Stressing About Stress?

How to Take the Angst Out of Wellbeing

Join Dave Algeo aboard "Sprout 1" and take another journey into your inner world where mind, meaning and metaphor collide.

This episode Dave explores why we can often find ourselves adding stress when we embark on a stress reduction plan or a wellbeing effort. Dave shares some tips to help you reduce the stress so you can get on with living life and moving towards your wellbeing goals.

Dave Algeo is a writer, coach, trainer and speaker empowering others to live big, by identifying the small but significant things that can transform the life we are living. Join Dave on the good ship 'Sprout1' as we explore the inner galaxy of the human mind, and find the sprouts that make the biggest difference. These are the sprouts you are looking for.

Search for 'Sprout Sweater' in your favourite podcast feed. To find out more about the podcast, and episode show notes at Podcast — Stress(ed) Guru and more about his in person and online events at www.stressedguru.com. Drop Dave a line at dave@sproutsweater.com to ask questions, offer feedback or suggestions for future podcast content.

Episode 14 Show Notes

The following is a rough draft of the content (not a full transcript - more notes forming the basis of the podcast recording

“I’m not gonna snap at the kids anymore” and then 30 seconds later “Just give me a minute peace would ya!”

Welcome aboard Sprout1 I’m your host Dave Algeo chief sprout sweater. Now set your seat to recline as we reflect on how our mind can make mugs of us all if we don’t recognize how to shift those well-meaning but anxiety-creating thought patterns towards more forgiving and flexible thinking approaches. Its episode 14 stressing about stress, how to take the angst out of well-being.

As we lift off the pad and before we get into the episode don’t forget if you find that the demands of life and the meaning of it all is leading you to sleepless nights tossing and turning, deep and not so deep questions rattling around your head, then hop on over to sproutsweater.com to gain access to my free Operation Snooze Sleep Improvement audio program. Start getting your head back and your shit together so that you can start getting life back on your terms, sproutsweater.com.

Last week I provided you with my three zeds to better sleep and encouraged you to identify some small changes you could make in your sleep zone, your prezzed time routine and the rituals, and some of the tips that can help you become a sleep Zen master. I hope you find that useful and don’t forget you can visit sproutsweater.com to sign up and receive access to my Operation Snooze Sleep Improvement program and all the audios that support it.

But today inspired by my work with clients on improving sleep in particular I want to deal with the issue of stressing about stress or losing sleep over not getting enough sleep and all the other ways that we can find then when embarking on a health or wellbeing improvement program;  we can kind of add more stress and pressure to ourselves than we actually reduce by embarking on these wellbeing programs. What do I mean? Well, have you ever found yourself when embarking on, say a weight loss program, that you become hyper-vigilant to what and how much you are eating? Or as you seek to improve your sleep, found yourself becoming really anxious about how much or how little sleep you’re getting and how poor quality or good quality it is. Perhaps you have one of those smartwatches that tell you exactly how little sleep you got as well. Or are you striving to get more downtime and relaxation into your life only to become anxious just about how anxious you are at any given time? You know I could go on with exercise being patient with the kids, that’s a biggie, “I’m not gonna snap at the kids anymore” and then 30 seconds later “Just give me a minute peace why would ya!” If you’ve been there I get you, I’m a work in progress, this affects me and has affected me quite significantly in the past actually. I don’t know about you, I think actually that as someone who is particularly driven to achieving things I can really amp up the level, I guess we say arousal, the focus, and that needle can go into the red. And if you particularly go focused and also prone to being really self-critical and hyper self-aware of whatever, you kind find yourself by setting the goal you’re adding an additional layer of monitoring, psychological monitoring. Something that seems to go off in your head “ok Dave” you obviously replace your name, “I’ve got this. I'll keep an eye on this and I’ll let you know whenever, wherever you go off track”, in sleep, weird focus, temper whatever. And that’s the trouble isn’t it, I guess it’s a bit like my smoke alarm in the house here. It's just positioned outside the kitchen but it's flipping tuned to pick up a whiff of somebody walking past the house 20 meters away smoking. Even when the doors and windows are shut and it drives me nuts. I can’t cook a thing without it going off. It's annoying. In other words, it's overly sensitive, it’s too its filter, it's tuned to the slightest, slightest indication there may be a fire. Could that be like you? Could that be like us? It certainly is for me. I guess the reasons for that are many, they are complex. From my experience of working with clients, I think there are a few common themes that come out.

One is we have an acute awareness of the goal. You might say that’s a good thing but tied in with that, the goal and how much it matters and more importantly how far we are from the goal and how pressed for time perhaps, whether by a genuine deadline or a deadline we put on it, how pressed for time we are into getting to the goal - there’s no time to waste. That can really add that pressure in. Or is two or a combination of one and two. There’s a tendency to over monitor oneself generally in anything and that leads us to, we tend to be very self-aware of everything we do say not do, etc., how we feel physically and emotionally and that can lead us to being more acutely focused on monitoring ourselves when we are working on a goal. I guess if we add in number 3 which is an awareness or a knowledge of the subject. Now I am not somebody when I approach a goal that can trust other people in saying “just follow this plan and you’ll be fine, you’ll get there”. I am somebody who needs to know my stuff. I need to research, I need to understand, I need to understand why that’s important to do it that way and in that order. I need to do the research, I’m very questioning and I guess cynical, and rightly so. Let’s be right in a lot of the fields of self-improvement, physical and psychological, there is a lot of rubbish out there. There’s a lot of well-intentioned rubbish but it's my nature to question. So, I don’t know whether this is potentially you as well, but as somebody who has that need for awareness and knowledge, I will dive into a subject. Great. However, what that can also ramp up is an understanding of the consequences of failure. For example, sleep. There is a lot about sleep and has been a lot in the press over the last year to two years, particularly over the last year with lockdown and restrictions and the disruption to sleep and a focus on the consequences of not getting enough sleep or good enough quality sleep. That in itself can then add its own level of anxiety because we start to not only monitor how well we are sleeping, we have an acute awareness that “I need to improve this sleep” and “I want to and want to improve it tomorrow” along with this “if I don’t I’m gonna die”. Let’s be right, that kind of focus can be really generating the anxiety. Now in my experience having researched more widely around sleep in particular what I have found is that yes we can all benefit from improving our sleep. Most of us generally can benefit from improving and getting better quality sleep at times. Sometimes sleep can be great, sometimes not so good and we can go for periods when it's not great. And yes there is an impact on our day-to-day lives and lifestyles and what have you, however within the field of sleep research there is still debate, hot debate on the genuine links between poor sleep or short sleep, being a 5-hour sleeper vs, an 8-hour sleeper has to the real consequences. So now I’m not going to enter into that debate here but whilst there is debate one of the things I have seen antidotally from my time as a police officer working shifts and getting disrupted and uneven patterns is, that it isn’t just the sleep. It’s the lifestyle around it. Don’t know about you but if you're a shift worker I know that come 1 o’clock on a Friday night in custody there was a temptation to get a kebab or a pizza because well, your working night shifts and it's busy and why not grab that on the go. It’s a bit of a treat isn’t it and why not. The lifestyle can generate into habits. I would often look at sleep and think it's not just the sleep is it. An awareness of these consequences can crank up the anxiety but often it's not that simple and when we are adding the pressure we can actually lead to disrupting things like our sleep causing problems with our eating. We make one mistake in eating if we are trying to follow some sort of healthy plan and we have a relapse as opposed to a lapse. There is a difference between that a lapse is where we make one mistake and we get back on it and a relapse is where we kind of lapse and it develops into returning to those previous not-so-great habits for a period of time. Both are very permissible and human, that’s what we do. It can happen but the quicker we can get back and recover from those things the better. So, if we can take off the stress that we add on through those 3 things and other combinations of things that we tend to add, we can give ourselves a real good chance at continuum more on whatever plan towards a goal than off.

So, here’s my tactics. Because if you tend to do that what we need to do is think about how can I take the pressure off and in terms of it these tactics relate to some of those reasons that I’ve mentioned before but can be applied generally as well. 

So, the first one is to sweat the sprout, not the cabbage. I’ve said this before in previous interviews and in the context of this, it goes back to that reason one. That when we are so goal fixated and we are constantly checking in the goal and how far away we are from it, we may well be adding that angst of “I’m too far away”, “I’ll never get there”, “it’s slow progress”, “I’m not quick enough”, “I’m not fast enough” and end up giving up. That is the focusing on the cabbage, the goal, the outcome rather than the sprouts. And what are the sprouts? The sprouts are the processes, the habits, the rituals, the routine. The meals that we change from processed to more healthy, the exercise that we do on a day-to-day basis, that walk, that pre-bedtime or prezzed time routine as I call it. If we focus our attention on just sweating the sprouts and taking our eye off the cabbage, checking in on it, how is my progress, but less frequently than perhaps you might be tempted to do, then we can trust the sprout. Trust in the sprout. Sweat the sprouts daily and as Simon Ward said in the interview in Episode 8, if you do the practices and the basics and get them right and just stick with those, you will get to where you need to go. So sweat the sprout, the routines and habits, and not the cabbage. That’s where trusting that process comes in. To take it to the next step is to realise that when we are reading research if your somebody who likes to read research and to look at well this is what the research tells us works for most people, we have to understand that there are a lot of factors around research. Firstly, the quality of the research, has it been a good thorough broad wide population sample for the research. Is it addressing the question that you need in terms of it and is the same population the right one? A classic one in terms of performance, sports performance particularly around sports supplements is that researchers who are paid by, often by companies who are the product to sell which is something to bear in mind, they are often focusing on elite athletes and performance at elite and extreme levels and not necessarily at the same level as you or I. So, recognize that research, whilst can be valid and robust and what have you in its own sense, it may not necessarily apply to you. All research has the bell curve. It has what will work, what tactics or approaches, routines or rituals, or whatever work for the majority of people in this but you are not necessarily the majority. You’re an individual. Yes, chances are you may fall into the bell curve for quite a lot of different things but you may be an outlier on some of the other things. There are always people who respond to a placebo. There are always people who respond to something or not respond to something else that the majority do. 

So, here’s where I want you to think about yourself as an experimenter. You are your own experimenter and you are your own sample population n=1. Treat it as a research process. And if you treat it as an experiment, treat this whole process, whatever habit you’re forming whether it's improving your sleep, improving your eating, getting more mobile and active, exercising or looking for a promotion at work or changing a career or developing a business, treat it as an experiment. Something that you need not be perfect at and actually you’ll indeed benefit from perhaps making the odd mistake along the way because mistakes you can learn a lot from. Something which is flexible and subject to change and one in which you adopt a sense of curiosity because your subject, your sample i.e., you n=1, you are the person you are experimenting with and upon safely and ethically but you are also adopting a curious process. How did that work? What went wrong there? or what could I do differently? Could I improve? that worked, great how could I improve on that? That curiosity can do 2 things. 

One it can help you engage at a level of motivation perhaps you didn’t previously have for the goal or the task and it can also help you to detach a little bit from being so personal. Because it is personal. It is you. It is your goal and your thing that you want to achieve but at times like attaching it says right, how did the experiment work and what can I learn from it? That can be really, really useful. If you make a mistake or a lapse or a relapse again a momentary omission of failure is fine, we can get back on it, we can treat it as that experiment. If it’s a relapse we just need to return to it as soon as we can. And return to it with a forgiving and accepting mindset. One of the things we can do is be very, very tough and hard on ourselves, so acceptance is an important part of it. Permission to be human you’ll make mistakes, your motivation will be low,  you will slip and slide along this messy journey towards whatever goal it is. The quicker you kind of forgive yourself, accept, and move on the better.

So as our craft the Sprout1 begins the landing process allowing you to return to your fellow humans, have a think about how you can best take off the pressure of working towards a goal, any goal but especially the wellbeing related goals. They are meant to be good for you, not add more stress to your life. Put your faith in the sprout. Sweat those small daily habits and routines experimenting and tweaking as you go and trust that you will be making your way towards the cabbage, the goal. Take care for now. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed your flight aboard sprout1. For show notes and information on how to get the podcast feed direct to your apple podcast, Spotify, or other favourite podcast feed visit sproutsweater.com and touchdown!

Episode 15 Teaser:

In episode 15 Dave reviews five books that have made the cut for him - find out which books support the Sprout Sweater approach to behaviour change.