Understanding the Impact of Chronic Stress on Leadership

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. Today we’re joined by Dr. Charles Stone, seasoned pastor, author, and leadership coach.

Feeling overwhelmed by the constant demands of ministry? Looking for biblical practices that can help reduce anxiety and fuel long-term health? Tune in as Charles shares insights from his latest book, Stress Less, blending timeless biblical wisdom with modern brain science to help leaders build resilience and manage stress more effectively.

• Two sides of the coin. // Charles defines stress as both the events we face and our responses to those events. While acute stress can motivate and alert us, chronic stress is damaging—affecting memory, sleep, emotional balance, and ultimately our ability to lead effectively. The goal is to build resilience, the ability to bounce back, grow, and adapt when under pressure.
• Nine resilience-building practices. // In Stress Less, Charles outlines nine resilience-building practices drawn from both scripture and science: breathing, emotions, thinking patterns, contemplative practices, cultivating certainty, gratitude, relationships, and sleep. Each habit targets a key area of health and renewal for stressed-out leaders.
• Breathe to reset. // One simple yet powerful tool is deep breathing. When we breathe deeply—especially with a longer exhale—we activate the vagus nerve, which signals our brain to lower the stress response. Charles encourages using the “sniff breath” (a double inhale followed by a long exhale) to quickly calm the body and mind in tense moments.
• Meditate on Him. // Neuroscience has found that spiritual practices like prayer, meditating on God’s word, and contemplation on Him promotes the relaxation response and decreases the stress response in our bodies. Charles uses the CASI acronym as a framework for contemplative spiritual practices that lower stress and deepen our faith. CASI stands for: Collaboration with God, Awe and Wonder (through worship), Sabbath Rest, Identity in Christ. These habits reinforce the biblical truth that we are not alone in our struggles.
• STOPP to deal with stress. // Ministry can be very stressful and never ending. Experiencing stressful circumstances is normal. To counteract reactive leadership under stress, remember to STOPP: Stop, Take a Breathe, Observe your thoughts and what’s happening around you, Pray, and Proceed. This helps leaders shift from stress-induced reactions to thoughtful, faith-rooted responses.
• Optimize Your Schedule // Know your body’s natural rhythm. Are you a morning “lark” or a night “owl”? Plan your most mentally demanding work during your peak focus hours and save administrative or routine tasks for lower-energy periods. Aligning your work with your internal rhythms enhances productivity and reduces burnout.
• Practical tools for your team. // Charles designed Stress Less to be used in community. Each chapter ends with questions, making it a perfect resource for staff teams to walk through together. Stress doesn’t have to define us—it can refine us. By integrating biblical truth with practical neuroscience, pastors and church leaders can find hope, healing, and strength for the journey.

Learn more about Charles Stone’s book, Stress Less: 9 Habits from the Bible and Brain Science to Build Resilience and Reduce Anxiety, here. Plus view all the resources Charles offers on his website at charlesstone.com.

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Well, hey friends, welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. We’re really looking forward to today’s conversation. Today we’re diving into something we all wrestle with: stress. And how we can actually build resilience and find peace in the middle of a crazy, busy ministry schedule.

Rich Birch — I’m thrilled to have Charles Stone with us. Dr. Charles Stone, he’s a pastor on the podcast, and you know when we have repeat guests, that means I think you should be paying attention to him. Charles is a seasoned pastor, a leadership coach, and author of many books, but today is a particularly timely and deeply practical book called Stress Less.

Rich Birch — Charles, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here.

Charles Stone — Rich, great to be with you again.

Rich Birch — Always great to connect. Why don’t you kind of fill in the picture for folks that don’t listen to every episode? So like my mom, she can skip the next 30 seconds, but for folks that don’t listen to every episode, give us kind of the Charles story.

Charles Stone — You bet, you bet. Well, for Canadian listeners, I spent 10 years in Canada at leading West Park Church in London, Ontario. Great experience. We moved to Laurel, Mississippi a couple of years ago, and it’s a little town where my wife grew up. We’ve been married coming up on 45 years.

Rich Birch — Good for you. Congratulations.

Charles Stone — Yeah, which is the delight of my life. Three adult kids. My son has five kids, so I have five grandkids. He’s in Boise, Idaho as a pastor.

Rich Birch — Nice.

Charles Stone — My oldest daughter’s in California, and my youngest, real proud of her. She got a dual citizenship. She stayed in London. So I’m kind of a normal guy, kind of a geek, love to learn, go to bed early, get up early.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it.

Charles Stone — That’s kinda me.

Rich Birch — The thing I’ve loved about, and we’re going to get into some of this today, but one of the things I love is your kind of area of, I like to call it specialty or expertise, is really this whole area of kind of brain science.

Charles Stone — Yep, yep.

Rich Birch — How does that connect with what we’ve known in scripture for years? We’re really going to dive into that today. So many leaders feel overwhelmed.

Charles Stone — Yep, yep.

Rich Birch — I know there are folks that are listening in, anytime we kind of scratch this topic, people lean in and they’re interested, but they really can’t put their finger on why. How would you define stress in simple terms for someone who feels like, man, they’re just not holding it all together?

Charles Stone — Yeah, great, great question. I answer it kind of in two or three levels. Just imagine I have a coin in front of me, the proverbial two sides of a coin. On one side of the stress coin is the stress event. What causes stress? That’s something out there, or even sometimes what we make up in our mind. So that’s one side of the coin.

Charles Stone — The other side is how we respond. Now, some of the responses are just automatic, but basically our behavioral response and how we think about stress. So those are the two sides of stress.

Charles Stone — Another point about stress and kind of unpacking this definition is that there are two flavors. There’s acute stress. It’s like, I’ve had a couple of interviews where the sound did not work starting out. My stress went up, so I was in solution mode, trying to figure it out, and then once I figured it out, it came back down. We all have acute stress. It motivates us. It gets us going. So there’s acute stress, but the bad stuff is called chronic stress.

Charles Stone — When our response to some stress event, either in our mind or out there is over a pair of days, weeks, months, that causes the problem. Now, having said that, here’s the definition of stress. It’s our body, it’s the way God’s wired us, our body and brain’s natural response to real or perceived threats or demands. And pastors have a bunch of them.

Rich Birch — Right, absolutely. Yeah, I love that. And you’ve already kind of hinted towards where I want to go in this conversation. One of the things I love about this book, Stress Less, is how you blend biblical insight and neuroscience, these two things together, and you mentioned it right there. Can you kind of help us unpack that a little bit? God has designed us with this.

Charles Stone — Yeah. Right.

Rich Birch — This is like a normal thing in our bodies. God’s put stress in there for a reason, but what does the Bible kind of speak to stress, even though it may not use that exact word?

Charles Stone — Yeah, yeah. Right. Well, we’ve all heard the phrase, all truth is God’s truth, and here’s a way I kind of explain that. Imagine an umbrella. That’s God’s word. That’s truth, capital T. All other truth falls underneath that, like engineering principles are true.

Rich Birch — Right.

Charles Stone — Math is true. Good science is true, small case “t”.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Charles Stone — I think St. Augustine and Calvin and others have said all truth is God’s truth, so I’m not afraid of that, but I always had that umbrella idea.

Charles Stone — Now, when it comes to stress, in the most common versions, you don’t find the word. Now, in the New Living Translation, there’s one verse I’m going to have on my screen here. Let me read it to you. It’s Psalm 119:143. It does include the word stress. It says, as pressure and stress bear down on me, I find joy in your commands. But you only find that a couple of times in the NLT, a couple of times in the Message paraphrase.

Charles Stone — However, all throughout scripture, you have these similar words that cause stress, that describe what causes stress: tribulation, persecution, burdens, testing, and temptation. So the concept is all throughout. The tribulations of life, although it doesn’t use the word stress, those cause stress, so it’s really all through the Bible without using the word.

Rich Birch — Yeah, like when we think of, I like how you kind of pulled apart chronic stress and acute stress, this idea that, and I think we can, I’m sure leaders that are listening in can, like you say, with the podcast, when the tech didn’t work, they could think of something in the last 24 hours that drove acute stress. But chronic stress, help us unpack that a little bit. What impact is that having on us as leaders or on our teams? What is that doing to us?

Charles Stone — Yep. Well, when we’re under chronic stress, that is, we’re responding in ways that cause this chronic stress. What it does, it causes the brain to release the stress hormone, cortisol. Now, we need cortisol. It’s not a big bad bully of hormones. We still need it. But when we stay at an elevated level for long periods of time, it does its damage to our body and our brain. Some of the things that it impacts, it impairs our memory. It impairs our thinking. It reduces motivation. It actually harms our body, can affect our heart. We can gain weight, affects blood sugar, disrupts our sleep, magnifies emotional pain, and lowers our reactivity threshold. And it actually degrades our ministry effectiveness because we aren’t fully present there. And because we have a lot of cognitive stuff going on, worry, rumination, those kinds of things, that detracts from being able to lead well.

Charles Stone — So we live in a world of stress, but I think it’s really acute for pastoral leaders and leaders in even the business world as well.

Rich Birch — Right. Absolutely. And so what are we supposed to do then? So we live in this pressure. How does the Bible help us understand? I like that you point towards this: Hey, this is an ancient problem. What are the kind of solutions that have been around for a long time? How does the Bible talk about this? And then how does that relate to what we know is best in science today?

Charles Stone — Well, the response we want to develop is the term I use that I call resilience. That’s really another term for character. Romans 5, 3 and 4 says we also rejoice in suffering because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance: character, and character: hope.

Charles Stone — And Rich, here’s the way I describe resilience. When I was a kid, I loved show and tell. I loved show and tell, I loved lunch, and I loved recess. And show and tell just basically captures the way God created our brains. We’re very visual. Here’s the way I describe resilience, which is what we want to develop in the face of stress.

Charles Stone — Let’s say I was at a speaking event, and I was explaining this, and I had a prop on stage, and it was a glass table, like a glass end table. And I had three things in my hand. One was a big rock, one was an egg, and one was a tennis ball.

Charles Stone — And so I asked the audience, okay, so I’m going to hold this rock up six feet above the table and drop it. What’s going to happen? Well, it’s going to break. It’s going to shards are going to go everywhere. I won’t be called back to that venue again to speak.

Charles Stone — So that would happen there. Now with the egg, if I drop the egg, what’s going to happen? It’s going to break and just make a mess. Some people respond to stress in that way. They don’t have resilience, so they just break stuff. They can break churches. They can break their health. They can break families.

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good.

Charles Stone — Others are like the egg. They don’t have any resilience. They break up, and they make a mess of things, mess of churches, mess of boards, all that kind of stuff.

Charles Stone — But then the other item I bring in, tennis ball. Used to play tennis. Don’t play anymore. If I drop the tennis ball down, what’s going to happen? It’s going to bounce back up. Now, if you Google slow-mo tennis ball, you’ll see these really cool videos of someone throwing a tennis ball, and the camera follows it. Now, here’s what it does. That ball squashes a little bit, and then it bounces back up.

Charles Stone — So resilience, the big picture thing responding to stress is developing resilience, which is our ability to bounce back from stressful situations. But not just bounce back, but adapt and learn, grow, character. So that’s the starting point. And then I describe in the book these specific ways that we can build resilience and deal with stress.

Rich Birch — I love that. That’s a very visual metaphor you’re using there. I love that there. Let’s unpack a little bit, if there are some habits that we should be building or helping our people build around resilience. I think this is such a critical and important piece of the puzzle for us.

Charles Stone — You bet. Well, the genesis of this conversation, this book, A Road Stressed Last, came from when I was a pastor up in London, Ontario. And my wife and I were on this vacation. It had buffets everywhere, and I love buffets. It was a great vacation. Except one thing, it had Wi-Fi everywhere. I’m a news junkie. I had my nose in my iPhone way too much. And this thing called COVID kept rising up in the news.

Charles Stone — I said, Cheryl, they’re going to shut us down. And they did. You were there, you know, the draconian shut down for months and months and months. And I distinctly remember that I was going to now have to lead a church of a thousand through a little tiny pinhole camera on my computer. And I said, you know, God, I didn’t sign up for this. Well, during that time, I was diagnosed having an AFib. That’s when your heart rate does not beat right. I was diagnosed with pre-diabetes. And I exercise, I eat right. And I was diagnosed with cancer all during these few months.

Rich Birch — Oh, my goodness.

Charles Stone — The irony was, I was doing a PhD dissertation on stress. So I thought, well, God, you have a sense of humor.

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Charles Stone — I guess that I’m going to be a lab rat. And that was kind of the genesis of this book and these nine resilience-building practices. So that’s a little bit of background that we can go a little deeper on those practices.

Rich Birch — Well, I love that. First of all, that’s like the preacher who’s, and this happens to me when I speak. I feel like the thing that I’m preaching on, it’s like the Lord sends in my direction. Like, man, I got to be thinking about that. I used to joke with preachers. I’m like, we got to preach about like health and wealth and maybe something magical will happen, you know, as opposed to that.

Rich Birch — That’s incredible. All of those things coming in on you in a, you know, we all carried the stress of COVID, but all that cancer and, wow, that’s crazy.

Charles Stone — Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rich Birch — So what, what are, maybe quickly outline the nine and then if you wouldn’t mind, and then maybe we could jump in on one of them and kind of talk, talk about one.

Charles Stone — Yeah. Well, I kind of get thematically. One involves how we breathe. These are, these are practices that can help us develop resilience. One has to do with how we breathe. Two have to deal with our emotions. One has to do with our thinking. One has to do with contemplative practices, you know, spiritual practices. One has to do with something called certainty. One has to do with gratitude. One has to do with relationships, and one has to do with sleep. So any of those, I’m game for any of those that you feel like we had a touch on one or two of them.

Rich Birch — Well, what about maybe breathing? Why don’t we start right at the top where you started? And, and, and then, you know, we’ll scratch the surface. There’s a ton we could, we obviously, we want people to pick up a copy of the book, but let’s start with breathing. That might be kind of interesting.

Charles Stone — Yep. Well, actually this ended up being the first one because it’s very easy to do. Now, if you, I think around 75 times plus, you’ll find the word breath or breathe in the scripture. And Genesis, God breathed into Adam. He became a living being. I think his early part of Acts, Jesus breathed on the early church, the Holy Spirit came. And then David, the psalmist wrote, let everything that has breath, praise the Lord.

Charles Stone — Now here’s the interesting neuroscience insight. Deep breathing activates a key set of nerves that come directly from my brain. It doesn’t come from my spinal cord, but these are, these are key nerves. They’re in pairs. One of them is called the vagus nerve, comes from the word vagrant. What does the vagrant do? He wanders around. So this nerve wanders around our hollow organs, our heart, our lungs, our stomach. So there’s a lot of communication back and forth.

Charles Stone — Scientists have found that deep breathing, especially on the exhale, when you exhale a little longer, it actually engages this nerve, which lowers the stress response. And here’s, here’s where you practice it. I call it the sniff breath.

Charles Stone — Now, the actual term is a psychological sigh, but here’s how it would work when you’re facing some stress. Just breathe in, you know, a little more and then breathe out through your mouth. Now on the out breath, you want to be a little longer than the in breath. Doing that three or four or five times. Labs all around the country found it lowers the stress response.

Rich Birch — Wow.

Charles Stone — So that is a simple, a portable tool you can take, anybody can use, anywhere. So yeah…

Rich Birch — Love it. I love that.

Charles Stone — That’s a good one.

Rich Birch — I’m sure there’s people listening right now, thousands of church leaders across the country as we’re driving into work, you know, breathing deeply. I love that idea. I’ve heard that before that.

Rich Birch — And I’ve, when people have led kind of the breathing exercises where it’s, you breathe in and then you keep going. It’s that kind of extended. That’s interesting.

Charles Stone — Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rich Birch — Interesting. Well, that’s cool. Now you also talked about contemplative practices as one of those. Why don’t you unpack that one? Talk me through that.

Charles Stone — Yes. Well, the practice I call it a soak your soul. You look at the life of Jesus. He was God in the flesh, perfect in every way, but he’s often spending time alone with his father. Mark 1:35 says Jesus regularly withdrew to spend time with his heavenly father. Got it before everybody else got up.

Charles Stone — What neuroscience has found that spiritual practices like prayer, like meditating on God’s word, on God’s greatness, like contemplation promotes the relaxation response and decreases the stress response. And there’s a little acronym I use. It’s called C-A-S-I, CASI, that would be the application.

Charles Stone — One is understand that when we face stress, our response must be collaboration with God. And this comes from a guy named Paul Gaumont. And he calls it religious coping. Three ways that we respond when we face stress. God, I got it. God, you just take care of it. Or in a partnership with God. Now, it’s not 50-50, obviously. But if we’re going to be able to really leverage these key spiritual practices, we must see ourselves as a partner with God.

Charles Stone — That “C” stands for collaboration with God. “A” stands for awe and wonder. That’s worship. Science tells us when we worship, it decreases the stress response. So “C” is collaboration with God. “A” is awe and wonder. “S” is Sabbath rest. And we know about Sabbath. Then the final one, “I” stands for your identity in Christ, reflecting on your identity in Christ.

Charles Stone — So that little acronym, C-A-S-I, gives a brief outline of some of these spiritual practices that the science and of course, scripture too. It’s amazing how science is catching up with scripture. It tells us it really helps us with these stressful experiences.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Amazing. This is fantastic. We’ll get to where people can pick up the book and all that, but I know this will be super helpful for people. I know there’s a lot of pastors, leaders who are leading people. Either they feel stuck in this kind of work, stress, burnout, repeat.

Charles Stone — Yeah.

Rich Birch — It’s a treadmill that they do not know how to get off of, or we see our people on that treadmill. It’s almost like they’re addicted to stress. They’re addicted to that feeling. What would you just say to someone that just doesn’t know where to begin? How do we start this? How do we break that cycle?

Charles Stone — Yeah. Well, I think first of all, acknowledging that ministry is very, very stressful. It’s never ending. We’ve got to have a deliverable every week or more than once a week. To experience stressful circumstances is a very normal part of living in a broken world. It just is.

Charles Stone — Now, we spoke earlier, as we were going through this list, we focused on the breath. Well, another acronym, if you’re looking for a place to start, it’s the little acronym STOP, but with an extra P, S-T-O-P-P. The S stands for literally stop. Develop a discipline of stopping in the midst of your stress.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Charles Stone — Pulling away for a few moments. So, “S” is stop. “T” is take a breath. That’s that breathing I was talking about, the sniff breath. “O” stands for observe. Just really notice that. What is really going on inside of my mind? What’s going on around here? First “P” stands for pray. Lord, I’m in a stressful situation. Really need your grace right here. Then “P” is proceed. So, S-T-O-P-P. “S” for stop. “T”, take a breath. “O”, observe. “P”, pray. Proceed. A little acronym that you can start there.

Charles Stone — Now, I’m going to add one more thing here. There’s a big word that everybody ought to understand, keep in mind. It’s called metacognition. Metacognition means to think about your thinking. So much of our stress is tied to our erroneous thinking, unhealthy thinking, worry, and ruminative thinking. Developing the discipline of building throughout your day to stop and notice the O is observe.

Rich Birch — What’s happening here? Yeah, yeah.

Charles Stone — To ask yourself, just what am I thinking? Are these thoughts being sponsored by the evil one, being sponsored by my worry…

Rich Birch — Right, yeah.

Charles Stone — …or is the word of God informing them? Is truth informing them?

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good.

Charles Stone — So, metacognition is another tool. It’s another simple word. It’s a big word, but a simple way. But we have to remember to do it.

Now, what I do sometimes on my phone, I have it beep at me every hour, hour and a half to remind me, like, oh, okay, I need to step back. Okay, Charles, what are you thinking about? Oh, boy, you really need to change channels, don’t you? So that’s another simple tool. Just remember to do it.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah. Stop. I love that. And yeah, I would say part of my life’s journey, it’s been like, I wish, it’s a little embarrassing to say. I wish that this hadn’t been kind of a consistent conversation, I would say, with the Lord is, we are people who just react. We are humans who just, something happens and then react.

Rich Birch — And I would say for years, decades, I’ve been asking the Lord: Lord, when something happens to me, give me the ability to just stop and observe and ask him, hey, what is it that you want in this moment? Not just to jump right to reaction, not just to jump to bias, to like, oh, hey, this is what we’ve got to do.

Rich Birch — I love that stop acronym as well for, I think we can be tempted as leaders to pile on our days, to go one thing to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next, and that’s not good. Is there any kind of science around even how we schedule our days to help have more resilience around stress?

Charles Stone — Yeah. I think it’s important to know kind of your, your pattern. First of all, your sleeping pattern, you know, some people are night owls, some people are, they’re called, you know, larks early. I’m an early riser. So you need to know that and try to build your day around that. If you, if your day, if you’re a night person, sleeping later is not a sinful thing.

Rich Birch — Right.

Charles Stone — But if you’re not a night person like me, staying up is not a, is not a sinful thing. So understanding that. And secondly, just understanding how your cycles of your hormones travel throughout the day.

Charles Stone — You probably know if you’re, if you pay attention to your productivity, there are certain periods when you’re most productive. I try to put my most productive time, my deep thinking time early in the morning. Now, some people that may be early afternoon. So being aware of where you’re most productive, partly protecting those times. And then the other times doing the kind of drudgery stuff, I got to answer emails, you know, do tactical stuff. So that’s a really helpful practice, I think.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s great. Carey Nieuwhof talks about that kind of, you know, concept in his book, At Your Best. And I know that is, is a very simple framework, green zone, yellow zone, red zone. It has like burned in my brain. I know my red zone starts about three o’clock in the afternoon. I’m like, nothing good happens after three o’clock in my life, but it’s helpful to say like, and I, so now I’ve tried to like, even yesterday I had to go run some errands, get in the car, drive around town, do a few things. I just organized, Hey, that’s red zone time. Like I’m, let’s not sit down and think clearly time. That’s like, I got to go pick up some stuff, go to the store, do this kind of stuff…

Mindless kind of stuff.

Rich Birch — …mindless stuff. Um, you know, listen to a few podcasts, that kind of thing. Man, that’s, that’s critically important.

Rich Birch — Now this book, let’s talk more specifically about Stress Less. I think when I see this, I think this could be a great tool that teams could use together to acknowledge with the people on our team. Hey, ministry is, uh, it’s, it’s a lot of work. I used to have a friend of mine who would say a ministry is a black hole.

Rich Birch — And he would say that with like a, a fun kind of smile on his face. It’s like, when will the mission ever be done? When will we have reached everybody in town? When will every marriage be restored? When will every person come to know Jesus? It is never ending and we have to build resilience in the midst of that. I think this book could help us, um, wrestle that with our teams. Talk us through how you could see a team using this as a resource, um, as they’re kind of trying to lead our people.

Charles Stone — Yeah, it can be very, uh, easily used like in staff meetings, first 10 minutes, take a chapter, you know, read it, read the week before and then interact around that because at the end of each chapter, I have some questions, some interactive questions. So they’re already there. You don’t have to spend a lot of cognitive or, you know, deep thinking time on that.

Charles Stone — Read it, go through the questions. And I think it’d be very, very insightful. And, and of course, hold each other accountable when you’re going through those nine practices. Like, you know, how’d you do this week on this? How’d you do this week on that? And that’s always, you know, not in a pejorative way, but in a positive way and a developmental way. So yeah, easy to apply there.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s, that’s so good. Well, the book is called Stress Less: nine habits from the Bible and brain science to build resilience and reduce anxiety, biblically sound and research informed. I’m sure we can pick this up at Amazon. Are there other places we want to send people to pick up copies of this book?

Charles Stone — I just tell everybody easy, Amazon, just search “stress less”. It’s right there, free shipping. And yeah, I don’t sell them myself.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Charles Stone — Just, just Amazon best place.

Rich Birch — Yeah. Nice. I, like I say, friends, I do think this could be a great resource for a team. It could be great for, you know, like maybe you’re thinking about this fall. Hey, what’s the kind of a book we could read together? I do think this could be a little different. It pushes, it rings a different bell. That’s a part of what I like about your work is it’s like, that’s a fresh voice, a fresh perspective on this. You know, you can trust Charles. He’s, he’s, you know, biblically-sound backed up with great research. This is a fantastic resource, you know, for your people.

Rich Birch — What does the future have for you? You know, Charles, as you look up over the horizon, as you’re looking at, you know, various, you know, things you’re working on, what’s next in the Charles Stone universe?

Charles Stone — Well, I’m at the geyser age. I’m 70 now. So I’m just a geyser.

Rich Birch — I don’t know about that.

Charles Stone — Around the house. I’ll pull up my pants. You know, for me personally, I’m really working on health. I’m weight weights, resistance training.

Rich Birch — Good for you.

Charles Stone — I row during the winter. I swim during the summer, working on getting appropriate protein, adding green to my morning smoothies. Because we age, we can’t avoid it.

Rich Birch — Right.

Charles Stone — Our bodies are temple of the Holy Spirit. So I’m really focusing on that.

Rich Birch — Good for you.

Charles Stone — I’ve been thinking about getting another degree. I know there’s probably something more that I’d love to learn.

Rich Birch — Oh, I love that. That’s fantastic. What are you thinking about getting another degree in? What would that, if you’re, you know, I won’t hold you to it. But what are you thinking about?

Charles Stone — Well, I really want to look at what is going on in our brain and how does that work with spiritual formation?

Rich Birch — Very cool.

Charles Stone — It’s like, there’s stuff going on inside of our brain that influence how we are formed and disciple. A lot of questions there. So when I’m swimming, I’m kind of thinking through that. So that’s, that’s another real interest. And I also mentioned to you earlier, we’re going to book on sleep in scripture. So tying those two together.

Rich Birch — Nice. Very cool. Well, that’s, that’s fantastic. Well, just as we wrap up, what would you, what would your final encouragement be to us? Last thing we should be thinking about as we wrap up today’s episode.

Charles Stone — Yeah. The final thing I’d say is stress need not define you, rather let it refine you. Stress need not define you, let it refine you.

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good.

Charles Stone — I quoted Romans 5:3, 4. We also rejoice in suffering because we know the suffering produces perseverance, perseverance: character, and character: hope. And the second thing involves that last word, hope.

Charles Stone — Every single one of us absolutely can manage the effects of the stress response. We don’t have control over that stress event. Stuff happens. Life is difficult. But we absolutely have some tools that are Bible-based, evidence-based, science-based that can help us in a more healthier way, respond to stress. So those are the kind of two final things I’d say.

Charles Stone — And by the way, Rich, if you go to my website, charlestone.com, there’s a little thing that comes up that says you can sign up for my blogs. When you do that, there’s a lot of free stuff. People can get totally free.

Rich Birch — Yeah, so good.

Charles Stone — And one of them is a template, like a 21-day or two-week building stress resilience. It’s free. It’s a good tool to go with the book. So that’s the one way that you can.

Rich Birch — Yeah. And that’s charlestone.com. We want to send people there. That’s fantastic.

Rich Birch — Charles, I just want to honor you to just do such great work. And I appreciate you being on today.

Charles Stone — I appreciate your work, too.

Rich Birch — And that final word there, I was like, oh, man, there’s so much packed in there. So friends, I would strongly suggest you pick up copies of “Stress Less”. Again, you can get that at Amazon: 9 Habits for Biblical from the Bible and Brain Science to Build Resilience and Reduce Anxiety from Charles Stone. It’ll be a great resource for you. Thanks so much, Charles. Appreciate being on today’s show.

Charles Stone — Thanks, Rich.