Summary
Joe identifies four underlying causes of stress that go beyond the typical advice of sleep, food, and exercise. The four layers are: thought patterns (how you think about stress itself, “should” thinking, limiting beliefs, the critical inner voice), emotional issues (unfelt emotions creating tension, and whether you’re being gentle with yourself), nervous system regulation (the balance between activation and rest, the role of pleasure in signaling safety), and identity (the stress of maintaining and defending a fixed self-concept).
For each cause, Joe guides interactive experiments: paying attention to stress without changing it, saying “ouch” to negative self-talk, trying to stop feeling emotions (which reveals how suppression creates stress), feeling pleasure through body awareness, and discovering who you are without past or future reference. The teaching emphasizes that progress on any one level cascades to the others.
Key Concepts
- Paying attention to stress without trying to change it reduces it
- How you think about stress determines whether it helps or harms
- Unfelt emotions create physical stress through muscle tension
- Identity stress comes from defending a fixed self-concept
- Pleasure signals safety
Key Quotes
“Oh my gosh, I can’t stop stressing out is more stressful than saying, oh, this is stress and it’s lovely.”
“There’s no way that you can not feel an emotion without holding your muscles.”
“If you’re constantly under attack from your head, if you’re constantly under attack from the thoughts and your body never feels that sense of safety, it never gets the rest and therefore it can never actually build resilience.”
“The more you have a harder identity, the more your life is just going to be stressful.”
“Who you are right now is always who you are.”
Transcript
There are a ton of books and videos about how to relieve your stress. But what nobody really talks about is the underlying causes of your stress. And in this video, I sit down with a woman and we talk about the four core issues underneath stress and different ways to work with them to change your life completely. And we don’t do it just in talking. We also give you real life experiments to run so that you can feel it. Right now, we’re going to just do a simple one where we’re paying attention to stress. So settle down for a minute. Feel inside your body and find any stress that you have. And all you’re going to do is just pay attention to it. Don’t do anything else. Don’t try to change it. Don’t try to get rid of it. Don’t invite it. Just be with whatever stress you can find. So that’s the experiment. It’s that simple. But you might want to notice right now that you’re less stressed than you were at the beginning of the experiment. If you think about the head orientation, the thought orientation towards stress, these are the things that create stress because of the way you think. So one thing is how you think about stress itself. That’s good or that’s bad is going to increase your stress or decrease your stress. Oh my gosh, I can’t stop stressing out is more stressful than saying, “Oh, this is stress and it’s lovely.” Or another thought process that really, for instance, is I should do this. I have to do this. obligation instead of, “Oh, I want to do this. I can’t wait to do this.” That that thought pattern can create a tremendous amount of stress. Limiting beliefs can create a tremendous amount of stress. Something that you think is not possible, but it is possible and then you feel stuck and trapped. That is a huge part of what can create stress in your life. Another one is just the critical voice in your head. Just the way that you talk to yourself. If you’re constantly under attack inside of your head, that is an amazing source of stress. In this experiment, we’re just going to learn a little something about the negative self-talk in our head. So, it’s a really simple experiment. You’re going to close your eyes and you’re going to listen to whatever the voice in your head has to say. Just simple. And anything that it says negative, if it says you’ll never get out of it, you can’t do it, you have to do this and this and this. Anything that a really crappy boss would say to you, you’re going to just respond by saying ouch out loud. So, every time it says something mean or not very nice or abusive or just super micromanaging, you just keep saying ouch. By this time, you’ll notice that the voice in the head is saying negative stuff to you often, and that’s stressful. It’s just stressful to live with something that’s talking to you like that all the time. So, I was 26, 27 years old, and I decided I’m going to go out into the woods and starve myself fast, whatever you want to call it. And I was having this moment where I realized that I was stressed out just sitting in the woods. And what happened in my system was, “Oh my god, I’m stressed out.” Then the next thing that happened was what’s wrong with me that I’m stressed out. And I became more stressed. So it wasn’t like there was, oh, this is too much stress and this is not enough stress. It was am I thinking about my stress in a way that is, oh, this is useful. Is it like in my system? Does it feel do my thoughts show, oh, hey, this is useful? Or am I rejecting the stress? Am I saying no, this isn’t good. This is bad. I need to stop that. And that is actually what made the stress good for me or bad for me. Let’s say you’re playing a game like basketball. There’s a massive activation. There’s a stress to it. You’re trying to get to the place. You’re trying to get the basket. There’s like this stress to it. It can feel really, really good. Or you can be, “Fuck, I got to go to work again. This sucks. And I’m thinking about it all the time.” And and the weird trick about this one is that you can’t convince yourself entirely, though you can a little bit, which is weird, but you can’t convince yourself entirely to, oh, I’m just going to have a positive attitude around stress and then stress is the right amount of stress because there’s a nervous system level, an emotional level to the body. So you can try to pep talk yourself into enjoying stress. And there’s ways that that actually can work a little bit, but at some place, some part of your body, if it’s still rejecting the stress, no matter what you want to be doing, what’s actually happening underneath, if the muscles are actually getting tense, if you’re actually uncomfortable with that amount of activity, then it doesn’t really matter. And any amount of pep talk isn’t going to really change anything for you. you’re not feeling something that you need to be feeling. You’re you have a stuck emotion that’s incredibly stressful. For instance, many people they’re just like overwhelmed. I have so much to do, but actually what’s just happening there is that they they like are angry and they’re not feeling it or they’re scared and they’re not feeling it. And so it feels like depression or anxiety or something like that because they’re not actually allowing that emotion to move. And holding that back requires you to hold your muscles, right? There’s no way that you can not feel an emotion without holding your muscles. And so if you just think about doing this for 10 minutes, it’s going to be really stressful and exhausting. So that’s a big part of the emotional thing. The other part of the emotional part of yourself that create a lot of stress is that are you loving yourself as you are or are you not? Are you being gentle with yourself or are you not on an emotional level? Right? I feel scared. Can I be gentle with that? Right? There’s no way that we cannot have an emotional cycle. Like there’s no way we’re not going to have tension and then release. This is part of life. Without that, we’re dead. Lungs. Without tension and release, we’re dead. Question is, how gently can you hold the tension and the release? And that includes emotions. In this experiment, we’re going to just feel what it’s like not to feel our emotions. So, it’s a really simple one. I want you to stop feeling all of your emotions right now. All right? You’re still feeling something. Stop feeling all of it. All of it. Everything you can do to stop feeling your emotions. Nope. You’re still feeling something, stop. Make sure that you stop feeling. And you might notice right now your entire body is stressed out. That’s what happens when you try not to feel emotions. It stresses your whole body out. And then on the nervous system, this is just this is like exercise, right? You’re not going to grow the most muscles by working out all the time. You’re not going to get in shape without resting. You have to do both. And so teaching the nervous system how to relax and to be activated. So think about it like a string on a violin. Too tight doesn’t work. Too loose doesn’t work. You’re looking for a balance of the nervous system. A couple ways to think about the stress of the nervous system is are you able to feel pleasure? I don’t mean pleasure like sexual pleasure. I mean pleasure like the just the gentle pleasure of being alive or washing the dishes or because that pleasure tells your whole system you’re safe. And if you’re not safe a certain part of the day, you’re going to burn out. If you’re constantly under attack from your head, if you’re constantly under attack from the thoughts and your body never feels that sense of safety, it never gets the rest and therefore it can never actually build resilience. The other way to think about it is through breath. There’s a lot of tricks that we can go through that just allow you to get into the parasympathetic nervous system and get rest. And there’s also this kind of backwards trick that happens where people do that too much. doesn’t happen often, but it happens where they are constantly downregulating their nervous system, and then that can create stress. In this experiment, we’re going to just play with what it is to feel pleasure. And the best definition for pleasure I’ve ever heard is just awareness of the sensations in your body moving. So, close your eyes for a minute. There’s lots of sensations in your body and just pay attention to them moving. And if you want to amplify it just a little bit, see what how much pleasure you can take in a breath in while noticing all the sensations in your body. So you can do this for five minutes a day, anytime you want. Just notice the sensations moving in your body and take pleasure in them. And here’s a really cool thing to know. Keep feeling that pleasure. Keep feeling the sensations. And now see what happens to the pleasure. If you couldn’t feel any tension in your body, no stress, no tension, what happens to the pleasure? Notice how it dims out just a little bit the tension in itself is part of the pleasure experience. And then there’s this other thing that happens which is you’re tying all these together and we’ll call that the identity. There’s identity stress and a huge amount of our stress comes from basically I think I’m this and I need to protect it in the world. Somebody beat me up on Twitter and so I need to protect that. Somebody thinks that I’m bad because I’m not valuable. Somebody thinks I’m a loser or I feel like I’m a loser. I can’t feel like a loser. I can’t feel like I’m codependent. you have this identity and if you have an identity, the more you have a harder identity, the more your life is just going to be stressful. So here’s an experiment you can do so that you can discover a little bit about your identity. It’s a simple experiment. So usually when we think about who we are, we have to go into the past or the future. something that we’ve done or something that we’re going to do, something that we felt or something that we’re going to feel, something that we thought or something that we are going to think. But what I want you to discover is who are you right now? So, close your eyes for a minute and without going into the past for any evidence or the future for any evidence, just in your body, feel who you are right now. Any thought you have about it has to come from the past or the future. So it’s just in your body. Who are you right now? You can even ask that question silently to yourself. Who am I right now? And the funny thing is who you are right now is always who you are. If you’re going beyond the basics of stress management, sleep and food and exercise, which definitely do it if you can, the ways to start approaching stress is to say, oh, what are the thoughts that create stress? What’s the emotional issues that are creating stress? What are the nervous system issues that are creating stress? And finally, what are the identity issues that are creating stress? And you can approach it on any of those levels and make progress. And then the more you make progress on one, the more everything else starts just falling into place.