Brandon Jones
speaker
227 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2024
last heard May 2024
Brandon Jones’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Okay. Not trying to point anyone out. We have a lot of people in common. They haven't responded yet.
And I'm happy to be here yet again. This is a very important topic. Honestly, I think stress is one of those things that shows up in our lives every day. And we don't know how to always manage it for ourselves. And there's no exact way to manage stress. It's very subjective based on the individual. So I'm looking forward to our conversation today.
Oh, absolutely. I think that they're closely related. Let's call them cousins, but they're not exactly the same. So let's start with anxiety. We'll start backwards. Okay. Anxiety is a state. Well, let me start by saying this. Everyone has anxiety. It's a part of this human condition. where we get anxious, we worry, we may fret over things, we may get nervous.
That's a part of just the human condition. Anxiety becomes a problem for people when it gets in the way of things that you want to do or things that you need to do. For example, we need to bathe. We need to groom ourselves. We need to eat at least two to three meals a day. We need at least six to eight hours of sleep.
But anxiety, when it becomes problematic or even clinical, is when it interferes with those sorts of things. Anxiety can get in your way of going into public places such as school or a bank or maybe even a concert. It may affect your ability to go inside of an elevator, go down an escalator. get in a vehicle, get on the highway, it can affect a lot of things.
And some of those things are things that we need to do to get to work, school, home, things of that nature. So that's anxiety. Again, we all get anxious about something. It can be a fear of a dog, a spider, it could be heights, it can be a lot of things, but anxiety becomes a problem for people when it interferes with your ability to do what you need to do or what you want to do.
So that's anxiety. And like I said, anxiety is a close cousin of stress. Stress is similar. It's a part of everyone's life. We all have stress. But stress can be looked at in three different kind of dimensions. The first dimension of stress is what we call positive stress. This is like waking up late.
You sleep through your alarm, and you also sleep through your snooze button, and you wake up, and you got 15 minutes to get out the door. Or maybe you forget to plug your phone up overnight, and you wake up with 3% battery life, and now your day is starting a little behind. You may spill coffee on your shirt, and you got to get out of the door. That's what we call positive stress, right?
It's this immediate kind of letdown that we end up having. We get a little razzled. But eventually, we'll figure out a solution to keep moving throughout our day. So it doesn't slow us down, but it does give us pause in the moment. That's what we call positive stress. And again, everyone experiences this. Some people, they'll experience positive stress more than one time in a day.
I would say you probably have at least three to four positive stress moments every week, just given the nature of how our lives are set up. You get an unexpected medical bill or your neighbor dog poops in your yard or something like that. You're going to have a level of stress that shows up. The second dimension of stress is what we call tolerable stress.
Now, again, most people will experience this as well. This is this is like when a grandparent suddenly passes away, doesn't feel good. You get overwhelmed. One of our main stress hormones is called cortisol. Your cortisol levels are raised pretty significantly due to the nature of the situation.
But over time, that stress level should come down, that cortisol level should come down because you figured out ways to adjust to whatever the event is that happened. Such things, car accidents, unexpected deaths, you know, just, you know,
bad news, like Kobe Bryant, when Kobe Bryant passed away, a lot of people's tolerable stress level was up because a lot of people seen him as a very notable figure. These are the things that happen for people, but with relationships, coping skills, things like that, we're able to move forward. But the thing about tolerable stress is that we can have these moments where it peaks back up.
It doesn't get back to where it was initially, but your stress levels can peak With things like anniversaries, birthdays, the holiday season, any type of reminders. It can even be a smell. Any type of reminders of that event or that individual can bring your stress level back up. But over time, it shouldn't be as significant.
But again, it's very subjective and it depends on who the person is and what kind of coping skills they have. And then the third dimension of stress, which is what I call the big bad wolf of stress, which is what we call toxic stress. Now, this is what people like myself and in my field, we deal with a lot of this, where folks are in this very high level of cortisol, high levels of stress.
And usually with toxic stress, it's prolonged. It's very, very long. Complex things are happening, very challenging situations, things like being chronically homeless or unhoused, things like having a chronic illness, being bullied, being in a domestic violence relationship, dealing with terrorism, living in a concentration camp.
These are types of things that can lead to what we call toxic levels of stress. Even living in a neighborhood where there's consistent noise 24-7, sirens, music, people talking, people up and down stairs in apartment buildings, those things can be seen as toxic stress. And your body's responding. Your body's responding to being in those environments.
And a lot of times when people are in that toxic stress space, they're not even aware of it because it's been going on so long. that it becomes normalized for them. And that's where a lot of my work is, is helping people identify that is not normal. And you can do something about it outside of just leaving the environment.
You have to work on those things because your body's still responding, whether you're cognitively aware of it or not. So that's a long example or explanation, but hopefully that gives people an idea of the difference and the connection.
Yep. Absolutely. It has a huge impact on our children. Now, remember, our children's brains are developing until they're about 24 years old, 25 years old. So as they're living in these conditions where there's a lot of stimuli is probably the best way to talk about it. You know, their brains are developing around dealing with so much noise, so much anxiety.
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