BITESIZE | The Truth About Stress: How to Reduce Overwhelm & Feel Calmer Every Day | Dr Rangan Chatterjee #682

What has the biggest impact on your health and happiness today? Perhaps you’re thinking it’s work, money, what you eat, how you sleep… Maybe it’s your friends and family and how you interact with them… These are all valid answers. But let me put it to you that I think there’s one factor that is linked to, but overrides, all of these things: stress. Today’s Bitesize is from episode 607 of the podcast which was a solo episode I recorded all about stress. While some stress is just part of life, if it starts to accumulate it can have negative consequences for our health and happiness. I explain what stress is, how “micro stress doses” can build up and impact on our lives, and I share some simple strategies that can help you de-stress and re-set your day. I genuinely hope this episode helps you see stress differently and reminds you that small, consistent changes can have a profound impact. A little stress is part of life – but chronic stress doesn’t have to be. Thanks to our sponsor https://heights.com/livemore In my free guide, Break Free From Stress, I share three simple tools you can start using today to help calm your nervous system and feel more in control – https://drchatterjee.com/FeelCalmer Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/607 Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts ⁠⁠https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore⁠⁠ For other podcast platforms go to ⁠⁠https://fblm.supercast.com. DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's bite-sized episode is sponsored by Thrive, the longevity supplement from Heitz that I have been taking daily for the last six months to help me with vitality, cellular energy and longevity. Now, there's a lot of noise in the supplement space and it can be confusing to know exactly what to take. Before I start taking something, I do my own due diligence. And for this one, I had a wonderful, enlightening conversation with the research team at Heitz. You see, in our bodies, we have something called NAD, which helps to support our cells' mitochondria in producing the energy our bodies need. But with age, our NAD levels start to deplete.

• 0:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Thrive helps resupply your cells by combining NR, a clinically validated NAD booster alongside coenzyme Q10, copper and resveratrol to provide a powerful combination designed to keep your cells thriving. If you want to give Thrive a go, Heitz are offering my listeners 20% off their first month at www.hite.com/livemore when you use the code LIVEMORE20. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of inspiration, insights and practical ideas to help you live well and thrive.

• 1:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's bite size is from episode 607 of the podcast, which was a solo episode that I recorded all about stress. While some stress, of course, is a natural part of life, if it starts to accumulate, it can have negative consequences for our health and happiness. I share why what I call micro-stress doses, or MSDs, can build up and impact our lives. And I also share some simple strategies that can help you de-stress and reset your day. Now, here's the big problem in the modern world.

• 2:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today, for many of us, dare I say, most of us, our stressed response is not being activated by wild predators, it's being activated by the state of our daily lives. Email inboxes, to-do lists, elderly parents we're trying to care for at the same time as looking after our own young children, and the list goes on. 80 to 90% of what a doctor sees in any given day these days is in some way related to stress. And when I explain to you what the stress response is, I think you will very clearly

• 2:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  see how chronic stress impacts every single organ system of the body. Okay, so what is stress? Well, the best way to think about this is that stress is literally there to keep you safe. The stress response gets activated when it thinks you're in danger. So let's go back in time, maybe 50 or 100,000 years ago, and let's imagine we're just getting on with our day. We're hunter-gatherers, we're in a small tribe. And then let's say you notice out of the corner of your eye, a predator approaching the camp. In an instant, your stress response gets activated and all kinds of things start to

• 3:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  happen in your body to help keep you safe. Let me give you a few examples. Your blood glucose starts to go up so that more sugar can get delivered to your brain. Your blood pressure starts to go up, which helps more oxygen get delivered to your brain, which again is going to help you in an emergency situation. Your amygdala, the emotional part of your brain, goes onto high alert. So you're suddenly hypervigilant. This is really, really helpful if you're trying to detect other threats that might be coming at that same time. Your blood becomes more prone to clotting.

• 4:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  So if you were to get attacked by a predator, instead of bleeding to death, the fact that your blood is going to clot quickly is something that could potentially save your life. Okay, so I've just mentioned four things there. Now, here's the big problem. For many of us, it's the state of our daily lives that is causing our stress response system to get activated. And so those things that help you in the short term start to become harmful in the long term. So let's just go through those four things that I mentioned and see how that plays out. Well, blood glucose going up for a short period of time to help you run away from a tiger, super useful.

• 5:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  If that's happening day in, day out to the state of your life, well, that causes fatigue. It causes belly fat to accumulate and ultimately is going to cause things like type 2 diabetes. Your blood pressure going up delivers more oxygen to the brain. Great if a predator is attacking you. Also fantastic if that's happening in response to your spinning class temporarily. In the short term, it's fine. In the long term, if that's happening to the state of your daily life, that persistently elevated blood pressure is going to increase your risk of heart attacks and strokes. Your amygdala, that emotional part of your brain going onto high alert in an emergency situation, no problem.

• 5:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  You want to be hypervigilant and hear any pinprick sound around you. But if that's happening in response to the state of your daily life, well, that's kind of what we call anxiety. Your blood being prone to clotting is fine in a short-term situation, day in, day out, that increases your risk of things like heart attacks and strokes. Stress is not a bad thing. A little bit of stress helps us. It's too much of it that remains unmanaged over a prolonged period of time that causes us the problems. And we now know clearly from the scientific research that chronic unmanaged stress can cause type 2 diabetes.

• 6:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  We know that chronic stress is a causative factor in the development of Alzheimer's disease, not just associated with, but causative. And frankly, you can find evidence that chronic unrelenting stress is implicated in the development of pretty much every single chronic disease that we have. So I'm not saying that to scare you. I'm actually saying that to empower you. Just because it's normal in modern society for many of us to feel stressed, doesn't mean it's optimal. And it doesn't mean it's not having a serious impact on the state of your life. But here's the thing, it's not actually as hard as you think it is to start managing this.

• 7:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  So this episode really is to hopefully inspire you to take stress seriously. I mean, think about it, in the modern world, if stress does not take a day off, can we really afford to take a day off from managing stress? And just on a very simple level, if you take a 30,000-foot view on the state of our lives these days, it used to be that downtime was built into the fabric of our lives. First of all, before modern technology and emails, it was very, very hard for many of us to take our work home. You left the office, you went home, you were kind of done.

• 7:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  The boundaries that have been blurred now, or frankly, decimated between work life and home life are one of the reasons why these kind of natural periods of recuperation and rest have gone. But just think about something like Sundays. Here in the UK, I remember as a kid, all the shops were pretty much closed on Sundays. You know, Sunday was the day of rest. People would chill with their family. There was a natural state of relaxation built in to one day of the week, whereas today, that's pretty much gone. There are activities, seven days a week, the shops are open. Again, there may be benefits off that, but we have to understand that that has come at a cost.

• 8:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  For many of us, we no longer switch off so that stress response is chronically being activated. Now, before I outline relatively simple ways that you can start to reduce the impact that stress has in your life, I want to share with you another concept that I've been talking to my patients about for years and first wrote about in my 2018 book, The Stress Solution. And that's the concept of micro-stress doses. My patients over the years have loved this because it really helps them understand how quickly stress can add up and have a negative consequence in their lives. Okay, so what is a micro-stress dose?

• 9:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, the micro-stress dose is a little dose of stress that in isolation, you can handle just fine. The problem comes when those micro-stress doses accumulate one on top of the other. Now, the reason they've become a problem is because all of us have our own unique personal stress threshold.

• 9:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Now, your threshold may be different from my threshold and our own thresholds might be different on different days. But the concept I want you to really understand is that when you hit your own personal stress threshold, that's when things go wrong. That's when your back goes or your neck goes into spasm. Or you send back a really reactive email to one of your colleagues or you shout at your kids, right? It tends to happen when you have reached your personal stress threshold. And here's the thing, if you weren't at your stress threshold, that same event from the outside world, that email from your colleague, it wouldn't have the same impact.

• 10:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  You wouldn't react. And that's why sometimes we can receive an email, let's say on a Monday morning when we're really well rested and deal with it absolutely fine and totally calmly. You receive that same email on a Friday afternoon at 4:45 PM after a really busy and stressful week, suddenly you interpret that email completely differently and you react. It's all to do with your levels of stress. So I contend that many of us these days are being exposed to at least 20 micro-stress doses before we've even left our house in the morning. And dare I say it, for some of us, we're being exposed to that many micro-stress doses

• 11:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  before we've left our beds. So let me explain to you how this might play out. Let's imagine you've had a busy day at work and you got back late. You don't want to go to bed and switch off, you want to unwind. And so you stay up late watching Netflix and let's just assume that it's got to midnight. You suddenly see your watch and you think, oh man, I've got to be up at half six tomorrow morning for work, I better go to bed. Okay, so you go to bed, you're fast asleep and now I want to show you just how quickly micro-stress doses, or MSDs for short, can build up. At 6:30 AM, you're in a deep sleep and your alarm goes off. Typically, for most people, that's on their phones.

• 12:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so you're in a deep sleep, you get jolted out of that, that is micro-stress dose or MSD number one. You look at the clock and go, oh man, 6:30, I don't want to get up yet, I'm knackered. You press snooze, you go back to sleep again. Six or seven minutes later, snooze goes off, you're jolted out of that restful state again, that is MSD number two. Then you actually pick up your phone and whilst in bed, whilst feeling a little bit hazy, you open up your email app and you see three or four work emails that you didn't get to the day before and you're like, oh man, I've got to get to those as soon as I can. MSD number three. Then you go to one of your social media accounts and see that someone's left you a bit of

• 12:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  a nasty comment on your last post, MSD number four. You then turn on to the news and see something tragic that's happened in another country that really affects you emotionally, MSD number five. Now guys, I'm only at MSD number five and you're probably still in bed, this is probably within 10 minutes of waking up in the morning and I could keep going, but it is quite reasonable that for some people, the first 20 minutes of their day, they've had 10 or 15, what I call micro-stress doses. Remember what I said, a micro-stress dose is a little dose of stress that in isolation you can handle just fine. Now, here's the problem.

• 13:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  If you're accumulating 10 or 15 or 20 micro-stress doses within the first half hour or hour of waking up, how do you think the rest of your day is going to go? Because what's happened is this, you have basically got closer and closer to your stress threshold by accumulating all of those stress doses, which just add one on top of the other. Now, that means you've got less headroom left, you are less resilient. It basically means that it's not going to take long in the day for you to experience another few micro-stress doses before you're at your threshold.

• 14:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  And this is one of the main reasons why so many people are feeling chronically stressed, they don't realise that they started off their day accumulating these micro-stress doses. So of course, later on, they're going to be reactive, they're going to get annoyed with other people, they're going to feel that they have no time in their life, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of the time is because of how you started your day. So think about that concept of micro-stress doses and how that applies in your life. And the two things you can do to prevent this are either, number one, stop accumulating

• 14:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  so many micro-stress doses in the first place, a lot easier said than done, I accept. But secondly, some of these micro-stress doses that come into your life are things that you can't do anything about, that outside your control, they are going to come in. So therefore, if you have the awareness of them regularly throughout the day, you can take pauses to make sure that they don't continue to accumulate. Because let's say at lunchtime, you're feeling super stressed, if you go for a 20-minute walk around the block and don't look at your phone at the same time, you'll come back having de-stressed a little bit. And so when you start your afternoon, you are further away from your stress threshold

• 15:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  than you were when you finished your morning. And so those are really the two key things I want you to think about. Okay, so I hope I've set the scene on stress, you know, what it is, what can be the negative impact on us, but then also this concept of micro-stress doses, I hope helps you understand why you might be feeling more stressed than you need to. So as I said at the start, I now want to move on to simple things that you can think about that I know will help you reduce your levels of stress and therefore directly improve your health and your happiness. Okay, habit number one, have a morning routine.

• 16:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Now, here's the thing about morning routines, every single person has a morning routine, whether they think they do or not. The question is, are you intentional about it? Remember what I just said about micro-stress doses? If you're someone who typically goes to bed late, wakes up feeling exhausted, uses your phone as your alarm clock and then whilst you're exhausted, as soon as you get up, you start scrolling through your phone and accumulating micro-stress doses and you do that day after day, well, that's your morning routine and that morning routine will have a consequence like all of ours do.

• 17:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  I really strongly do believe that the way you start your days has a huge impact on the rest of your day. I've experienced this myself and I've seen it with so many patients over the years. And if you're someone who struggles with low mood or anxiety, I really want you to think about how you start each day. What I've learnt over the years is that so many of our thoughts and behaviours are downstream from the content we consume. So if you start your day with negative news headlines and negativity on social media

• 17:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  and work stress from your email inbox, is it any wonder that you feel that your life is slightly out of control? That you feel negative about yourself, about the state of the world? And that negativity often leads you to feeling stuck and powerless. Now, I think it's pretty obvious if you really think about it, that if you start your day with negativity, don't be surprised if the rest of your day continues with negativity as well. So I'm just not sure, starting our days in that way, is that helpful? Now, will some people be okay? Sure. That's the same with anything. And if that's you, great, I'm not necessarily asking you to change anything.

• 18:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  If you've been listening to me for a number of years, you'll know that I don't really like telling anyone else what to do. What I'm hoping to do is share simple ideas with you that I believe can be helpful. But I would say, one of the reasons that intentional morning routines really help is because you intentionally start your day in a certain state, which means by default, you're not accumulating all of those micro-stress doses. Just, just think about that for a minute. I painted you a picture about someone who maybe within the first 15 minutes of their day has accumulated 15 micro-stress doses.

• 19:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Now, let's just take 15 minutes and say, well, what else might that person be able to do instead? Let's just say for argument's sake, that instead of that, when you woke up, you were not going to look at your phone, instead you were going to do 10 minutes of meditation and maybe five minutes of journaling.

• 19:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's still taken you 15 minutes. But I would say one of the benefits is that you automatically reduce the accumulation of 15 micro stress doses. So not only have you not accumulated those and are therefore closer to your personal stress thresholds, you're probably actually taking yourself further away from your stress thresholds than you were when you started the day. Some people wake up feeling a little anxious or low moods, right? So those things can be inherently stressful for some people. If you start your day infusing calm and positivity into your brain and your mind and your body,

• 20:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  that's going to have a massive profound effect. So the question then becomes, what do you do as part of your morning routine? Well, ultimately, you have to decide what works for you. I would even say to you, five minutes can still make a massive difference. And I've seen this over and over again with busy people in my practice over the years who said, I don't have time for morning routine. I've helped persuade them to try a five minute morning routine. And I've just seen transformative improvements in their lives. So I would just ask you to think about, how do you start every day? Is there something you could do differently?

• 20:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm a huge fan of things like breathwork and meditation and journaling, but I don't really mind what you do. Even just having a hot drink in silence or sitting in your kitchen in complete silence for five or 10 minutes, even that can be quite transformative. So point number one is think about your morning routine. Habit number two, learn a breathing technique that you can take with you anywhere in life. What do I mean when I say that? Well, I believe all of us should have at least one breathing technique available to us that we can keep around with us in our back pocket, wherever we go, that should

• 21:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  we ever need it, we can use it. Now, why am I so passionate about this idea? Well, it's because the way you breathe is literally information for your body. A lot of people don't realise that. So if you're feeling stressed, the way you breathe typically will start to change. This is a really important point to understand. Stress does not just exist in your mind, it also affects your body and your physiology. So when you're feeling time pressured, or you've got a lot of emails to get through, or you've got some deadlines, whatever it might be, your breathing starts to change.

• 22:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  And usually it will change in three ways. You'll breathe more from your chest than your diaphragm, you'll start to breathe a bit more shallowly than deeply, and your breathing rate will quicken. But the amazing thing is, is you can literally hack your way out of that. Now, I think the term hack has been very much overused, but I think it really works here, because if you can intentionally slow down and focus on your breath, you can change those three things immediately. When you're not paying attention and you're breathing fast and shallowly and more from your chest and your diaphragm, you literally send stress signals up to your brain and your brain then responds by sending stress signals down to your body and it becomes

• 23:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  a vicious cycle. But if you have a breathwork technique that you can utilise, so let's say a minute or so, instead you can start to send calm signals up to your brain, which in turn will send calm signals back down to your body. Now, there are a tonne of breathwork techniques out there and you have to find the one that works for you, the one that makes you feel good, that you feel you can do. On a personal level, one of the ones that I found most effective with myself and with many of my patients is what I call the three, four, five breath. And basically, it's dead easy. You breathe in for a count of three, you hold for a count of four, and you breathe

• 23:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  out for a count of five. Now, ideally, I would say, yeah, do it through the nose and out through the nose if you can, or in through the nose and out through the mouth. But if you can't do that, if nasal breathing is too difficult at the moment, okay, don't stress about that. Do it through your mouth if you have to. The key point with this breath is that whenever your out breath is longer than your in breath, you help to switch off the stress part of your nervous system and promote the relaxation parts. Remember, at the start of this episode, I explained to you what the stress response is, okay? And the case I'm making here, so if you're feeling chronically stressed and that stress

• 24:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  response has been activated, we want to do something as soon as we can to bring us back into that relaxation state where the stress response is not being as activated as it was. And I don't really know of a quicker way to do this than with breathing. Now, if the three, four, five breath technique for you feels too difficult, okay, just drop it down a bit, go two, three, four. But the key is that the out breath should be longer than the in breath. And I have seen this three, four, five breath transform the lives of so many people. It's a great way to start the day, it's a great way to end the day, it's a great thing

• 25:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  to do at lunchtime if you feel that your micro stress doses have accumulated and you're close to that stress threshold and, you know, you don't want to keep accumulating them and getting more and more reactive and stressed throughout the day. The key point here is find a breathwork technique that you like and enjoy and you can feel the difference from, and then just know that you've got that with you whenever you need to. And just remember, if you're feeling time pressured, one of those three, four, five breaths takes 12 seconds, five of them takes just one minute. And I can pretty much guarantee if you do that for one minute, you will feel different. I really hope you enjoyed this week's Bite Size.

• 26:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my new conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Size next Friday.