How To Be Less Stressed

I wanted to take 3 minutes to share something that has been very helpful for me in managing stress, and better yet, it’s well-backed by science.

Andrew Huberman, a gift to us all, is a neuroscientist out of Stanford. His podcast, The Huberman Lab, covers all topics related to maximizing human performance. He has spoken at length about the idea of “Top-down Control,” and therein lies our freedom from Stress.

For simplicity’s sake, we will use the terminology “body” and “mind”.

The Experience of Stress

Here’s how this usually goes down. We experience an event as stressful. Our heart rate elevates, our breathe shortens, our blood pressures raise, and our body prepares to confront the stress: the old fight or flight response.

In response to these changes in the body, our mind perceives stress.

“Woah, look what’s happening to my body. This must be bad.”

This results in a cascade of negative emotion, run away thinking beyond our control, which does not serve us and occupies our attention.

We then get stuck in this feedback loop: our body says somethings wrong, so our mind says somethings wrong, which communicates to the body that somethings wrong, and on and on and on.

Some people live in this cycle for decades.

So how can we not be one of them? How can we become free of stress? How can we be king or queen of our castle?

Enter Top-Down Control

As you well know by now, I live by the maxim: “Increase Voluntary Struggle, Decrease Involuntary Suffering”. It sounds good, but it’s also true. The more I do difficult things, the less I feel the weight and burden of Being. I was pleased to find some assurance for my hypothesis from the work of Huberman.

He is a great advocate for heat and cold exposure (sauna and cold showers/cold plunge). There are several physiological benefits from this, beyond the scope of this conversation. One benefit, perhaps the greatest benefit, is pertinent to our discussion today.

Top-Down Control

What this means is simple: by repeatedly putting ourselves in positions of physical stress, we can develop the ability to navigate that stress psychology. When we repeatedly put our body under stress, we can train the mind to not follow suit and take part in this struggle.

This is what happens when you see all those crazy people in 33-degree water, or 220-degree saunas, and they sit as calm as Buddhist monks. Their body is experiencing the stress, but when those signals enter the mind, they have developed the capacity to keep the mind still amid the struggle.

By doing this repeatedly, we experience carry over effects.

When life presents us with challenge, and our body experiences stress, we have created the space/detachment/awareness/control which prevents that physiological stress from stimulating psychological stress.

This is what happens when I say: Increase voluntary struggle, Decrease involuntary suffering.

By repeatedly entering the realm of physical struggle, we develop the mental resilience which affords us the psychological freedom from the ill-effects of Stress. Now we can be in stressful situations and not be “triggered” by the environment.

This is what it means to become well-trained for the vicissitudes of life. This is top-down control. This is when the mind can become independent, and therefore can optimally serve, the body.

How To Experience Less Stress

This title isn’t true, technically. But it’s more than true, technically.

By putting ourselves in physical stress on a consistent basis we develop the inner resilience which is resistant to stress. The disciplines don’t matter, so long as they are stressful. You can use any number of vehicles to train the mind through the body.

Sauna. Cold Plunge. Strength Training. Running. Cycling. Yoga. Intense bouts of Badminton.

It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that you put your body under great stress, voluntarily, so that you develop the resilience to experience far less stress, psychological.

Stress-management is a skill. Skills can be trained. Skills can be fostered and improved.

I think we can all agree that the one skill we could all use a bit more of is stress-management.

Here's the ironic part:

We manage stress by creating more of it. Go do difficult things. Keep doing them until they feel manageable. Then up the weight, the distance, the ice in the water, the length of the pose, WHATEVER it is you are doing.

Gradually increase the physiological stress as your body adapts. By doing so, your mental resilience adapts as well.

In Closing

Increase voluntary struggle. Decrease involuntary suffering. Develop top-down control. Become a master of yourself.

Albert Camus said something along the lines of: In the midst of winter, I discovered within me an invincible summer.

What he said was: in the midst of great stress, I found a place within me free of stress.

We all possess such a place within us. We just need to spend more time there.

I wish you freedom of stress through stress, my friend.

Godspeed,
Chris Matakas