AMA: Navigating The Stresses of Change, How Men Can Practice Self Love + The Holistic Health Lens of Homeostasis

Mar 29, 2024

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Wellness + Wisdom Episode 625

Wellness + Wisdom Podcast Host and Wellness Force Media CEO, Josh Trent, shares his experience and advice about how to deal with the stress that accompanies challenging times in our lives, his #1 tip on how to get back to homeostasis and heal disease, and what men can do every day to practice self-love.

Send Josh your AMA Question HERE!

Today's Questions

Stacie: I'm a beach volleyball coach, and I help kids through some first big life transitions, trying to get committed to playing college volleyball. What advice would you give them to manage stepping into something uncomfortable and unknown and what practices would help them navigate the stresses of it?

Hayley: When it comes to holistic health and really getting to the root cause of a person's health and well-being, what system in the body, mind, and spirit are you looking to first? Is it the digestive system? Is it the nervous system? Is it our energetic chakras?

From your perspective and from all knowledge and wisdom, what is the first line of defense that you are looking to support and to nourish when we're looking at deep holistic health?

Faraz Khan: I am going through a practice of self-love and understanding the parts of me that I haven't loved in my childhood and going back to those. And so I'm super curious of what you do, how do you show up every single day with love and grace and compassion for yourself?

And when the daily stressors hit you and your nervous system gets dysregulated, how do you bring that back into balance? And how do you hold love for yourself and for your kids and for your family? So I'm super curious about any tips, techniques, or practices that you use just for more self-love, brother. Love you.

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Listen To Episode 625 As Josh Trent Answers Your Questions [03:05] How to Navigate Stresses of Change

Okay, Mar, let's get to the AMA questions today. Who is our first question from?

We have Stacie and she's a volleyball coach. So this is going to be interesting because she's teaching young girls. And I'm not sure if boys too, volleyball at high school.

All right, let's hear from Stacie because I actually used to coach Volleyball players. This is back in the day, Mission Beach, California.

Shout out to the Wave House, which used to exist there. But let's hear from Stacie and how to navigate the stresses of change.

Hey Josh, thank you for this opportunity. My question is, I'm going to preface it with, I'm a beach volleyball coach, and I help kids through some first big life transitions, trying to get committed to playing college volleyball.

What advice would you give them to manage stepping into something uncomfortable and unknown and what practices would help them navigate the stresses of it?

Okay, navigating stress is the big one. So thanks for your question, Stacie. I used to be a coach and I was a trainer for 10 years. And so a lot of what I learned when, I guess it was 10,000 hours plus, actually much more than that, but maybe a baseline 10,000 hours, all human stressors are universal. So we'll just start there.

Everybody experiences stress in the same way, but to the degree that our nervous system has been encoded by lowercase and capital T trauma, that's the degree in which we have the capacity to feel our stress or to process our stress.

So I actually think if I were to do it all over again when I was coaching the volleyball players and these were women that in the AVP or that were trying out for the AVP. And I remember they were all dealing with the same stuff we were dealing and they had the stressors of performing as an athlete.

Now for college volleyball players, they have even less life experience because they're typically, you know, 18 to 20-ish. And so they don't have a big repository of life experience to pull upon. And so the best way that I would do it if I were you, and what I would go back and change in time based on what I know now, is I would actually have an introductory questionnaire, like a PARQ if you're a personal trainer.

And I would make sure in that par-q that I did an emotional inventory with the athletes. And I would actually have specific questions laid out so they could get their stress out of their mind and get it onto paper or get it onto a video. Some type of way that you as a coach or you as a guide, that's really what you are.

You know, you're half coach and you're also half life coach because the stresses of change happen because these are being pushed to their max. And so whatever their degree of capacity for processing stress is, you have to know that.

You have to get inside of their psyche and really understand what has happened in their life to think the way they do. Because the stressors and the things that have happened for them in their life are going up on the court. It's the same way they're gonna play their sport.

So I would have a questionnaire that dove deep into emotional inventory. What is your relationship with your mother? What's your relationship with your father? How was childhood for you? Can you scan above your timeline and figure out what were the key events that trained you to associate with stress? And then what are your coping mechanisms?

I would have a list for these athletes that their coping mechanisms are raw and honest with themselves. Do they drink? Do they smoke? Do they party?

What are the ways in which they mash down their feelings and mash down their fears so you can start helping them decouple from those coping mechanisms?

Now, granted, none of this is like psychological advice. I'm not a therapist, but I just see patterns over and over and over and over again in myself with our guests and everyone else.

A really powerful resource for this is episode 612 with Dr. Michael Gervais. He was a performance coach for many years, decades for NHL and NFL, and he talks about living an authentic life, and how to stop worrying about what other people think of you...

[13:30] The Holistic Health Lens of Homeostasis

Let's get to the next question. Who is our next question from here? It's from Hayley and she's asking about holistic health and there's a lot for you on this one. So let's listen to it.

Hi Josh. When it comes to holistic health and really getting to the root cause of a person's health and well-being, what system in the body, mind, and spirit are you looking to first? Is it the digestive system? Is it the nervous system? Is it our energetic chakras?

From your perspective and from all knowledge and wisdom, what is the first line of defense that you are looking to support and to nourish when we're looking at deep holistic health.

It's so good. And I actually was feeling into this earlier. And I wonder, Hayley, are you talking about somebody who is dealing with a health issue? I think Mar and I had a consensus on that, that this is somebody with a health issue.

ut also this question pertains to just homeostasis and optimization body, right? The key place to start with everything, everything, everything is the 1 marker in our body that rises when we're under psychological, emotional, mental, financial, or spiritual stress, right?

I see things through the wellness lens because that's what I've learned in my life actually moves the needle. The one marker, the very most important thing that everyone gets to be aware of is inflammation.

Inflammation is the barometer your body is truly at and the best inflammatory marker that I have come across and seen and we talked about this with Shawn Wells and Daniel Solomons in our episode 618. So just go to JoshTrent.com/618.

This marker is called CRP, a C-reactive protein. So C-reactive protein is a measurement of actually what is on in your body?

It leads to internal markers of stress, like oxidative stress, a good test for that is from Genova Diagnostics. So CRP and oxidative stress can rise together. Also, CRP can affect HDL-LDL. Also, CRP can affect heart health as a whole. It can affect blood sugar. They all feed into each other.

And I guess the best way to describe this would be through a story a metaphor, right? Because that's how we all learn the most.

Something I learned from my mentor, Paul Cech, in his book, in 2008, I read this book called How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy. And he talked about our allostatic load. Allostatic load is how much stress is in total from those 5 parts of the self. And also, by the way, relationships are in there as well, right?

Relationships are both, relationships are all the things. So relationships are actually encoded into the lens of the wellness Pentagon. So all of these things can raise our CRP.

Inflammation is essentially a marker of our body dealing with a stressor that's pulling it out of center or pulling it out of homeostasis. And in his book, Paul talks about allostatic load. Allostatic load, there's a bathtub and the bathtub is your capacity to process stress. And if water is the stress, water is filling up your bathtub, that's your allostatic load.

Well, what happens, Hayley, and all of us, when the bathtub starts overflowing, when you're broke, when you're stressed, when there's trauma, when there's relationship stress, or when financially you're just completely crushed, you start to have what's called complete and total dysregulation in your nervous system. That is the water spilling over the edges of the tub.

First and foremost, you can't fix everything all at once. You only can fix where you are one thing at a time. So I would absolutely, absolutely recommend using inflammation, specifically CRP, as the barometer for lowering your allostatic load.

Now that's going to take many forms because what first, the chicken or the egg, right? Is it the stress that's causing your CRP to rise? Or is it your familial lineage that you actually came into the world with where you're just having a set point for more stress?

Like for myself, I've identified hypervigilance from childhood. I also can connect that to in utero with my mother arguing with my father while I was in her body...

[23:55] How Men Can Practice Self-Love

Let's move on to our very last question. Our very last question is from a dear brother of mine. Who is this and what is their question, Mar?

Faraz Khan, he's the host of the Anti-Aging Hacks Podcast. And his question is about self-love, which is, I think, our favorite topic this year, I would say. It's our favorite topic because no 1 taught us how to do it. Let's see what Faraz has to say.

Hey Josh, this is Faraz Khan. Hope you're doing amazing. Brother, first of all, I want to acknowledge you and your growth. You've grown so much in the last 2 years that I've known and I just stand in awe of all the work that you're doing.

So I love you for that and I'm so honored to be able to do immense work with you. Now I've got a question for you that might be also helpful for the audience. And the question is this, how are you showing up every single day loving yourself more?

Because I am going through a practice of self-love and understanding the parts of me that I haven't loved in my childhood and going back to those. And so I'm super curious of what you do, how do you show up every single day with love and grace and compassion for yourself?

And when the daily stressors hit you and your nervous system gets dysregulated, how do you bring that back into balance? And how do you hold love for yourself and for your kids and for your family?

So I'm super curious about any tips, techniques or practices that you use just for more self-love, brother. Love you.

Love you too, man. And I say that with authenticity because it's very rare to have, for men at least, um, a trusted network of real brothers that you can bring things to, you can receive feedback from, and you can really grow with.

It's rare because we came, most of us, unless you were blessed, it's not all of us, unless you were blessed with incredibly conscious parents that were on a deep spiritual devotional that then infused into us as children and young adults, the majority of us never had the tools.

We did not have the psychological tools. We did not have the emotional intelligence to be able to process the things we feel first and foremost. And I'll say that for men. I do believe that women, and I'm making a reductionistic here, it's a blanket statement.

Women have deeper access to their unconscious mind. It's just something I've noticed, and it's something that I believe is part of a woman's gift to the world, to teach men how to be in union with their unconscious.

Now, it's not to say that there are incredibly advanced human beings, both men and women, that have deep access to their unconscious. It's just a testament to the work that they do in their life.

So the way I would start the answer to this question of how do I show up with love when triggered? How do I be present for myself and my family? How do I hold myself through the stressors of life with unique, specific practices of self-love? And isn't this the crux, Mar? Isn't this the core question for all of us?

Like, yes, I understand this question is for men and the women that are listening, please take to heart what I'm gonna say to, you know, gently or even intelligently bring this to your man in your life.

But I will say that this is a human question. This isn't necessarily specifically a gender question. This is all human beings that experience this. Here is what happens, and this is a high-level set I'm going to share. When we experience stress, what is stress?

Let's just start there. So stress is an input that is perceived as a threat to the body or the mind in some way. That's essentially what stress is. It's an input, it's just information...

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