How Changing Your Physical State Helps Remove Stress.

DO Lectures

Aug 3, 2016·4 min read

Joshua Fields Millburn is a writer and a minimalist. In late 2009, after the death of his mother and the breakdown of his marriage during the same month, he began to question everything. He now owns fewer than 288 possessions and quit his six figure job in 2011 to write full-time.

What do you think of when you hear the word stress?

A noticeable — but often unnoticed — change in physiology.

Tell me about a time when you experience stress.

Everyday we experience endless stimuli — infinite discrete bits of input via our glowing screens. But we don’t “get” stressed, we do stressed: we mimic the posture, breathing patterns, and actions of a stressed person to get us into a stressed state.

Tell me about a moment when you felt the benefits of stress.

Stress is often an indicator that our actions aren’t meeting our expectations, which means we can either change our actions or our expectations — or both — to get out of stress.

Do you feel stress motivates you or paralyses you? How so?

Neither. Stress is a barometer that allows us to measure how we should interact with — and react to — the world around us.

How much of your life would you say you spend stressed out?

While we all get stressed, getting ‘stressed out’ isn’t useful, so I avoid it at all costs. Again, we do stress, which means we can also get out of stress before it ‘stresses us out.’

Which areas of your life are most affected when you’re under stress?

When we’re too stressed, everything suffers: our physical health, our mental health, our relationships, our creativity, and our ability to focus on what’s truly important.

If you were given a magic wand in the middle of your next stress fit, what would you do?

Question the sanity and integrity of the person who handed me anything ‘magical.’

Switching back to reality, what do you do in your day-to-day life to help yourself handle stressful situations?

Stop whatever I’m doing and take one minute to change my physiology: breathe deeply, look in the mirror and smile, jump up and down like an elated person. Changing my physical state helps remove the stress.

Which is worse: work stress or home stress?

Which is worse: a chocolate cake topped with tuna or a tuna steak topped with chocolate?

How does stress feed into/inform your work?

Thankfully, it doesn’t.

This is the seventh post in an eight-week series of articles all about stress and how to make it work for you and your business.

The next article will be published on Friday the 5th of August, where we’ll be introducing you to the entrepreneur who’s swapped stress for calm. See you there.

Do Stress. One Day Event. London. Oct 14th.

The Do Lectures is holding a one-day event called ‘Do Stress’. It will deliver insights, future strategies, and will examine the zeitgiest for ‘human based companies’ and how ‘work’ is going to change. And what that means for your business?

There will be 10 talks from entrepreneurs, thought-leaders, change-makers and visionaries. As Dan Pink reminds us all: “Talented people need organisations less than organisations need talented people”.

That is why smart companies are creating human cultures, not corporate ones in order to thrive. How you stay ahead in the future is not the same as what kept you ahead in the past.

Why attend?

It answers the question of who leads the way in look after their people, what are they doing, why is it working? How does culture help your business? How does your purpose? How does the design of your office? Even, how you sit at a computer?

How does a human culture prevent burn out? How does it help you win the talent war? And how, just as importantly, does it help you retain your people too. What perks are the most important?

The good news is companies who look after their people are also the best businesses over the long term. Human based companies are the future. So how do you become one? Our one day event is designed to give you the answers.

The One Day Event — Do Stress

10 speakers.

2 workshops.

200 attendees.

For more information, or to register your interest, head over to our website.