Jennifer Taitz
Appearances
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
Hi Mike, it's great to talk to you.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
You know, Mike, a huge downside to being human is that we have a knack for taking stress and majorly multiplying it. I mean, we take something that's somewhat stressful or very stressful, and then we add on to that thinking even worse than what's actually happening.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
And the more that we think in ways that just disempower us, our body does a number on us, and then we easily judge our body's response, then we cope in ways that totally backfire. It's like you're stressed about a work demand, and then you start procrastinating or trying to get things perfect in a way that
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
prevents you from getting the deadline met, or you feel like you need to fall asleep at night. And rather than having faith in your body, you tell yourself, if you don't fall asleep right now, tomorrow's going to be terrible, which just makes you tense. And then maybe you pick up your phone, and then there's no way that sleep is going to come.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
So there is very real stress in the world, and in our lives, of course, especially right now. But we have a knack, unfortunately, for just taking it and making it that much worse and then spreading it all around us, making the people around us also experience what we're feeling and feeling like we're dumping it and making it contagious.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
It's kind of upsetting, but it's also incredibly liberating because if we appreciate the stress cycle of knowing what our minds do that makes things that much worse and appreciating this habit of overthinking and ruminating and how that takes
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
something that was upsetting for a couple minutes and makes it stressful for hours and days and years, or taking something ambiguous and making it that, you know, horrible, we can free ourselves.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
There's so many ways we can free ourselves at different points, whether with our minds, in our bodies, or through behavior, so we don't spread stress to the people that we care about and take work stress and lead to turn that into relationship stress.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
I think as people, there's a famous book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. I think as people, we just have this knack for thinking and overthinking and getting lost in language that just makes things super judgmental and chaotic. But again, if we understand what we're doing, we can entirely change our relationship and improve our quality of life.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
I just want to start by normalizing. I can't begin to imagine the pain that people are going through. And I actually can sort of imagine because I'm working with people that have lost their homes. And so the pain is really, really real. But telling yourself not only do you lose your house, but you're also living through an apocalypse is just taking it and making it so much bigger than what is.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
And I'm also really... profoundly moved by people's resilience. I just actually saw a client last night who lost her house and I have a daughter, a similar age to her daughter, and I ran over to where she's staying and brought her some clothes. And I was struck by her resilience.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
And she said something that I don't know if I could have had the courage to say, but thank God we're alive and home is where the people that you love are. And of course, emotions come in waves and they're certainly going to
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
to be expected to be waves of tremendous grief and loss and panic, but also there are waves of being able to enjoy a meal with loved ones sitting across from you, even if it's not in your home and appreciation for the people around that are trying to help. And humans are notoriously bad. It's what's called effective forecasting or predicting how they'll feel in the future.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
And people ultimately are able to cope with difficult things far better than their minds let on.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
It feels like the end of the world. And one thing that we can all do is... you know, half of the time we're not in this moment. We're thinking about something that happened in the past or something that's going to happen in the future. But we know that the more present we are, the more likely we are to be happier. And 50% of the time our mind is going elsewhere.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
But if we can come back, anchor ourselves, feel our feet on the ground, what am I thinking? What am I feeling? What am I doing? We can feel a lot more able to manage and navigate. And I think the people that are really, and again, I don't wanna minimize, this is a really big thing that people will be thinking about for years and decades and maybe for the rest of our lives.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
But even if someone does go through a traumatic event, I'm blown away by exercises that I do with my patients that significantly improve PTSD in a matter of five sessions. And so there are things to do that are different than what we might normally do that can offer hope even in the hardest of times.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
Absolutely. So I talk about first and foremost, our stress mindset, what we make of our ability to cope with both stress and emotions. If we believe that we can't cope, that it's just too much, I can't, and that our body stress response is going to kill us, that we're going to, you know, heart palpitations mean that we're at risk of heart disease and premature death, that does a number to us.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
That becomes a negative self-fulfilling prophecy. But believing that you can cope. The most common measure of stress is actually called the perceived stress scale. If you believe you can cope and that your body's stress response is serving you, it's helping you prepare for action and it's adaptive and
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
then that actually just learning those two things, that you can cope with stress and your body is on your side, dramatically helps people, reduces their cortisol, correlates with being able to persist in more challenging goals.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
Sure. So there's so many things and this is why I love this topic because different things work for different people. But a couple of first aid things that come to mind, and I love this question, is even, you know, we all get spam emails and we get robo calls and we just ignore them, right? We just hit do not disturb or we...
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
have a junk sorter that it doesn't even meet our eyes or we don't even lose any focus to it. But oftentimes when we're upset, we fail to realize that we're in our own kind of spam, in the pile of our own spam. We all metaphorically and somewhat literally have different states of mind. And when we're
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
feeling intense emotions or going through something very difficult, it's human nature to be an emotion mind. An emotion mind is different than reasonable mind. And simply noticing I'm in emotion mind, it's the middle of the night, I woke up, I'm thinking really anxious thoughts rather than getting into the exact anxious thoughts and trying to refute them or distract yourself from them.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
Just telling yourself I'm in emotion mind. This is a junk call. This is a spam email. I am just an emotion mind. And then you can kind of more readily untangle rather than trying to like, you know, respond to something that's ridiculous.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
So that's one option is calling out emotion mind, which can help people from this noxious habit of getting lost in these ruminations and, you know, telling other people all the things that are going wrong that just makes them feel even more real. Another one that I really like is creating a hope kit. It sounds simple, but literally collecting a few objects that give you a sense of perspective.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
If you have a picture of some loved ones or a song that really reminds you of better times or a card someone left you, having a collection of things that widens your focus. So if you get a disappointing email or you learn that something that you worked for didn't happen,
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
Instead of being narrowly focused in such a painful myopic way on all the things that are going wrong, a broader sense of all the things that are going right. I mean, I could easily, if I worked on something and it didn't, you know, an article or something, and then something, an editor didn't like it, just realizing, okay, I have, you know, beautiful, healthy children.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
And that's what actually, of course, there's room to validate. Of course, I'm disappointed. But when our mind plays these tricks on us, like, life's not fair to have kind of a wider perspective and a hope kit can really do that. And there's a lot of research that has found that even for people with cancer or that feel very, very depressed, having a hope kit can actually create real hope.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
Oh, Mike, there's so many to choose from. One more is doing the opposite. A lot of times we feel stressed and we act in ways that stress us out further. We feel stressed and we send a grumpy text or we procrastinate or we cancel plans. We decide we just don't have time to see friends for dinner. But a very powerful thing is actually doing what you would do if you felt differently.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
A lot of times we wait to feel differently to do differently. But the only way to actually change how you feel is to change how you live. And so if you feel like
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
sluggish I don't want to go to the gym class today because I'm tired and I'm in a bad mood that you will perpetuate your bad mood by skipping the things that you know generally nourish you and some people try this but don't do it all the way and we need to do this all the way if you're
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
trying to get some work done, but also checking your email throughout and telling yourself you're going to do a bad job, so why bother? You're not going to be able to actually cross the thing off your list. But I love opposite action.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
I think it works all around whether you're feeling grumpy with your spouse and acting in ways that perpetuate feeling grumpy because then they're grumpy towards you and that keeps you in a vicious cycle. But we could all interrupt vicious cycles with virtuous ones by changing our behaviors in more positive directions.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
Yeah, and even if you don't immediately feel better, you're setting in motion the steps to start to live better.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
you know, emotion mind when we're, our emotions are intense. The limbic system is on fire and we just cannot think clearly. And we really zoom in and we have a hard time with perspective, which is why I like these exercises that just quickly help us see I'm an emotion mind. Let me get some perspective. Let me listen to this podcast rather than focusing on the driver that cut me off.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
We get flooded, but people are also incredibly good at getting better in just minutes, like literally minutes. Yeah.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
through small things it's like little wheels on a big suitcase you don't need something big outside of yourself you know listening to a song on the radio or um relaxing your face and your grip on the steering wheel can automatically give you a little bit more spaciousness so we we can easily rev ourselves up but we could also choose to reset our minds and bodies and act in ways that help
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
There are a couple things about that that I like. I like something called worry time, which is when rather than having worry as an all-day ticker in your brain, that's just you're kind of doing something, but there's a lot of energy and space taken up by worries. You could batch your worries and save them for another time. Maybe you write them down for 20 minutes later in the day. So
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
more of the day you're present and then you have this time to actually sit with them and there's also something called expressive writing which is a specific way of writing with a beginning middle and an end and really going deeper into your feelings a lot of times we're just kind of scratching the surface and not really addressing how we really feel.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
And actually one way to significantly reduce this habit of overthinking is writing about something. If something's really upsetting to you, rather than just telling yourself, a lot of things that people are upset about are very real. It's not just... thoughts to sing, but they're real pains and losses and disappointments. If you write about that, you can give yourself a little bit of closure.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
You can actually process what feels splintered and messy. And in studies where people were asked to write for 30 minutes a day for, sorry, 20 minutes a day for three days, six months later, they had reductions in depression and rumination. And so there's something about putting it down that helps you kind of close it out.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
It's all a magic trick. I mean, it's all a magic trick. Like even in this moment, just taking a minute to appreciate that you're able to enjoy your senses, look at the sights in front of you and the sounds that you're listening to right now. And there's, I mean, there's so much magic. And I think also just remembering like a huge aspiration is to just not make things worse and a hard time
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
by not making things worse, by not taking something annoying that happened during your day and dumping it on your kid or making it a reason to derail from your health goals, not making things worse will automatically make things better and also come with this priceless feeling of knowing that you can count on yourself regardless of what shows up in your life.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
And I think that's really what peace of mind is, is knowing that you can make things better in very difficult times, not just for you, but for the people around you.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
Thanks, Mike. It's been a real pleasure. I'm so grateful that we had the time to talk.
Something You Should Know
A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress
A huge downside to being human is that we have a knack for taking stress and majorly multiplying it. I mean, we take something that's somewhat stressful and then we add on to that thinking even worse than what's actually happening.