Podcast 503: Mastering Stress

MARTIN: Hello, this is Martin for Life Enthusiast Podcast and today with me David Lawson, colleague and a partner and stress management specialist. David is focusing specifically on helping people dealing with anxiety and stress and trauma and whatever else leads to it. And I think this message is going to be very, very timely and relevant. David, welcome.

DAVID: Thank you, Martin. I'm happy to be here and share my experience on helping people manage stress and anxiety which usually leads to burnout or any number of different health issues. I'm happy to be here and looking forward to our conversation today.

MARTIN: Yeah. How does it usually show up in people's lives?

DAVID: I think what happens is stress starts and it manifests its very symptoms. So symptoms could be a lot of times it could be anxiety, could be depression, any sort of the mental stuff. And then you also have a lot of different physical symptoms and that's more sort of your world where people have digestive problems or immune issues. I think there's so many different health issues people are struggling with today. But if you look at the cause, our medical system's very good in the west is at treating symptoms. But not so much getting to the root cause.

And if you look at the root cause of most illnesses out there, they usually lead to stress. I think the status, like 95% of illnesses, the root cause is usually a stress born or trauma. In my experience a lot of repressed trauma and emotions.

MARTIN: Yeah I do tell people is that all the physical stuff and we can treat a lot of it with nutrition and better advice and exercise and all of that but, most of it is actually stuck somewhere in the subconscious. The dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system is buried somewhere in our… Well, stuff that drives our behaviors that's usually under the volitional control somewhere out there that we find difficult to reach. Right.

DAVID: Yeah, I can agree 100%. And I think most people in our culture, we've had some trauma. So everyone's had varying degrees of trauma. It could be a number of things like sexual abuse or a parent that maybe was now alcoholic or a divorce or there's so many different trauma based things that happen to us throughout our lives and I think our medical system has not really taught us to look at that trauma. So in most cases we’ll self medicate some of the emotional stuff and the traumas through alcohol, narcotics, even pharmaceuticals in many cases. Again, a lot of the stuff that we're doing to deal with these emotions that are uncomfortable is we're pushing them down. My experience is most people, I do a movement practice called qigong, which is a form of Tai Chi. And a lot of times what I find when people start moving is their breath and their movement can't really flow because they've got energy that they push. In martial arts they call it the dantian. It's just below the belly button. In Japan, they call it the hara point. So that's our main core where we store our energy. And a lot of these traumatic,

MARTIN: In India they call it the root chakra too, right?

DAVID: Yeah, the root chakra. Exactly. So a lot of these emotions that people have, they push them down below that root chakra in the root chakra area. And that's where there's fear, anxiety and the stress sort of lives. And the stuff that I teach people and the things that I help people with is to get to that some of that stress and that emotional stuff that they've been pushing down and moving through the body. And once that starts to move and flow through the body, you get prana, what they call in yoga terms, or chi in the Chinese medicine term, you get that prana qi flowing and then people come back to perfect health.

MARTIN: I totally relate. If you can move the energy, then life happens. We are supposed to be a dynamic creature that interacts with the universe. And stagnation is one of the biggest enemies of flow, of life, of interaction with the environment.

DAVID: Yeah. And I think a lot of people have digestive issues right now because another field,  a modality that I use when I do my coaching is Ayurveda. So Ayurveda is a science. It's one of the oldest science of life in the world. It's about 5,000 years old. And a lot of the issues that people have is what you just talked about is stagnation. So we're not getting that. In Ayurveda they call it agni. So we need really strong digestive fire to process the food that we eat, to process our emotions. And a lot of people, if they don't have that strong agni that's when it leads to illness. So that can manifest. In Ayurveda we have three major physiologies in the body, the vata, pitta and kapha. So people have imbalances in those different areas. In our culture, it's usually a vata imbalance, which is the stuff in the mind, the air and space. So it's the insomnias, it's the depressions, it's the anxieties. There's a lot of mental turbulence in our culture. So one of the best ways to bring ourselves into homeostasis, your balance, and you do some of this work too, is really connecting inside and figuring out what we need to feed ourselves. Whether that's through movement, through exercise, through breath, through nutrition, all the things, the pillars, through sleep. My experience with most clients is they don't really have a regular routine. So one of the best ways to get people into balance is the first thing I do is help people establish a routine.

MARTIN: Yeah, this is massive because you need to make a commitment to something, but doing it daily, it becomes a habit. Like, I don't have to think twice about brushing my teeth after I get up, it just happens. I don't negotiate it. Right?

DAVID: Yeah. And I think, it sounds really simple, but people ask me, what's the first start? How can I get better? And one of the things I help them plug into is regular routine, little things, like plugging into the circadian rhythms of nature. Like going to bed when the sun sets, like 10, 10:30, getting up when the sun rises, 5:30, 6:00 am. Little things like waking up and checking in with your emotions. So taking five or 10 minutes and just maybe focusing on your heart and checking in with how you're feeling, that helps. Especially us men, we're not taught to feel our emotions. So a little practice that I get people do is to close their eyes, take a few deep breaths and focus on their heart and just feel what they're feeling for the day. And if they have a smile, great. If they have a tear, that's great too.

But a little thing like that might help your audience is to, I call it processing your emotions. So a practice of just checking in in the morning, processing your emotions, that's a great start. And then also, I think our culture is a little bit mixed up with food. I mean, it's important what you eat, but it's also important when you eat. So we are taught to come home after work at 5 or 6 o'clock and we make dinner. We have steaks and potatoes and a couple glasses of wine. Then we go to bed and we try and digest all of that. In Ayurveda, one of the things that's really important is when you eat. So our digestive fire burns the highest between noon and 2pm so to eat our biggest meal at that time and then a lighter meal or even no meal at dinner makes a little bit more sense. So things like that, establishing a routine and making sure you're eating very mindful and at the right times of the day and make sure you're not doing something that's stressful, for example, while you're eating.

MARTIN: Yeah. Put your dinner on and turn on the news.

DAVID: Yeah, exactly.

MARTIN: Right, right. Yeah. Not a good thing. Well, unless you're really masterful at managing your emotions and stay completely detached from the messages coming at you.

DAVID: Right. Yeah, yeah.

MARTIN: I mean, you can meditate your way through a funeral if you want to. Right?

DAVID: Yeah, that's right. It's. It's being mindful when you're eating and being mindful of your, you talk about the daily practices. I think for most people, the best start is getting up at the same time every day, going to bed at the same time every day, eating three meals a day at the same time, little things like that. Establishing balance helps to bring. It sounds very simple, but if you start to bring balance into your routine, it actually starts to bring balance into your body and your health.

MARTIN: Yeah, I'm certainly up on the routines with the meals. And what's interesting is there are these endocrine dominances that dictate to people whether they should be doing three equal meals or if they should vary the sizes. Because some people do better on a large breakfast and minor dinner, and others there is a particular body type that does actually better on a large dinner and zero breakfast. So it's interesting that there are variations there, but most and foremost, 60% of the population is the body type that should be doing three equal meals. And remember that the midday meal is the most important of the lot.

DAVID: Yeah. I mean, again, if you're plugging into the circadian reasons of nature, our digestive fire burns the best between about 12pm and 2pm and that's when we want to digest our food. Right. A lot of these health issues that you work with, the digestive stuff and immune stuff, people are not digesting their food.

MARTIN: Yeah, it's troublesome. All right, so the program that you would set up for someone, how do people reach you and what would that look like? Do you do individual programs or group programs?

DAVID: Yeah, so a couple ways you can work with me. I have  an online course that people have access to. It goes through the modules we talked about. It goes through breath work, it goes through meditation, mindfulness, it goes through movement, movement practice, tai chi, qigong practice. It goes through checking in, learning how to check in with your feelings, learning how to breathe properly. That's one way. 

And also I offer one on one coaching as well so they can reach me at my websites, awakewarrior.com and that is a 12 week program. I work with people so they meet with me every other week and we go through a program to help them get healthy really, so help them manage the stress more effectively. I also do two day retreats, different parts of the world, so people can come and meet me and spend two days. It's more of an intensive way.

MARTIN: People can do a weekend and come back completely reformed human, different.

DAVID: Yeah. And again, a lot of it’s, once you learn some of these practices and plug them into your life and set up a daily routine, people come back into health.

MARTIN: Right on then. This is good. So specifically, do we want to teach somebody something here now? Some kind of a breath work?

DAVID: Yeah, we could maybe do something together.

MARTIN: Yeah.

DAVID: There's a lot of stress this time of year with holiday coming up and people are running around and you can feel sort of the collective consciousness of humanity struggling in a lot of different ways right now. So during the day, if you want to do a quick reset, I find something that's really good, our breath sort of goes with our emotions. So when we're stressed, we breathe very shallow. We breathe at the top part of our lungs. 

MARTIN: And the more stressed you are, the further your shoulders rise up to your ears.

DAVID: Yeah. And our breath becomes very shallow and that sort of escalates and it's like a vicious circle. We’re not breathing so then we feel more stress. So one thing we do have control over is our breathing. So we can control our breathing we can bring the stress response down to reset the parasympathetic nervous system and come back into calm.

So something that's very easy for people to do is just you close your eyes, you put your hands on your belly. It's called belly breathing or Buddha breathing, I call it. It's just basically a simple breath. You inhale through your nose. We can try it together. So inhale for about the count of four through your nose and fill your breath. Your belly up, your belly expands as you do that and then exhale out through your mouth for about a count of four and then the belly comes back in. So we can do it a few times. So inhale through your nose and your belly expands and then exhale through your mouth and the belly goes back in.

MARTIN: Right on.  I find that even more calming is when you make the exhalation longer than the inhalation. 

DAVID: Yeah, that's another thing. When we're under stress, you'll find that our exhales are very short. So it’s like (demonstrates short breath) exactly, right. So if you can focus on your exhalation matching your inhalation. If you do a few breathing exercises in the morning, one that's really good as well for people, what happens is if you start to practice this in the morning, even five or ten minutes, just inhaling through your nose and a long inhale all the way up the back of your body and then a long exhale out through your nose down the front of the body. So basically, it's called pranayama breathing.

So it's something the yogis have been doing for thousands of years. And these guys can bring their heart rate down to very, very low. They can lower their blood pressure just by breath. So it’s very powerful. So doing something in the morning for five to 10 minutes, if you start breathing really slow in through the nose, like a long slow inhale through the nose and a long exhale out the nose, what happens is if you practice this over and it doesn't happen overnight, but a few months of doing this is actually you start breathing like this during the day. So you create a pattern where you start breathing like this all day long. So for people that are struggling with stress and anxiety, breath work is something that you can, if you learn and you start practicing it daily, you start to train the brain to breathe like that all day long, you won't feel as stressed and as anxious.

MARTIN: Right on. That is this is the sympathetic versus parasympathetic. The autonomic nervous system is either in the fight or flight mode, or the rest and repair mode. And you should theoretically be in the relaxed parasympathetic side more often than in the stress anxiety side. But that's not what's going on in the modern world because if you're in traffic, you have to be doing 360 degree awareness. So you're, you have a danger lurking behind every possible corner every two seconds. You have to stress up.

DAVID: Yeah, you're right, Martin. Unfortunately, that's where our society is living right now. And that constant fight or flight, fight or flight mode. So when you're in that fight or flight mode, your body's starts to turn on some of the DNA or the genes that are not so good, and that's what leads to the illness. So we want to try and live in more of that rest and digest or rest and relax response in life. And for most people now, things are moving so fast, you actually have to plug into some of these practices.

You have to plug into some learning how to do the breathwork, learning how to calm the mind. We talked about the mindful eating and establishing a daily routine. When you start to do that, you start to live in more of the parasympathetic, the rest and digest versus the sympathetic. Which is again, the fight or flight, which leads to the illnesses and the digestive issues and all the things that you work with with your clients? Again, most of the time, our western medical system is taught to treat so many of these symptoms, but we have to learn to get to the root. And getting to the root is really important.  And that's what these practices do, they start to have people look inside and realize what some of the things that they're say pushing down or suppressing.

MARTIN: That's a big one. What are you not facing in your life? What are you unwilling to look at? What are you burying and not dealing with? Those are the things that ultimately, how do I put it nicely? It's less important what you're eating and more important what's eating you.

DAVID: Yeah, I love that. That's a beautiful quote. And it's funny. One of the challenges when I work with people is actually getting them to sit and just be. Because our culture's taught to be so busy. So we run around from activity to activity. You can see it in the kids now. It's like one activity, the next activity. We're not. We're never taught to just be.

MARTIN: And yet we call them, call ourselves human beings, but we act like human doings. Right?

DAVID: Yeah, I think that's a good analogy. We're not taught to sit and just be. And a lot of people, it's challenging because when you sit and just be, that's when some of these uncomfortable emotions come up. But the paradox is it's really uncomfortable. But the comfort and the freedom is on the other side of the uncomfortable. So if you can sit, learn to process some of these things that you've been pushing down, that's when you're going to start to break free from some of these illnesses and health challenges and discover health and that's challenging. But if you can learn to do this,

MARTIN: Yeah, you’re now putting your finger on this thing of being busy so that you don't have to face stuff. And we do this. A workaholic is a person who will use work to not face life. And of course, alcoholic will use alcohol to just numb their mind. And of course, sexaholic will chase the thrills and so on. Right. Like, we have all these behaviors that we are using to not allow this, what you just proposed, sitting down and facing the music.

DAVID: Yeah, that's the best analogy. You're right. There's so many different ways to numb those emotions you've got. You mentioned a few of them. People turn to Netflix. And a lot of times you come home and you just watch people binge watch television. You have to be careful what you feed your mind. Because all these things we feed our mind, we have to process as well. So the important thing is to learn to sit and be with the uncomfortable emotions and the pains and the traumas. And that's very challenging, and a lot of people need a mentor or coach to help walk them through that. But again, once you learn how to tap into that practice, you'll find homeostasis, perfect health, and freedom.

MARTIN: Yeah. So Awak​​e Warrior. That's a very good one. You actually suggested that our life experiences help us become awake. Right?

DAVID: Yeah, I think the best teacher in life is our own experiences. And my past was riddled with lots of health issues. And sometimes you have to, a lot of people, they get a health challenge and they really become identified with it. So they become, oh this is my diabetes, or this is my this is my that. A lot of these illnesses and health challenges that we have come into our life are actually gifts.

MARTIN: Yeah. Same here. The things that don't break you or you have to learn to overcome, otherwise you become a victim, which is not a good place to be. There's only dependency and decline stuck in that modality. You need to get your agency, you need to decide to take the reins of your life into your own hands and decide what direction you want to travel and then, and then take the first step in that direction. Right?

DAVID: Yeah, that's key. You mentioned the victimhood. A lot of people like to become victims of their story, and they get attached. My story, my mom did this to me, or my dad was this, that all happened to you but you have to become empowered. And by becoming empowered, you have to let some of those stories go. And when you let those stories go, then you can create your own story for your life. And a lot of times the stories and the victimhood that we live by is a lot of pain and emotional traumas, which again, leads to the illness. So owning your story in a positive way, letting go of some of the negativity and realizing that you can become whoever you want to be in your own life.

MARTIN: Yeah. I think the breathwork and the meditation and the stillness and the movement are wonderful tools to help process all of this.

DAVID: Yeah. A lot of times psychotherapy is great for some people, but for other people it's not so good because a lot of these emotions, we can talk about things for years. Some people go to therapy for five or 10 years and they're talking about the same old thing. And that could be great for some. But for a lot of people, I find some of these emotions get stored, as I mentioned, in the body.

MARTIN: I actually think that psychotherapy is detrimental because when you have an emotional charge on something and you talk about it, you discharge it and you lose all of the energy that could have propelled you out of the trap. So, you're just paying somebody to be a friend, that's all.

DAVID: Yeah, yeah, you're right. I mean, it's nice to have a friend and to talk about your life, but at some point, again, you have to take ownership. And a lot of times when I work with people like breath work you mentioned is very powerful. So just to give you a brief description of breath work, there's two main types. There's holotropic, which is a very aggressive type of breath work. You'll see that with the Wim Hof movement right now, it's a lot of fast rapid breathing, which is really good because it gets stuff that is stored in that parasympathetic and emotions start to release. You can even go a step further with that. I've worked with a breath therapist where it's an hour of really intense breathing. And it's almost like taking psychedelics. It has the same effect of psychedelics when you breathe. It's about an hour of deep breathing. And that's very nice because it helps you release a lot of trauma and emotions that are stuck in the body.

And the other type of breathwork, Martin. Which most of us need and don't practice as much as we can. Again, because it’s become very popularized this Wim Hof rapid breath work. And there's nothing wrong with that, it helps remove some of the emotions and the traumas that are stuck in the body. But pranayama is more of what we did before. Just like the Buddha breath, like the relaxing breathing.

MARTIN: Yep.

DAVID: What that does is that puts the body into that rest and digest mode. And most people, that's the one that they really do need.

MARTIN: Right? Yeah. Well, both are useful. Right. One is to burn off negative stuff that's in the body. The other one is very good at helping in what you call it, bring in stillness. Allow the healing.

DAVID: Yeah. And you know when we start to quiet the mind and the body, that's when the healing starts to take place.

MARTIN: Yeah. Right. Well, let's just wrap it on that. So for people to find you. I see that you have a Facebook. Is it a group or a public page?

DAVID: It's a business page. I also have Instagram and LinkedIn.

MARTIN: Okay. And it's all Awake​​ Warrior. You can probably find those two words. I'll put it in the show notes.

DAVID: Yeah, it's awakewarrior.com that's the best place to find me if anyone's interested in diving deeper into some of these subjects.

MARTIN: Right on.

MARTIN: I think it's super needed. People don't realize just how much they really need to learn to be in the moment and be able to control their autonomic nervous system responses. And autonomic or used to be called automatic. It's just outside of your awareness. It's not totally outside of your control. You can actually volitionally do stuff to it. You already mentioned it that through breath work you can control your heart rate, you can control other responses. Whether you shut down your digestion and elimination or whether you're going to pee your pants. Those are all possible outcomes that you can control. If you can actually take control and it takes a bit of training. And I believe that your approach will help people get there.

DAVID: Yeah. As I said, breath is powerful. You can bring your, you can change your emotional state just by your breath. There’s a quote that says if you can learn to manage your breath, you can just about manage just about any situation in life.

MARTIN: Yep. If you can stay calm inside in face of danger, you're actually going to be able to deal with it rather than just running around screaming here on fire.

DAVID: Yeah, exactly.

MARTIN: Yeah. All right. Awake Warrior, David Lawson. Thank you very much. I'm looking forward to our future encounters. Thank you for being here today.

DAVID: Yeah, pleasure, Martin. Thank you for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. I enjoyed our conversation and hopefully your audience can gain something from this talk and help bring them to a place of better health and and wellness in their life.

MARTIN: You bet. Okay, look up Awake​​ Warrior. This is Martin Pytela at life-enthusiast.com. Thank you.