so much better in the other areas of your life that you owe it to everyone you perform your best for to do it.
We have been witnessing an extreme amount of caring for others and self-less ness over the last half of the year that could warm any heart. It's wonderful to know our loved ones have our back and are doing everything possible to stay positive and support us during the odd and difficult times.
But something that is for certain is that the selfless supporters can't go on indefinitely without checking in to how they are also doing. While some may have a good routine for this, more often than not, it is the most selfless of us that need the practices of self-care the most.
We have been seeing incidences of burn out increase over the last several years and the burden of COVID-19 is only like to exacerbate that problem.
When our bodies are in sympathetic overdrive for too long without giving the proper chances to rest, we start to shut down and crash. This can lead to compromised immune systems and illness or even the need for hospitalization when things get too far out of hand.
So let's talk about some of the ways that you or your selfless loved ones can practice self-care and give some of that love back into the system to keep on going much longer term.
Take Regular Pauses Throughout the Day
Most of us just jump from one task to the next without giving ourselves the chance to pause and re-engage.
There’s a big difference in how you will feel when you allow yourself even a minute or two to close your eyes or even just let your gaze soften between tasks or at the top of every hour.
We get stressed when we keep pushing hard without resetting and often it is eye fatigue from constantly staring at our work that drives this limiting factor in our bodies. Allowing the eyes the chance to rest can dramatically change how you feel throughout the whole day and into the evening as you transition from work to home life.
Fuel Good. Don't Just Feel Good.
We often reach for the most tantalizing of foods when we are feeling stressed or worn out because we get a lovely hit of dopamine in anticipation of and from the act of eating these foods. But think about how you feel after the fact. Probably not very good, and often you feel even worse because these junk foods are not refuelling your body the right way.
It’s undoubtedly a challenge to change our eating habits but knowing that it can make a huge difference for how good we feel and how well we can care for our loved ones when we are caring for ourselves first.
Move Your Body
Our bodies are meant to move. And often a lot more than we allow ourselves to. It’s important when caring for yourself and for others to stay physically active and healthy.
This doesn’t look like hard work, it looks like consistent work. A 30-minute walk each day or two fifteen-minute walks is enough to make a difference.
Give Yourself More Time To Fully Escape
As selfless caregivers, we have others on our minds at all times. It’s what we do but to continue going on in that way long-term requires that we keep our selves in mind as well.
The way that we best take care of ourselves will vary from one person to the next but it’s important that in addition to the micro-breaks that you take throughout the day you give yourself a deeper chance to reset on whatever frequency you feel you need.
For some individuals, this may mean an hour alone twice a week to do something you love like read a book quietly or go for a treatment at the spa.
It doesn’t really matter what activities you take part in as long as it resonates with you like something you get a lot of joy from.
Do what you need to if it requires you to plan in advance because it’s crucial to your long-term well-being and ability to care for others.
Once you start to implement this time into your schedule regularly, it will become a natural part of how you approach things and you will see the dramatic differences in how much more of yourself you have to give to those who need you most.
Increasing Your Wellness With This Easy Stress and Energy Tracker Solution
We are all stressed and feeling anxious right now and one of the most practical things that you can do to get a handle on the situation and help you to focus on the things that you can control is by creating a simple tracker system to monitor the most important aspects of your wellness right now.
One of the most impactful takeaways I got from Tony Robbins at the power of success seminar that I attended was how beneficial tracking your energy levels can be to sustain a higher level of performance - regardless of what that means to you.
Habits trackers are the simplest way to do that and while you can create a digital table or use an app, like a Fitbit or Oura ring to track some of the metrics, writing it down on paper or in a journal seems to be the most effective way of visually portraying this and truly understanding what the trends mean for you.
A simple tracker, like the one that I've included as a bonus download in the wellness challenge week, can allow you to write the number associated with your subjective feelings each day.
In the image below you'll see how I visually represent these details on an X- and Y-axis. Daily I track my energy level with a dot or bullet and my subjective sleep quality with an open circle. I'm also adding in a subjective stress level with a different symbol.
What I want you to do is create a similar tracker for yourself.
You can print off the tracker from the wellness course, or create your own in a journal or even on a scrap piece of paper.
If you're drawing it out for yourself, create the graph that is more visual than just the boxes from the habit tracker template.
-Draw or mark out space for ten lines.
-Each day give yourself a score from 1 - 10 for the following:
Your energy level - how ready are you to perform at your best? 10 would be unstoppable.
Your sleep - 10 would be the perfect amount of sleep for your needs and waking up feeling refreshed.
Your stress level - 10 being the absolute worst you’ve ever felt.
I find that I will personally record sleep in the morning but save energy and stress levels for at least a few hours later once I have had some time to wake up. You can even do these much later after you've had some time to reflect on how well you performed today.
Nobody seeking flow and peak performance, or even just stress-free living in our current circumstances wants to live a life that's always a 6 or 7 out of 10, just as you wouldn’t go around bragging if you scored 60% on a test.
Making the stress tracker something visual like this works so well because it motivates you to want to find solutions.
And if you don't know where to start, sign up for the free healthy, happy, and stress-free challenge week for easy challenges you can implement into your at-home routine.
Creating Balance With Your Weekends
You’ve Got To Make Time To Recharge
The concept of burning the candle from both ends embodies the trendy term called work-life balance, or lack thereof as seems to be more and more the case. If you are in a hard and stressful job but also spending your weekends staying up late and partying or neglecting sleep for Netflix binges, the wick that is your lifeforce is getting burnt out from both ends.
Thanksgiving long weekend just passed us and usually, long weekends give us respite from the ‘always on’ mentality that we live with today, as businesses also closed for a day of rest and give us all the chance to pause. However, long weekends are also filled with family gatherings and times of celebration which can mean late nights, good food, and plenty of drinking. All of this is great when it means reconnecting with friends and family spread near and far to create lasting memories but recognizing its impact on your nervous system and stress levels is valuable for avoiding a state of full-on burnout and keeping your training or business progressing if you are involved in any sports or entrepreneurial endeavours.
My Thanksgiving weekend this year was the aforementioned kind as I was attending my best friend John’s wedding in Toronto and I knew that I would have to find balance in other parts of my life and throughout the weekend in order to not crash after the wedding.
This is what a few busy days and late nights can do to your recovery. The following data from my Oura ring display from Saturday morning and Sunday morning on Thanksgiving weekend tells you all you need to know.
Knowing how various factors impact my sleep quality helps me to make choices to regain balance or simply know that I may wake up feeling less than optimal after a busy weekend like this and that I should go light with training to avoid pushing myself into a deeper hole or risking injury.
The value in knowing that a few nights short of optimal sleep combined with busy and active days crushes your recovery and readiness for training extends to general exercise as well as sport-specific training. If you like to work out just to stay healthy, following a busy weekend like the one I had, you may want to consider doing light weight training only or avoiding it altogether and just doing some low-intensity cardio, yoga, and stretching until your body is more fully recovered.
In addition to considerations with how your workouts are designed to create balance, do what you can to mitigate stress at work, and find other parasympathetic activities to include while you are returning to normal. For me this included getting some extra rest with an hour-long float session once I returned home, getting outside for a quiet walk, and getting extra sleep for the following few nights.
Most often the choices that help us regain balance aren’t the most fun or easiest options (but they will make you feel better) which is why you need to make the conscious choice to improve your recovery and reduce chronic stress levels.
Tips For Regaining Balance
Adjust Your Workout Plan Until You Are Better Recovered - don’t tax the nervous system with high-intensity weights or cardio.
Eat healthy foods - this is completely subjective to you and your goals but you probably know when you’re making the right choices. Use a food tracker like MyFitnessPal for a bit if it helps you get back on track.
Forest bathing - getting deep into nature has restorative effects on your mind, body, and soul.
Get extra sleep - turn off your devices and go to bed early to catch up on some Zzz’s.
Go for a float - find a float centre near you and get into a state of deep parasympathetic rejuvenation.
Reduce caffeine - when your body is reaching its limits you may be reaching for that extra cup of coffee to keep going. Avoiding doing that will limit further contribution to adrenal fatigue and stress.
Plan in advance - if you know you’re coming into crunch time at work or in training, prepare ahead of time with all of the above tips so that your competition or all-nighter at work doesn’t grind you into the dirt.
There are many ways to return to optimal functioning but it all starts with awareness which we intuitively know when we’re approaching burnout and overtaxing ourselves. We don’t always have the luxury of stepping on the brakes and settling down - there are seasons in our lives when we have to go full-tilt forward. But when you can it’s best to slow down and keep balance in place.
If you’re unsure of what this feels like in yourself or if you want even more details, a device like the Oura ring, Whoop, or other HRV tracking tools can help you to quantitatively measure your recovery to keep track of trends. Intelligent use of your own recovery trends will allow you to push yourself harder for longer without getting sick, injured, or burnt out and is a critical factor in the success of many world-class performers across all fields of business and sports.
When you’re stressed and overworked, proper recovery isn’t just going to come to you; you’ve got to create time to regain balance.