how to reduce stress: 6 tactics from the podcasts that treat it like a skill

Epel is a professor of psychiatry at UCSF who studies what stress does to the body. her starting point, on the transcript: a stress response that spikes and recovers is healthy. the trouble is that we keep it running in our heads. "Our thoughts are the most common form of stress."

the tactic: find a stress shield you believe. she calls them strength statements, and her image is to "be the lion instead of the gazelle." both have high blood pressure in a chase. only one is in threat mode. her examples: "I got this. I can do it. I can get through it. I have what it takes." for the stuff you cannot change, she pictures pulling a rope tied to a brick wall: "What if you just drop the rope?"

try this week: write one shield line on a sticky note and say it the moment your heart starts racing. then pick one thing you keep pulling on that will not move, and say drop the rope each time you catch yourself.

Hamza is a self-improvement creator, not a scientist, and this is a solo video to his own audience. his argument is that most of us are not stressed in one big way. we are stressed in hundreds of small ways we never notice, every time we rush something that did not need rushing.

the tactic: run a cortisol spike audit. his example is pressing a remote button three times fast, which takes about as long as pressing it once on purpose. for a day or two, notice each tiny rush (the door, the keyboard, the coffee) and do the action once, slowly. the locked tactics on the page add dropping your shoulders and telling speed of implementation apart from rushing.

no transcript was available for this one, so everything here is paraphrased from the episode and the Podex summary.

try this week: pick three small actions you do in a hurry every day. for five days, do each one slowly and once. when you catch yourself rushing, drop your shoulders and start again.

Shi Heng Yi was born in Germany to Vietnamese refugees and has trained in the Shaolin tradition for 35 years. on the Jack Neel podcast he starts with an experiment, on the transcript: "Try to calculate whatever next thought is going to come up in your mind." you cannot. so, in his words, "it doesn't make sense to me to blindly follow whatever comes up in the mind."

the tactic: find the gap between the thought and you. the moment you see a thought as something that popped up, not as you, you get a choice: "Choosing to just let it pass or to be hooked by it." his blunter version: "Either you master the mind or you are being enslaved by the mind." a locked tactic adds the body side: move it, so the extra energy does not all go into thinking.

try this week: once a day, sit for 30 seconds and try to predict your next thought. then, when a stressful thought shows up later, name it (there is the money thought) and choose: let it pass, or act on it now.

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist and philosopher who created the Waking Up meditation app. on Huberman Lab he explains why a stressful feeling sticks around, on the transcript: "The minute spent lost in thought about what's making you angry is the thing that drags through the physiology of anger." once you are mindful, "you can notice thought as thought and how quickly that dissipates."

the tactic: catch the thinking, not the feeling. anger and fear have a job, in his view: they point you at a possible emergency. but "It's better to actually be calm in an emergency." the free play on the Podex page goes one level deeper, looking for the one who is looking. the anger play is on the same page, locked.

try this week: next time something annoys you, set a 60-second timer. for that minute, do not argue with it in your head. just notice each thought about it as a thought. write down whether the feeling was smaller when the timer ended.

Adolphs is a Caltech professor who studies the neuroscience of emotion. his first rule for regulating a feeling, on the transcript: "the earlier you can stop that process, the better." his second is that the calming itself is trainable. after weeks of ice baths, a driver honking at him while he parked no longer set him off: "Well, after the ice bath, it's flat." he is careful about it: "This is an experiment of one. I'm not claiming this as a published study."

the tactic: train the reset when nothing is at stake. cold is his route. a gentler one from the same episode: his lab starts every meeting with phones down and "five minutes of silence, a sort of meditative silence for people to clear their minds."

try this week: before your two biggest meetings or tasks each day, take five minutes of silence, phone face down. if you are healthy and want the cold version, end your shower cold and notice how fast your breathing settles.

Tara Swart is a neuroscientist, medical doctor and executive advisor. her headline claim on The Diary of a CEO is that stress is contagious, and she means it physically: she says cortisol leaks out through sweat and affects the people around you. that mechanism is her strong version. the everyday version is easy to test: notice how one tense person changes a meeting. her point for leaders, on the transcript: "your stress levels as a leader as a CEO are going to have more impact on everybody else than the rest of the people put together."

the tactic: reset before the room, then get it out. she names two fixes: aerobic exercise, and journaling, "writing out what's on your mind rather than just let it be in there and keep going round and round."

try this week: before your most important meeting, take five quiet minutes first. that evening, do 20 minutes of exercise that makes you sweat, then write one page about whatever is still going round.