The #1 Stress Management Tool You’re Probably Overlooking (Personal Development Wisdom Snippets) | #605

[Agi Keramidas]
Welcome to Personal Development Mastery Podcast and this is another snippet of wisdom where I select my favourite, most insightful moments from previous episodes. Let's dive right in.

[Mark Gray]
But yeah, I do have like a holistic, that whole approach to my coaching. I work with a lot of very successful people and with that success usually comes high stress. Now, one of the first things I teach my clients and it's not a, it's not like actionable steps or it's not a specific like strategy.

It's just having the ability to actually recognise that you're stressed. So if you are in a perpetual state of being stressed, it's all you know. Okay.

And if you are running these, if you're, if you're running big businesses, or you're just trying to fend for your family and you're just stressed all the time is that you always have that constant state of stress, but you do need to recognise when you have moments that maybe you're more stressed and you need to be able to recognise like, okay, I'm stressed a bit more than normal. It's like, why is that? And then you can give yourself a little bit of a, a little bit of almost like breathing room or I'm not going to say not an excuse, sorry, but like a reason for why you're feeling that way.

And it's like, maybe I had a big project I had to get done. And that's why my stress was higher. It's like, why was I a bit more annoyed with my spouse or my patients was less for my kids.

And it's because you had higher stress. So that's one of the first things I just try to make people aware of is having the ability to actually recognise when you're stressed is super important. Because then once you recognise it, and you're aware, then you can do something about it.

Whereas if you just go around with your head in the clouds, almost, and you just know, you just think that's how I feel all the time. That's just who I am, then you won't do anything about it. So you have to be aware, so then you can do something.

And then when it comes to just kind of managing stress, like just personally speaking, what I do with my clients is, it's obviously all dependent on the individual. But there's a load of different practises or kind of strategies. The number one stress management tool, I advise to all clients is sleep.

And it's as simple as that. And because it Yeah, you probably knew that was coming and people that are listening probably knew that as well. And it's, I'll keep saying it to the cows come home.

It's just that's how important it is. And like besides some of the specifics I get into with like, obviously, my training and like, fixing injuries, where most people wouldn't know what I'm doing, or what I talked about, if I was talking about specific muscles, they're like, what is that? Most of the stuff I talk about is very simple.

And it's what most coaches talk about as well. It's very simple things, just that we repeat them a lot, because they're the things that work. So things like if you want to lose body, if you want to lose weight, eating a calorie deficit, if you want to gain muscle, eat enough protein and lift weights, if you want to manage your stress better, get enough sleep.

It's just one of the tools, because the flip side of that is then if you don't sleep enough, you end up becoming more stressed. And if you're stressed, you actually can find it quite hard to get to sleep. So it's a bit of a vicious cycle.

But sleep in itself, just like exercising, just like managing your stress, and maybe just like having the skills of proper nutrition and that sort of stuff, sleep is a skill. And that's something I tried to make my clients aware of and educate is that if you like you have to be good at sleeping, some people are great sleepers, we've all heard that as like, oh, they're a great sleeper, they can fall asleep in one minute. And as babies, we can sleep all the time.

As we get older, a lot of us lose that skill. And it's because we're busy doing stuff. It's like, we spend our teens up playing Xbox.

So what God knows time in the in the evening, in the night, sorry, never hit our teens and early 20s. We go out drinking and partying that sort of stuff. I'm just generally speaking.

So sleep becomes less and less of a priority. So it's very easy for people to slip out of that skill. And, but it's much easier to have that skill if it's a priority.

So that's the issue a lot of people especially in this space we're talking about is they don't have they don't place that value on sleep. And if you don't place the value in something, you don't prioritise it. So it's the same way as weight training.

If you are weight training, or if you have value on weight training, you'll do it because you're doing it because you want to be as strong as possible, you want to be able to run when you're 80, whatever it is, you prioritise that you value it. Sleep is the exact same. So yeah, if you can get your seven, eight hours sleep, that will have a massive impact on your stress levels, because you're going to wake up your mind will be clearer, you'll have more energy.

So what does that do? It with much greater vigour and you're, you're energised, you're more productive, your cognitive function is better. And that just all starts from sleep.

So I will say, sleep is like the foundation upon which everything else is built on. And if you don't have that foundation, everything else is just a little bit shaky. And it's, yeah, it's, it's as simple as that.

That's, that's, it's the bread and butter of your health.

[Agi Keramidas]
If you enjoy listening and appreciate what we're doing here, the quick, simple favour I'm asking of you is to click the subscribe button. Until next time, stand out, don't fit in.