Tools to Turn Chronic Stress into Fuel for the Future

In this episode of Integrative You Radio, Dr. Nicole delves into the crucial topic of stress and its profound impact on our lives. She begins by highlighting the prevalence of stress in modern society and how many of us have come to normalize it. Dr. Nicole explores the interconnectedness of stress, anxiety, and our physical and biochemical well-being. She emphasizes how our beliefs, often shaped by early experiences and societal conditioning, influence our thoughts, emotions, and overall mental health.

In this thought-provoking episode, Dr. Nicole challenges the prevailing notion that chronic stress is an inevitable part of life. She underscores the significance of reevaluating our belief systems and their impact on our mental and physical health. Tune in to the full episode to learn more!

Interested in learning more about Dr. Nick & Dr. Nicole’s courses, memberships, or private work? Learn more at Integrative You. Have a quick question, Would you like to schedule a 

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What you’ll learn:    

1. Beliefs shape stress: Our beliefs deeply influence how we respond to stress, impacting our thoughts, emotions, and reactions.
2. Pause for clarity: Taking short breaks to detach and reflect can help us break the cycle of chronic stress and improve mental health.
3. Mind and body matter: Achieving well-being involves addressing both mental and physical aspects, such as meditation to calm the mind and understanding the biochemical effects of stress.

Quotes: 

“Stress is just part of life, and you just have to figure out how to handle it." - Dr. Nicole

"You're not creating your life; you're creating more of what you don't want."  - Dr. Nicole

Transcription:

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Integrative You Radio.

I am Doctor Nicole, and I am writing solo today,

talking to you about a really,

really important topic around stress.

So this was kind of sparked because of a more recent real that I did on social media.

And there was a lot of engagement, a lot of people that I think could really resonate with this

idea of living majority of their life under a lot of stress.

And I also can relate because this was a large majority of my life,

maybe my whole life, to be really honest with you.

And there are just some really specific things that I want to touch upon.

And I wanna bridge the gap between the normalization of stress.

And this idea of anxiety,

which is unfortunately and epidemic that we are living with.

And also, how is this connected to our bodies biochemically

and physically because it's all intertwined is really the point that I'm trying to make.

Their are many individuals that are in the mindset of well,

I'm dealing with stress right now,

but it will it will be over soon

once I reach this or once I'm in the relationship once I have the job,

once I have the financial security, we all have this idea of the end date of our stress,

but very often we find that stress will perpetuate or stress will come in cycles.

And the cycles of stress are usually a feedback mechanism to give us information to say,

hey, There is something that's running in the background that hasn't been fully resolved

or hasn't been fully understood.

I'm gonna talk a little bit more about this and how this is shaped.

But also, there are a lot of people that are walking around

with stress telling themselves This is just

what life is,

or I've learned how to live with stress.

I've learned how to handle stress.

And I know this very well because of the area that I lived in most of my life was the New Jersey,

New York area and this is kind of embedded in you.

It's embedded in you that you need to hustle,

you need to work hard. Stress is just part of life,

and you just have to figure out how to handle it.

And this is something that I do think sets the pace

for a lot of chronic physical illness and mental illness in the future,

thinking that that is the inevitable,

thinking that that is what life should be,

keeps us from all of the richness and abundance of life.

And trust me, when you're in the trenches,

of feeling so overwhelmed and stressed,

I might be pissing you off right now. And and that's okay.

It's, again, it's a feedback mechanism. I know that I used to feel very triggered

when people would say,

oh, I meditate, and, oh,

I, you know, just I take some time off when I need it.

And I'm like, oh, that must be nice. That's not my reality.

And it at that time, it wasn't my reality.

But it's also I didn't make it my reality.

There was what I know now,

a deep addiction to the pain,

the discomfort, the stress. Did I know that?

No. But what I realized is that When I finally slowed down a couple of years ago,

man, I was uncomfortable. I was probably the most uncomfortable that I ever was in my whole life.

I was more comfortable with being stressed with being overworked,

with being overwhelmed, with a million fires coming my way.

I was more comfortable with that.

And less comfortable with sitting still.

It just felt like well,

this is this is how I feel successful.

I feel like I'm I'm doing things. I'm putting out fires,

but I'm also helping people. And I'm also paying people and giving them a job and giving them,

a living. And it was just a very,

very interesting story that I created in my mind.

But more importantly, is that story didn't just come out of nowhere.

That story came out of a significant belief system.

And a significant amount of programs that were embedded in me since I was very young.

And that's what a lot of you need to wrap your head around is that this is deep.

Most of how you're operating now is based off of the things that you have either experienced

or observed.

From your younger years. And some of it was a decision

or a thought process that you came upon in your own experience,

and some of it was pushed upon you. And I know that I was of an error that my parents you know,

they worked their nine-to-five jobs. They worked really hard.

They were very loyal. They showed up on time.

They did the best that they could possibly do in hopes that they would get the raise.

They would be more appreciated. They would work their way up the ladder.

They would finally be financially free.

And unfortunately, that didn't really happen.

And so in my observation, one,

I was being told, hustle,

work hard, so that was something that definitely carried into my adulthood,

but also at the same time I observed that working hard didn't

always get you where you want it to be,

especially if you were not necessarily in the driver's seat.

So I embarked on, I'm going to take my work ethic and the program that was instilled in me,

the beliefs that you have to work hard. And as long as you work hard,

you'll create something. But I'm gonna take out the factor that I observed of that third party.

So I'm gonna work hard, but I'm gonna do it for myself,

and I'm gonna be the creator of my reality.

And you later find out it's still not how it works.

And the only reason I say that is because going going going doing doing doing,

feeling frantic and chaotic never moves the needle.

And I feel confident enough at this point in my journey to say it never moves the needle

because you might feel like it's moving the needle,

but really all that it's doing is keeping you on the hamster wheel.

You're going round and round and round and you're not necessarily going forward.

And if you do go forward, you usually get knocked backwards.

You find that traction. You get that that you move ahead.

And you potentially fall two to three steps back.

And this is what happens when you do not have the time

or the bandwidth to think clearly to make proactive decisions opposed to reactive decisions.

And this is multilayered because I don't want you to think that

this is all about your analytical

mind or your logical mind.

There is a cascade of things that happen.

So let's backtrack really here, really quick here.

So one, your beliefs,

create your thoughts, which create your emotions.

So if you have a belief system that you have to work hard to

create whatever you're trying to create,

wealth, abundance, quality time with your family,

freedom, So you have that belief which then creates thoughts

and some judgments So if somebody doesn't work hard,

They're lazy, they're never gonna be successful.

They don't care about their family, whatever thought process,

comes to your mind based off of your belief system.

And then, of course, there is the thoughts of if I'm not working hard,

I'm lazy. If I'm not working hard,

I'm not productive. If I'm not working hard,

I'm a bad parent. I'm a bad role model.

Which then creates your emotions. So if you're projecting your belief system onto someone else,

You might be angry, frustrated,

resentful. And then if you're projecting that belief system on yourself

and you feel like you're not you're not cutting it,

then you're going to have guilt and shame.

And those emotions are not productive

for anyone because if you live in a place that you have very little to no gratitude for your life,

And you live in a place of constantly judging others,

judging yourself, feeling guilty about what you did or didn't do,

Having shame around that, then you are going to attract more of what you think about.

And The more you have these thoughts,

the more hardwired they become.

And now you live in an emotional state where you are reacting to life.

You're not creating your life. Well, that's actually not true.

You are creating your life, but you're creating more of what you don't want.

Because your thought process is constantly focused on all the things happening to you.

So this gets worse and worse and worse,

the more chaotic, the more frantic you are,

the less time that you have to take a freaking pause to think straight.

And it sure as heck doesn't help if you're constantly seeking information,

wisdom validation from others. Sometimes you need to sit with yourself.

It's not always about someone else giving you advice mentoring you being your sounding board.

Because sometimes they potentially push you in the opposite direction of where you're trying to go.

So remember that your beliefs,

Some of them are your own beliefs based on your experiences,

Some of them have been injected onto you based off of your culture,

community, religion, mentors,

family, parents, grandparents, etcetera.

And that is creating your thoughts,

which is creating your emotions. And if you are a person that is chronically stressed,

you're chronically pissed off,

you're chronically feel guilty or shamed or embarrassed.

You have to start looking at the belief systems

and how are they potentially creating these cycles that are keeping you trapped.

Easier said than done. If this is something that you really wanna dive into,

you need to check out our values course because the values helps you to understand what you value,

what you truly value, opposed to what people told you,

you should value. And that is where power lies.

But when it comes to this idea of living in this chronic stress state,

as I mentioned before is that there is an addiction that can happen

and this addiction happens because as you stay stressed,

you change your biochemistry. You change your hormones,

you change your neurotransmitters, and your body will learn to adapt.

This can have more extremes when you have specific events that create a high magnitude of emotions,

AKA, a car accident that induced a ton of fear or a divorce that induced a ton of anxiety,

shame, anger, rage.

So when you have specific events that create a high magnitude of emotions,

this is also something that's going to change your biochemistry,

and it is also going to turn certain genes on and certain genes off.

So this is why there's so much more to the story

when it comes to helping to improve your overall mental health

and your physical health because your mind

is what dictates your body As much as you might wanna fight me on that,

I've been doing this twelve years, and my main focus was the body and the biochemistry.

And there were some people that saw improvements,

but there were many that didn't until we started to make sure that we were addressing the mind.

We were addressing the stress. We were addressing the PTSD.

We were addressing the fact that they never felt good enough.

All of those things. Those are at the foundation of your body,

physical, and biochemical. So as we have these different experiences,

it could be the one event that creates the high emotional magnitude that was either fear,

guilt, shame, anger, or it was the compounding.

It was the compounding that you never felt supported.

You never felt safe. You never felt secure. You never felt stable.

You always felt like you had to you were on your own.

You had to you had to go to war with people in order to survive.

You lived in survival. These compounding effects will do the same thing.

They will turn genes off. They will turn genes on,

and they will change your biochemical expression.

So when you're really trying to uplevel your mind

and you're trying to get out of your stress response in trying to grow yourself,

and you're trying to create all the things that you wanna

create from the great job to more time with

your family to the financial freedom to the freedom in general.

It's about understanding these different layers

and being able to have a strategy that not only gets you out of this

fight or flight chronic stress response calms your nervous system down.

But also is something that's going to allow you to what's the right word I'm trying to say?

Project from there. You're trying to use that as a stepping stone to move forward.

And it's also understanding that there's cycles.

You're not going to do something if it's I'm gonna do a supplement

protocol in order to improve my neurotransmitters.

And but I'm not gonna change the job that I hate or get out of the relationship that is toxic.

And then there's also the vice versa. Okay,

I'm gonna eliminate things out of my life that stress me out or are toxic.

But then you also have it necessarily figured out how to address the biochemical changes

or the fact that your body has adapted and learned how to operate in a chronic stress state.

So it's, like, it's meeting in the middle.

It's meeting in the middle to figure out

what has to happen in your day-to-day life in order to create more boundaries and preserve yourself.

But then it's also what is the repair that needs to happen on the physical body,

the biochemical body, the epigenetic body,

because it all works together.

So what I will say to you is that this might sound like holy crap.

This is really complicated. How can I how can I do all of this?

Step number one, you have to stop doing,

doing, going, going,

going, distracting yourself, distracting yourself,

distracting yourself, entertaining yourself, entertaining yourself,

entertaining yourself, entertaining yourself. There's a lot of distractions in this world.

There is social media. There is TV.

There is your phone,

which is literally a mini laptop in your pocket at all times.

There is a lot of distractions. There is a million reasons for you to not sit with yourself.

There's a million reasons to not take five minutes to try to breathe and think clearly.

There's a million things to do. But that is the key.

The key is To take a step back,

detach yourself, this could legitimately be five minutes.

Five minutes of your day. Work your way up to ten minutes.

Work your way up to fifteen minutes. If you can take a pause Ashley

when you're super emotionally reactive.

And if you can sit back and say,

okay, we're gonna take a minute here.

We're gonna breathe. And I'm gonna think about why is this pissing me off so much.

What is the root of this? And be able to think about,

is this me? Is this a past program?

Do I even know why these emotions came up?

Is there a rational reason why or is this just a cycle for me?

Take some time to pause.

And more importantly, is that if you can start to do different things to calm your brain weight,

I'm gonna get into this in just a minute. It's gonna be very short,

sweet to the point. You will calm the stress response in your body.

You will calm the fight or flight response,

and you will find that if you normally reacted in one minute,

maybe it takes you ten minutes.

Maybe it takes you ten hours. Maybe it eventually takes you ten days.

And this is a key thing that I learned in my own journey of starting to pause,

starting to use binaural beats,

then meditation to call my brain waves is that I talked to my mentor.

And I said I felt so calm when this stressful situation happened.

You know, normally I would have been really reactive to it,

but I was so calm, but now I feel equally as pissed off as I normally would.

And I feel like I'm so disappointed in myself because I feel like I made progress,

and I guess I haven't. And he said,

okay, hold on, let's take a step back here.

How long did it take you in the past to react?

I was like, oh gosh, I would have reacted within three minutes.

He's like, how long did it take you to react?

I was like, oh, it took about five days. He's like,

I'm gonna call that progress. I was like,

yeah. Yeah. That's that's a good way to put it.

So it's not that things just disappear.

It's just you find that you react differently,

or you are more calm and grounded,

and maybe those same emotions come up a little bit later.

But the fact that you're not as reactive in that moment is progress.

And the more you commit to it, the more that you will find that you are less

and less and less reactive to your life,

and things start to flow more easily.

So slowing your brain waves, there's quite a few hacks on how to do this.

You can get on YouTube and look up alpha wave binaural beats.

And you can just listen to some alpha wave binaural beats.

Alpha waves is the breaks So just to recap really quick,

beta waves. So beta waves,

if you look this up online, this is when your brain is active.

You know, it's when you get things done when you go about your day.

And beta waves are very normal in your waking hours.

But the problem is that most people are in fight or flight,

which means they're in something called high beta.

And high beta is kind of like your brain's going haywire.

And it's very hard for it to process information that's coming in.

It's very hard for it to not create emotional reactions based on the information that's coming in.

And there's a lot of people that are operating in high beta,

AKA, fight or flight, most of their life,

most of the day. And when they take a pause

and they sit down on the couch

or they give themselves that minute because maybe somebody force them.

Oh, I can't sit still. Oh, I'm bored.

Oh, I'm not productive. Oh, and they're extremely uncomfortable.

And that is a huge sign that you you're hardwired for stress.

And being hardwired for stress, you're never going to wake up every day feeling like,

wow. I really love my life. You're gonna wake up every day feeling like,

shit, another day. Lifechess is hard.

Why me? And do we really wanna live that way?

So I challenge you to not accept that as the norm and to say,

nope. That doesn't have to be my reality. But,

yes, you're gonna have to go against the grain of this typical American society of go

go go do do do do hustle hustle hustle don't sit still.

And then when you do sit still binge your Netflix,

your phone, and a million other things to distract you from reflecting in your own brain.

So you use this alpha brain wave or alpha binaural beads,

and alpha is just pumping the brain on that high beta.

It's pumping the brakes to slow those brain waves down to get you a little bit more calm.

And This is something that will start to retrain the brain waves,

which will allow you to calm the stress or fonts,

calm your nervous system down, and then really allow you to just get a little bit more clear.

Think a little bit more clearly. And the more that this happens,

the more clear you can be, the more creative you can get,

the more strategic you can be about your decisions.

The more clear you can get on who you really are as a person,

what do you really value? What do you really believe?

Not the beliefs that are convoluted by society and everything else.

In addition to that, if you wanna take this a step further,

You're like, okay. I've been doing my little binaural beats.

Definitely feeling a little bit more chill. You can move into leveraging meditation.

And meditation is not, like, sitting there,

kumbaya, legs crossed. Yeah. I guess you could do that if you want,

but taking those same alpha wave binaural beats or leveraging some custom-made,

meditations, Doctor Nick has made many meditations on our integrated view dot health website,

that you can access. They have all different intentions if you're trying to heal from sickness

or symptoms if you are trying to feel more empowered,

if you're trying to create more abundance,

if you're just trying to calm the fuck down.

We have we have you covered. Doctor.

Joda Spensa is another fantastic option for meditations.

And this is something that you can leverage in order to take a step further.

The key thing is that you want to try to leverage your brain waves

So when you get up in the morning,

you kind of linger between, delta,

which is when you're sleeping to alpha waves.

And as you go out of alpha,

you go back into beta. Again, you're up about doing things.

So right when you first get up in the morning,

You want to try to do your meditation then.

If it's ten minutes, fifteen minutes,

maximize the ability to tap into those alpha brain waves.

And this is something that is going to help transform your day.

For those of you that are like cringe at the idea of meditation,

I get it. That was me. I hope you're not like me in the sense that you have to hit ultimate rock

bottom before you decide to embark on something like this.

Because it's not about overcommitting yourself.

It's about just leveraging some simple tools that can help to slow those brain waves down.

And to reprogram your nervous system to be able to function without a shit ton of stress hormones.

And this is step one.

The other steps that come in later is about getting clear on

who you are getting clear on your values,

which is something that we have a course on.

In addition to that is being able to be in a calm enough mind

and have a calm enough nervous system that you have the ability

to break through some of your past programs

and cycles My favorite saying from Doctor.

Nick is turning your past into fuel for your future.

A lot of our experiences that we presumes to have been bad or negative.

When you have someone with the right expertise ask you the right questions,

you can turn these past, even painful experiences into fuel for your future.

And I've seen this many, many, many times.

I've experienced it with Doctor.

Nick, and it is something that is very,

very powerful. Because it's it's taking that magnitude of this was really bad

and the magnitude of the fear or the anxiety or the shame or the guilt or the anger,

and it's reducing that magnitude down by shifting your perception.

And that is where you continue to reprogram your nervous system.

That is where you continue to grow yourself mentally and emotionally.

And this is this is always something that's going to be part of growth.

I wanna say this. I I've I literally had this conversation this morning with a client.

I was like, don't ever think that the growth is going to be an upward trajectory.

We won't all want it to be that, and then we beat ourselves up when it's not.

But growth is all about loss for gain.

And I'm not saying this. This is legitimately based off of the

laws of physics is that nothing is created

nor destroyed.

Everything is always in balance. AKA,

there is always good, there is always bad.

When you want to birth something new and amazing,

you are going to have a loss. And I'll keep it simple.

If you want to have a gain of quality friendships of people that get you,

people that you with people that you can spend hours with laughing that you're like,

oh my god. Where did the time go? To gain those relationships,

chances are you have to let go of toxic ones.

And this principle applies to so many aspects of life.

There is a loss to be a gain. And if you go into this thinking that Oh,

I'm only gonna gain, gain, gain. You're setting yourself up for a nightmare.

Fantasy to a nightmare. A lot of us have a fantasy of what a relationship should look like.

What a family should look like. And when it doesn't fulfill that quote-unquote fantasy,

we then have a nightmare. We have more stress.

So that's really the phase that I personally feel like you need a facilitator for.

You need someone to open your eyes to things that society Didn't

because society has programmed us to just deal with the stress,

The stress is normal, being anxious as normal,

depression is normal. It's genetic. It's genetic.

Okay. And we don't necessarily know how our environment is affecting us.

We don't know what we can do about it. We feel a lack of control

and a lack of control leads to chaos.

So step one, take a fucking pause.

Step two, slow your brain waves down.

Listen to some binaural beats, that is gonna help you get into your alpha brain waves.

Meditation is step number three. Please don't go try to do an hour-long meditation if you never done it before.

Five minutes, ten minutes. Work your way up.

And don't force yourself. Do it if it feels good.

And also remember, if you feel like shit every day,

you can, you know, just power through.

Step four, clarity on your values,

what's important to you, get rid of the noise of what you should be,

who you should be, what you should think,

etcetera. And then five is how to turn your past.

No matter if it was positive or painful,

turn it into fuel for your future. And be able to have the right tools to create your life.