#249: 5 Steps to Heal Your Brain, Body and Life from Chronic Stress with Jennifer Love

If You Want To Stop Chronic Stress In Its Tracks You Should:

1. Recognize when you are feeling stressed and identify your personal symptoms
2. Create a ritual to calm your stress response and check-in with yourself
3. Stop leaning on your distractions and start reflecting on the ways you deal with stress 
4. Change your actions and thoughts to add value rather than chaos

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Episode Summary

Stress can not only impact your mood and energy, it can actually change the way in which your brain responds to the source of your stress response. For so many women who are combating stress on the daily, this chronic affliction can have serious long-term effects on their physical health, mental state, and overall wellbeing.

Heal Your Life From Chronic Stress

Dr. Jennifer Love is board-certified in psychiatry, addiction psychiatry, and medicine, and is the new co-author of the book When Crisis Strikes: 5 Steps to Heal Your Brain, Body, and Life from Chronic Stress. Dr. Love is passionate about helping others get to the bottom of their stress bucket and loves to help others find a way to live life without chronic stress pulling them down.

Stress Is Like Snorkeling

Dr. Love believes that life is like snorkeling. Often we can be distracted by everything that is happening around us, focusing on keeping an eye out for sharks and enjoying the brilliance of the world under the sea. But suddenly we can look up and realize that we have drifted out past where we started and no longer recognize our surroundings anymore. 

Stress works just like snorkeling, which is why we have to take the time to check on ourselves, remove the distractions, and pull ourselves back into shore. Walking through these steps can help you evaluate how you react to chronic stress and take action to better handle your problems.

The Five Steps To Get a Grip on Stress

The five steps outlined in Dr. Love’s new book can help you get a grip on your stress, figure out what you can about an issue, take action, and reflect on what you have been through. The time of introspection is crucial when analyzing if the actions and thought patterns you have are adding value to your life, or just creating more chaos. 

None of us have time to get hung up in the vicious cycle of chronic stress. Dr. Love’s tools can help you get to the bottom of your stress bucket so that you can face new stressful challenges with the capacity to combat whatever happens.

Are you ready to stop living in a cycle of chronic stress and start empowering yourself to engage with what serves you? Share which of Dr. Love’s tips you are going to implement into your daily routine with me in the comments section of the episode page.

Quotes

“What is happening to you is much less important than the context in which it is happening.” (12:28)

“We have to stop escaping, bring the focus in, name the problem and then really get at what is underneath this problem. What is the meaning of this problem to me?” (18:05)

“It needs to be done because otherwise you can be in that snorkeling, and be drifting and drifting, and look up and be completely in a different area than where you want to be in your life.” (22:46)

“Really starting to take the focus from the crisis and onto the things you value, and reconnecting with those values, that is important to do before we get to the fifth step.” (26:58)

“Reading a self-help book shouldn’t feel like a chore. Doing work on yourself shouldn’t feel like a chore. It needs to have humor in it, it needs to have a lighthearted approach.” (35:22)

In This Episode

• The surprising symptoms of chronic stress that you may be completely overlooking (7:40)
• How past traumas can play a role in the root causes of your physiological issues (11:47)
• The importance of taking the time to reflect when going through big stressors (23:42)
• Why you need to make the time for self-care without feeling guilty (31:04)
• How to analyze if your actions and thoughts are adding value or chaos to your life (34:00)

Resources Mentioned

Calm & Restore Instant Chewable

When Crisis Strikes: 5 Steps to Heal Your Brain, Body, and Life from Chronic Stress by Dr. Jennifer Love and Kjell Tore Hovik

Love + Hovik Website

Follow Dr. Love on Instagram

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