Hello there, welcome back. It's Adam shore the heart guy. And in the last module we talked about managing your emotions. In this module, we're going to talk about how to manage stress. So we covered a little bit about the stress response from an emotional point of view. But now I'm going to take this in a lot more detail.

So let's look at the stress response and how it affects you. Now, our stress response is the same stress response that we've had since our days as cavemen. So back in the days when you may have been a caveman, you could have been sitting around the fire eating your dinner, and a Tyrannosaurus Rex may have come around the corner and wanting to join you for dinner in a Hannibal Lecter sort of way. Now, in that case, your body is designed to either fight for your life or to run your life. So the stress response kicks in Get this high adrenalin, your blood redirects to your heart and your periphery. You, you, you, you've got a higher immunity to pain, you're ready you're feeling naturally more resilient.

Because you have your life is in danger. So I'd probably suggest with the T rex you'd want to be running but they might be out to run you. So I can only imagine if you don't have that cave to run into it could be a problem. So whatever it is you do you Your body needs to be able to fight for your life or to run your life. So that is the origins of the stress response. You'll get decreased appetite, that's not even a factor.

You're more alert, you're ready to go. Now, in this day and age, our body our brain hasn't learned to tell the difference between a real threat to our life and a perceived threat. Which means if somebody calls you something that you don't like or Have an argument, we get the same stress response as if we're going to fight for our life or run for our life. So you can be set sitting at your laptop or your desktop, whatever it is. And if somebody had a go at you, then you may feel the urge to want to punch through the screen or even to throw your phone and smash something. If you've ever been in that last fight or flight at your body saying, I am ready to fight for my life or to run for my life.

And you're thinking about the same thing that somebody said will trigger this stress response continuously. So common symptoms for people who keep thinking about this, who are in this stress response, very common symptoms is your energy. Who do this throughout the day. Sometimes you feel like you're ready to go, and other times you're absolutely exhausted. This is because Your body's having to get ready to fight for your life and then it's turned down and there's no way to express it. So, you've got this dynamic going on.

And the other thing is sleeplessness, of course, you're going to be more alert when you're thinking about things that cause you stress. Because your body's preparing you to fight or run through your life, cause you can't sleep. If you're thinking about your boss, calling you lazy, or not appreciating what you're doing, or the argument you've just had with your kids or your partner. All of these things trigger that same stress response. Another aspect of the stress response is, you'll find your appetite going up and down. Because while you're stressed, you haven't you haven't got much of an appetite, but when you come down, you'll find that you might be binge eating.

So symptoms of people getting this caught in this cycle, is you can put on weight and that's because your body's having to adjust To this fighting for your life running for your life, and then the fallout when you come crashing back down at the end of it, and you've lost all of your energy. So it's important to understand the stress response and how it works. Now one thing with the human condition is that we are a paradoxical species. We all love certain things to be consistent in our life. Maybe you like to eat at a certain time, maybe you'd like to sleep at a certain time. Maybe you'd like to work at a certain time.

Maybe you'd like to know you've got a job. You like that consistency. You like to know that you you're in a happy and loving marriage, or or partnership with people. Maybe you love that consistency in your life. But there's also an aspect of our, our, our persona, where we like change as well. We like variety.

We like surprises as long as they're nice. prizes are not the sort of surprises that can throw us off balance. So the human condition is that we love consistency. But we also like surprises and change. And quite often the two aspects of these things that we like, don't always overlap, changes inevitable. And your ability to deal with change ultimately affects your ability to be resilient.

How another aspect of life is that we can sometimes take things for granted. And when we do that, there can be negative outcomes that come out of it. And let me give you an example from my from my a&e days from my accident and emergency emergency room days out we used to look after all sorts of patients, and we once got a patient in and she had advanced stage cancer. She'd made everybody Been into her cubicle cry break down in tears. And she'd been told by the doctors that she would have been dead three weeks earlier, but she wasn't. And she'd made everybody's life miserable, who walked into her room and they said, Adam, please will you go and deal with her.

So I went into the room and found this woman hunched over in the corner of the room with dark rings around her eyes and bloodshot eyes. She looked like the character for anyone that seen the Lord of the Rings of Gollum. And I walked in and I said what I did to most patients. Good afternoon. My name is Adam. I'll be looking after you today.

What name do you like to be called? And she looked round to me like this. And I suddenly got very evil looking, and I started to feel a little bit unsettled by this interaction. And she just launched into this tirade, questioning my motives. My, my mother's legitimacy, whether my dad actually existed or not, to have my competence, my, my entire life and my ability and even qualification for being there in front of her. And what she said was so vicious, it went on for probably about two minutes, but it seemed about 10.

And if ever you've been caught in one of those conversations, you know what I'm talking about. And I just felt this emotion goes through me, I felt myself getting incredibly stressed. And I was then at a point where I started to worry that I'd said something that was wrong, but all I done was introduced myself. And then I suddenly realized that she'd done this to everyone that had gone in there. And two of the loveliest girls that I've worked with had been in floods of tears, because she'd done the same to them. And I realized in that moment that Somebody had to stop this cycle.

So I matched her anger, and I matched her emotion. And I was just as vicious to her as she had been to me to the point of saying that two things were gonna happen within the next two days. The first thing that she would be dead and we would all be celebrating, for the first time on the ward would be celebrating somebody. And the second thing I told her was that I buy drinks for everyone in a pop. Now, that was a fairly cruel thing to say. But it was obviously the first thing that anyone had said to this woman that had given her an insight of how she was making other people feel.

And at that point, she broke down and she started to cry. And at that stage, I was able to get Closer to give her a hug. And I found out that 30 years earlier, she's had a conversation with her daughter and told her that if you marry that guy you just brought in then I'm disowning you. And she did. And she did. And she hadn't seen her daughter for 30 years.

Now, I managed to get her daughter there that day. I managed to bring her in to the room. through sheer luck, she was still at the same address, as she had been beforehand. Where it not for that I would never have been able to get married, but I did. And the two of them started crying. They started to hug each other.

And they realized that that day that they'd both been so incredibly stubborn that this woman had gone 30 years she didn't even get to know her grandchildren who were all grown up now. The youngest was 18. Our oldest was about 22 Free grandchildren and she'd missed them growing up because of stubbornness, because of stress, because the same things in the heat of the moment and then being too stubborn to go back and undo them to resolve them to make it up. So this is how the stress response can influence our decisions and our lives. And if you don't get used to dealing with your stress response, or knowing that your stress response is there, and, and, and sometimes holding in stuff that you're going to say, because again, we talked about high emotion, low intelligence. Have you ever said something when you're really stressed, that's come back to haunt you.

Repeatedly. be your partner might be your kids might be somebody at work that keeps reminding you at that time when you said this, when you did this, and you know, you can't even explain why you did it. He was highly emotional you did and stuff that you went on to regret. This is how stress works. Here's a piece of advice that I give to people to get around this place. You never know when the last time you're going to see someone is.

And we tend to get more angry and emotional, we're more freer with our emotions for the people that care the most, cuz nobody else is going to listen to us. So what I want you to do now is just write down five people in your life, that if they weren't here, that you would you would miss the most. Take time to do this exercise. Now, if you've done that exercise, you will now know the five people who you care the most about. And that's not always easy to see on a daily basis, especially if you're a parent, or you're a kid relationships between parents and children are often strained because we bring up so much of each other stuff. So I want you now to write down some positive things.

Write down a message. Now you don't even have to say it, or send it, write down a letter, leave something, leave something there that if anything happened to you, that these positive messages would be passed on to the people that you know the most that you care about the most. It could be email, it might be a video that you record, you give the memory stick to somebody and say, if anything happens to me, please give this to them. It could be a letter, leave it somewhere, say. Make sure that your last memories for the people that you love are positive ones, because I've seen the results of those that don't. So that's how stress works.

That's how we sometimes say and do things where we act out of character. And if that's you, it's time to start looking At least relationships and thinking, what can we do to resolve that? And in the next video, we're going to look about how to solve problems. And I look forward to connecting with you in that video.