How to Manage Stress as an Entrepreneur (Full Protocol)

Summary

Stress can be your best friend or your worst enemy. In this video, I'll discuss proven research-backed strategies that will help you manage all types of stress (short-term, medium-term, and long-term stress) effectively, so you can remain in control while others lose theirs.

Transcript

Stress, which is your psychological physiological response to things can be your worst enemy or your best friend. In this video, I want to show you proven research backed strategies that will help you deal with short term, medium term and long term stress. So you always remain in control while others lose theirs. Let's get to it.

[INTRO] Hey, I'm Leon Castillo, Founder of Selfmastered, a High Performance Training Company that helps entrepreneurs scale their businesses by solving their solid bottleneck, their own performance. We transform the unproductive & overwhelmed and unfocused entrepreneurs into laser-focused business athletes that can achieve in one day, what they previously achieved in one week.

Today, we'll talk about stress, because as you know, a stress management is crucial and your crew doesn't matter what it is that you do, those are able to remain in control at all times in the middle of the intrapreneurial storm will have the upper hand remember the Charlie Munger said, some really intelligent people are terrible investors because they have bad temperament. So managing yourself and your emotions is paramount, if you want to win, and emotions and physiology are the two sources of stress that we have in our normal word lives. And before we dive deep, let's really define what we mean by stress.

But essentially, you're stressed out when you are over relying on the fight or flight response of your nervous system when you're over relying on your sympathetic nervous system. And the goal here is to always be operating from a parasympathetic nervous system, which is always from a calm and collected stamp.

And in order to deal with long term, short term and medium term stress, we need to follow two rules. One is that we have more control over our stress response that we thought possible and to is that our goal has to be to build capacity. So in essence, we need to learn how to go from fight or flight response to calm and collected to rest and recovery.

But also, we need to be training ourselves so that we do not snap out of that parasympathetic nervous system and become stressed, all of a sudden, and both things can be trained, they're much easier than you think. And this is what the best of the best do every single day to remain in control.

So how do we go from being on fight or flight mode to be in rest and recovery mode? Well, we can do this through breathing, because breathing was one of the mechanisms that we can have to signal the brain to send relax signals to our muscles and to our nervous system. And in order to do this, we need to breathe in a way that our exhale is longer than our inhale. Because when we do that, the diaphragm which is a skeletal muscle will liberate Space and Heart will be momentarily bigger, which will lead to app relaxation response in your body. So as simple as this, every time you're feeling stressed out, do deep breathing in which the exhale is way longer than the inhale. There are several formats for this.

You can do a three in six out you can do seven in 14 out doesn't only matter which one you choose what matters that The exhale is always longer than the inhale. So that's how you control your fight or flight response. But how can you build capacity? How can you push yourself so that you will never snap into the fight or flight response? Well, by doing short term stressors that build your adrenaline system.

The idea is that by subjecting yourself to short term stressors, you condition your brain and mind to deal with stresses in a better way. And some of the stressors that you can use are also breathing something called to more breathing or Wim Hof breathing can also be through cold showers. So contrast showers that through cold exposure trigger an adrenaline response, and it can also be through exercise.

So high intensity interval training or highly powered bouts of exercise that really stressed the body and then are followed by rest and recovery periods. Now let's get into the breathing breathing the two more breathing or Wim Hof breathing. They're essentially the same thing.

Two more is an old traditional breathing technique from the Tibetan monks in Tibet and Wim Hof is a very similar it's all about inhaling and exhaling for 30 times in rapid succession, and then holding your breath and that by hyperventilating what you're doing is you're exciting your adrenaline system so that you can create a stronger immune system via this adrenaline.

This is a short term stressor that preps your system to deal with infections or illnesses or all the freshmen for more life in a more effective manner. So Wim Hof or tumor breathing then co Showers. You've heard this 1000s of times, but nonetheless, it actually works. So by forcing yourself to experiment to code, you're also training your adrenaline system and you are pushing the limits of your stress response.

And finally, exercise anything and everything that is done in with high intensity in a short amount of time. And that is followed by a proper rest recovery protocols will give you the ability to sustain higher levels of stress. So that's the two principles that you need to keep front and center at all times.

One, you have more control of your in the moment stress response. And the best way to go about this is through breathing by exhaling longer than inhaling. And then to there's proven ways of building stress capacity over time. If you're enjoying this video, remember to subscribe and hit the bell.

So you never miss out on any of our juicy videos. And quick question for you though, how do you normally deal with everyday stress? What is the mechanism or the protocol that you have to help you control your emotional response? I'd love to know. So let's get into how can we do to short term stress? Well, short term, the best way to deal with short term stress is really by building capacity over time following the protocols that we just discussed through breeding to mon Wim Hof through exercise and through cold showers among others, right.

The more capacity you build, the better you'll be able to deal with the short term stressors of motor life. But there's also a fourth one that you can use. And it's reframing what stress actually looks like. And this has proven by quite a few, quite a lot of psychological research is if you reframe a negative stressor as a positive one, so instead of saying I'm scared or or I'm stressed out of you say I'm excited about this, I'm really looking forward to this, you can trick your mind to remove part of that stress because short term stress is not inherently bad.

In fact, as we just saw shorter terms can actually be very good at building yourself into a more resilient and powerful being. So do those protocols for building capacity and also reframe what short term stress actually is now what to do with medium term stress, medium stress stress is when you start having trouble going to sleep when your sleep quality goes down.

That's when you might be suffering from medium term stress that can last several days or several weeks. And at this point, what you need to do is create boundaries in your life so that you have clear separation between your work life in your daily life in the stressful parts of your life, and restful parts of your life sounds simple, but it is insanely effective. And a few of this lifestyle changes that you can implement is one have a definition of Done.

So know exactly what it is that you should be doing in any given day and what looks like a good day for you and what looks like a good week for you. If you're constantly working without an end in sight. It is very easy to develop medium term stress and eventually burnout. Start by mapping out what are the key projects and initiatives that you need to do on any given week and actually execute on them.

And once you've done it, stop working, give yourself time to rest and recover. And which leads me to the second idea you need to work with 100% intensity on or 100% of don't do this flatlining that most people do in which you work seven minutes, then check Twitter for 15 minutes and back five minutes work that 10 minutes to checking the news, whatever aim to be 90 to 120 minutes fully focus fully on the task and then disengage completely to give yourself the ability to rest of the quarter.

If you become good at this, you start working as athletes train and compete, you will find that you're able to handle stress much better. Which leads me to the next idea set boundaries. If you have a definition of done and you're always working 100% And if you're not 100% You're not working, then the last step is to create rituals that help you separate your work persona from the personal persona that can be wind down rituals in the evenings can be fully disengaging during the weekends.

It can be having protocols to walk in nature, not being near technology can be anything and everything that actually creates separations, and as it says Never take work home because that's what surefire way of messing up those boundaries.

So these strategies are useful for dealing with medium term stress is by creating boundaries, being mindful about what you're doing never overworking. And if you are willing to work on weekends, because you are willing to send rocket to Mars, you need to first get there by systematically building capacity over time. So if you really want to go the Elon Musk way to have to put in, you know, 80 hour 80 to 100 hour weeks every week, which is very hard to sustain. You need to train yourself over the years to deal with the stress response that comes from pushing yourself so hard.

If you start working every single weekend without being ready without having the correct protocols, you will fail so and finally how to deal with long term stress. So on top of what we already share for short term and medium stress, stress, the number one thing that needs to be done at this point is to avoid making decisions that put you in a stressful position, most notably regarding money. So one of the best things you can do to be better in your business is to have several months of cash in the bank that is an underrated tip that I nonetheless have intelligence on us for ages at this point.

So really don't make financial decisions that put you in the red. Don't use that as a constraint to deliver your best self because you will crumble. So number one, in order to deal with long term stress is to architect your work life so that you are not over exposing yourself to risks that can create stress, then two is nurture your social connections.

Humans are social animals, and we need to connect with others in order to be psychologically healthy, so don't fall into the trap of overworking yourself to death, isolating yourself to get more done, because at the end, you will crumble. So nurture your family, your friends and your acquaintances relationship, so that you can remove sources of long term stress, such as high isolation, then three, gratitude. You've heard this 1000 times, but it's true.

Nonetheless, research proves that if you have a regular graduate practice or writing every day, or at least every week, the things that you're grateful for, you will wire your brain specifically your serotonin system to look for the positive side of things, which will remove sources of stress in the long term.

And finally, have fun. Having fun is so important. Don't take yourself too seriously. You're not going to get out of this world alive so you may as well have fun and bonus points if you have fun by connecting with others as like in playing sports or whatever that you are connecting and having fun at the same time. Do not forget your hobbies do not forget that in order to sustain your best self hard work, you need to be able to have a best self in your life.

So I think this was very comprehensive. Let me know what you think about this video. The goal was to give you a general understanding of what is stress and how to make it your best friend by having a few protocols that are research proven and will help you remain in control what others are in dire straits.