EQ4E #11 Stress Reduction

Hello, welcome to the Essential Questions for Educators Podcast, or EQ4E on Spotify. My name is William Brooks and I am your host. I have got a special podcast today. I get to talk about something that was very important to me. It was a discovery that I needed to find in my life. I'm not generally a very high-strung person or you. You might be, I don't know, but I don't know what year it was that I realized I remember grading papers at my desk one day. And just all of a sudden feeling this burning in the back of my, you know, in the upper back area and my shoulders even. And I was like, what is going on? I was like, it's, it just hurts. It burns. And so I got up and I walked around a little bit and kind of went away. And then I sat back down to grade papers again and before I knew it, it was back. And I realized my shoulders were slowly going up into my ears and I was like, wait a second. Is this stress? I think this might be stress because I'm generally not a very stressed out person. I discovered when I started noticing things that it would happen when I was paying bills when I was apparently grading papers when I was doing my homework back when I was taking classes. I would get this burning sensation in my upper back and my shoulders as tension would start coming in. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I got to do something about this. And back when I first noticed it, I would go running or something like that. And that would kind of take care of it. But, you know, my knees, you know, they can run these days if I'm being chased or there's a tornado in the area or something like that. But I generally don't run on purpose. So unless there's something that's getting ready to go down. Now I still work out, you know, I do things like that. But the running that I used to do, which culminated in triathlon, half marathons, the country music marathon in Nashville, I just don't do that any longer. And so I was like, okay, how can I deal with this stress? And that's what I really want to talk about today. And I've got four things that I would like to point out. These are four things that worked for me. They do not have to be four things that work for you. But hey, for all I know, the essential question, you know, how do I, what can I do about my stress levels as an educator or whatever I do? It may trigger something in you to either go search for your own ways. You may try one of my ways. It may lead you to something else entirely. But stress of the kind that makes your shoulders burn and whatnot. Some people get headaches. Some people, you know, it should be dealt with. They should. And I found four kind of quick, easy ways to deal with stress. And I would like to share those. The first one was, what did I find out about this first one? Well, okay, full disclosure. My mom is a therapist. She was a practicing therapist. She's retired now. So I always kind of had the mindset of, okay, if I can't work through something like this, I got to go searching. I've got a search for my own solutions. And so I read somewhere on my search that a change in physical environment is a big deal regarding changing stress, which I guess I discovered when I got up from grading papers and it kind of eventually went away. When I read this, I had come out of the classroom and I was in a form of administration. I wasn't evaluating anyone, but I was working on the support of the school. And I had a lot of stuff going on. It doesn't matter what specifically, but I read somewhere. If you just get up, if you just get up, that also coincided when the principal I was working with at the time, her name was Crystal. She said, you know, build my happy place. If I need a happy place, which sometimes I need a happy place, but my happy place is our child care center that we had at our school that served the community and some of our students that had kids. She would go down there and I didn't ask her details. I don't know if she just watched the kids play or maybe held a baby. I don't know how involved she got, but she would go down to that happy place. So when I read this about changing physical location, physical state, if you will, my first mental motto was, they're going to tell me to go work out again. And that ended up not being the case at all. I discovered, after reading this, and when my principal told me this, that my happy place happened to be an art room. At least that was one of my places. Or just getting up and going and walking around the building. Or sometimes I walked outside the building. I had a variety of different techniques to get up, move around, do whatever I needed to do to change where I was, what I, where I physically was, as well as what I was physically doing. I did not run down to the gym and look some ways. I didn't do anything like that. But I definitely got myself physically out of the place that I'm at. If you're a classroom teacher and you're going, yeah, okay, you must be nice. You know, get up from your office, go to the bathroom when you want to, so on and so forth, tell us more, tell us more. Now, like if you're a classroom teacher and you're at your desk, maybe get up and, you know, walk around or if you're walking around and what your students are doing, it's starting to stress you out, maybe go have a seat, you know, whatever you need to do, but just try to do something physically. So that really spoke to me at the time and I wanted to share that. That may mean something different based on your context, but maybe it'll help. So that's number one, change your physical location or your physical state. Number two has to do with breathing. Now, actually, that's two and three. I know you're breathing. Everyone's breathing and everyone is still stressed, so like what's the deal? Well, what I discovered through a podcast I was listening to is that there are different types of what they call breath work that you can go through. And I was never really, you know, to be honest, that kind of sounded hippie-dippy to me, like, oh, yeah, man, so I'm going to like cross my legs, man, and I'm going to make that little, you know, my middle finger touches my thumb on both sides, I'm going to rest them on my knee. No, no, no, that's not what we're talking about. Two specific types of breathing that has helped me is number one box breathing, B-O-X breathing. And I was like, okay, what in the world is box breathing? And again, I went out searching for ways to call myself down a little bit. What I needed to reduce some stress and box breathing is simply in through your nose for a count of four, hold your breath for a count of four, out through your mouth, count of four, hold it with no air in your lungs for a count of four, and then repeat. So in through the nose, out through the mouth, and I was counting by fours. And when I discovered this, it was listening to a podcast, and it was a former Navy SEAL, and he was talking about the breath work and the breathing, how that's important in combat, or at least combat training, because you don't, you don't want to be thinking about your breathing techniques when you're in actual combat, but how he learned and other Navy SEALs learned. I don't know if this was officially part of the training, but how to control heart rates, control anxiety, control stress with breathing. Now, I was not in the military, I was in a school, and at this point I had an office, but I remember trying it and thinking, okay, you know, that was kind of nice, that was kind of nice. And I've gone back to it from time to time, but where it really helped me, where I knew, like, hey, I'm an experiment of an experiment of n equals one here. How do I know this is really working? Well, I was doing some CrossFit back in my CrossFit days, and I started getting these horrible headaches, and they were exercised induced headaches. So I went to my doctor, and I was like, Doc, I'm doing these crazy workouts, and I just get hit with these headaches, and I remember he looked at me and he's like, well, let's rule out a brain tumor. I was like, Doc, Doc, really? I mean, you went there first, he's like, we're just going to rule it out, because what you sound like, it could be this, it could be that, it could be the other, but let's just rule that out. Have you ever had an MRI before? No, I haven't had an MRI. Well, here, I'm going to schedule one, so on and so forth. So I go to this MRI, and if you've ever been in an MRI machine, those things can be really thin, claustrophobic, and I even had an open-sided MRI, but still you slide into one of those things, and oh, by the way, I should mention I did not have a brain tumor, but I had to go through this process. But anyway, spoiler alert, build did not have a brain tumor. Okay, so I get slid into this thing, and immediately it's like the top of it, it's at your nose, the bottom, you're obviously laying on something, but it's right under you, and the sides are open, but you can't take a glance, you can't turn your head at all to look at the openness of the side. So it's not a tube, but it's very claustrophobic, and I didn't know I was claustrophobic, and I didn't hit a panic button or anything like that. I didn't have to be pulled out, but what I realized, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm starting to feel some anxiety, I'm starting to get really stressed here. And the only thing I knew to do at the time was box breathing, so I started box breathing. Now my eyes were closed as well, because I did not want to see the top of this thing, right, right, I enter so for my eyeballs, but I closed my mouth, closed my mouth, I closed my eyes, and I started box breathing. And I'll tell you what, that worked, and I was like, okay, all right, like when I was in my office, I was like, okay, you know, that was a nice little breathing exercise, I guess I feel better, I don't know, but that got me through that MRI without having to hit any kind of panic button, have them have to slide me out or anything like that. So, I was like, oh, yeah, that's pretty legit, so that's number two. I mentioned the middle two of the four have to do with breathing. And I came up, or I found number three, very recently, on, wait for it, a podcast. I heard Dr. Andrew Huberman, Huberman, he works at, I believe a Stanford lab does a bunch of research, physiology, I should, if I'm going to reference him, I should probably have his bio here, but, but he's a super fancier, fancy doctor guy that does lab work and has a lab where he does a lot of research. And he calls it, or I don't think he came up with it, but it is called the physiological sigh, like sigh, that kind of sigh. And he talked about, I did watch a brief video, he does, does talk about how he didn't come up with it, but recently this was, this technique was rediscovered in it, it helps lower the heart rate, it helps get possibly a buildup of carbon dioxide in the lungs out of your lungs out of your bloodstream. And he says, it's really simple, and you just have to do it a couple of times. He says, all right, you take a breath in through your nose and you stop, but you pause just for a few moments, and then you take another big breath on top of that. So you don't want to take the full deep breath, so you don't have anything left, but when I've seen him demonstrate it before, he literally probably does an 80% breath. And then that last 20% is just right at the very end, hold it and then let the air out through your mouth slowly, a lot slower than it came in on both breaths. And he says, you do that two, three, four times, and that kind of resets you a little bit, the stress goes down, and I agree, I have used the physiological sigh many times to kind of reduce my stress and anxiety in a couple of different situations. So that is number three, the physiological sigh. All right, before I get to my favorite one, and this is this was a game changer for me, but before I get to my last one, I want to mention that I do have a blog. The blog is essential questions for educators.com. You spell it all out. There's no there's no for the number four in it. It's just essential questions for educators.com. And this is blog number 3434. And it goes over my four techniques, but the second and the third one, the box breathing, I have links in those blog posts that you can click on and it talks about box breathing. I think they're four or five minutes of explanation, some background. So if you're interested in learning a little bit more, I mean, Google it yourself, go on YouTube yourself, but I put two very specific links on there, the physiological sigh, I do like to an interview with Dr. Andrew Huberman, so you can hear him talk about it as well. Okay, last but not least, my favorite, and this has nothing to do with breathing, but it is called the power of preferences. What do you prefer? Now, how does that have to do with anything? I mean, you'd prefer a lot of things that would happen that or not happen that are stressing you out, but here's the thing. I have a friend who is a therapist, I'm practicing therapist, and we're talking about stress one day, and he goes, you know, in life, there aren't that many laws between, you know, how people get along and, you know, that interpersonal dynamic, you know, teaching, being an administrator, so on and so forth, very few laws. There are laws, there are what he calls, thou shaltz, thou shaltz, not speed over the speed limit, or you can get a ticket, you know, that kind of thing, thou shalt not murder. Let's go, let's go way back. I think someone wrote that down on a stone tablet once, thou shalt not murder, but he said those are really very few and far between, and he said, people get in a lot of trouble in interpersonal relationships, whether that's a personal relationship or a boss employee relationship, or if you're an educator listening to this, a principal who's an evaluator, evaluate he experience, or even coaching, instructional coaching, and it can be very stressful. And so he said, you know, there are very few thou shaltz, if you can make a shift in your mind to, I prefer, as opposed to he or she should have, or shouldn't have. That's kind of a big mental shift for a lot of people that is like in my practice, I found that makes a big difference. So I was like, oh, that's interesting, and we talked about it a little bit more, but then I started practicing it. I was like, oh my gosh, so just a quick example. I've worked in professional development since, well, it's probably the early 2000s. I've been going to professional development long before that, but there is something strange that happens when you're a professional developer, like you're trained in professional development, and then you attend a professional development, because your brain is not just thinking about the content and the process as you're going through, but it's also going, oh, I would have done it this way, or why didn't they do it that way, and so on and so forth. I found myself getting very unfairly annoyed that the professional developer, where I was sitting in the crowd, wasn't doing it the way I would have done it. I mean, come on, Bill, come on, drop the ego a little bit, but I was still getting annoyed, and when that, my friend shared that with me, I started shifting my thinking in multiple areas, but this one was one of them too. I would prefer that that PD person would have had us do something different, or I would have preferred that we wouldn't have done that, and I am telling you what that was a game changer for me. The annoyance that I felt did not dissipate into nothingness into the ether, if you will. No, it was still there, but it wasn't as much. I never looked it up, I never looked at, is this a therapy technique, I wasn't in therapy at the moment, but he shared that with me, and I kind of wish I knew the background on it, but that mindset made a massive difference. I was changing over to, oh, man, that should have, oh, that should not have, to, man, I would have preferred. I can't explain it, try it a couple times, try it with one of your kids, try it, if you're a parent, and a kid does something, I mean, yes, you have to address it very directly sometimes. It makes a choice that you're like, okay, yeah, shouldn't have done that, maybe switch it with, man, I would have preferred, they wouldn't have made that choice, but I guess they did, but my preference would have been not, and just see how that changes. It might be a game changer for you as well, it may not, but whatever. All right, it's about time to wrap this up, put a bow on it, but having, I mentioned earlier, my mother was a licensed professional therapist, so I feel the need to add this on, I add this on to my blog as well, that if you think you're dealing with some chronic stress or some things that you just can't shake, don't forget that there, you can box, you can box breathe that to death, but it's probably not going to, not going to fix it. You can talk about preferences, you can, all the things, sometimes it is good to talk to a professional, and just because you may have had a negative experience with a professional in the past does not mean you'll have one in the future. So, you know, get out there, and as an assistant principal, I talked to kids from time to time that we're very frustrated with therapy, and we just tell them, I was like, hey, you know, make sure that you're talking about what you want to talk about in there, you know, just kind of sees that moment, sees that opportunity, but also maybe talk to your parents about if it's not working at a different therapist, and I bet you they may help you out with that. I would encourage you to do that, but I would encourage you mostly if you're like, yeah, I probably really need to talk to somebody, maybe listen to that voice and do that. But anyway, there, I feel better now, I feel better mentioning that mom feels better about me mentioning that as well, but I just want to finish with guys, education is tough, life is tough, and if you can have these small little things that you can do that can help you just a little bit here and a little bit there, that's kind of what this podcast was all about. And I wrote that blog number 34 recently, and it was because that's fine, thanks Dave, thanks to yes, and that was because I'm in school still, I'm a consultant, I travel all over the country, and I've seen the looks on faces, I've seen the stressed out people that I've been working with recently, and I actually published that blog earlier that I normally do, I went right back to my hotel room, I was traveling at the time, and I cranked it out. I was like, I got to do a little something, and so it's tough out there, I know it's tough out there, and it's not just teaching, it's other things as well. So I hope that again, this either helped you, was helpful for you, or it sends you off searching for different ways to relieve stress, but I hope this helped, it was maybe just a little cog in your wheel to maybe take some steps towards reducing stress. Okay, that said, hey, if you enjoy this, make sure and subscribe, share it, I always love, love it when you guys share stuff, and I hear from other people, and I'm starting to hear from people, that is kind of nice. So reach out if you want to, there's my contact information, my blog, you can go to that, and I would love to hear from you. Alright, you guys have a great week, take care, bye bye.