podcast

Hi everybody. Welcome to the podcast again today. What do you do when you have a huge project or overwhelming task or demand coming up in your future that is just really giving you anxiety and stressing you out? I wanna illustrate for you something concrete, a step-by-step process you can do to help turn your stress around this event from bad stress into good stress, or in other words, how to turn it from the threat response into a challenge response, and I'm going to illustrate it with a story about one of my coaching clients, who I'll call Laura. Laura was really stressed because she was gonna have to move in a couple of months. She was in school, she was in a really hard program, and the move was going to correspond with the beginning of her last semester in her program, which she already knew was gonna be really difficult, really stressful. Her husband was also really stressed at work and the move was also going to, going to coincide with winter time, so all of the ice and snow and cold weather, and she was just feeling really overwhelmed about the idea of having to move right at this time. And also because she had never really done a move like this before. When she and her husband had moved into their current apartment, they didn't have a lot of stuff. And so it was kind of an easy move and they were just accumulating things little by little. But now they were moving into a different apartment. It was a good opportunity, it was gonna be cheaper, it was gonna be bigger, it was gonna be better all around. But in order to get there, she had to move. And it was gonna be at a really bad time for the two of them, and also at a really bad time of year. And she was just feeling really distraught about this upcoming move.
I talked to her a little bit about how there is such a thing as good stress, which we've talked about so many times before on our podcast. Popular culture thinks that stress equals bad, something bad, right? But we have talked about how there is such a thing as good stress. It depends on your relationship with the stress. And that if you can evaluate the demands of the situation as within your resources, then you will have a challenge response, which will help you to improve your Cardi cardiac efficiency and increase oxygenation and blood flow to your brain. And help you have better performance than if you weren't stressed at all.
So if you like Laura, find that you are feeling really anxious and overwhelmed about something coming up in your future that you don't feel like you know how to do, then it's then that's an indicator that you are in the threat response which produces this motivation that you wanna avoid the stressor. You wanna get away from it, you wanna hide from it. And it also debilitates your cognitive, cognitive performance. You can't think very well when you're in a threat response. So let me walk you through what I did with Laura to help her to change her relationship with this overwhelming move that was coming up for her.
So I started by asking her, what are all of the steps? Let's list the individual tasks that are involved in making this move happen. So first of all, right, she needs to go and get boxes and she talked about how she and her husband wanted to go get these plastic bins from Home Depot so that they could reuse them after the move for other things. So get boxes. That was the first thing on the list. The second thing, she talked about how they would need to go through all of their possessions and sort and get rid of a bunch of stuff because there was gonna be a lot of things that they didn't wanna keep, and they didn't wanna have to move them. So there was a task of sorting through everything, and some of it she had to do together with her husband. They had to decide together, or it was his stuff, and some of it she could do on her own. But that was the, it was the task of sorting. The third thing was that they would need to put everything in the boxes. You need to pack everything up. Once they had packed everything up, then the next point on the list was that they would need to put everything in their vehicles that they were using to move. It was a close apartment, so it wasn't going to involve a far drive, but they weren't move renting a moving truck. They were just borrowing somebody's truck, small truck. And so this was gonna involve a lot of trips, putting things in their car and in the truck, and moving it over to the apartment, back and forth, back and forth. And the next thing on the list was once they had moved everything into that new apartment, was that they would have to put things away and organize them. So we went through and we detailed every step that this move would involve, that we could think of. And then I asked her, let's try and estimate how much time, how many hours each one of these steps is going to take. Of course, there are a lot of unknowns. You can't know exactly how long it's gonna take to do all of these things, but just give me your best guess. Okay, so the first item on her list about getting boxes, going to Home Depot, this involved going to a city that was about an hour away. She estimated that in order to get all the boxes they need, they would need about four hours to drive to the city and back and get, get the boxes from Home Depot. Okay, so four hours for the first thing. The second thing, which was sorting through things and getting rid of a lot of things and doing some of that with her husband and some by herself. I asked her to estimate how long that would take. She thought that maybe the part with her husband, she could get done in four hours if they sat down and did it. That they could do it in four hours and that the rest of it, she could probably get done herself in six hours and then she would need to actually take the things that they were not gonna keep to a secondhand store, you know, make the donations, that might take another two hours. Okay. So then we moved on to the next thing on the list, which was that she needed to put everything in boxes. And of course it's hard to estimate how long this is gonna take, but I asked her just to give me her best guess. And she thought, okay, 20 hours I think. I think, I think I can do it in 20 hours. It was difficult for her to estimate, as I said, because she'd never really done a move like this before, but that was what she estimated, 20 hours. Then the next part was putting things in the vehicles, driving to the new place and unloading. Doing that. Multiple times, and we talked about how the unloading is maybe a little faster than the loading because you're unloading from a small space, the car truck into a larger space, her new apartment. And so there's not as much trying to fit everything in like a three-dimensional puzzle. So she thought about that and she thought, okay, I think 16 hours is a safe guess for that part. And the next thing, which was to put things away and organize everything, obviously this was gonna take a lot of time and it's difficult to say exactly how much, but in order to be safe, her best estimate was about 30 hours. Okay. So we totaled all of these hours up that she had estimated, and it, we came up with 82 hours. So this move that she was going to make was going to take 82 hours. And then I asked her to take out her calendar and start trying to fit these 82 hours into her actual schedule, into her actual calendar. When I was talking to her, this was November and she was only gonna have to move in January or February, so there was some time to do some of these preliminary things like going to get the boxes and sorting through things. And so I asked her to to really go through and put it on her calendar, physically write it in. And we just talked through the very first item. For example, when you, when do you think that you can go and get the boxes? And she looked at her calendar and she saw that they could do it on the following Saturday. They could go down to this city an hour away and get the boxes and come back. They could do that four hour chunk that was allotted for that part of the move. And then I told her to continue putting those hours in on her calendar, on her own. On the next coaching session that we had, I followed up with her and I asked her how she was doing with her anxiety regarding this move, and she said she was feeling a lot better because she realized that it was just a matter of time, it was 82 hours, it was concrete, and she could put it in her calendar. And she said even though it was November, they had already, she and her husband had already started going through and sorting the things that they were gonna, that they were gonna get rid of.
So before we started talking about this, the move was overwhelming and she really felt like hiding and protecting herself from it, running away from it, which is what happens when you're in a threat response. But now that we had quantified everything and she had actually put it into her schedule and into her calendar, she saw how those demands, which we had put a number on, 82 hours, could actually fit in her schedule, which were her, which was her resources, right? She saw that she had this many hours in a week. She already had these other commitments, but she could fit in these specific tasks at this time and at that time. So it was a way for her to put the demands actually into her resources. And it wasn't, it wasn't overwhelming anymore. And they had actually approached the task already in November trying to sort through everything. It had become manageable. It had switched from a threatening task to a challenging task that they felt like they could approach and that they had the resources to meet.
So Laura thought that was pretty cool. She already did this type of thing with her schoolwork. When she had a school project, she already would put it in her calendar. She would already figure out what the different parts of it were and what the different amounts of time that it would take to do these different parts. And she already put it into her calendar. That was something that was a habit of hers. But she hadn't thought of tr applying it to something outside of the domain of school, like making a move.
So when you have something coming up that is really making you feel anxious and overwhelmed because it's just huge and you can't even figure out how to begin and it, and it feels like way too much for you, then that means you're in this threat, the threat response. Let's convert it to challenge by bringing down the size of the demands. You're in the threat response. That means that your, your perception of the demands is way beyond your resources. You feel like your resources are small compared to the demands. So one of the ways that we can change your brain's perception of this overwhelming task coming up is to quantify those demands. Let's measure them. Let's turn the light on. When things are dark they're a lot scarier because we can't see the dimensions, we can't see how big they are. We don't even know what it is. But when you can sit down and, and list all of the steps involved that you can imagine to get this process done, and then convert that into a number of hours, estimate your hours, then you're switching the light on and you're seeing exactly what the dimensions are of this thing that you need to confront. And then when you actually put it into your calendar and your schedule and your own timeframe, then you are sticking it into the resources that you have. You are fitting the demands into your resources. And then all of a sudden it doesn't feel way too much for you anymore. It feels concrete. It might still feel like it's gonna be hard, like it's gonna tax you. This is still stress, meaning that it's gonna demand some kind of change from you. But it's the difference between taxing and exceeding your resources. The threat response, you feel like the task will exceed your, your resources. The challenge response, you feel like it will just tax your resources, but that you can do it if you just give that extra push of energy. And when your brain makes that assessment, then your body helps you out. Your physiology, your hormones, your automa, autonomic nervous system, your motivations, your feelings will help you feel like approaching this task just like it helped Laura feel like already starting on sorting through her stuff for her move.
So that's my idea for you today. If you want extra help, you can always look me up and I can coach you individually about your situation. My website is calm your caveman.com. You can sign up for an individual coaching session. But that's it for today. Thanks for joining me, and we'll see you next week.