If there’s one episode that encapsulates the mission of the entire podcast, this is it.  It’s time to dig in to why we shouldn’t be tolerating life’s little discomforts and pains, thinking that they’ll just go away, or that “someday” we’ll find the time and energy to feel better. 

If not now, then when? 

Let this be your inspiration to take action now, to find the small changes that can add up over time to lasting health and greater joy.  It’s too common to think that we’ll make a change when life slows down, after some goal is accomplished, or once the discomfort is great enough to force us into action… But then it may be too late.  And often it comes with a much greater effort, energy, and lifestyle change.  

In this episode we’ll explore 

• Why “the years off the end” really do matter
• Transforming the work ethic you may be working with 
• Tuning in to your body to understand its needs 
• The sneaky stressors that add up to weigh you down 
• Discovering what you truly want 
• Learning the lessons that matter from our elders 

Thanks for tuning in for episode #100!  Let Susi know what you’d like more of, on this show or just to proclaim it for your own life! Send a message to susi@3xlessstress.com

Susi: Welcome back. I’m so happy to have you with me for a very, very special occasion. This is episode number 100 of Happified! That means I have been at this for coming up on two years, 100 weekly episodes coming to you from the corner of my living room. And I am thrilled to have you with me. Thank you for being a part of my community for joining me along the ride here on Happified.

So, here’s another solo episode for you, sharing a little bit more of what is on my heart. What’s at the front of my mind and a little bit of why I show up every week, even when life is happening all around me and I’m fitting stuff in around the edges. Just like you, priorities are always changing and demands are always coming up on the scene.

And I wanted to share some insights as to why I think what I have to say, why I think my message is one that’s so important to bring forward right now. So thank you first of all, for joining me for this episode, if it’s your first one, if you’ve been tuning in along the way, I’m so grateful to have you here.

I would love to hear from you about what you would like more of. And just think about that for a minute. What would you like more of? We’re going to come back to that later in this conversation. But especially here on the show, if there’s a topic I haven’t covered, if there’s one that I opened up for you and I haven’t come back to, or dug in deeply enough, let me know about it because this is-

What I really want to create here is a resource for you. Something you can come back to. If you visit me on happifiedlife.com, that’s the short link to take you right to the podcast page, happifiedlife.com. You can enter a search term: men’s health, sleep, stress. 

Boy, you’d probably get a couple hits on that one! And it will search through, because I add the transcripts of these shows. And so you can come to the most relevant episodes and dig in. Find out what I’ve explored on this topic and use these tools that I bring to you. 

Meet my friends that I have brought here on the show and see what feels supportive, because what works for someone is not what will work for everyone. And if you know me, you know that I’m a bit of a shop girl and I love to have the right tool for the job. And so this is what I consider to be my toolkit that I’m bringing to you for your own wellbeing. 

So, let me dig in a little bit. The topic of this show is “Why should we fix it before it’s broken?” Maybe we’re gonna have some more shop references. We’ll see what just comes out of my mouth as we go forward.

Why am I a stress activist? Why am I such a happiness advocate? And I’ll share a little bit about my story, I’m sure, as we go on, but first of all, here’s really what it comes down to is the question of, what is your quality of life? And when are you going to get to enjoy the quality that you want in your life?

if not now, then when? Because I love you. You are in my heart. I love you for tuning in, but we don’t get to count on anything. All we can do is show up and do our best and be present every day and enjoy it. Savor these moments. Some people, get the mixed blessing of understanding that their time here on earth might be limited.

And most of us don’t. And so what story are we writing for ourselves, and what are we enjoying? And are you living your life based on enjoying tomorrow, or the next chapter, or your retirement? And putting everything on hold, putting your joy on hold, putting your relationships on hold, the connection with your family, with your friends, getting involved in your community. Telling yourself, “when I have time, when I get this job promotion and I get my weekends back when I don’t have to work so much overtime, that’s when I’m going to make space for this”, because if you don’t make space for this yourself, no one else will.

I’ll be here to cheer you on, but I can’t do it for you and no one else can. So let’s lighten this up a bit. Let’s step back a second. And let’s come back to the topic. Why do we need to fix something if it isn’t broken, right? If I’m feeling okay. If I’m gonna make it until the family vacation, that’s coming up this August.

If I’m going to sleep in and not set my alarm for a week when I get that holiday vacation, that downtime in a couple of months, right? Everything is, “not too far out”. We can tell ourselves it’s coming, but if things aren’t operating at optimum, how do we come back to that? And it seems overwhelming when life is really busy, when there’s already enough on the to-do list, to add a little bit of exercise, to add getting fresher produce so you’re getting more vegetables and fruits, to carve out a little bit more time for sleep. 

I can hear you laughing. And I appreciate, right, sleep often comes in at the bottom of the list, but it really deserves a place at the top. We’ll take a look at those sneaky stressors that we just allow.

And then when we aren’t feeling great, when we wake up feeling sluggish, when our stomach is in knots more often than not, our digestive system is like on its own schedule, and Lord knows what that’s gonna be. When you are tolerating normal headaches, when you have hay fever and allergies all the time. And that’s one of my tell tales, is when my allergies kick up, I know that things are adding up and my body is not as resilient as I need it to be.

What’s your telltale sign? What’s the signal that you, as often as possible kind of hit mute on? Because you don’t have time to get curious, to sit with it, to wonder, “what’s going on. How can I turn this around?” Because life keeps up serving up other demands. And so we try to hit the mute button on these signals that our body is giving us. Still getting a little ahead of myself.

So first I wanted to share a story. When I was in college, and this is definitely dating myself, but when I was in college, my friends and I. I can’t even tell you how many times we watched Dennis Leary’s comedy special from HBO, “No Cure for Cancer”. Definitely dated myself, but if you have a way of getting a hold of that, it is really a classic piece of comedy. Very saucy, very salty.

And, you know, I was a theater student, a smoker at the time, and he had lots of bits about not giving up smoking cigarettes, you know. And he had a story about a very well known exercise activist, a jogger, who dropped dead of a heart attack when? When he was jogging. Right? And there is some irony in that.

But Dennis at one point says, “why deny myself what I want right now? Why worry about my health, about lung cancer. It’s the years off the end”. And when you’re 20, you think that’s pretty funny. You think, that’s right! Why would I deny myself what I want right now, what brings me pleasure? It’s those years off the end and how good are they gonna be anyway? 

That’s what we think when we’re young, sometimes our mental model doesn’t evolve. And that’s what we think when we’re middle aged. We think, “yeah but right now I can handle it, right now it’s not that uncomfortable. And it’s those years off the end. Am I really going to enjoy them anyway?” 

So we get into a space where we start to ask the question through different lenses, where we start to ask, “are we going to be enjoying those years at the end?” Are we setting ourself up, as we tolerate slipping down this slippery slope of health, to have chronic conditions later on? 

What small changes- And this is what really lights me up, what small changes can we make right now that will prevent that so that we don’t have to make a radical lifestyle change down the line?

Because how well does that work? Let me rewind you to January 15th. If you made a new year’s resolution to exercise more, to meditate every day to do something different, how long did that actually stick with you? Right? Because those big changes are really hard to make. 

So let’s start small. Let’s keep it simple. Let’s do something that you can check the box every day and say, “I did that for me”. 

And every day that gets easier. And every day you’re lightening your stress load a little bit. So you have a little bit more capacity to be present when you get home to your family. You have a little bit more capacity to take a breath when someone brings a stressful conversation by phone, by email, hanging over the top of your cubicle, through the zoom meeting if you’re working remotely. 

Another topic that I can share, if it feels important to you. Is talking about burnout. Something that I’ve had the opportunity to talk with quite a few corporate teams over the last two years, about how working remotely can kind of set the stage for burnout.

We are givers. As, as a rule, as a race, as people in general, we give of ourselves. Sometimes we give because we want other people to be happy. Sometimes we give of ourself, we let people cross boundaries, because it’s easier for us to accommodate that than it is for us to maintain those boundaries. So why does that matter?

Why, when we’re giving ourselves up inch by inch, how does that add up and impact us? 

So let’s take a look at that. I am, no secret, a good Midwestern girl. I was born here in Southern California where I live now, but I was raised on a farm in central Illinois and definitely, um, marinated in that Midwestern work ethic, right?

Overwork is kind of heroic. There’s a lot of stoicism in the Midwest, you know, there’s honor to people who pull them up by their boots, by their own bootstraps. It’s a very ‘do it yourself’ mentality. People aren’t often willing to ask for help. It’s a show of weakness, perhaps, to admit that you don’t know something or that something hasn’t worked and to seek solutions elsewhere.

And how much easier could it be, really? And how much more humanizing can it be, when we have those relationships and connections, where we can say “this isn’t working for me, do you have an idea?” Or, “I could really use a break. Can we just like sit down and have a talk? Let’s have a cup of coffee”, right?

“Let’s check in” and check in on how we’re doing, instead of powering through. That’s very much that work ethic, you know, powering through, putting your own personal needs to the side because there’s an objective to be accomplished. I know, when I was a kid, we were on the farm. There’s always work to be done.

There was not time for daydreaming in fields or getting lost in all of the good books that I wished that I could as a kid. It, it was a busy, busy time, “there’s always work to be done”. And, in all things, balance. 

And if balance is triggering for you, I’m not talking about the perfectly level scales, balance is always “50-50”.

I’m talking about, we adjust it all the time. There’s work and then there’s play. There’s rest and then there’s dedication and devotion, right? We get to move that balance. It’s more of a journey instead of a destination. 

But how do we get there, if that’s not where we come? When we’re kind of breaking the mold and even generational models, when survival was much more, um, at risk, you know? We’re coming through generations, centuries of difficulty, of oppression. And we can make the choice to not buy into those old paradigms, to not believe that only hard work is rewarded. To not believe that our personal happiness has no value or benefit to ourselves or those around us. It’s actually- actually the opposite is true. 

Our happiness is so precious and so valuable, it actually makes the rest of life easier. You can check out my earlier episode, “The Power of Positivity”, if you want to get a little bit further into that logic, but that’s not what we’re here about today.

What I want to share with you, what I hope you will take away, is that we need to rest. We need to create these opportunities for self-care. And self-care isn’t bubble baths and jade face rollers. Unless that’s the kind of care that you need, it can be on the list. 

But self-care is getting the sleep that your body needs to rest, to recharge, to detox, to file the memories from yesterday so we have that bank to move forward with today, to heal ourselves. We deserve- you know, self care is eating nutritious food so that our cells have the building blocks that they need to repair and regenerate. Activity to move our body, to discharge the hormones of stress. Getting your body moving is a powerful way to end the stress cycle so we can come back to balance. We can shift from sympathetic stress, we can move from fight or flight back into rest or digest, that parasympathetic stress state, right. 

Stress isn’t bad. We just let it take control. So how do we handle that? How do we tune into where the stress is and recognize what we need to do with it?

Tuning in is a huge part of it. Our body is giving us those signals, right? As I mentioned before, when you wake up, is your stomach in knots? Do you have a headache every day? Do you have allergies all the time? It’s hard to make time to tune into these and to get curious, because there’s so many other things that demand our attention and our energy. 

But what else do we have, but this body, this vessel that we are moving forward with? If we don’t take care of it, again, who else will? We can’t lean on our Western medical system, our healthcare, or if you prefer to call it our “sick care” system, to bring us back to health. They can stop the bleeding, but they aren’t very good at finding the cause.

And that is something that we have to become the captain, and we have to navigate to. Sometimes it takes finding different practitioners, because a doctor says, “you’re getting a little older. You’re just gonna have to make peace with a little acid reflux, with a little extra sensitivity to allergies, with a little pain and tingling in your legs. That’s your new normal.” 

No, that’s not normal. That’s your body saying there’s something wrong and it might not be an easy thing to uncover, but it could be easier than you think if you take back control. 

So where do these things come from and how do we get to tune into this? And how can we lighten our load?

One of the things that I’m super passionate about, and the reason that my website is “3 X less stress” is because really we can boil down a lot of these slow burning problems and situations into three different aspects of stress. 

So these three aspects of stress, as I see them are physical, emotional, and environmental, and there’s overlap, because everything is connected. There’s physical stress, like not getting the sleep that you need, like perhaps living in an environment with a lot of electromagnetic frequencies. We live in a very wifi connected world. And if there’s already something else going on in your body, if your immune system is weakened, we can be susceptible to those EMFs.

So, so it takes a little curiosity. There’s those physical stressors, there’s emotional stressors. And that might be something that comes to mind first. When you think about stress, you think about being irritable, frustrated, misunderstood, depressed, having anxiety, those emotions that come up through stress, definitely driven by the neurochemicals that are released in our stress response. Driven by the way that we nourish and restore our bodies. But it’s also very much a sign and a signal. These are messages that we can tune into to get curious about when we’re uncomfortable. 

You know, it’s important to remember that our body’s natural state is balanced health and wellbeing. If we’re not in the way, if we don’t have obstacles, our body is really extraordinary at coming back to balance, at healing itself, at coming back to where it should be. 

So if it’s not feeling balanced, let’s get curious about what those obstacles are.

Many many times it’s these low level, kind of low volume, the static on the radio, chronic stressors, like I’ve mentioned. Physical stressors of not getting enough sleep, and emotional stressors of having difficult relations with other people and not expressing your emotions so that those emotions get bottled up. 

Those emotions, when we aren’t able to express them, can actually cause physical issues and dis-ease, right. And then environmental stressors. As a former shop girl this is dear to my heart because chemicals that I used to work with have affected my health. That used to be an exceptional story. Now it’s a very normal story.

Now it’s hard to find people who don’t have chemicals, like perfluorinated chemicals, PFOAs, Teflon in their blood, right. There are these forever chemicals that come from “better living through chemicals”, thank you, DuPont, that are so pervasive in our environment that we’re finding these in mothers who are carrying babies.

This influence can’t be- well, it can’t be nothing, right. I believe it can’t be underestimated. There’s a lot of chronic diseases and syndromes that we’re seeing that we didn’t see 30, 40, 50 years ago, before some of these became so widespread in use. So what’s in our environment? 

The EPA actually recognizes that indoor air quality is one of the primary health concerns, and think about it. We’re inside 90% of the time. Now pre COVID we spend a lot of that time at work or in a school building, and kids have gone back to schools, but not all of us have gone back to work. So we have a lot more authority in the cleanliness of our environments if we are working from home.

But how much thought do we give it? How much time have we spent looking at the qualities of the filter in our heating and air conditioning systems. How much do we think about the fragrances that are in our cleaning products? 

Fragrances are one of the most common culprits in endocrine disrupting chemicals, right? Chemicals that affect the way that our hormones are created, released, taken back up in our bodies. Hormones control everything from our hunger, our sleep cycle, our development, behavior, reproductive systems. All of that is so sensitive to minute influence of different chemicals like BPAs in plastics, like pthalates in fragrances, like PFOAs in non-stick cookware.

That’s a lot, right? So then the other side of the scale is, “oh my gosh. So there’s these little things that I could pay attention to, but that list is endless and I’ve got the endless to-do list and…” It’s not broken, I don’t have time to fix it. 

Listen. This isn’t an all or nothing game. This is about making better choices where we can, because the cumulative impact is tremendous.

We’re not looking for a flawless record. We’re not looking for a 100% conversion. I’m not saying you have to clean out all your cabinets. But you could, and I’m going to host a workshop in a couple of weeks. Email me if you want information for my “Healthy Home Makeover”. 

Because sometimes a fresh start is a great way to go.

Sometimes it’s just about making a different choice as you finish a bottle of cleaner, and you think about what cleaner you want to bring into your home next. I love ewg.org and their ingredients checklist, and they have a terrific app you can take with you to the store and run a quick check on some cleaning products, but I digress. 

So there are these different ways in which these low level stresses add up, right. And you’ve probably heard of the stress bucket analogy. A little stress goes in: that lack of sleep, the Doritos at lunch, the, you know, always-on wifi. You know, if you live in a condo building or somewhere where you have a lot of smart meters by your bed and you have headaches you can’t explain, it’s worth getting curious. Right? 

So these things add up in the stress bucket, and then when life comes along and adds a stress, we already don’t have any capacity left to meet it. So that’s why I love to address these sneaky stressors where we can, as we can, to bring back that capacity for resilience. Right? 

So it’s not, as I said, about making 100% of the right choices, it’s about recognizing there are different choices to be made. Recognizing that every day is a fresh start. And as James Clear says, every action we take is a vote for the person that we want to be. It’s a lot easier to get started now than to say, “when I have time, I’m gonna make the 60 different changes, these new choices, my whole day is gonna be transformed”, right? 

So let’s come back to basics. Let’s scale it down and make it doable, intangible because stress over time, chronic stress, right, and these little things that add up, they don’t let us pause and restore ourselves and feel nourished and come back to balance.

The impacts of chronic stress lead to heart disease, as we’ve known for a very long time. Lead to diabetes, because stress and releasing cortisol spikes our blood sugar. Simple biological reason: we need energy to run from the tiger in the bush, right? But when our sugar is being spiked all the time in our bloodstream, then our bodies become insulin resistant, we lose that balance. 

And we’re setting the table for diabetes. Saying that it’s just about the way that we eat does it a vast disservice. Stress is a very important factor in the way that our body regulates itself, and the risk that we’re putting ourselves at, not only for diabetes, but for types of cancer. It’s been very closely related to specific types of cancer, but I would argue that I think it has an impact in just about every type, right? 

Our stress impacts our immune system. When our immune system goes haywire, it starts attacking itself, and then we’ve got a lot bigger mess to clean up, right? Then it’s really broken. And I love the analogy, “what good does it do us to mop up the floor if we haven’t turned off the sink?” 

So taking care of these myriad chronic stressors is how we can start to turn off the sink or at least turn down the flow. So we’re not only trying to do cleanup, and it’s a hopeless task at the end, right? 

So one story that I wanna share, and the reason that I’m passionate about this, the reason that I left the work that I was doing to make a big pivot to study holistic health, to move into this space is because the work that I was doing with my senior clients. 

I was helping them move from their family home, typically they might have been there 40 or 50 years in one house, raised their children and had so many memories and imagined that they would live as long as they could live. Until something happened. Until a health crisis, until a doctor said, you’re not safe going back to your home until their children said, mom, dad, you can’t be at home. We can’t be responsible for this, and you’re not safe. We have to be able to rest, you know, at night, knowing that you’re safe, and you can’t be independent anymore. 

These are heartbreaking conversations to have as a child, I’m sure doctors don’t enjoy it either, but my clients to be on the receiving end of that, to have their authority taken away, to lose their independence was devastating.

Didn’t matter that here in San Diego retirement living is like resort living and they were moving into a full activity calendar and countless new friends and a beautiful apartment with a view, you know, and I did everything I could with my little theater magic skills to set it up and they would go to bed that night in the same bed they woke up in, in their home, right. We made it as seamless as possible, but the emotional stress of that kind of move, I’m sure you can feel it. 

And so here in my Gen X middle-agedom, in the middle of the story I’m thinking to myself, I’m never gonna wanna be there. I’m never going to want someone else telling me what I have to do, where I’m allowed to live. Now I might wanna live there because there’s a lot of benefits to community living and that stage of your life. There’s a lot of benefits to being in community. However, I want it to be my own choice. I want to live all of my days, according to my own choice. 

I want to maintain my independence and I want to love all of the days that I live. And I think you do too. I think we all do. 

And sometimes we have that really close mirror of reflection. We’ve seen a parent or helped to support a parent going through chronic health issues, and it’s been super clear. We can see, you know, perhaps we have the genetic predisposition, but we have the power of epigenetics to change our story.

If we change our environment, we do not have to play out the same genetic script. We don’t have to flip those switches and activate those diseases in our bodies if we allow our body to be nourished and restored and it can heal itself. This is a lot easier to do upstream than to try to change course downstream, when we’re in the rapids on the river. Right? 

So that’s my personal wake up call. That’s my personal call to action, is that I know me myself, I don’t want to lose that choice and I don’t know anyone close to me who does want to lose that choice. And whether you’re a Boomer or a Zoomer or Gen X with me, or you’re a Millennial or Generation Z, all of us are gonna wanna maintain our own personal authority and autonomy.

And the way that we do that is to take control of our health. And the way that we stay healthy is to recognize the influence of stress. 

Not all stress is bad. That’s a conversation for another day. Stress is a powerful teacher. It inspires us to be safe, to move towards safety. It imprints these lessons so that we don’t forget them. But we have the ability to also put value in the rest of the story, to put value in happiness.

Again, check out my Power of Positivity conversation from a couple of weeks ago- To put power in happiness and wellbeing and connection with others. We, as humans are wired to be connected. So how can we take care better care of ourselves so we can support others? How can we through supporting others, recognize the value that we bring to this world and why our wellbeing is so important and why it’s okay-

It’s not just okay, it’s essential that you put your wellbeing first. That you discover where your boundaries are and that you enforce them so that you can stay healthy and well and centered and wherever you are on that scale of balance. Right? It’s not selfish to put yourself first. Self care is not selfish.

All of this leads to not only better wellbeing, long lasting independence, better community support from you, but also modeling that for our next generations. Because as I said, we’re shifting patterns. We can shift out of survival mode to thrive mode. Doesn’t that sound so much better. 

I’d love to hear what you think. Let me know where this lands with you. If this starts a fire, let me know the one thing, one thing that you think you could change, that you would like to upgrade, that you would like to turn down the volume on stress. Just right here. Just maybe not those Doritos at lunch anymore. 

Think about what you want. Pain pushes until pleasure pulls. Right? 

Think about what you want in your life, what you want your future to look like so that you have that to pull you forward. 

And if you have to start with what you don’t want, if you have to start from the pain points, “I don’t wanna wake up feeling heavy and sluggish every day. I don’t wanna come home at the end of the day with zero patience left for the people that I love most in the world.” What do you not want? 

Use that as a starting point, if you have to, to get crystal clear on what you do want, but use that ‘do want’, use that vision that is magnetic to pull you forward. Because on the days when you don’t wanna set your alarm 30 minutes early to get a walk in before work or to carve out five minutes for mindful breathing. Doesn’t have to be 40 for meditation, five minutes to get started. 

Give yourself a picture of why this is important, of why you are important. 

You have to be as important to you as you are to me. And you’re important to me. You’re a beautiful soul. You do great work in this world. We need you to be able to show up. So, let me know what you think. Let me know where this lands for you, I’d love to hear from you. Thank you for joining me whether this is your first episode or your 100th episode. I’m so grateful to have you with me along the ride. You know I love to talk to groups, to classes, to you in particular, I do one on one coaching in whatever way I can serve and support, to help shine a light, please let me. I’m always available, sending you great big love. 

With gratitude and hope for your happiness. We’ll talk to you soon.