Introduction Of Podcast
Stress is one of the key enablers for some of the leading chronic diseases in the world. The reality is we cannot have a 100% stress free life, but we can definitely manage it better. To tell us how, we are joined by Elisha Goldstein in this episode. Elisha helps us equip with multiple tools for us to manage our stress more efficiently. Hop on to know more.
Timestamps
(00:00 – 01:37) – Introduction
(01:56 – 07:12) – Elisha’s Journey Into Mindfulness
(07:20 – 12:30) – Importance Of Change
(13:05 – 21:39) – Biological Definition Of Stress
(21:40 – 28:58) – Is Anger Too A Form Of Energy?
(29:12 – 33:25) – Stress Showing On Biomarkers
(33:31 – 37:58) – How Can We Handle Stress Better?
Key Takeaways – Transcripts
Intro (Mohit): When you talk about stress and especially stress in the modern era, there are several triggers, right? Right from work stress to stress caused due to problems in personal life. This also in turn has a cascading effect on your physical health, your productivity and takes it toll on your emotional health as well. Right from low self esteem, insecurity issues, anxiety, depression, to name a few. But is there a solution to this? Can we manage this in a much better way? To help us simplify this, we are joined by Elisha Goldstein. Elisha is the founder of Mindful Living Collective. He is a clinical psychologist, speaker and author of numerous best selling books. Elisha’s life has been pretty interesting having indulged in a lot of booze and drug-fuelled parties. Early into his career. Stress had a major role to play leading to this lifestyle, but he had had it enough and took a complete 180 somewhere down the line. We understand from him that is this developing character arc really common in people? Do we really need to indulge in unhealthy ways for the realization to occur? We then understand from Elisha what stress really is and how does one feel stressed. He outlines the different ways in which people can handle stress in a better way. Stress plays a detrimental role in your health, but does it also affect our glucose levels? Elisha explains it all. Lastly, we’ll ask Elisha the one thing people can do every day to manage stress more efficiently. Let’s hear more from Elisha now.
(Mohit): Hi Elisha, great to have you here. Really it’s such a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
(Elisha): I love to be here. Thanks for having me.
Question (Mohit): Really cool. I think since the last time I think we’ve done some work on the Ultrahuman platform. Really enjoyed. Before we actually begin, would love to really understand from your side, how did you get here? Like what’s your background story around? How did you get into this journey of mindfulness and essentially the work that you’re doing right now?
Answer (Elisha): Yeah, my story is similar to a lot of people’s stories. I think for me, I found this out of a deep need. There was a time in my life when I was working in San Francisco during the dot com boom in the early part of this century or the late part of the last century. And I was working really hard in telecom sales, selling people their data lines and the corporate world. And at the same time I was playing a whole lot harder. So I was on my off hours or sometimes my on hours. I was really abusing my mind and body with drugs and alcohol. It was a high level party atmosphere there and I just felt really lost. And so I was seeking, I was seeking like there has to be something more. There has to be something that can help ground me. There has to be something that can give me a sense of personal control in my life as a greater sense of meaning. And I was reading stuff and I was like reading books and I was trying to find the answer. And at some point I got to a point where I was in the south of Market Street for those who are familiar with San Francisco. And I told my friends that if you ever catch me with this guy who is up days at a time like he was to me, like the epitome of someone who was extremely lost in his life and if you ever catch me with this guy, you know, I’ve hit the bottom of the barrel and, you know, come come save me if anything. And so there I was. I was with him. And so I woke up in that moment and just said, this is it. I’m at the absolute bottom of my life right now. And I took a chance and just left and walked back to my house because you can do that in San Francisco. And eventually my family had an intervention with me and I went away to an adult retreat center. And it was there that I got in touch with a guy who introduced me to more the experience of mindfulness. I would say he did it through eating. And for those who are listening right now, this is a great entryway to really experiencing mindfulness in its essence with something you do every day. Anyway, so for me, he introduced me to an orange and he said, why don’t you just entertain me and let’s eat this orange in this particular way. And I kind of thought at the time he was a little crazy and I was like, this isn’t going to be for me. And so he had me kind of look at it and see if I was seeing anything different and had me peel back the skin. And I remember in that moment like the zest popping up in front of my eyes, something I hadn’t really seen before because typically I’m not probably paying attention. I’m just like eating whatever is in front of me. And then he had me look at the meat of the orange, the veins, the colors. And I’d never seen the intricate nature of the veins in an orange. And then he had me taste it and it just exploded in my mouth. And he said, well, how was that? And I’m like, that was probably the best orange I’d ever tasted in my life. He said, how does your body feel? And for the first time in a long time, I said, It feels really relaxed. And he said, what would the days, weeks and months it’d be like if you had more of this? And I said, I would love it. Sign me up. How do I get more of this? This is incredible. And then for the month, I felt like I was flying high, like immersed in this self of reflective inquiry and space, of course, because I was outside of my daily life too. And so then I go back to my corporate world feeling like I’m enlightened and saved in so many ways. And then it took me two weeks to fall back into my old habits. And so that told me something really important. What that told me, Mohit, was that the people and environments we surround ourselves with and we can get smarter about this, really make a big impact on our brains, implicit decision making to move in the direction of the things we want to do in our lives, the way we want to live in our lives. And that’s really important to pay attention to. So a seed was planted, though, regardless. And I ended up going back to graduate school eventually to support myself and wanting to support other people in a more meaningful life for me and for others. And that’s when I got more in touch with a study of mindfulness more formally. I did my own research around it, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology. I ended up co-authoriing a book, the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Workbook, with a mentor of mine named Bob Stahl. And then eventually that unfolded into more books that now affect Uncovering Happiness programs, leading global programs like Uncover the Power within my personal coaching program, getting in touch with wonderful people like you at Ultrahuman and who are doing incredible work right now and just kind of proliferating this ability of being, of service to raise our sense of insight and awareness and consciousness individually and collectively, in the world.
Question (Mohit): Well, this is really fascinating. Almost reminds me of the Newton’s Apple story, right? that this is the discovery of mindfulness to looking at an orange instead of an apple. And just by the power of observation, just by observing how you do mundane everyday things, how you can actually just have a better experience of life, much deeper immersive, much way more immersive experience of life. And he also said another interesting thing, which is like you need to surround yourself with the right people and the right environment. How does that go for a lot of people? Because I think what a lot of people end up doing is almost by their midlife, they end up deciding that this is their environment and sometimes it’s not ideal for the type of life that they want to live. How does that go about? Does it really need a change element in their life? Like this was really a change element for you, for sure, right? Discovering that this was the rock bottom. What are some of the things that you have seen in people in their lives?
Answer (Elisha): Yeah. People right now currently are struggling with a much greater increase of anxiety, and there’s so much happening in the world right now, aside from a couple of last couple of years of the pandemic and the wars that are going on all over the world. And the one that’s most prominently in the news is Russia and Ukraine and what’s going to happen over there, and that affects the global economy for so many. And you know, here in Los Angeles, I just came across the headlines today that we’re in a historic water shortage right now. People are struggling in their personal lives with their own personal losses that they’re experiencing or job changes and concerns about the future of their own finances. And so there’s a lot of things happening within our individual human psyches and our collective psyches. And when you look at the statistics right now, you see that there is a general spike in anxiety and depression and anybody that has experienced past trauma in their lives that plays on that, so they get a resurgence of their trauma that’s there, which really ultimately leads to a really frayed nervous system. So we’re like walking around as individuals with these frayed nervous systems. And so what we need to do is recognize that and recognize that while we’re more than our biology, our biology and our physiology really impacts our perception and our mood and that impacts our relationships, which feeds back again, back to our sense of safety or security. And so we need to learn how to take back control of our minds so that we can learn how to relate to our nervous systems differently, recognizing the fraying that’s there and be able to move towards a more skilful relationship to it so that we can soothe it more as we need to come back into a state of feeling more grounded and balanced in the midst of the chaos that’s here and that’s correlated with feeling more resilient. It’s a natural antidepressant, it’s a natural anti anxiety. We can learn how to be in this way in our daily life even within all that’s happening right now. And it sure helps, Mohit, to have people around us, and this is the point that you were noting within your question. It sure helps to have people around us that are also supportive of that for us or are also doing that same thing. So they’re reminding us that oh hey, this is the way I want to live. But the reality is we have a whole lot of people around us and a culture around us. For the most part, many of us do anyway. That doesn’t remind us of living in this way that actually plays and prays upon our nervous system’s inflammation because it knows that that’s going to get us to pay attention to their sources, their news, their commercials, their what have you, so that they can increase their own economy. And so we have to again recognize that that’s the river that we’re swimming in and that’s the current that’s here. But we don’t have to just take a ride on the current of that river. We can also recognize that OK, this is the way it is I’m going to take a moment and stand in this river and recognize the current and see it, see all of everything floating by and I’m going to really take care of myself in the midst of it because I have the power to do that. And it starts with practices within myself that can support that. I can learn how to train my brain to calm down, to create more ease, to focus more on what matters. I can learn to organize my environment in a particular way like the people I made contact with more specifically, who are more supportive and encouraging of my own health and wellbeing also whether that’s just even exercising more. Like I know in Ultrahuman there’s a big focus on exercise and strength training and things like that which is so wonderful. It’s a foundation. That’s what I like about your app is that it really integrates the mind and body in a skillful way and so there it is. We have the ability to train that sense of personal control.
Question (Mohit): Well, I love the analogy that you made which is around it being a river and it’s really fascinating that when you visualize it as a river you can panic around this river of anxiety and stress and all that’s happening in the world. Or you actually learn to swim like the way you said, maybe take a moment inside the river and figure out what’s really happening and then you take a hold of your breath and basically figure out like this is the way to navigate the river. That’s really, really fascinating because I’ll connect these two experiences, right? The first experience that you mentioned was of eating an orange first time ever in a very very different way and swimming through the river mindlessly it’s almost the same, right? Once you know how to swim, it becomes sort of like your muscle memory. Similarly when potentially you know how to observe, everything sort of like becomes more beautiful, just much more magnified. And double clicking a little bit on what you also said in terms of, let’s say all that’s happening in the world, right? So there is a lot of anxiety and stress all around us and it looks like there’s no end to it right now. At least given the fact that there’s one thing after the other that’s actually happening. Probably the best ways to build your own armor and maybe figure out more sustainable way to live your life so that you actually don’t end up being more stressed and anxious about these things. So double clicking a little bit on like what are some of these let’s even talk about stress specifically, let’s take that as an example. First of all, what’s stress biologically? What does it really mean? How do people feel stressed? Because everybody talks about stress but how do you understand that this is how you can feel stress? Or is there a sort of like a specific way in which you can identify that this is stress and maybe some of the ways in which people can actually figure out their way around living more or handling their stress in a better way. Sure.
Answer (Elisha): Yeah. First of all, I just want to acknowledge the metaphor you use around double clicking on something. I haven’t heard that. And I thought, that’s so cool, let’s double click on that because it’s a technology metaphor and I think that’s really cool to use that as like, let’s focus on this.
(Mohit): It’s a boomer terminology. I think most of us don’t double click right now, but I think maybe 20 years back, double clicking was then.
(Elisha): Yeah, I love that. Yeah. So stress is a form of energy. That’s all. And it’s a form of energy in our body, and it can be used for good. It’s energy that creates strength. It creates motivation. It helps us move forward towards something. It’s putting our foot on the pedal a little bit. But what happens is when the stress gets mixed with uncertainty or the perception of the inability to accomplish some expectation or there’s just too many tabs open at once in our mind, to use the technology metaphor, that’s when our body starts going into this fight or flight or freeze mode and we don’t have anywhere to go with it. So the energy kind of compiles on ourselves, and it can turn into overwhelm, which makes it harder to focus on things or to feel like we can actually do it. So we get more of a sense that we can’t actually do this thing, which leads to this physiological overwhelm, which can lead to anxiety, which is the sense of fear and uncertainty together. And ultimately it can create cellular inflammation in our body as the cortisol continues to surge. And that could over time, if that’s chronic, that can lead to disease in our body and certainly disease in our minds and body. But like, chronically over time has been shown to lead to disease. So it’s not too much stress over time is not good for us physically or mentally. So the first intervention to me is to be on the lookout for what does stress means? You want to ask yourself if you’re listening to this right now, how do I know I’m stressed? So when we talk about stress, we typically talk about it when we say, are you stressed? We typically talk about it in the form of something that’s a negative in some way. What we mean is when we say, are you stressed? Has it reached the breaking point of too much? It’s not a balanced stress. It’s not a motivating form of stress. It’s not positive stress. It’s more negative stress. And so the question is for you personally, because it’s not a one-size-fit- sall as much as people like to explain it like that, you want to ask yourself, how do I know that I’m stressed? When I ask people that question? Or when I ask myself that question, I say, okay, so I noticed it. The first thing my first response is going to be, I notice my heart rate is really up. I’ve noticed I’m breathing from almost my neck, not even my chest, but more my neck almost. And I noticed my shoulders are really tense or my stomach is beginning to tighten or turn. We’re recognizing it physiologically because it’s a physiological response. The benefit of recognizing it physiologically versus some people who are really, really in their head, they say, I don’t know, I just feel it in my head, which is then, okay, so at least we feel it physically in our heads. But if you actually started to connect more to your body, you’ll see it has an impact on the entire body. Why is that? Because our brain is part of the nervous system. So our brain is connected to the connection of it and the nervous system, the nerves are connected and wrapped all around our spine and they go throughout our arms and hands and fingers. And so we feel these things all throughout our body. We feel this stress all throughout our body. The intervention, the simple intervention. This is something that I speak about in my program with Ultrahuman and I speak about in my personal coaching program – Uncover the Power Within, is just to be on the lookout for after you answer that question, how do I know I’m stressed? And you start to recognize the symptoms in your body around it just to be on the lookout for where and when is your body bracing in the day. That’s a sign that stress is really there. And then more than negative stress, typically. And so then once you recognize that now you’re stepping into a space between stimulus and response where there’s more choice, possibility and freedom. And in that space of awareness with that choice, you can say, oh, my shoulders are tensing, oh, I’m breathing from my neck. Oh, I’m tensing in my back. I’m going to choose to allow that to soften now. So rather than saying like, let me battle the stress in my head, let me battle the thoughts about why I’m worrying so much, or what am I stressed about, or before you even do any of that, you want to balance out the activity in your brain. And the way to do that is by paying attention to your body and by noticing where the tension is. And you might soften it or choose to stretch that part of your body out so you can loosen that air of your body. And then what’s going to happen is the activity in your brain is going to start balancing out. Then once you have a more balanced out, more blood flow, more evenly flowing throughout your brain, you can say, all right, so what was I stressed about after all? Well, there’s just a lot going on right now. It’s just like it feels like there’s too much going on. All right, so then the question is now within the space of awareness, I can ask the question like, okay, so what am I needing right now? And you might take 15 minutes out or 20 minutes out, and if you don’t do this already and you’re in business or you’re just in your daily life, you don’t take a little sliver of time out every week at least to just reflect on your life like, how am I doing? Where are the stressors right now? Where are my accomplishments right now? How are things going? What do I want to do going forward? That is an incredibly important practice to do. It’s called having a proactive strategy for your attention and your life. And it’s very important. It can really create a great sense of personal control and agency in doing something like that. And so in this case, you’re just saying like, okay, so what am I needing right now? Maybe I’m needing to exercise. Maybe I’m needing if we’re talking about the Ultrahman now, maybe I’m needing to start coordinating some more movement and just checking out how I’m doing more regularly. Or maybe I’m needing to step into a state of I need to make a little space for meditation. Or maybe I need to just go outside and get some sunshine on my face. Or maybe I need to contact a friend right now. Or maybe I need help. Maybe I need to get some therapy, maybe need some coaching because I really don’t know what I’m doing in my work. Or maybe I’m needing, if you can, a personal trainer because it’s just not working. Need I some human support in getting this exercise plan going. We get a lot of insights. We get opportunities to make new choices when we recognize where the stresses in our bodies and we begin to soften or loosen it. We have so much more of our faculty, of our mind and brain available to us and it’s very simple to do. But that’s to me what stress is. And that’s a very easy remediation to put the control back into our minds and our lives.
Question (Mohit): Wow, so many amazing things there. I think probably this is one of the first times I’ve ever heard stress being a form of energy that really gives it a positive twist to stress, to be honest. And the first time I probably heard it for something like this was actually for anger. Like saying that, yes, anger is a form of misdirected energy and it can help you change things, but probably if you don’t use it the right way, you’re going to sort of like get consumed in it. So I think the other interesting thing that you mentioned really cool is the fact that, because stress is both neurological and also biological, it’s like sort of like interconnected and probably because the vagus nerve going through your spine and like interconnecting your body. You feel it biologically as much as you feel it psychologically. There is going to be a physiological response. And the way I understand this is you can control your physiological response. Given that your neurological response affects the physiological response, it would work the other way around as well. Your physiological response, if you can understand and learn and control all these biological factors around breathing around, let’s say, looking at your shoulder tension, you can potentially understand a little bit about your psychology, control a little bit about control some of these stressful factors. But that’s a really cool way to think through things, through some of these problems, right? Every problem has a connected butterfly effect, and if you can understand the butterfly effect and control it, we’d be better equipped to handle the problem as well. Does that apply to most neurological and physiological things that happen to people?
Answer (Elisha): Just like you said, the simplest way to keep it for everyone is that, yes, everything is connected, and one thing impacts another thing in both in all directions. So you talk about physiology and neurology and just little kind of note around the anger piece just to kind of back up to that for a second. So anger, to me, is not misdirected energy. Anger is another form of energy. It’s an emotion. It’s energy in motion. And the reason it’s not misdirected is because anger can be used quite constructively, so it can be directed in one way or another. It can be directed well or misdirected, but on its own, there’s no judgment around it. It’s just a form of energy. It’s an energy in motion. I like to think of emotions, like if you put e-motion, it’s energy in motion. And so it’s just another emotion, and there’s no judgment. It’s a human experience, and sometimes it can be used for good, and sometimes it can be toward detriment. It’s just all about how we engage it and for the stress, it’s all connected. So, you know, we can and I want to include our thoughts in here for a second too, so our thoughts can impact how we entertain our thoughts. Like, for example, if we’re worrying a lot or if we’re hating our pain and wishing it away, or if there’s a part of ourself that we hate and we wish we didn’t have this part of ourselves. Like the part of ourselves that makes mistakes in front of people and we get to feel embarrassed if we hate that part of ourselves. All of these create negative stress on our body physiologically. So these types of thinking and beliefs really impact our physiology. And you can see it in people. You see them walking around. You see them walking around hunched over. You can see people whose kind of shoulders are turned inward or their faces are torted or something like that. It really impacts the way we hold ourselves physically. And then if you practice and repeat that over time, you start to form your body in a particular way. It’s really fascinating. And so you could see it with other people who are walking quite differently, where their chests are slightly elevated and there’s more of an ease around their face and, you know, their thoughts are a little bit different or they’ve been working with their mind differently. Either way, it could be nature or nurture or a little both. So with the point is here is that by changing our physiology, we can change the way the activity in our mind. Like, for example, exercise has been shown, as you likely know, to be really wonderful for mood. And so that mood means we’re perceiving things differently, we’re thinking differently and then perceiving things differently. And thinking differently is really great for our physiology as well. And so we use these words to try and describe things like thinking and physiology and neurology and our brain. But really it’s all the same. It’s all connected. We only see it as disconnected because we’re using language to try and describe it. But it all impacts, it’s all interconnected as one. But we’re dissecting it to try and understand how does this impact that and how does this impact that. But yes, being able to that’s why meditation helps you bring more insight into how you’re thinking, your relationship with your body, your relationship with your emotions. And so you learn how to set at least with mindfulness meditation, you learn how to settle into and connect more with that space of awareness. Well, you’re not tangled up in the thoughts or the sensations in your body or your physiology. You’re more just witnessing this. So you can learn and have the personal control to say, well, how do I want to relate to a tense chest or a stomach that is turning, or shoulders that are tightening? Or how do I relate to this worrying in my mind that’s happening? Or this part of me that’s hating this other part of me, or this part of me that’s hating the pain? How do I want to relate to this? How can I learn to dissolve that or not hold onto it so tightly? And as I learned how to do that, my body relaxes. Interesting. Or as I begin to relax my body, the intensity of those thoughts aren’t as intense. Interesting. We can really see how they’re like, levers that pull the other thing as we do that.
(Mohit): I love this simplification that you made, which is basically language, essentially makes us sort of like divide these things into different objective systems. And actually, I would confess that when we work with, let’s say, a medical doctor or sports scientists, it’s much easier to sort of like, understand the system and break it down. Though most of the biological effects are actually interconnected, most of the biological effects are just like human physiology. Everything actually affects the other thing. And it could be understood in a much better way if people understand this as one system and not like five different systems working together. But I love the way you mentioned that, especially emotion, energy and motion thing. It definitely helps me visualize emotions in a much more positive way, in a much more objective way rather. And yeah, I think the fact that you mentioned that how it is related to everything else. One of the things that came to my mind was like process like eating, or let’s say food in this case, right? What we have seen with the Ultrahuman Cyborg, the glucose monitoring integration on the platform is that a lot of what we feel psychologically, let’s say it’s like a stress and anxiety shows up in a biomarker like glucose and it’s almost unreal. Like just a couple of days back, I was listening to somebody, one of the users of the platform, telling us that the amount of glucose spike that I had for a bagel versus getting stuck in a traffic jam is almost the same. It’s that significant. So yeah, it’s quite fascinating that ways.
(Elisha): Yeah, that’s really interesting. You start to see the impacts of how different things impact us or how different things can impact us in the same way. It gives you more of, in some ways a meta awareness of the more insight we have, the more choices we have on how do I want to adjust my life. Maybe there’s some things I’m doing that I don’t even realize are automatic or not good for me. And so once I have some insight into it and we can get insight by just paying attention to our own present moment experience, we can get insight by understanding how our nutrition impacts our body and impacts our mood. We can get insight in a variety of ways. And to me that all falls under the umbrella of mindfulness as a general umbrella, as this ability. When we talk about mindfulness as a lifestyle, mindfulness is about being trying to be aware in the various facets of our life, about how interactions work, how cause and effect works. Everything works of cause and effect. Everything in the universe works of cause and effect. To really simplify and boil it down just to that. And so we’re looking at it if I do this, what’s the impact of that? I do this, what’s the impact of that? And then the interesting thing to think about Mohit is the difference between intention and impact. So my intention is to really support myself by eating by juicing every morning and having and I heard juice is really good for me, celery juice is really good for me. So I drink a litre of celery juice every morning. But the impact is I’m on the toilet all day. So the question then is that my intention is good, but is the impact good? So we have a lot of things that are marketed to us as this is great for everyone. And the reality is we have to have a very curious mindset. Nothing’s a one-size-fits-all. So we want to have a curious mindset and say, okay, so the intention is for this to be good for me. What’s the impact? What am I noticing? And maybe I’m really noticing that it’s not about drinking as much juice as I want. What I really start to learn is this much juice feels really good but after that it starts to have a deteriorating impact on me. So we learn as we go. And so one of the important mindsets to have to any of this, whether it’s your exercise, strength training or meditation or mind training, is to have a growth mindset around it. Have a mindset of curiosity and experimentation because ultimately you’re watching like a scientist and you’re saying how does this impact me? Like is this supportive for me? And then what doses does this work for me? There it is. We want to kind of have that type of mindset and approach to any of this stuff.
Question (Mohit): Just blown away by the insight. I think curiosity is definitely one of the best tools that you can inculcate in your life given the fact that a curious mind is often maybe it’s not the most relaxed or I don’t think it’s in the same dimension potentially. Curiosity is a superpower that a lot of us can use to observe things in a much better way. But Elisha, this has been really insightful and while I was taking notes during our conversation, one thing that emerged throughout the conversation was how you actually simplified everything and basically it drove it down to the most abstract, simplest meaning of how you can understand things. And with that I would love for you to for listeners what is one of the most simplest things that they could do to understand the stress or maybe like handle stress in a better way?
Answer (Elisha): Maybe that one simple thing that you can do every day that you can remember right now. So I’m a big fan of repetition. Repetition gets a bad rap in our culture, different learning cultures. People think that they hear something once and they should get it and if they don’t it hasn’t actually had a double-edged sword here. People think that when they hear something, they know it meaning like if they hear it again, that’s not new to me, I’m just hearing the same thing again. Click. I’m going to go to the next channel or the next podcast or the next thing. But really it hasn’t really sunk in until you’re actively and implicitly doing something in your daily life, you haven’t gotten it yet. And so repetition is so important because the reality, what that does is that continues to kick things top of mind for you. Even stuff you know about before. Sometimes I speak on a podcast or in an audience or whatever and I say I’m probably saying something you already know, but hopefully I’m just bringing it top of mind, trying to alleviate that experts mind that gets in everyone’s way. So I’m going to repeat something here that I said earlier in this podcast that I think is a really important point that I want you to get. That’s probably the simplest way to mediate stress in your life and take back control over your mind in your life. And I’ll say again, this is something that I teach in the Ultrahuman course that I have here. It’s also something that I bring right to the forefront in my personal coaching program called Uncover the Power Within. And this is around the body. So in its simplest thing, if there’s one thing you take away from today from just listening to this, it’s to be on the lookout for where there’s any holding or tension in your body that is telling you that there’s some kind of stress response activated. And I would pay particular attention to your face because we hold stress in our face and oftentimes we’re not really aware of it because that’s just where we’re viewing everything from. And so your cheeks, your jaw, your tongue, particular attention there, but also just throughout your body. And if you notice any holding or tension, that’s a moment to celebrate. It’s not a bad thing, that’s a great thing because now you have this awareness. Now you’re in that space between stimulus and response. Now you have a sense of personal control and choice. So choose to actively soften that area of your body. Choose to actively stretch out that area of your body. Choose to actively massage that area of your body that is directly impacting your brain and the activity in your brain and the overwhelm and worry and the stuckness that it’s in that’s activating the stress response. So we’re engaging our bodies as the simplest form of intervention. So I’d say that’s the key thing. The second thing is to take to heart that repetition is probably one of the most important things that nature has shown us that grows things. Repetition of watering a plant, repetition of exercising and engaging a muscle, grows a muscle. Repetition creates learning. So repeat this every day. Every day. Just be on the lookout for where your body is tensing or holding and see if you can expand or soften or stretch out or massage or engage your mind through your body as the most important initial intervention. Just to keep it very simple. There’s a number of other things we can do in engaging our thoughts and to learn how to grow from this place. But this is the baseline place to have really great impact in the simplest form and then we can build from there. But I would say that would be the simplest takeaway that I would suggest here. And then to drop the question in after you do that, just to layer this into another place, which is just like, what do I need right now? And so, again, your body may need to move, it may need to exercise. You might have been sitting a long time during the day and you’re not gotten out. You might need to connect with a friend, you might need to get some sunshine on your face. You might need to any of these things. What do I need? Or I might need to sit in meditation, I might need just to relax. I might need to just take a break. What do I need? And just ask yourself that question and see what your mind comes up with.
(Mohit): Well, Elisha, I have no words for this, but it’s been such a pleasure. I certainly learned a lot myself as well, and I’m sure that I think our listeners here did learn a lot of concepts. New concepts were also a better way to absorb it, right? Which is basically figure out the simplest thing. And you also summarized it for them really well, and that’s my biggest takeaway as well. I think, for our listeners, another thing to notice is for them to understand is that you can check out Elisha’s program on the Ultrahuman app, so don’t miss that. And from Ultrahuman team, we would love to really thank you, Elisha, for being here and it’s been such a pleasure and for you to do the session with us. And it’s been such a pleasure and amazing hearing you all the way along. So thanks a ton and really, really appreciate you being here.
(Elisha): Thank you. And thanks for all you do Mohit to bring more strength and healing to the world.
(Mohit): Thank you, Elisha.
Outro (Mohit): There might be different triggers of stress for everyone, but what is common, it does affect our health for the bad, and managing it becomes extremely critical, as otherwise it will lead to chronic illnesses that we should really be avoiding. I hope this episode was insightful for you and you are now equipped with a better sense of managing stress than you were before listening to this episode. If you liked what you gained from this, please share the Ultrahuman Podcast with your friends and family. Help them take proper measures for an efficient stress management. I’ll see you soon with the next episode.
