Nourish yourself to reduce your stressability: the fundamentals (5 min)
This article is part of Dare Be's Leadership Handbook, a guide to help people lead with impact and heart.
This article is written to follow “Reduce your stress - identify your stressors,” which goes over the fundamentals of stress and how to start addressing external stressors in your life. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading that article first, then moving on to this one.
Here, we will examine stressability, or our internal capacity to deal with external stressors. Plus, the nourishment practices I’ll go over below will not only help with stress; they will also build your self-confidence and self-esteem.
Let’s jump into it.
Stressability: nature versus nurture
Stressability is part wiring and part personal history. In other words, it’s a little bit of nature and a little bit of nurture.
Changing your fundamental nature is, of course, a difficult task. Some people who have had life-changing and/or near-death experiences seem to have succeeded, reporting a different relationship with stressors and a higher appreciation of life in general.
These people have rewired their brains in a way that is naturally more stress resistant — and good for them! However, this hasn’t happened to me, and I don’t want to count on it. In either case, I won’t be jumping off cliffs any time soon in an attempt to force my brain to look on the bright side.
So, we’ll focus on the “nurture” side of things, in order to take some control over the situation and work to reduce stressability. Thankfully, that is possible by trying the practices suggested below.
Keep in mind that not every practice described below will work for you. You are coming in with a unique set of stress triggers and personal experiences, which will make some techniques more effective than others. So experiment with these practices and create the optimal personalised cocktail of resilience for you!
Let’s get into it. I’ve included six nourishment practices, as well as how much time they take to complete, plus information as to why each is so important.
Optimise your sleep
When we are well rested, our nervous system is more resilient. Quality sleep plays a huge role in this.
Here are the best practices I have come across to wake up feeling energised and ready to deal with life’s difficulties:
Don’t drink coffee in the afternoon. Caffeine has a half life of 10-12 hours in most people. This means that when you drink an espresso at 2pm, at midnight there’s still caffeine from half of that espresso zooming through your bloodstream. Personally, I cut out coffee completely and now find that I’m actually less tired than when I had 2-3 cups a day.
Reduce your alcohol consumption. Alcohol may help you fall asleep in the short term, but it delays your entrance into a deep-sleep state, which is when we truly recover and rest. Avoid it if you want to be more relaxed the following day.
Only use the bed for sleeping. Don’t work in your bed, and when you find that you’re wide awake in the middle of the night, get up. Instead of tossing and turning for hours, sit somewhere comfortable and read a book (ideally nothing with a screen!). When you feel tired again, go back to bed. This has worked well for me, and I have been surprised by how energised I am the following day.
No screens before bed. You’ve likely seen this advice again and again, and that’s because it works. Screens and blue light frequently over-stimulate your brain and keep you awake. Some people even find it helpful to ban their phones from their bedrooms altogether.
Get some sunlight as soon as you wake up. Exposing yourself to direct natural sunlight or turning powerful lights on first thing in the morning sets your internal circadian rhythm. This will then send a signal at the end of the day that it is time to sleep.
Use blackout curtains. As important as it is to get light first thing in the morning, it is also important to be in complete darkness as you sleep. Blackout curtains can be extremely helpful to this effect, avoiding any artificial light in your bedroom.
Try breathing techniques. When I struggle to sleep, I use the 4-7-8 breathing technique, and it often helps me drift off. It’s very simple: breathe in through your nose for 4 seconds, hold for 7 seconds, and breathe out slowly through your mouth for 8 seconds. Breathe in using your diaphragm, pushing the belly forward. I use my fingers to keep count.
Keep in mind that this isn’t a quick fix. The first time I tried this, I was very excited because I thought I would suddenly fall asleep. That’s not what happened. Instead, doing 5 to 15 cycles relaxed my body and brain and slowly made falling asleep easier.
Feed your body with proper nutrition
There are plenty of resources out there to help you eat healthily, according to specific needs. I recommend consulting those, or a licensed nutritionist if necessary, to ensure that you’re eating the right food for your body.
The key points that I’m sharing with you here are the steps that I’ve tried, which can reduce stress on your body overall.
Here are the general rules that I am following:
Minimise processed food. This is a broad term, but here I’m defining it as anything that has been created in a factory. Many ingredients used in processed food are inflammatory, which is a stress response in itself — avoid them!
Eat plenty of antioxidant-rich food. This includes broccoli, spinach, carrots, potatoes, and many more vegetables, plus berries and other fruits. Antioxidants can reduce the inflammatory response (i.e. stress) happening in your body.
Drink lots of water. This can also help reduce your body’s inflammatory responses.
Overall, this might add a bit more time to your schedule, as following the tips above will require you to cook more meals for yourself and to buy more whole ingredients from the grocery store. But the benefits to your body and mind will be worth it in the long run!
I’d love to hear more recommendations from well-informed nutritionists, so feel free to add your thoughts!
Stay active
Being active in the morning wakes up the body and helps people lower their stressability throughout the rest of the day.
If you want to make it a new habit, I suggest you start small. Keep it short, simple, and easy.
For instance, I do a roughly 7 minute workout most days from home. Rather than getting up and going to the gym, I follow a simple routine in the bathroom right beside my bedroom. It is easy to follow and doesn’t require much equipment. I don’t make it too painful, so that I still want to do it the following day.
There are plenty of different options to try. Yoga, for example, is a great physical activity if you can make it convenient for you. My wife goes to a yoga studio 3 minutes from our house with different classes available during the week.
You can add any other type of sport, like cardio, at other times of the day. This may also help you release some of the stress, reducing your stressability after the activity.
Like any new habit you are trying to form, convenience is key.
Reach out for some love and tenderness
This doesn’t take long! You can spend one minute hugging a loved one or spending quality time with a friend.
Simply being with the people we love or who love us (including pets!) reduces stress. Get human skin contact, give hugs, and share the love. The skin to skin contact decreases your alert system and makes everybody feel better.
Lean on your support network
Take 10-20 minutes to call a friend or two and share your situation with others. Just talking about your stress will help you feel less lonely, which can make challenges less insurmountable than they originally seemed.
Even if your friend is not able to coach you through a difficult time or offer actionable solutions, just having an attentive ear will help ease the burden.
Try out green bathing
You may have heard of forest bathing as a popular activity in Japan. Well, studies have shown that spending time outdoors helps reduce stress and lowers our alert system. So it’s worth giving it a try!
Again, make it easy, and take 5 minutes before the start of your working day to take a walk outside. If you live near a park or wooded area, stroll among the trees. During each walk, give yourself a challenge to notice something new that you hadn’t noticed before. This will help you also switch off your thinking brain and develop your sense of observation.
Make it a habit
Try each of the practices I’ve listed above, and, like I said before, it’s okay if they don’t all work for you! However, make note of the ones that do work and build them into your daily routine.
To maximise your chances of creating a lasting habit, make it as easy and as simple as possible, ideally before something that you like to do. You could try one or two practices at a time for a week and see the impact they have on you. It will take some time, but the results are worth it.
I hope you have enjoyed these insights! Taking the time to nourish your body and mind is key to lowering your baseline stressability, in addition to pinpointing your stressors, as we went over in the previous article.
In the following article, I’ll dive into more detailed tips on not only nourishing yourself, but also completely shifting your mental state. For more in-depth insights on improving your life and daily habits, sign up to my newsletter below.