Moving Past Stress Through Fitness: Strengthen Your Mind-Body Connection for a Balanced Life

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Feeling overwhelmed and unsure of where to start in getting your life back on track? What if I told you that the key to unlocking success in all aspects of your life lies in something as simple as fitness? In this episode of We All Have Something, we're breaking down the importance of focusing on your physical health and how it can lead to better clarity, focus, and overall wellbeing. We'll be exploring the basics of sleep, hydration, nutrition, and movement, and their impact on the mind-body connection.

Discover how changing up your fitness routine can help you power through stressful times, as well as the benefits of consuming nutritional food supported with quality supplements to keep your body and mind in balance. We'll also be discussing a study from the University of British Columbia, which shows that regular aerobic exercise can boost your memory and learning capabilities, and could even help prevent dementia! So join us in our journey to create a strong foundation for success in all aspects of life, starting with fitness!


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Episode Music "Inspiration Corporate" by Sandra Inspiration Music
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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:22

Welcome to another episode of We All Have Something, and man do. We have some things to discuss today. For starters, there's a report that came out a few years ago that talks about this really big new thing that can help reduce heart disease, stroke and diabetes. It even could possibly help you lose weight, lower your blood pressure and prevent depression, and one of the side effects from all of that, of course, is you just feel better, look better and live better. But we'll get back to what this is in just a minute, because I do wanna say thank you to everyone who has stepped up to become a supporter of this podcast. We all have something is a listener-supported podcast, meaning we can do these episodes and different interviews that have already happened and those coming up ad-free, and I appreciate that. If you're interested in becoming a supporter, just click on the link in the episode notes at the very top there to become a supporter. Now, as a supporter, you receive a personal email from me that says thank you, because I do appreciate it. It really helps out. You'll also receive a couple of we all have something stickers suitable for sticking on your water bottle, your car, your computer, wherever you want. It's just really cool stickers that you can put wherever you want to. I mean, it's a pretty good deal, and I'll also mention your name on the podcast too, with your permission, of course.

Speaker 1: 1:37

With all of that said, let's jump into the intro, shall we? I'm Rick Schwartz, life coach, public speaker and all-around curious guy. My curiosity, my life and the lives that many people I have worked with have taught me time and time again that there are challenges to overcome and successes to celebrate. You're listening to We All Have Something a podcast about the human experience, a podcast about celebrating our authentic self. So let's get started Now.

Speaker 1: 2:09

The episode before the last one, so not the one where I did an interview with Laura Gastronauting about conquering doubt and dreaming bigger and being limitless which, by the way, if you haven't listened to that episode, you really should. She's amazing and also can't recommend her books enough. However, i'm not talking about that episode. It's the episode before that, taking back my life after a disruptive season. I actually got a lot of feedback on that one. I had a few people asking me about what it was that I went through and all that, and you know it's just work stuff and I knew it was coming, like I said in the episode. So not a lot to explore there. But what I do want to make this episode about is in reference to a question I received several times, but I've worded it a little bit differently each time, but the gist of it is this People wanted to know where do you start when you come out of that disruptive season, when it's time to get things back in order and start working on things again.

Speaker 1: 2:59

Where do you start? Now, if you follow the Ula principles that I coach and live by, there's seven key areas of life, so I can see why that when you come out of a disruptive period, it could be hard to decide. Okay, where do I start? I've got seven areas to pick from and you can have this decision overload, to sort of I'm already tired and exhausted from things being disrupted. I just don't know where to start. Everything needs my attention. If I try to do everything at once, what do I do? It's not gonna work. I hear you. I get it Totally understand For me. What I do is I start at the beginning.

Speaker 1: 3:29

You see, when we work through the Ula framework, it always starts with fitness. No hold on, hold on, wait, wait, wait. Don't flinch so much just because I said fitness, it's not. I don't mean you gotta buy a gym membership or you gotta start any marathons or dieting and all that stuff. When I talk about fitness, yes, you can join a gym if you want to, you can start running marathons and doing something special with your diet, but what I really am interested in up front is how is your sleep? How is your hydration? Are you drinking enough water throughout the day? What is your plan of nutrition? Doesn't mean you have to diet. We think diet. We think cutting out all the fun things we like to eat, but I do wanna talk about the level of nutrition. Can we dial back some of the things that aren't good for you and dial up some of the things that are? Doesn't mean we eliminate everything and hold ourselves to this great restriction.

Speaker 1: 4:14

And then, yes, the other part of fitness is moving your body. Why, though, you might be asking, why fitness, rick? I know I've been disrupting. My life has been completely disrupted. I've been ignoring my family or my friends, or I haven't had any fun for months on end. I wanna do something fun. I don't wanna go for a walk. I don't wanna eat better.

Speaker 1: 4:33

Listen, here's the deal. Yes, all the key areas of life are important Fitness, finance, family field, your career, of course, faith, friends and fun. They're all important. But here's the deal. We always start with fitness for a reason Because there's a huge mind-body connection. The ability for your body to handle the workload and the stresses of other parts of life, the ability for your mind to have clarity and do what it needs to do in the other parts of life all come from the mind-body connection and keeping yourself healthy, thinking about your fitness. If you are sleep deprived, dehydrated, eating poorly, not able to move your body without being out of breath, then good luck being able to focus on and basically manage yourself through the other key areas of life.

Speaker 1: 5:21

So, going back to the beginning of this episode, where I mentioned, there was this new discovery, this thing they're talking about a few years back, how it can reduce the odds of developing heart disease, stroke and diabetes and maybe even help you lose weight and lower your blood pressure and prevent depression and heck, maybe even look better because of it, not just feel better. Yeah, it's fitness, yeah, it's exercise. Here's the deal. Exercise does all sorts of things for the mechanics of your body And again, don't flinch when I say exercise. This could be a walk around the block. If you haven't done a walk around a block or walking a mile, a brisk walk for 10 minutes is incredibly healthy for those who just take those 10 minutes, otherwise doing nothing. It goes on.

Speaker 1: 6:04

So this is actually what I'm reading from is a study that came out in 2014. So it's old news It really is, but it still holds true. You can look up more recent stuff. It's all there still, and the reason I pulled this up is A. It's from Harvard Health, so it's definitely got some weight behind it. But also, too, there's other studies that are cited in here. So there's one from the University of British Columbia that's cited in this that says regular aerobic exercise.

Speaker 1: 6:29

This is the kind of exercise that gets your heart and your sweat glands pumping, appears to boost the size of the hippocampus in the brain, the area involved in verbal memory and learning. Resistance training, balance and muscle toning exercises don't have the same result. So not to say those other ones are bad, but it's to say that other forms, all sorts of different forms of exercise, can benefit your body, not just physical health in your heart and getting your blood pressure down to all of those things, but also benefits the mind. In fact, a lot of research has been done about how those who exercise seem to be able to push back dementia from happening and even prevent it in some cases. Now dementia isn't completely understood yet, but they are saying those who are physically active in their senior years and were physically active leading up to those senior years have been able to stave off that dementia. So here's another part too.

Speaker 1: 7:19

Exercise helps memory and thinking through both direct and indirect means. Think about that You're going for a brisk walk for 10 minutes a day and you're already increasing your memory abilities and your ability to think clearly. The benefits of exercise that says here the benefits of exercise come directly from the ability to reduce insulin resistance, reduce inflammation and stimulate the release of growth factors. These are chemicals in the brain that affect the health of the brain cells, the growth of new blood vessels in the brain and even abundance and survival of new brain cells. Indirectly, exercise improves mood and sleep and reduces stress and anxiety. So that goes hand in hand with the fact that there's all these different chemicals that are released in the body that help combat stress and anxiety. Now, this part isn't part of the study, but this is what I do know from my experience of working with animals and what I know about.

Speaker 1: 8:10

When animals get stressed and this includes humans, who of course you know it's that fight or flight. You get the adrenaline release and all of that happens When you're under that stress and that duress and that anxiety. Now it could be an acute moment of stress or it could be that lingering stress we're always under because of work and because of life and maybe something with our partner or spouse at home, or there's financial stress, and it's always compounding and it's always kind of there at this low hum And you can get foggy in the brain when that happens. And here's why. Here's a fun fact about being stressed out in that fight or flight mode. Your brain naturally does not want to be able to focus on multiple things. See your fight or flight mode. Your stress response in your body is tied to the physical side of things of being able to get the heck away from whatever that stress is and or fight it.

Speaker 1: 9:01

When you are needing to fight for your life or run from your life, you don't want to be distracted by other things You don't want to be distracted by. There might be something interesting over there to eat or look at, or oh, that was that's kind of wow, that's beautiful, i want to go check that out. Meanwhile, the saber tooth cat is trying to bite your butt. So, from the standpoint of what stress does to us, putting us in that fight or flight mode, our brain naturally says look, we got one thing only we can think about, and it's survival. Whether it's fighting for our life, we got to focus clearly and only on that. Or running for our life, we have to focus clearly, only on that. Nothing else matters. So when you are dealing with modern stress, there is no saber tooth cat chasing you. Then your brain still goes yeah, well, sorry, this is how we were wired, so we're going to go ahead and do singular focus. Oh, and, by the way, we're going to pump in some adrenaline.

Speaker 1: 9:54

Now your body's like look here, hey friend, we have to do one or two things here. We either have to run away really fast or we need to put up a heck of a fight. Well, meanwhile, you're sitting at your office job under the stress of deadlines and whatever else is going on in your life compound about other things going on, maybe in your personal life or whatever it might be, and there's no running away or fighting for your life. Well, those chemicals that get dumped into your body, the hormones that get dumped in your body because of stress, they're there for survival purposes. You don't move your body. What happens? It impacts your heart rate and impacts your blood pressure. It sticks around. The response that you're supposed to give is supposed to burn off those things, if you will for lack of a better term to allow your body to process them, which then releases other chemicals that balance it out and bring things back to a sort of a homeostasis or a natural pattern for you to live in.

Speaker 1: 10:41

So the reason we start with fitness, especially after a disruptive time of life, is you most likely have been under some sort of stress, whether it's a stress of just life wasn't normal, whether it was a stress of whatever that season was that disrupted, it was a stressful thing that caused the disruption itself. And if, during that period, you could not do any sort of physical movement or exercise to help work those things out, then of course you are going to have the higher blood pressure, insulin problems, all sorts of other things that we've already listed, and it's going to be hard for you to focus on things beyond just that one stressor. Sometimes we get to the point where there's so many different stressors we can't even choose which one we're supposed to focus on, so we just shut down completely. That whole inaction occurs. We start with fitness. I'm going to say again we start with fitness because it allows us to move through what our body's natural response is offered up as how to deal with stress.

Speaker 1: 11:42

You want clarity of mind? Go out for a walk outside. You want to have lower blood pressure and be able to sleep better at night. Go out for a walk outside. If you're like well, rick, i'm already fairly physically active, double check Are you really as physically active as you think you are, or do you think about being physically active a lot, but really only do it a little bit? And if you are physically active, then I challenge you to change up your fitness routine.

Speaker 1: 12:06

We hit plateaus physically. Our body gets accustomed to what we're doing and it's like okay, well, this walk you've been doing for 10 minutes every day for the last month and a half. That's great, but we're so accustomed to it now it doesn't really impact us the same way. So maybe make it a really brisk walk for seven minutes in the middle of those 10 minutes, or a really brisk walk for the first five minutes or last five minutes, or change up to 15 minutes, I don't care. Maybe it involves throwing in some yoga in there or some deep stretching and breathing. Maybe it involves doing more than just walking in a flat surface try going uphill. Maybe it's time to join the gym or get a buddy to help you do some jogging instead of just walking.

Speaker 1: 12:42

Whatever it might be, the value in changing it up, the value in adding a little bit of physical challenge to your body, doesn't just benefit your body, but it benefits your mind as well. It allows you to move through stress. And here's the thing if you are normally very physically active and you maintain it through stressful times, it allows your mind and body to process a stress a little bit easier. Do you understand what I'm getting out of here? This is why we start with fitness. When someone comes to me as a new client and their life is in disarray, even if they're like look, i just need, i need some coaching for my career, and I'm like I can do that That's a big part of what I do. I do a lot of coaching for people who are having career issues, or they're so involved with the career everything else in life has fallen away. So maybe it's like I don't really think I need career coaching, but I need coaching to get my life back on order. No matter what you come to me with, i will always start with fitness. The value in checking in with where you are getting a clear understanding of the need for good sleep, for hydration, your habits and behaviors around your body and how you take care of that temple of yours. That is going to be the big precursor to determine how well you move through the rest of these things. So, again, coming out of those stressful times, coming out of a time of disruption, that's what I do.

Speaker 1: 14:02

First is fitness, and here's the other side of it too. You know we talk about nutrition. What are you doing for supplements? What are you doing for making sure your body is getting everything it needs to be at its best health? Are you eating highly nutritionist food Doesn't mean that you've got to go on some sort of fancy paleo or crazy other diet that doesn't jive with your system or your lifestyle. It just means I want you to be very aware of the nutrition you're offering your body Because, again, nutrition doesn't just impact your body. It impacts your mind as well, just like the fitness does. It's across the board. You can't expect to have great fitness if you're just eating junk all the time.

Speaker 1: 14:46

Yeah, i myself have been taking mind and body supplements from ULA. For what? March, april, may, almost four months now, and stuff is great. I love it. I love it And if you are interested in that, i'll be happy to talk to you more about that. But that's not what this podcast is about. It's not what this episode is about. You know you can go back a couple of episodes. As a bonus episode from season two, i did a whole interview with the founders of ULA as to why they created this and how, and their passion behind good nutrition, the homeostasis in the body. But the reality is, no matter what you want to approach, no matter what you want to do, no matter what supplements you want to take, you want to make sure you're treating your body well, because it's going to allow you to really make sure you can take care of the other key components of your life And something I say all the time.

Speaker 1: 15:26

You see it on social media, all the time. You see it on my account, all the time. Taking care of yourself first is the best way to take care of other people. You matter, you're important and we need you here. You don't take care of yourself, you can't take care of those that are important to you. And I'll tell you what. I learned that the hard way. I think I knew it, maybe on a conscious level, but I didn't practice it And, yeah, you know, early 2020, i fell apart emotionally, mentally, my health fell apart, everything.

Speaker 1: 15:58

And it was right before the pandemic. And you know, it's just, we all have our own pandemic stories. There's no doubt about that. But mine was coming to a head literally the week before the pandemic And, yeah, it was a big eye-opener for me about the importance of taking care of yourself, especially in stressful times, so you can take care of others. Otherwise, you crash and burn and you're not good for anybody. Now, i don't mean to bring you down by talking about that, because, hey, on the other side of it, here I am what you know three years later, a little over three years later, and I'm doing really well, and I've been through a couple more big stressful times and I wouldn't say I breezed through them, but I was more conscious and mindful through them because of what I have learned about health, nutrition and fitness, especially allowing me to work through these things All right. Well, it's time to wrap this up, and I want to say I do truly hope that something mentioned in here was of value to you, whether it was a reminder about the importance of fitness and how to get started, or give you a clear point to start from if you come out of a stressful time.

Speaker 1: 16:57

And if not for you, maybe somebody who know could use this information as well. It's that ripple effect. When we start sharing information like this, we start talking about it more. We have discussions about it. We create ripple effects. Sometimes we see the results of that ripple effect and sometimes we don't, and that's okay too. What matters is we're putting stuff out there to make the world a better place, one person at a time.

Speaker 1: 17:17

Now, if you haven't already, i'd really appreciate it if you'd subscribe to the podcast and also leave a review. If where you listen to podcasts allows you to do that, leave a review or some stars, whatever it might be. Now, i've heard two different sides to this. One states, of course, that the reviews and stars helps bump up algorithms, and so people looking for this content can find it easier because it puts it in front of them. I've also heard recently from people in the professional podcast and say, no, there's no algorithm attached to it, but it does help people in the sense of when they are looking to listen to something new. They see stars, they see a review. They'll read a couple And if it sounds legit and there's really something going on here, they're going to give it a listen. Either way, it goes back to what we're mentioning is that ripple effect. Help other people find this information. Get this information spread around. We're going to make the world a better place. And, of course, you can always find out more information about my coaching and what I do on my website, coachrickshortscom. You can also find all of my social media links there as well.

Speaker 1: 18:11

Now, if you're interested in the coaching, feel free to sign up for a discovery call. What that is is 30-minute Zoom. You and I hop on. We talk about what's going on in your life, talk about my coaching style. For any reason, it doesn't seem like a fit. We got to be honest about it, right? I mean nothing wrong with a good chat, but if we're not going to be a good fit, we're not a good fit. However, if we do, we're like, hey, you know, i think my coaching is going to help you out. And you're like, yeah, i think your coaching is going to help me out. We'll go on from there as coach and client and we'll see how that all works out. We can talk about that a lot more. So, again, just go to coachrickshortscom or even scroll down the episode notes. You can find my social media links there, as well as the website too. All right, thanks again for listening. I really appreciate it. Have a good one everybody.