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What Exactly Is Stress?

Lesson 4 from: FAST CLASS: Stress is Optional

Cynthia Ackrill

What Exactly Is Stress?

Lesson 4 from: FAST CLASS: Stress is Optional

Cynthia Ackrill

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Lesson Info

4. What Exactly Is Stress?

Lesson Info

What Exactly Is Stress?

So what stress my sense? It's a physiological, it's a certain physiology where obviously we're some things, he's I guess the breath is at a certain rate, and I would assume certain kind of chemicals are in your body, but also probably if they do brain waves, there's a certain thing with your perceptions in your mind. Yeah. And you're Simon jumping way into the physiology, some and we're gonna get through that, because that's that's true. That is your reaction. That's your physiologic reaction to a thought process. And we do this to ourselves all day long. We have this concept in our minds that stress is something that happens to us, and this is the way that it is discussed in our world. The way we talk about stress were in conversations. It's quite often I'm so stressed. I have a bad boss, something is happening to us. But this is actually a myth that's a stress. Or your boss may be a stress or somebody who's presenting a challenge to you. But the stress is your physical and mental rea...

ction to what you perceive is happening and that's a really important part of the sentence. It's your reaction to what you perceive is happening. Now. If you're in a burning building, you don't need to perceive it, it's happening. It's there's some physical things that happened to us. But the majority of what we're talking about really does depend on perception. So whenever our our perception doesn't meet our expectations, we feel stressed. I expected those words to look different on that page is I type them out so I feel stressed. They aren't perfect. But it has to do with expectation and perception. And sometimes we need to tease down to what our expectations are because they're totally unrealistic. So we've set ourselves up to be stressed. We're also stressed whenever our balance is off and by that, I mean, our our biological balance if our blood sugar is low, our bodies feel stress were designed to keep balance or what they call in biology homeostasis. We are beautiful, beautiful organisms that self heal that adapt when we give ourselves the space to do that. And we really haven't been doing that lately. So this is really a key point. Stress is our reaction to what's happening. And that's where we get our control. As I said earlier, our brains like models. We like to fit things into what we've already learned. We we start with rudimentary learning and then we fit the details in. So our brains do well with a model. So your brain has this huge job out there. Its job is to keep you safe. Your brain is monitoring. It's 100 billion cells sitting between your ears monitoring to see if you are safe. And it's taking in billions of bits of information all day long, Those bits of information coming from the outside world. What's the temperature? Is that car going to hit me? Those information coming from the inside world? I shouldn't have eaten gluten. I am hot. All of those different things are coming in, they're filtered through your brain and your perception. And there's a little area in there called the amygdala little red spot that labels whether something is dangerous to you or not. And that's huge. Is this dangerous? If it's dangerous and the label gets the it's dangerous stamp, then it's gonna start changing your focus. It's gonna start your emotions shifting in a different direction and they're going to be all these physical changes that we've been talking about, your guts gonna shut down, your mind's going to speed up all these different things are gonna happen. And when we trigger this danger motion over and over and over and over and over again. Day in and day out, we start compromising the normal performance that should be there. The normal repairing and adaptive behaviors that our bodies are programmed for. Get compromised. When we're spending all of our time reacting to danger. Does that make sense? We basically have to states, we have our away state. This is something dangerous. This person is toxic. This email is toxic. We have a retreat state. Remember back in grade school, they show you the pictures of the amoeba and the amoeba would go towards something or the amoeba blue blue away from something. We're not that different. We're going, we're deciding all day long if something should be a toured or in a way it's a lot like thumbs up in it or thumbs downing it. We've, you know, we've got sort of a facebook sign going on here which I just did backwards. So in our away state were closed, were clenched, were tight. We are not creative in that state because we're closed down. We don't have access to our full brain. Were very reactive. We might learn something immediately. I mean there is crisis learning that occurs has got a short circuit to your memory that if you're bitten by something, you probably are not going back toward that thing. Again, that's important memory. But other than that are learning in our memory isn't good in this state as opposed to when we're in an open state and we're curious and we're learning new things and we can process it into memory were much more positively biased and that's a much healthier state to be in. So we are humans and were amazing. But we are still creatures that have these two states of being that we flip in and out and we can be in different ones for different things at different times. So when this this reaction is triggered, It takes about 1400 chemical reactions. That just sounds exhausting, doesn't it? 1400 chemical reactions. That's an enormous amount of energy. So when we were talking about balancing energy And we've just spent 1400 chemical reactions on a nasty email that wasn't even really intended for us. We just wasted some energy, didn't we? So that's what I'd like to keep coming back to that, choosing how we spend it instead of spending it on this. Now sometimes were triggered into this and we didn't have any choice. Um and that's a good thing to that keeps us safe. It truly does. Have you ever wound up in the next lane of traffic because somebody cut you off and it takes a minute to even realize how you got there because you were bopping along, thinking about the report, you had to give or listening to the radio and all of a sudden you're in the next lane of traffic. Um This stuff saves you, it's a good, good thing and it saves you from the big stuff. It's the problem is it's the same reaction if it is that car cutting you off, that could have killed you as it is to this now, it may not be quite as many chemicals, but it's the little stuff day in and day out. It's like the chinese say death from 1000 paper cuts. It's the little stuff constantly draining us that's joined that so is stressed bad. I hope you've heard that is not, it saved you and you do need stress for the people who asked before. You do need stress to get on task. It is like many things in life, This is one of the few laws from psychology. This is the your godson curve and like many things in life it's a bell curve. Um if you have no challenge, you are bored. We've all had a boring job at some point or boring task within our own job. We tend to not do the boring tasks within our own job or if we're feeling stressed about the really stressful task, we'll go do the boring one to relieve ourselves to come back down the curb. But we're bored at this end of the curve. We don't have enough challenge. Then we start to get stimulated. Then we start to get a little more alert and focused, a little more creative. So people who are in a creative job do need some challenge. Does it need to be a deadline in a big stressor? Know their ways to find that too and find the shades of gray in this. You start to get more effective until you get to peak performance. This is where your state of flow would be. You've got the challenge is to get through what you need to get through and you feel empowered here because you feel like you've got the ability to cope with what the challenges so you can get to flow. You can get to your coolest state of creativity because you're not sitting there worried that you don't have what you need, you're in it, you're not worrying about it. Does that make sense? But beyond their, when the challenge starts to rise above whether you have the tying the skills, the resources, the authority when the challenge starts to rise above that, right? Well we start to fall down the curve and at first we lose our efficiency. We get less creative when we're stressed. Our world narrows. When I'm coaching people who are under stress, it's sort of interesting as as they calm down, they begin to be able to brainstorm more about what they can do in the situation when you're not calm, when you're freaking out, you can't see the solution and you start to lose your concentration. And we've all been around somebody who's you know, they think they're doing just fine and they're not. Now remember how the blood went from the frontal lobe down to the legs? Well, one of the jobs of the frontal lobe is to monitor you. So you don't know you're in this part of the curve, your co workers know your relationships. No, your best buddy might know that, you know, wow, you're not really on today, are you? So one of the problems with this whole stressed thing that our bodies do is it is kind of one size fits all, whether it's the big thing or the little thing.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Keys to Creating Strategies to Ease the Drain of Stress.pdf
Stress Is Optional Workbook Parts 1 and 2.pdf
Stress Is Optional Workbook Part 3.pdf
Apps Resource List.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

Shahinaz El Ramly
 

How do you write the video text and it function with the video at same pace, this is mooc, is mooc allowed outside coursera, this is so imp. for my courses. I want feedback.

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