You know, we hear stress, stress is bad, stress can kill us, no one likes to feel stressed, etc. But as you and I both know, that's not the entire picture. So I'd love for you to just educate us a bit on what stress is and what it isn't, where it can be problematic and where perhaps it can even be beneficial.

So as a stress scientist, it is a word I use a lot, but it has to be broken down because it has so many different kind of dimensions and meanings. So there's good and bad stress, there's acute and chronic stress, and you know, technically it just means anytime we feel overwhelmed, that we feel like the demands are too much for our resources.

So that's kind of a very technical way to put it. But really, so much of life is about meeting challenges, and we're never going to get rid of different stressful situations in life, if anything, they are increasing. And so it really comes down to not the stressors or what happens to us, but really how we respond, the stress response.

So that's a distinction that we're still trying to get the field to talk about stress in a more specific way so that we can think about what situations are in your life. They might be difficult ongoing situations like caregiving, or work stress, or worrying about health, your own or someone's.

And then there's how are you coping with it? So when something happens, we mount a stress response and we recover, and that's beautiful, no harm done. We need that. That's why we're here still alive is that survival response. It's a problem these days of just, we keep it alive in our head, we keep it alive with our thoughts.

Our thoughts are the most common form of stress. Even though I expected that we would get into tools to combat stress a little bit later, since you have now told us that our thoughts are the biggest sort of propagator of internal stress, what to your knowledge is the best way or what are the best ways for us to manage overthinking and ruminating on stressful topics?

Because I certainly experienced stress. And when I do, I have tools related to breath work, running, exercise, sleep, non-sleep deep rest. I'm a huge fan of all these sorts of things. But when we succumb to stress and the thinking patterns take over where the gears are turning and they won't stop turning, what does the science tell us about ways to manage those thoughts?

Should we go with them in the sense that we try and rationalize or understand the basis of the stress or should we try and divert our thinking away? Or is there some other tool that I'm unaware of? Yes, yes, both and. So I like to bin it in three categories.

So one is we, well, I'll just say, first of all, we have to have some awareness of how our mind works or we're just like, you know, a subject to thinking our thoughts are real, thinking that it's helpful to keep ruminating and problem solving because that's our tendency is to go toward whatever we think there's threat or risk and to problem solve that.

We could just be stuck there all day in this kind of threat mode or red mind state. And that's just a shame. We don't need to turn on that stress response all the time. But that's where we are as a society. So that's why I wrote the stress prescription.

Take any survey, even pre-pandemic, and people feel, the majority of people feel an overwhelming amount of stress. So even this past year, 46% of adults report feeling overwhelmed by stress. And then you break it down, you're like, oh, this is really bad for young adults and women and people of color.

And so we have these, you know, groups that are targeted for marginalization that are feeling an extremely high amount of stress in most of those subgroups. So bottom, yeah. Wouldn't you argue that most everyone is feeling more stress now or is it just, what do the data say? Yeah.

So I think that we're, we come with different levels of awareness of our stress. And so when I find someone who really doesn't feel a lot of stress, sometimes I can see right through that and they're just not aware. And sometimes it really is true. They're often in a different stage of life and they control their environment a lot.

And they've been through a lot. I mean, one of the big patterns in the population levels of stress is that the older people are less stressed, period. If you're over 65, you have been through so much, solved so much. You just have a better perspective on life and on stressors.

And then our adults, our young adults have like four times the level of stress as our older adults. So we do, you know, we don't have to wait till we get older, but there certainly is true wisdom and resilience that comes with age for many people. Often we're so used to feeling daily stress from our urban and modern life that we don't notice it.

We're just used to it. And so we're going through the day with kind of like clenched hands and just, you know, for listeners, just even just taking a check in now and noticing how you might be holding stress in your body. That's a huge clue. It's a huge place where we accumulate tension.

So we might not be aware that we're stressed, but we're clenching our hands. And in fact, my taxi driver who drove me here, let me know that he's exactly that point, that he doesn't realize he's stressed until he realizes that he's tensing his shoulders and his fists. And so great signal, you know, doing a check in to like notice where in our body we're holding stress is step one to releasing it.