AMA with AMA: To stress or not to stress?
Is that really the question?
Pssst. As always, my posts are far too long for e-mail format, so make sure you click ‘read more’ at the bottom to see the whole thing!
Dear AMA,
It feels like there’s a lot more being talked about related to burnout, stress, anxiety, depression, etc. There might be a message of “be gentle with yourself” and “practice self care.” That never exactly resonated with me but I guess I understand the intention (e.g. if you’re working too many hours, then set boundaries with your boss and work fewer hours).
I think rules around productivity were set up in my childhood and I’m having trouble letting go of being “useful” to society. On the other hand, there’s people talking about how we are too comfortable (e.g. indoors away from inclement weather; being able to get groceries instead of hunting). I have been thinking about reading "The Comfort Crisis" and I anticipate it’s about this.
I understand that stress/burnout from work is different from stress related to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but I just feel like I am in the middle of some mixed signals here. Should I “expose” myself to fewer stressors or more stressors? More or less discomfort? (obviously the kind of stressor matters, I would rather be out in the rain and wind, an “ancient” stressor than have to be in a terrible e-mail situation, a more modern stressor).
How do you deal with and welcome different kinds of stressors and discomfort into your life?
What a fantastic question - and this is something that I’ve thought about quite a bit. I want to start by saying that while I don’t intentionally seek out stress, various types of stress are something that I do experience on a regular basis. I also don’t try to ‘get rid’ of it — because in focusing on what I don’t want (i.e. pushing stress away and resisting it), will ultimately create more of it. I’ve discussed this in a few other posts, but the essence of this idea is simple: trying to control external circumstances in order to improve your internal environment is like playing a losing game of whack-a-mole. In order to cope with and manage stress in your life, you must start by building your own, internal foundation of peace. This starts with being present with yourself. It is not as simple as taking a bath, visiting a spa, or treating yourself to an almond croissant. Sure, those things are great, but if you haven’t looked deep within yourself, they will only be a temporary balm. The answer is not to escape from where you are — the answer is to truly be where you are.
As you can imagine, founding a company and running a business can be: overwhelming, oppressive, demanding, stressful, frustrating and exhausting. It can also be: exhilarating, rewarding, wonderful, inspiring, exciting and fun. I imagine that most people experience these (or similar) emotions on a regular basis. I’m not going to sugarcoat this: life is really challenging, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t own a business… we each have our own challenges and stressors that we face on a daily basis.
I agree with the statement in the question that ‘natural stressors’ can be a more healthy type of stress in our life. For instance, the stress that you might experience trying to take cover in a rainstorm is probably a more natural and ‘healthy’ type of stress than the stress that you experience when you are obsessively mulling over the nasty customer service e-mail that arrived in your inbox… or the annoying habit your co-worker has… or worrying about your monthly sales numbers.
I’ll give you an example of something that felt really stressful to me (at the time), and then tell you how I moved forward, once I realized that being stressed out was not helping me. When REI placed their first order with Kula Cloth in 2020, one of the things that I had to do was design new packaging. My creative director Amanda and I designed and created a compostable bag that were were pretty excited about it — and REI was was pretty anxious to get their first delivery of the product. They placed their first order, and I simultaneously knew that the bags were en route from their manufacturing facility in Germany. I also knew that REI wanted their first order of 2,000 Kula Cloths, and that they were expecting them in a timely manner.
What happened? The company who was shipping the bags to me needed a remedial training in how to ship a large shipment by air freight. I was working with a customs broker to make the shipment happen, and the bag company had my incorrect address and EIN number (tax ID) on the shipping form. Essentially, the entire shipping process was an absolute cluster that resulted in my bags being stuck in bag purgatory for weeks. I had no clue where they were… at one point they were stuck in Germany for awhile… and then they disappeared temporarily, before I discovered that they hadn’t even left the manufacturing facility yet. Meanwhile, I had the biggest client of my Kula Cloth career waiting to receive their first shipment of Kulas. It was, in a word, spiritual. My brain wanted to spin out of control. I wanted to freak out and get angry and yell at them and tell them that they were going to ‘f-up’ my life and my business, but I decided to pause and look inward. What is the situation in your life right now, Anastasia? I asked myself. I looked around me. I was standing in my kitchen, breathing. My heart was beating. I closed my eyes and I noticed my breathing. I felt the breath come in and out of my body. I was alive. I was OK.
During the course of this saga, I was primarily communicating with a woman from the bag company who was based in Israel. As I navigated the process, I tried to keep my focus on the kind people who were helping me… instead of lashing out in frustration. Do you know what I learned about this woman as I continued this process? In the midst of trying to coordinate my own shipment of bags… she was in the process of watching one of her parents die. Suddenly, my bags seemed like a really really dumb thing to be worried about. Not that my business didn’t matter… but the process of this bag delivery helped me to see what really mattered. And it wasn’t bags.
I decided to write to Blake, the FedEx guy who was assigned to my customs fiasco. But instead of being snippy, I thought I could try to make the entire experience fun:
A day later, a short e-mail from Blake arrived:
Now, I promise this isn’t a collab with FedEx and they aren’t sending me a check in the mail for sharing this e-mail. For me, these interactions were a reminder of the human-ness and goodness that can be easily missed when we get so wrapped up in our minds that we forget it is there. The entire experience of having my bags delivered ultimately turned into a beautiful, multi-faceted adventure in shipping. When I look back on Kula Historical Events, it is a tiny blip in the radar. As I have moved forward and experienced similar delays and unexpected bumps and dips in the road, I keep my focus not on what is going wrong … but on all of the right that is visible, if you know where to look for it. And you know what? REI never said anything to me. I’ve continued to deliver products to them — sometimes I run out of bags or Kulas — and I always manage to handle it in the moment.
Natural Stress vs Created Stress
When I think about the difference between ‘natural’ stress and ‘created’ stress, the difference can be distilled down to one thing: a state of presence. When we experience more natural stressors, those things often place us in a state of being where we are in the moment. For instance: I’m climbing a mountain when suddenly, I hear thunder in the distance. What do I do? I make a decision in the moment to find some sort of shelter so that I can protect myself from the incoming storm. I act accordingly - and trust myself to handle whatever nature throws at me in that moment. What don’t I do? I don’t go home and obsess about what the storm ‘did to me’ or what I’m going to say to that storm next time I see it… and I don’t go tell people about what a horrible storm that was… and I don’t blast the storm on social media and get myself all spun up about it. Sure, I might tell some campfire stories about that one time that I was in the storm… but I don’t hold myself in the energy of that stress. Once the storm is gone, it’s gone.
For some reason, we have a hard time doing this when it concerns our personal lives and relationships — it’s just a lot more difficult for most of us, because most of us are completely identified with the thoughts in our mind. We think a thought, and we believe: this is true. As Tara Brach says in her book Radical Compassion, “A thought is real… but it isn’t necessarily true.”
When I first started a meditation practice many years ago, I experienced my first ‘gap’ in the thought stream. Suddenly I asked myself the question… “Wait… if I can observe my thoughts… then am I different from them?” The answer is something that each of us have to discover on our own, but, spoiler alert: the answer is yes. You are not your thoughts. Your thoughts are energetic ‘forms’ that drift in an out of the canvas of who you truly are — the conscious awareness that lives within your body. That’s a pretty deep concept to understand, and it’s really not even something that can be written about or conceptually explained — it’s something you have to experience, and eventually, as you begin to awaken to it… you’ll know.
As I started to meditate, I began to recognize that my thoughts were not me. This gave me the ability to observe them, but not necessarily believe them. As I went through my day, particularly while dealing with folks in business or personal relationships, thousands and thousands of thoughts would appear. Many of those thoughts were helpful, but many of them were not. I watched as I would spin up imaginary conversations and ridiculous scenarios that had not happened. I would work myself in a stressful tizzy in complete panic about something that had not happened. I would agonize and stress myself out about unreal events that had never occurred. And in the process, I was miserable. And what was making me miserable? The event or person? No… because the thing I was thinking about wasn’t even real… it was simply in my mind. I looked deeply into my stress, fear and doubt and I realized that I was the one creating it. Ouch. It was a bitter pill to swallow, and if I’m being honest, it still is. I’m not going to tell you that I’m an enlightened being who lives in a state of ecstatic bliss all day long: worries and fears and doubts are constantly arising in my mind. The difference now is this: I don’t always believe them.
Imagine yourself with a net, and start to notice your thoughts as they begin to float by in the stream of your consciousness. One by one… scoop them up and look at them. Ask yourself: Is this thought real or is it imaginary? Is it a memory? Be honest when you answer. With imaginary thoughts, it’s easy to defend your own thinking by saying something like, “But it could happen… and I need to be prepared for it”, and then ask yourself again, “But has it happened yet?”. As you move forward you begin to let go of the incessant worrying and trust yourself: I can handle things as they happen in the moment.
I am not suggesting that you don’t plan or be prepared. Absolutely, be prepared and do the things that make you feel good about what you are doing. What I am suggesting is that you live your life from a best case scenario mindsight, rather than a worst case scenario mindset. Instead of asking myself, “What could go wrong”… I always ask myself, “What can go right?” If what you focus on is what you create in life… isn’t it a better idea to focus on the things that can and will go right if you trust yourself to handle things in the moment?
So, the first step to dissolving the stress and overwhelm in your life is to recognize that most of it is created internally — and most of it is coming from a deep place that probably has to do with a wound that we don’t even know we have. This part of you needs to be loved and nurtured. I used to be reactive and stressed all the time. If somebody ‘did something’ that triggered one of my wounds, with absolutely zero self- awareness, I would create ‘meaning’ around what they did and rile myself up about what had happened — the drama was never ending. I cut people out of my life all the time because they were ‘toxic’ or because they had ‘done things’ to me — when in reality… I was the one doing things to me. They were not there, in front of me, attempting to intentionally cause me any pain or discomfort — I was doing all of that for them, and then reacting to the imaginary figment of them in my imagination that was hurting a part of me that I believed was unlovable.
How does this play out in ‘normal’ life? It can look like this: You get an e-mail from somebody that irks you in some way. Maybe it questions something you are doing… maybe it’s bad news about something you felt hopeful for… maybe it’s a nasty message from a customer. Instead of being there with that e-mail in the moment and allowing ourself to process the feeling in the moment — we run with it. We make breakfast the next day, and we are stewing about it while we are cooking our eggs. We talk about the ‘problem’ with our friends. We mull about it. We obsess about it. More stressful thoughts create… you guessed it… more stressful thoughts. And not only that — but more stressful thoughts create other stressful situations. It’s just like one of those days when you lose your keys in the morning… stub your toe… get a speeding ticket on the way to work… and then realize that you showed up in your pajama bottoms. Once you are focused on the chaos, stress and mess of it all — more of it appears.
It sucks. And I still do this. I am not immune from it. The past few months have, quite honestly, been pretty challenging for me. Growing a business is exhausting and I have watched myself really want to get completely overwhelmed about it. I find myself getting angry and creating stories that feature me as the main character — Introducing…. Anastasia and her overwhelming amount of work that nobody has a clue how much she does and nobody really cares and she’s on her own and has been abandoned and is drowning in a sea of way too much to do and everything is going to come crashing down. Guess what? Guess how many times that stress has ever helped me? Zero. There has not been one instance of self-created stress and overwhelm that has made me think, “Wow, I’m so glad I did that.”
So, what do I do? I breathe. I dance. I meditate. I disrupt the computer. The computer is your brain, and your brain is programmed to think the same thoughts that you’ve always thought… over and over and over again. It will continue to do that, until you begin the process of self- awareness and begin to tell yourself, “There is another way.” When I notice myself diving down one of my familiar rabbit holes (we all know what these are for each of us), I try to catch myself. There are moments when I will literally say, out loud, ‘STOP!’. I will pause and take a moment to feel my body. I will pause to take a moment to observe the thoughts and emotions that are running through my bloodstream and consciousness. I will pause and say, “Is this helpful or harmful to me right now?”. Most of the time, it is harmful. If needed, I will step away from what I am doing and find something creative to do that can interrupt that pattern. There are many many tactics and techniques to doing this — and each of us needs to find what works for us individually.
Peace is there. Peace is not a distant utopia that you can experience once you get through, ‘this next thing’. If we spend our lives waiting for peace to arrive… it never will. The ultimate awakening of life is to recognize that peace is the absolute core and essence of who we are. The thoughts and noise are on the surface of our consciousness — but deep inside, there is something much more: the life that lives within each of us. This is a place of true peace, stillness and awareness. It is a place of connectedness with ourselves and with the world around us. It is a place that is accessible to each of us, in every moment.
Eckhart Tolle gives a great example in ‘The Power of Now’ of two ducks who have a skirmish in a lake. He describes watching the ducks fighting… and then, when they separate from each other, they flap their wings to clear their physical bodies of the energy of that exchange… and then they go on with their day, lazily floating in a lake and looking for food. Humans do not have the same practice. We have an interaction with another person and we mull it over and relentlessly replay it in our minds over and over again until even the original event has become obsolete in our minds and we have turned it into something far worse within the cells of our own body. The same thing happens when we worry about the unknown — we create an imaginary future that is so hostile that our very cells shudder and cringe at the stress of being in a place so horrible. Here’s the thing: our bodies and brains don’t know the difference between the actual experience of an event and the thought of that event. Which means, that when you are creating a stressful situation in your own mind and worrying about it obsessively for 3 weeks — your body doesn’t know that the situation hasn’t even happened. Your body is experiencing that unnatural stress for 3 weeks — endlessly. Another question I ask myself is, “Is this loving to myself?” If the answer is no, I know that I need to find a way to let it go.
I have never read the book The Comfort Crisis (but it sounds so interesting!), so I can’t speak to that book specifically — but I will say that in my own life, I’ve discovered that some of the ‘difficulty’ that I’ve experienced in the backcountry and in the wilderness has helped me find the strength that I need to move through life. When you can haul a 30+ lb pack for 90 miles on the Wind River High Route — it helps you to recognize that you can do difficult things. When you can be amidst an actual storm and weather it with grace and confidence… you know that you can also find your footing in the turbulent moments of life that test our resolve. I can also say, without a shadow of a doubt, that nothing that I’ve ever experienced in the backcountry is more difficult than just being a human and navigating life. Being a human is confusing and chaotic… and sometimes downright difficult, frustrating and lonely.
I mean, really, what are we even doing here? There are more than 7 billion of us, all floating on a round orb in an infinite cosmos — isn’t that a bit alarming when you stop to think about it? And yet, I believe that each of us has a tiny spark of a knowing that we are all a part of something that we can’t truly understand. We get into life and we do what we are told we should do: we worry about the things that people tell us we need to worry about… we are careful about the things we need to be careful about… our feelings get hurt… we fail… we succeed… we flail hopelessly in the abyss… and through it all, we find ourselves thinking, WHAT IN THE ACTUAL HECK?!
And yet - there are moments. There are a lot of moments. If you are a parent, maybe it’s a moment you spent with your child… or maybe a moment when you were alone. Maybe it’s the feeling of freedom you felt on your first summit. Maybe it was the time you laid down on the ground in the dark and looked at the sky. Perhaps you felt it when you danced in your living room when nobody was home… or maybe it happened when you floated in a lake… the water covering your ears and amplifying your heartbeat until that was the only sound you could hear. Those moments are reminding us that we can find presence in our lives. We can create a gap between the thoughts that we create and who we truly are. It is in coming back, over and over again, to who we truly are that we begin to dissolve the illusion of stress that we have created… and we begin to reclaim the joy and love that is our truly natural state of being.
I mentioned in my last post about The Joy Wire that my husband and I started doing ‘abundance walks’ every morning so that we could focus on and create the things that we wanted in our individual lives and in our relationship. One of those things for me was this: I am the most relaxed, peaceful, and calm entrepreneur in the history of the world. I have fun. I love what I do. I handle things in the moment. I am connected to myself. I allow myself to go with the flow and I trust myself to handle things as they arise. I an present and open to the infinite possibilities of life. Abundance flows to me easily and effortlessly.
While I am happy to report that I have not reached superhuman status yet (I’m trying)… I have felt that my foundation has shifted. My foundation is no longer one of stress and overwhelm and reactivity. My foundation is one of peace and fun and calm — which means that when I do experience stress, I have the tools to observe those feelings, to process them and to handle them in a way that allows them to move through my body without sticking around for weeks. This is major progress from somebody who used to be able to hold a 6-month grudge like it was nobody’s business. I used to be able to give somebody the silent treatment like my life depended on it. As I began a spiritual journey in my own life, I quickly realized that this energy was hurting me more than anybody else. It was not loving to me. It was not loving to the other people in my life. It was not loving energy to add to the collective energy of the planet.
All energy does not have to be good. In fact, that would be ridiculous to think that we came here on earth to lay around and eat bon bons all day. We didn’t. We came here to grow and expand - and a part of that process is experiencing the entire palette of emotions that life has to offer. All of the colors combine to create something beautiful — and we can be with each unique pigment and find the beauty in its particular nuances and shades and see how it contributes to the overall beauty of the masterpiece of our lives. Suddenly, we no longer experience stress or negative emotions as ‘bad’ — we simply see and notice that they are a different color in the spectrum of life, and how lucky we are to get to wake up each day and create. Each of the things we experience in our life is unique and challenging and difficult, but none of them affect the wholeness of who we are. Each of us is precious, unique, and miraculous. Bags arriving late from FedEx cannot possibly touch the essence of consciousness — which is a thing so vast and indescribable that even the greatest poet couldn’t write it down.
So, this is a very long answer to say: You’ve got this. You are doing your best, but you’ll figure it out. This too will pass. Take a deep breath. Drink some tea. Ask yourself: My thoughts might be real, but are they true? Lay on the ground and look at the stars. Dance. Close your eyes. Remember who you are. Allow the answers to come to you. You have everything that you need inside… right now. Trust yourself. You can and will handle things in the moment. Let go a little bit more. Feel the wind on your face and let the storm come. You will find shelter not in controlling the things you cannot control — but from within yourself. Underneath the chaotic waves and turbulent waters there is a stillness - and that stillness is you. Listen to it, and see what it has to say, and you will know that all you really have to do is flap your wings.
You are loved so much friends!
Love,
Anastasia
My new favorite ❤️