Eliminating Stress

Today, Bob gets into the science of stress. Why do small annoyances set us off? Is a good night’s sleep really key to combating anxiety? You’ll learn about this and so much more as Bob instructs us on how meditation can help you stay calm.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Stay Calm as a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
to Stay Calm, your daily dose of calmness. I'm Bob Roth,
and I've been teaching people to meditate for fifty years,
helping them to stay calm under pressure, reboot and re
energize their lives, and basically be a happier, healthier version

(00:22):
of themselves. And now I want to help you do
the same. Ready, sit comfortably, take a few deep breaths,
and let's begin today's journey. You know how one day,
maybe you didn't sleep well, and you wake up a
bit cranky, and someone does something and it gets under
your skin. But the next day you slept better. Maybe

(00:43):
you got in some exercise and the same person does
the exact same thing, and this time you don't even notice.
No big deal, you think. So one day you're perceived
a behavior is annoying, and the next day you perceived
the exact same behavior as no big deal. What happened.
Your perception of the situation changed, so your response to

(01:05):
the situation changed. The American Psychological Association explains that when
someone perceives a situation to be challenging, threatening, or uncontrollable,
then the brain produces an excess of the stress hormone cortisol.
And when that happens, well, you get caught in the
middle of a vicious cycle of stress and cortisol. When

(01:27):
that continues to happen day after day, year after year,
then you can become chronically anxious, chronically depressed. You can
gain an unhealthy amount of weight, or you could get
high blood pressure or diabetes. So why do we get stressed? Well,
there are two factors involved in the process. One we

(01:49):
often have no control over, and the other we can
have a lot of control over. The first is called stressors.
These are the external situations thread its demands, challenges, pressures.
The stressor can be very big, such as a family
member who gets diagnosed with a serious illness, to something
smaller like you're trying to work from home but your

(02:12):
kids are squabbling and you can't focus, or you get
a snarky text message from someone who's supposed to be
a good friend. The second factor is called the stress response,
and that's how we respond to stressors. We're on a
good routine and feeling healthy and energetic, we handle the
news of a sick family member so much better. Same

(02:33):
with every other stressor that comes our way. But if
we're not sleeping well and could use a little TLC
and someone sends that snarky message or our kid acts
out well, then our brain sends a signal to the
adrenals to pump out cortisol because we're feeling under attack.
We are stressed, and how does that stress hit us?

(02:57):
According to science, in so many to bilitating ways. First,
on a muscular level, our body tenses up. We can
get attention headache where our jaws tightened up, or stomach
knots up, or we get back pain our blood vessels constrict. Second, again,
our adrenal glands pump out cortisol. Yes, we all need

(03:21):
some cortisol to get through the day, But the big
problem these days is that the adrenals produced way too
much of it, and now we're getting anxious, jumpy, irritable.
A lot too much cortisol compromises the immune system. That's
why we get sick more often when we're stressed. Cortisol
also floods the memory center of the brain, the hippocampus.

(03:43):
That's why we forget where we put the keys, forget
answers to questions on an exam, forget important people we're
supposed to call, and finally the amigdali in the brain
gets hyper aroused, and now we're in a fight or
flight mode and we overreact to everything. It can take
hours for a spike in cortisol to come down for

(04:05):
us to stop feeling upset and get back to normal.
So what can we do to address this all too
familiar situation. Ultimately, the best thing we can do to
reduce cortisol is to give our body very, very deep rest,
and that's where meditation comes in, because during the transcending process,

(04:28):
your body experiences a state of RESTful alertness, and during
this deep relaxation there is a thirty to reduction in
cortisol levels, and that is a far greater reduction in
cortisol than anything you can get from a good night's
sleep or even physical exercise. But still some people say, yeah,

(04:49):
meditation is good, I just don't have the time. Well,
consider this. There are one thousand, four hundred and forty
minutes in a day. Now consider how much time we
waste messing around with social media or just being easily
distracted and not using our time wisely. So if we
think we don't have a few minutes to meditate and

(05:11):
do a little self care for our brain. Then we
may need to reevaluate the priorities of our day, and
we may even want to consider re evaluating the priorities
of our life. I leave you with this quote, anonymously
written but so appropriate. Stop trying to calm the storm.

(05:31):
Calm yourself and the storm will pass, all right. Thank
you for joining me today. I hope you heard something
that inspires, that uplifts you and that you can incorporate
into your own life. This is Bob Roth. Stay calm. Hey,

(05:58):
all of you out there, I'd love to hear from you.
Can send me your stories, your questions, or anything else
on your mind. Just connect with me on Twitter, Facebook
or Instagram at meditation Bob. You can also send me
an email at meditation Bob Roth at gmail dot com.
I look forward to hearing from you.