Toxic Stress and Your Performance

Toxic Stress

Whether you are a professional athlete or business leader, the pressure of performance can lead to burnout and bad decision making. Certain stress allows athletes to reach “the zone” and perform at an unbelievable level. It is the toxic stress that is harmful to your health and performance. Managing this toxic stress versus using coping mechanisms is something everyone should try to understand as early as possible. Coping mechanisms do not address the problem and will just delay your issues.

Andy: “And it's like a cup, so if this cup was completely full, a couple drops of water, a couple of drops of stress is going to overflow it. It's going to cause it so much disruption, but if you can drain it, then you can really handle a lot more stress, but we don't know how to drain stress. We know how to cope, we know how to check out. We know how to numb through addictions and different things to cope, but we don't know how to let out stress through our body, through conversations, through coach and through these different ways. And if we don't have blow-off valves in our life, not coping mechanisms, if we don't have blow-off valves in our life where we can really get out what's inside, we won't last because we'll be in a constant state of hypervigilance, a constant state of toxic stress.”

One thing I have learned being a parent is that you can not take care of someone else without first taking care of yourself. This means to be at the top of your game and mentally sharp you have to take time for yourself. This can really take the form of anything that you enjoy doing; running, hiking, biking, yoga, skiing, lifting, massage, vacations, staycations and then adding time to focus on thoughts and emotions through mediation, prayer, or mindfulness. It is important to keep in mind that nutrition, sleep, and health all are essential to your emotional well-being. Andy describes fragmentation as the opposite of wholeness.

Andy continues: “So, really, I'm tapping into my identity, my sense of purpose and meaning and I'm living from that as enough rather than trying to put on, on the outside to make me feel something on the inside. So, a couple of different ways to look at it, but really, fragmentation is putting on the outside in hopes that you'll get something on the inside and wholeness is depositing something internally, identity, worth and value, purpose and meaning and allowing that to shape us externally.”

True change has to come from within. This truth about change made me think about the book Catalyst by Jonah Berger and how you can deliver all the knowledge in the world but unless someone takes agency or control over the change it will not happen.

Subconscious Thoughts

You can’t fool yourself, you will experience emotions no matter if you suppress them or not.

Andy: “95% of our decision making is subconscious, what he's saying is, your emotion, where you come from and the story from, really from zero to 18, or from zero to 40, whatever it is, shapes and directs how we make decisions and why we make decisions.”

So much of personality and your beliefs are shaped early in life. These affect decision making for the rest of your life. When under stress, you are more likely to make emotional decisions subconsciously. How to assess and analyze emotions is a skill you can learn that will create a pathway to living an integrated, balanced life. It is not showing weakness to want to improve emotional wellness. It is just another part knowing yourself and your identity.

Lifelong Process

The pathway to wholeness is for your whole life. Being aware when you are moving off track is the key to creating habits to get back on track. As with sports psychologists, an emotional wellness coach can help improve if you have the mindset to seek that improvement out. Andy compares it to being no different than training your strength or your competitive mind:

What I think is a really good starting place is to take that professional business or sports mindset into a different sphere, which is the emotional sphere and learn when I feel the discomfort, when I feel like my body is getting tense when my heart tightens up when my shoulders tense up, when everything in my body wants to get out of this room right now, acknowledge and name it and move through it. We build resistance to it, we build a tolerance to it, and that's what makes leaders great in that area. It's not just picking up a couple of things, it's the practical, really leaning into it and feeling it and moving through and getting better at feeling it.

Andy calls it a teachable mind. I call it being coachable. It is one of the main reasons I had success in my football career. I learned from a young age with my Dad coaching my Pop Warner team that if I wanted to get better I would have to be able to hear what I can be doing better and not take it personally. And then have the discipline to go out and implement it. Now as I coach my kids, I see how valuable a coachable person is, that can take instruction and then go out and do it.

Resources Pro Tip

There are a lot of resources below but with time so limited I have to recommend something that has worked for me. I can’t take credit for finally signing up; that goes to Greg Lindsay for mentioning it when I first started at AWM. I, obviously, knew about it and loved podcasts but it was his recommendation that finally got me on board. The listen at 1.3-1.5x speed is game-changing. Huge thanks to him as it has given me the time to read books that have been on my rather long reading list for a while now.

Resources Mentioned

• Catalyst by Jonah Berger

• Andy’s Ted Talk

• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

• Anatomy of the Soul by Curt Thompson

• Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett

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