Episode 11: Three Ways to Keep It Light... So You Can Handle the Heavy

Let’s be real, stress is hard. One of my favorite quotes is “by keeping it light, the heavy can be handled” (from an amazing movie called Step Into Liquid). This episode discusses three ways we can do just that.

Download my free Less-Stress Challenge Guide here for 16 stress management tools and a monthly stress tracker.

Episode Transcript:

INTRO MUSIC: Welcome to The Compassionate Wellness Podcast. I'm Alex Treanor. I'm a Nationally Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, and I am so excited you're here. The wellness industry is full of do's and do not's, should's and should not's. But I like to take a different approach. I'll be sharing all things health and wellness from a joyful, real-life compassionate perspective. If you're ready to drop the cookie-cutter approach and create a life you truly love, while eating a cookie or two along the way, let's dive in.

Hey, friends! July is almost over, which means this is the last episode of our less stress challenge. Throughout the month of July, we've been focusing on stress, and this will be our grand finale!

I'm actually recording this episode a few days later than usual because I have felt so stuck on what to talk about today. As I've been recording these episodes, it's been a good reminder that stress is not always a fun topic to talk about. It's hard to talk about the hard things, and stress is often a hard thing. When we're feeling stressed, everything feels harder; the hard is harder.

I feel like that's kind of what we've talked about so far. How do we overcome this when we're feeling so down and things are heavy? What do we do? And it's been a lot. As I've been thinking, "how do we wrap this up?" I've been a little bit stuck. Honestly, I've been stressing myself over what topic to discuss, which is a great example of how much our perception plays into the stress. Does this topic really matter in the grand scheme of things? Probably not. This episode is not going to impact someone's life in any major way, most likely.

But I have felt stressed about it, and I've been frustrated. It's been this heavy thing recently. But I'm also getting down to the wire where I have to record something.So I gave myself a deadline, which is a trick that I use often when I am struggling with something, and I also used my favorite self-compassion question, which is "what do I need right now?"

As I've been thinking on that, "okay, what do I need right now, to help get this episode done?" I kept thinking I need to make it fun. I'm not having any fun talking about stress right now. In my mind, that meant like, "oh, you need to go ride, go karts, right? You need to go do something fun". And then I think I had this idea that oh, when you're in a go kart, this perfect podcast episode outline, is just going to be downloaded into your brain in the midst of this lap on a go kart track. And then I thought, "that's dumb. That's not gonna happen. That's not how it works". And so I didn't want to have fun either, right?! I do need to have fun with it, but that seems frivolous, so that's not the answer. Instead, I've just felt this pressure and I've felt this perfectionism that I often resort back to that this episode, for whatever reason, it has to be great. I want to make something that's meaningful to somebody and I put that pressure on myself.

As I was thinking about all this, over and over again, over analyzing, in my mind, this desire to have fun and to figure out how to cap off a month of talking about stress, I was reminded of a quote from one of my favorite movies. It's actually a quote that I I'm surprised I haven't used it in a podcast episode yet because I anytime I speak in public, I always sneak this quote in. I think it's funny and people who know me know, it's kind of our inside joke that if I'm speaking, you're going to hear this quote.

The quote is, "by keeping it light, the heavy can be handled".

It's actually from one of my favorite movies, a movie called Step Into Liquid. This movie basically highlights various different surf cultures or people in the surf industry, all throughout the world. Just a little bit about what it means to be a surfer, what surfing culture is, where it comes from. It's a really cool movie.

But this particular quote, I actually went back and watched it so here's the full quote, they say, "Humor more than anything defines a surfer. Talent is fine, but funny is a lot better. After all, why surf if you're not having fun and by keeping it light, the heavy can be handled".

This quote introduces a chapter of this movie, which talks about this surfer named Jesse Billauer, who was a top prospect as an amateur surfer. They said "he was destined to be a pro surfer". One day he went out surfing, the wave caught him, hit his neck, and he went headfirst into the bottom of the ocean. He said he felt his body just immediately go numb and tingly. He actually ended up having a spinal cord injury and so he's paralyzed now.

This part of the movie talks about how he started a foundation and wanted to get back in the water. So he enlisted the help of some friends, and even though he's paralyzed, he goes out into the ocean. He has his friends, caretakers there with him, and they push him into waves so that he can still enjoy surfing, even despite this accident that he had. He's talks about how he has a lot of pain in his body, a lot of burning sensations. He'll have tight muscles, but the minute that he gets in the water, it all just disappears. He says he smiles from ear to ear, everything vanishes, he forgets all his worries. He says nothing can compare to that.

It was such a great reminder that life is so much a matter of our perspective, and where our focus is. Jesse could have chosen to focus on "Why me? Why did this happen? This is so unfair. I can't do the things I love". But instead, he is determined to have fun, to do the things he enjoys, to have the people around him that he loves and that mean something to him, and to make the best of a very hard situation.

So I've been thinking about that quote in relation to stress and that's what I want to talk about today. As we're wrapping up this less-stress challenge, is that by keeping it light, the heavy can be handled.

I want to touch on a few ways that we can keep it light when things feel heavy.

The first thing is gratitude, which is looking for the positives. There's a study from 2005 by the founder, essentially, of positive psychology, Martin Seligman. They did a study with 411 people that found that individuals who wrote down three good things every evening, for one week, experienced increased happiness, and decreased depressive symptoms for six months after that study, just from that simple gratitude practice of writing three good things every evening. That same study also found that writing a letter of gratitude to someone and then hand delivering it to them, increased their happiness after the study for up to a month. So it's the simple things that we can do to reflect on gratitude to show appreciation for somebody else, or even just to look for the positives.

In the last episode, we talked about mindfulness and how we can train our brain to be more present and more aware. Gratitude is very similar in that it trains our brain to look for the good things, and to not focus as much on the negatives, or the stressful things, the heavy things.

The second thing we can do is to interact with friends, with family with people we enjoy. Just like Jesse did, in his example of getting back out into the surf and taking people that he could rely on and that were helpful to him and that he appreciated, we can do that same thing by gathering our people around us. Social connection is one of the pillars of Lifestyle Medicine. We sometimes forget the importance of that because we get caught in, "oh, I need to eat a certain way. I need to exercise a certain way. I need to make sure I'm getting all my sleep. I need to manage my stress in productive ways". But there's something to be said for just interacting in a positive way with the people around us. There's a huge power in this.

Social connection is a subjective experience. You don't have to be extroverted, or in the middle of every party, or attending every event to have positive social connection. It's a feeling of being connected. That can look like different things or mean different things for people. How we achieve that is going to be different, but it's important that we do feel that connection and that we have those relationships around us.

The last tool that I want to talk about is play. Play actually has a definition, believe it or not. Dr. Stuart Brown, is the founder of the National Institute for Play. He defines play as "time spent without purpose". Can we just appreciate that for a moment, because I don't think it's very often, at least in my own life, and in a lot of the clients that I work with, I don't think we often have time that is just spent without a purpose. Even the other day, I caught myself resting. I was probably scrolling on TikTok or something, which I do enjoy, but I have this idea that even my rest should feel productive, that if I'm going to spend time doing nothing, I should feel better afterwards. I should feel more rested. I should feel like that was worth my time. I was thinking, "wow, I'm even trying to make my rest time productive".

Play is different, because play doesn't have a purpose. It's just play.

Dr. Brown proposes that there are seven properties of play. As we go through these, I want you to envision yourself as a child, and the activities that you liked to do, the playing that you did, the friends that you had, what kinds of things you did in the neighborhood, just have that image of yourself as a child in mind as we go through these different properties of play.

So the first one is that play is purposeless, you do not need to play in order to survive. It doesn't serve a grand purpose.

Play is also voluntary. So it's something that's your choice, you can never be forced to play, or else it's not play.

Play has an inherent attraction, meaning that it's just for fun, we play because we want to, that's it.

Play also has a freedom from time, which reminds me of the phrase, time flies when you're having fun, right? When we're playing. You're not watching the clock; your mom is the one that is saying "you only have five more minutes", because you're not tracking time, you're not paying attention to that you're just enjoying playing.

Play also diminishes your consciousness of self, which I think is a really interesting one, especially for women where we tend to think about "oh, how do I look doing a certain activity? Am I going to look awkward are people going to judge me?" When we're playing, we're not worried about what other people think, or how we look doing an activity, we're able to just enjoy it.

Play is also improvisational. I's very creative. There's no expectations. You can create as you go. Think of being a kid and playing house or...I'm trying to think what other games we used play...like those silly like neighborhood games, right? Kick the can. Those types of things where you kind of make up rules as you go. You improvise. You explore. You discover. You have a new situation come up and say "wait, that's against the rules now." You make it up as you go. It's fun, it's creative.

The last property is that there's a continuation of desire. You want to keep doing it. It fulfills some enjoyment in you that brings you back and makes you want to keep playing again in the future.

Play is often something we associate with childhood and I think that's kind of unfortunate, because there's so many benefits to play. It does help us to keep things light.

When I think of play, I actually think of my dad, who is not a child, but is the most playful human that I know. He's always been that way. He brings a piece of fun into everything that he does. I remember as a kid going grocery shopping, and we would put the groceries on the conveyor belt when we were checking out, and my dad always built towers with the cereal boxes. There was a whole story with the moat and the different items that meant different things and color coded things and it was always fun. He's such a great example to me of the benefit of play, and that when we keep things light and enjoyable and add an elements of fun to our routine wherever we can, that it helps us to manage stress a little bit more. Things feel a little bit lighter when we can do it with a smile.

I know as we've been focusing on stress management this month, we have talked a lot about these purposeful actions to manage stress: breathing exercises, meditation, body scans, your stress response. All of those things are absolutely helpful. And I also am grateful to wrap it up today with a little bit more lightheartedness.

My encouragement for this week would be to do something for fun, do something for play. I know a lot of my clients are moms; school is starting back up, this is a busy time of year, a lot happening. I encourage you to consider what you can do this week to keep things light, and to keep things fun and playful, and to use that as a way that you can also help to manage your stress throughout the remainder of this month (and beyond this month too actually!).

That is what I have for you today. Thank you for joining me. Thank you so much for all of your feedback on these episodes. I always appreciate if you can give me a rating and review, that would be awesome. I am looking forward to talking with you again next week!

OUTRO MUSIC: Thanks for joining me on this episode of the compassionate wellness podcast. If this message resonated with you, please share it with someone you care about. I'd love to connect with you as well follow me on Instagram @alextreanor.coaching, or visit my website alextreanorcoaching.com. And as a reminder, Treanor spelled kind of goofy, it's T-R-E-A-N-O-R. For any references mentioned in this episode, be sure to check out the show notes. I hope you have a wonderful day and don't forget to make time for something you enjoy.

References:

• Step Into Liquid - 2003 Film

• 2005 Study by Martin Seligman et al. on Happiness

• Dr. Stuart Brown - Definition and Properties of Play