Top 10 Strategies to Reduce Stress,
Prevent Burnout, and Embrace Calm

The 5 AM Miracle Podcast, hosted by Jeff Sanders

Episode #543: Top 10 Strategies to Reduce Stress, Prevent Burnout, and Embrace Calm

Jeff Sanders
Take a moment right now and just breathe.

Let any stress you are carrying drop away for the next few minutes.

Focus your mind on what's happening right now.

Let the regrets of yesterday or the worry about tomorrow just fade away.

Breathe right here, right now.

What if I told you that your stress is a choice?

You may not believe me, but what if that statement were true?

How could that change your daily life?

How could your approach to work, home life, or your current goals and challenges, how could all of that shift if you believed that your stress right now is a choice?

Stress is often terribly destructive, but our response to it doesn't have to be.

This is the 5 a.m. miracle, episode number 543, the top 10 strategies to reduce your stress, prevent burnout, and embrace calm.

Good morning and welcome to the 5 a.m. miracle.

This is a special slower edition.

I am Jeff Sanders, and normally this podcast is dedicated to dominating your day before breakfast.

This week, we're going to take a slower approach.

In the episode, I'm going to break down why I do believe that your stress and mine are choices, which strategies can reduce your stress right now, and probably the best possible angle how you can prevent burnout, panic attacks, and the worst forms of overwhelm.

Let's dig in.

So for the sake of arguments, let's say that you believe that what I'm saying is true, that your stress is a choice, that that bold statement could be true.

Imagine if your mental state is a learned behavior.

Could you unlearn it?

Could you learn to minimize or even eliminate the default stress response that you feel deep in your bones?

You know, in part, stress is a physiological response to real danger, but in our modern world, we rarely face the dangers of our past.

Our stressors today, they're emotional, financial, relational, especially mental.

You know, my own history with stress is a complicated one, probably like yours and other people you may know as well.

Stress is a pervasive beast.

In my early 30s, when my wife Tessa and I learned that we would need fertility treatments to have children, well, my life went from one of the normal stressors that someone who's preparing to have children might have, the possible fears of the future, those were escalated to a much higher level.

Physical worries and concerns, medical stressors and concerns, relational between Tessa and I, all of these things compounded with the normal stressors of becoming parents.

And in this season, in my early 30s, I began to have a series of panic attacks, real debilitating panic attacks.

If you've never experienced that, if you don't know what that emotional state feels like, it's like being frozen in this really destructive state where you feel awful.

Panic and fear and worry dominate every ounce of your being.

And my experience with them is that I felt like I couldn't move.

I felt frozen.

I felt stuck in the moment in this very visceral fear.

The funny thing is the most fear I've ever experienced happened while skydiving, of all things, not from fear of the future.

Fear of the actual moment that I was in when I was jumping out of an airplane on my 29th birthday.

That was over a decade ago.

And I can still tell you to this day that that was the most intense fear I've ever experienced.

But the panic attacks that I had were just as real, even though they were all self-generated in my head and I had to unlearn the default response that I was having.

I had to find a new way to operate, a new way to approach challenges and the uncertainty of my future.

Ultimately, what I learned from that season, looking back at it, it's over six, seven years ago now, I didn't handle my emotions well.

I was in a season where I would get angry very quickly.

I would default to a fearful state.

I would default to a worst case scenario type of imagination for the future.

So I was essentially living in constant fear and worry, which is, I don't know, one of the least productive or helpful responses you could possibly imagine.

It's not helpful.

Now that's not necessarily going to do much for you if I tell you just stop worrying.

That's not helpful.

I know from experience.

I've been there.

Being told just to stop it doesn't work.

There's a really great SNL skit from a long time ago called Stop It and just Google it.

It's fantastic.

That's exactly how I feel many times in these moments of why can't I just stop it?

Why can't I just simply not do the thing I've been doing?

How do I unlearn these default behaviors?

How do I reduce my stress?

How do I prevent those burnout scenarios, overwhelm, panic attacks, those debilitating worst case scenarios?

Well, fortunately, learning to curb your emotions is a skill.

Now it's one that I've been working on for a long time, but one that I am so much more aware of today than I was, let's say, seven or eight years ago.

So the 10 strategies I'm about to share with you all have helped me to rein in my own stress and they continue to challenge me to think of stress as a choice.

That decision to think of stress as a choice empowers me to choose better responses, to choose a default response that is proactive, that is encouraging, that is hopeful, that is action-oriented.

I want to be the kind of guy who can take on a new stress or new challenge, a surprise set of circumstances and respond in that very healthy, action-oriented, proactive manner.

It's a tall order.

It's not necessarily guaranteed to happen.

I'm going to have to do my very best to ensure that I am putting myself in that position for that to be true, but it can be true.

And so let's discuss those 10 strategies.

Let's see if we can't help you in this moment.

If you are experiencing stress at a high level, if you are preparing yourself for a new season coming up that might incorporate a lot more stress, having kids is a good example of that.

If you are about to enter into a season like that, you're going to change your careers, you're going to change your family dynamic, you're going to do something that you know is going to be hard, then you might just live in that future state of worry and you're going to need strategies to cope with that before it even happens to unlearn that behavior as well as, of course, encountering the normal stressors of daily life.

So the first and most important strategy here to focus on, the one that we just did at the top of the show, strategy number one is to breathe.

You control your stress in the moment.

Breathing is, yes, a default physiological thing that is automatic, but it's also something that we can override.

We can choose how to breathe more intelligently.

We can choose to breathe in a way that serves us.

Whenever you hear someone helping somebody out who is hyperventilating, who's having a stressful moment, who's in a panic attack, someone who is really struggling, you'll hear other people, "Hey, man, just take a few deep breaths.

Just slow down and take a few deep breaths."

It's good advice, but there's a big flaw in the advice and the flaw is the assumption that the person you're talking to knows how to do this.

That might sound silly.

Wait, wait, knows how to breathe?

But yes, exactly.

Breathing is automatic and so by default, we don't think about it.

When you choose to think about it, when you choose to be intentional with your breath, that's when you discover you're breathing poorly.

That's when you discover you can breathe much more deeply than you tend to do.

You can breathe slower than you tend to do.

You can practice this.

This is a skill to improve, not just breathing normally on a regular day, but breathing in these moments when things are tough.

Then when someone does come to you and says, "Hey, man, you're kind of freaking out here.

Take a few deep breaths."

What should then happen is for you to say, "I know how to do that.

That's already baked into my psyche because I've been rehearsing this.

I've been preparing for this moment.

So here we go.

Let me take a full deep breath all the way into the lower part of my abdomen, my diaphragm to open up down low."

It's not shoulders up and expanding.

That's the wrong direction.

This is deep, low, in your gut, belly out kind of breathing.

The kind of thing we usually suck in our gut to look thin.

Well, no, no, no.

This is the opposite of that.

This is let your Buddha belly pop out.

Let that just really sink in deep.

That's when you know you've allowed your lung space and your diaphragm to open up.

That's when the slower breath can happen.

That's when more oxygen can be flowing through you.

Now, yes, this is the kind of thing, I'll give the disclaimer now, I should have earlier, that if you're driving or working out or doing something, I don't know, heavy machinery, where these alerts usually are, don't do this now.

Do this later when you're sitting down in a safe space because you could potentially pass out.

Breathing deeply, once again, it's a skill.

You have to learn and teach yourself how to do this in a way that is beneficial.

Years ago, I bought a course from Wim Hof.

He's one of the most popular breathing teachers, I guess you could say, that's well known in addition to his cold therapy work.

One thing that I learned from Wim right away was this incredible intentionality on the breath, this incredible sense of if I'm going to radically alter my physical state in the moment, almost regardless of where I am in the moment, I can physiologically, mentally shift my state of being by just breathing differently and breathing with more intelligence and more intuition and really tapping into that kind of innate desire to be at a lower cortisol level, a lower stress state.

Breathing is by far and away the most important strategy to master, to practice, to get really good at.

In these moments when life is difficult, you can just breathe and you can do so in a way that's going to bring you into the present moment in a way that nothing else truly can.

Strategy number two, and this one I think will hit home.

Don't make the problem worse.

I know it sounds once again kind of obvious, but at the same time, this is not obvious for a lot of us.

It's not obvious to intentionally be aware that we might actually be an obstacle in our own way, that the problem might be us and that we might be unintentionally making our challenges more difficult than we really should be.

The advice here is fairly straightforward.

Stop doing those things.

Stop it.

Whatever you're doing that might be making your problem worse, just don't do it anymore.

Once again, easier said than done.

An example of this could include everything from a poor diet to staying up late, drinking too much caffeine or alcohol, consuming information that could harm your psyche, reading really awful stories in the news, constantly looking at your phone and social media, being tapped into people and stories that don't help you, that don't bring you up and give you that uplifting sense of being your best self.

I say that as someone who looks at the news and social media often enough to know that more often than not, it's not helpful.

More often than not, I have a choice in the moment.

If I'm feeling a sense of stress, of worry, of fear, of anxiety, and then I choose to go consume this kind of content or poor food or I choose to stay up late watching television or whatever the thing is I may choose to do, I'm not serving myself.

It's not helpful.

None of these things are adding up to a better solution and better future.

They're all just either A, ignoring the problem outright, trying to numb your feelings and walk away, or they are actively making your problem exponentially worse.

The goal here is to be aware of those choices, aware of those circumstances to then remove yourself from that environment, remove yourself from that scenario and tap into something that is going to be directly beneficial as often as possible.

I didn't really frame this conversation like I probably should have in total, but one thing I do and I'll just pause here and do it now, this conversation this week is about strategies to reduce stress, of course, preventing burnout, panic attacks, overwhelm.

What I'm really talking about here are high achievers, goal-oriented people who are the type A's of the world, who drink a lot of caffeine, set a lot of big goals.

You push the boundaries.

You ask more of yourself.

You ask possibly too much of yourself or you're in a season of life or maybe you didn't choose any of that stuff.

You just are in a very challenging season where things have happened to you and now it is on you to own the problem, own the solution, be responsible and move forward with more intelligence.

I say all that to say that what I'm talking about this week are people just like you and me who we are the goal setters and achievers of the world who want bigger things, but there's a fatal flaw of the high achiever, which is that it's the double-edged sword.

The thing that makes us great is also our greatest weakness.

If we push hard and we have great goals and we are just super ambitious, we're also the most prone to stress, anxiety, overwhelm and burnout.

We need these strategies.

We need these solutions.

We need some tools in our toolbox that we can draw from when things get difficult.

You may not think of yourself as someone who needs meditation or breathing techniques or intentionality around de-stressing.

You might think of yourself as someone who is just a kicking butt kind of guy.

You are out there doing stuff.

You're really making a name for yourself and life's going well.

I will say to my younger version of me that I was that guy.

I say that because that's how I used to be.

When I didn't see the future yet, when I only saw the present moment, I couldn't imagine yet that I would need these skills.

I hadn't experienced it yet.

I hadn't lived through it yet.

I didn't know yet how valuable a skill set like these would introduce for me, that being able to handle stressors in the moment better, being able to breathe intentionally better, I didn't know that those skills would matter.

Then when I figured it out, well, it's kind of too late.

The problem occurred.

I responded poorly and then I had to learn from my own failures to rebuild more intelligently.

I'm in part giving a heads up to those who have yet to hit that mark, but also a nice reminder to the rest of us who have already been there and we know what it feels like.

We know that we need this stuff.

We know that we need it.

We just need to be more intentional about it being baked into our lives.

Having said that, let's get back to the list now of the top 10 strategies to reduce stress.

The third strategy is to proactively cut everything you can.

I cannot stress enough how effective this is at reducing stress.

Of all the things that I focus on best, it's not breathing and it's not reducing the problem.

My greatest skill set is focus and that's what this provides.

When you proactively cut, it allows focus to show up in a way that it just can't otherwise.

The number one reason why people, you and I, feel overwhelmed when that specific emotion shows up, it's because we're trying to do too much in the time frame that we have.

When we proactively cut everything that we possibly can, we only do what must be done today and nothing else.

Everything else that's optional is then postponed or deleted.

The actual list of things to do and focus on becomes extraordinarily short.

That's so empowering and so uplifting and so hopeful because all of a sudden your to-do list is doable.

In fact, it might even be easy.

All of a sudden, the stress of trying to get it all done just seems so pointless because what you have in front of you now is so much more doable.

Obviously, the challenge here is knowing what to cut, having the power to actually remove that from your calendar.

I say that because you might be at a job where you don't have a lot of choices as far as what to remove.

You'll have to be more creative on having conversations and a longer term plan to build out a more idealized schedule.

On the areas where you do have direct control, this is incredibly empowering to be able to say, "I'm going to be so intentional with my time.

The only things that are on my calendar are things that matter and the rest is just not there."

That's going to reduce your stress faster than most.

It's one of the first things I do when I feel stressed is I go to my calendar.

It's absolutely one of the very first things I do is I go to my task list, I go to my calendar, and I start cutting like you would not believe, postponing, deleting, rescheduling.

All of that happens right away.

Then I instantly calm down.

I feel so much better.

Then I shift to the next action to take.

The fourth strategy plays on the third one.

Now we know we're going to cut a lot of stuff.

The fourth strategy is more of a lifestyle decision, which is taking a ruthless approach to saying no by default.

You've heard this advice before, that saying no more often is good.

What I'm going to tell you though is that saying no is not good.

Saying no is necessary.

Saying no is not an optional strategy.

This is a must do.

I very rarely say that on this podcast, but this is one of those areas where I cannot back away from the necessity of this.

If you don't say no by default, if you say yes or maybe, or I'll get back to you, anything that's not a hardcore no, you are opening the door for saying yes.

You're putting yourself in that position to, even if you eventually do say yes, you have to then eventually get back to someone to tell them no.

It's just you want to have no be the thing.

No is the answer.

No is just across the board.

That's it.

This is how you're going to prevent burnout and panic attacks and the worst forms of overwhelm.

Doing less is the answer because stress comes from being overwhelmed and overwhelm comes from trying to do too much in the allotted time.

You want to do less and therefore give yourself more time.

Denying all of these new requests is going to be challenging, but you're going to have to do it.

You're going to have to learn how to say no with grace, how to say no politely, but how to say no more often.

One of the other bigger challenges that I have as someone who is, I think of myself as a very creative person because I'm constantly having to generate new ideas for all kinds of things and my biggest weakness is myself.

I have to ignore my own new ideas for future goals or projects or whatever the case is.

Yes, I write ideas down and I may address them later and that is helpful, but one of the best things you could do is just learn to tell yourself no.

Learn how to ignore your own ideas if that's what's required because if you're anything like me, you may be your own worst enemy here and saying no to yourself might be your best and first go-to solution here.

Now, of course, along the same lines, you want to cancel recurring meetings or commitments.

Anything that is going to be a repeated action is going to have a lot more time usage allotted to it and so those are the first things you want to be able to let go of.

As this new lifestyle kicks in for you and really adopting this ruthless approach to saying no by default, this is going to become part of that repertoire of yours is that you look at your calendar and you ask the question, "What have I said yes to a long time ago that's still on my calendar?

I said yes to a recurring meeting.

I said yes to this club that I joined.

Yes, this group I'm a part of.

I said yes to a volunteer opportunity that I just don't have time for."

Whatever the thing is and those are some of the most difficult things to say no to because you feel obligated to do something even if there is no direct and tangible benefit for you.

You might think of yourself as being tied to it because it does benefit someone else and it gets complicated.

It gets tricky but it's also a necessity for you to keep your sanity and to be able to serve yourself and others in the future is being able to say no today and no tomorrow and no the next day until eventually it becomes so obvious you can say yes that it's a no-brainer but you're not going to get there until you're ready.

If you're in the moment now, you're not there yet.

The fifth strategy is to then take these lessons of saying no, these lessons of cutting.

We now want to rebuild your calendar with a specific health-first approach.

This is a strategy that really identifies itself with this podcast.

It's one and the same.

The 5 A.M.

Miracle, the podcast subtitle is healthy productivity for high achievers.

The health-first approach is the approach.

It's the thing that this podcast stands for.

What I want you to do is to prioritize healthy habits before anything else.

Think of it as a this before that analogy.

Drink water before coffee.

Do your yoga before your morning meeting.

Meditate before the sales pitch, etc., etc.

This before that.

Healthy activity before whatever else is on your calendar.

If you have to schedule meetings with yourself on your calendar so no one else can steal that time so you have a guaranteed amount of time to do your healthy habits, then that's what it takes.

Then you do that instead.

You schedule meetings with yourself to make sure you can do your yoga, your meditation, your water before coffee.

Some of these are easier than others, but all of them stem from the same core concept that when you look at your calendar, you look at today's task list, the very first things ideally will build you up to be able to execute at a higher level down the road.

In other words, let's imagine that on an average day, your first and best priority is to get great sleep.

Then your second best habit is to drink water.

Your third best habit is to move your body in some physical activity.

What you're doing is you're setting the stage for being able to perform at a higher level later in the day because you're going to bring your best self to the stage.

Whether it's a meeting, a sales pitch, just hard work you have to do to think and use your brain, you need to bring your best self to that work.

You can do that if you're well rested and energized and focused and you don't have those typical distractions you might have when you're sick or unhealthy or injured or stressed or under slept, all those things that just pull us away from being our best selves to give of ourselves in the way we want to.

All that could be possible when you rebuild your calendar with this health first approach.

This is hard.

This part is difficult because calendars are tricky, but if you take this seriously and you really want to build these things in, you're going to see opportunities everywhere.

You're going to find these chances where normally you would have wasted time and instead you'd now have a new approach that has this health first strategy that is now going to trump the previous default response you had.

That's the goal.

To change our default responses is the goal because then the future is going to be more guaranteed because we know that's who we are now.

We're that kind of person now.

We are the health first approach person and then your future is all but guaranteed.

The success you're looking for will be there.

Strategy number six, start one new healthy habit that you know reduces your stress.

This is such a good one because it's so personal and so consistently effective.

Let's say for example that you are the kind of person who meditates.

I just had lunch recently with one of my friends who has been doing transcendental meditation for the last few months and he is becoming now pretty obsessed with it.

It really is his go-to thing and he couldn't stop talking about it with me.

I loved it.

I loved hearing more about it because I'm not the kind of person who meditates but I'm intrigued now because of what he was talking about.

If you find that thing that works for you that gets you that excited to start into something because you know that it's going to work, well then that's the thing you want to leverage hopefully in the moment or very soon after because you know it's going to work for you.

I'll use myself as a good example here for one that I know works for me which is cardio fitness.

By cardio fitness I mean walking, hiking, trail running, anything that gets my heart pumping in that cardiovascular aerobic exercise sense.

That's what releases endorphins.

I feel so much more alive afterwards which I will juxtapose with weight lifting or the anaerobic workouts that are without oxygen.

That's what that means with anaerobic.

The weight lifting component though beneficial for my muscle growth and strength and flexibility, it doesn't do much for my emotional state.

If I go to the gym this afternoon let's say and I lift weights for an hour and I come back home, I feel stronger but I don't necessarily feel happier.

I don't really feel more alive but if I spent that same hour going to the trail and went for a run or even just for a hike, I'm going to come back with a smile on my face every single time.

It's like clockwork and it's pretty amazing to me how true that is.

When you find an activity that just releases those endorphins that brings out your best self it's hard to walk away from that.

It's hard not to become that person more often because it just brings out the best in you in a way nothing else can.

Your goal here is to start with a new healthy habit and by new I mean the old one, the one you already know works.

Go back to that one and just do it more often.

We're just doubling down on something we already know is successful.

It could also be something that's outside of a standard healthy habit, those kind of things you do by yourself, meditation or exercise and actually go the direction of socialization, being around community, close friends, family, people you love and trust.

There is a very powerful sense of communal love, let's call it, or something that comes from that sense of I can be my healthier self when I am physically around other people who bring out the best in me.

Even today, I'll kind of pause here and go off script a bit.

I am recording this podcast in my parents' basement at their house in Missouri.

My wife and daughters, we all came to the grandparents' house this week for a vacation week for a holiday over the summer.

I am recording this in a spare bedroom with my portable podcast studio.

One of the things that I've been doing the last few days is socializing with my family in a way I don't usually do.

One thing that happens to me every single time that we make this trip to visit the grandparents and to be around family is I have this instantaneous sense of stress relief.

I go to bed earlier.

I sleep in later.

I don't do nearly as much during the day.

It's rare for me to even record a podcast while being here.

I just decided this would be a good time to tackle this topic in large part because of how chill I feel, which is an unusual feeling.

I'm not – I mean, you might hear it in my voice.

This entire episode has been so much more low-key than normal.

I've had my three coffees today or whatever it was earlier.

I've already been there.

I'm doing similar habits, but the stress level overall has been reduced dramatically because I put myself in an environment where that is expected to just chill, just be.

No one's forcing me to work.

If I do that, I'm choosing that.

The expectation is just be here.

Be with people.

Be with your family.

Just don't be weird.

Other than that, just chill out.

You need times like that in your life.

We all need times like that in our lives.

For you, find that thing, whether it is once again a solo activity, meditation, trail running, or whether it is a communal socialization or something else.

Take that thing you know works.

Do it more often.

Strategy number seven.

This one's a little bit different, but extraordinarily helpful, which is to practice conscious mental bicep curls.

Let me say that one more time.

We're going to practice conscious mental bicep curls.

If you've read the book or heard the podcast from Dan Harris, the creator of the 10% Happier brand, you've heard his take on meditation, which involves these mental bicep curls, which is his take on meditation where you will acknowledge something, a thought, a distraction, whatever the case is, and then you let it go.

You acknowledge what's happening and then you let it go.

You do that on repeat.

By training yourself how to acknowledge the distraction and then let it go, you train yourself to be more focused and to be more in the moment.

What we're looking for here in this context of strategies to reduce stress and burnout is we're looking for those moments when a stressor will appear, when something that is challenging or fear-inducing or just darn right difficult hits our brain and we have the tendency to respond poorly.

We have that normal default response to just go, "Ah, I'm going to freak out.

This is bad."

Instead, we're looking for that conscious mental bicep curl to acknowledge the stressor and let it go.

Acknowledge what just happened and just let it be.

Now, it doesn't mean we're ignoring it.

It doesn't mean we're going to walk away from the stressor completely, but it means we're not going to let the emotional default response kick in.

We're going to acknowledge the stressor in large part.

This is what I tend to do, is write it down immediately.

You feel the thought, the negativity shows up.

It's in your brain.

What do you do with it?

Write it down.

Get that thing out of your head and onto paper.

Now it's no longer going to be just a negative emotion in your brain.

It is now something tangible that's outside of you that can be scheduled, that can be acted upon, that can be brainstormed solutions for.

It becomes something exterior to you.

This is what I find to be the most helpful in this scenario, is that a conscious mental bicep curl is an acknowledgement of the stressor and the letting go of it can be active.

The letting go, it's not just mental, it is also physical.

Write it down, schedule it, act on it, make it go away because you completed the task, you addressed it with a solution and it's gone.

This is a skill like none other.

Being able to acknowledge something and let it go in the moment has immense power and it's the kind of thing that we all need to work on, myself included.

The more that you do this, the better you get and the faster you will be at handling those stressors and converting that into an opportunity to move forward in a healthier way.

Strategy number eight.

In this example, we're going to take whatever's going on in your life and look at it through the lens of your past behavior.

When were you highly stressed out in the past?

Worst season, awful, really bad season.

The one I discussed earlier when my wife and I learned about fertility challenges and it really hit me like a ton of bricks.

Think back to those bad moments and do the opposite.

When were you super relaxed and carefree and chill?

When was the last time you just let go and were just fine?

Our goal here is to incorporate our own best habits based on our previous biggest mistakes and successes.

In other words, our future selves could, in theory, be a culmination of our best decisions.

We've learned from our greatest successes and doubled down on them.

We've learned from our greatest mistakes and we have put up guardrails to prevent them.

In that way, we are guaranteeing a better future.

To learn from your past is to really say, "I'm going to have a better future because I'm not flying blind here.

I'm paying attention.

I know my own tendencies.

I know my own default habits and responses.

Because I know myself well, I will therefore build a better future for me that pushes me in the direction I need to go."

The majority of this, for me, comes down to doubling down on things that work well.

It is helpful to understand the past mistakes, but I tend to have a lot more success when I double down on the successes.

In other words, as a good example of that, if I look back to my season where I had panic attacks, I could focus on that and try to put up guardrails to prevent those extreme stressors.

What tends to be more helpful is to ask myself what makes me feel better, the trail running is a good example, and just simply ask myself, "How can I incorporate more of that?"

In other words, more of the good instead of less of the bad.

Because if you do more of the good, you by default get less of the bad.

That is such a different way of thinking about problems because one approach could be, "Well, here's the problem, what should I do about it?"

I would say, "Well, forget that.

What's the opportunity?

Let's go focus on that instead."

Yes, some things will require more intentionality around specific problem solving, but I'm more interested in just what's going to bring out the best in me, what allows me to double down on successes.

That is my best future.

That's what I want to see from me going forward.

Strategy number nine, outline your ideal calendar that is built around your personal optimization plan.

Speaking of what I just said about knowing yourself well and doubling down your successes, if you've read my book, The 5 AM Miracle, you have heard of the personal optimization plan, which is essentially a list of activities that bring out the best in you, a way to optimize yourself.

The plan in that sense is to figure out how to schedule those things more often on your calendar.

Your ideal calendar is going to incorporate specific actions and activities that you know are your best self.

They're on paper, on purpose, written down and pre-scheduled.

When that takes place, you're able to then guarantee the activities, guarantee the time frame, the environment, the scheduling components that are the logistics that can be obstacles like none other.

We need to get around those logistical obstacles by acknowledging what we want and then just asking the simple question, "How can I guarantee it?"

The answer for that is always a calendaring answer.

Always.

That's how you answer the how, is it has to go on the calendar to guarantee the time, the location, the resources necessary.

This is a very simple question of how do I intentionally approach my time knowing myself well to make sure I can schedule what is the best of me.

The final 10th strategy, and this is one that I struggle with more than all of the others probably combined, which is to embrace calm by default.

I just said earlier that I am recording this podcast at my parents' house.

I'm here multiple times a year.

It's a great place to be and I'm very chill when I'm here.

One of my biggest questions is why can't I experience this level of calm at my house in Nashville?

Why can't I feel that sense of chill when I'm there?

I don't.

I frankly do not feel this level of chill when I'm there.

You can probably hear it in my voice when I record podcasts.

You can probably hear those weeks where I've got a little bit more edge, a little bit more stress.

It does come out.

It's impossible for me to hide that really.

I can fake it sort of and I try a lot to fake it, but that's not helpful.

What's really helpful in this case is honesty.

The honesty behind this conversation is that I don't know how to be calm at my own house.

I have to leave.

I have to go somewhere else to find it.

One of the challenges that I have faced, and I think that you may as well, is identifying those locations, those environments, those specific places you can go where you can be your best self, where you can embrace calm in an intentional way.

Best example of that would be if you go to a yoga class, you go to a meditation class, you go to an environment where somebody else has crafted a space for you to chill out, where the person who is leading the session, the one who has designed this activity has done so with calm in mind, that that was the goal.

When you experience those types of environments, it is powerful.

It is so incredibly, potentially life-changing to be in those moments.

Then the only question I would have is how do I bake in that level of intentionality in my day-to-day life where I embrace calm by default as opposed to my typical response, which is to drink more coffee and move faster.

Those moments should always exist.

I'm not opposed to them, but if the default response is calm, then maybe my default go-to beverage may not be a coffee.

Maybe my default action may not be to check off a box on my to-do list.

That's my challenge to you, is to ask yourself that question.

How do you typically respond to your life?

If your typical response is one of tense shoulders and feeling this sense of, "I got to move.

I got to go," I would challenge you to figure out a way to do it differently.

I'm not arguing that's actually better.

Sometimes a calm approach won't be you, and that's fine.

I think there's a lot of benefit here, a lot of benefit to shifting gears and seeing how that can benefit life every day for you.

Do the opposite and see how it impacts you.

Then this whole conversation of stress reduction, of overwhelm, of panic attacks, of anxiety, these are difficult conversations to have.

One thing that I don't get enough of that I would like to is specific feedback from you.

Does this land?

Does this make sense to you?

I say that because, best example of any podcaster, I'm talking to myself, to a microphone in a room alone.

I don't know how this is landing for you.

I don't know specifically if this hit home.

I would love to know if it did or didn't.

Email me, jeff@jeffsanders.com.

I will respond back to you in 24 hours or less, guaranteed.

More importantly than that, I want to know if I've hit a nerve here because I have been through an incredibly challenging season in the recent months.

One thing that has been more true than it ever has been is that my own intentionality towards calming, stress reducing decision making is my new norm.

Whether I want it to be or not, it has to be.

That guarantee of a calmer future is a good one.

It's a healthy one.

It's a peaceful one.

Peace is not a word that I use very often to describe my life, but it's one that I strive to.

Yeah, let me know how this works for you.

I'd love to hear from you.

Jeff@jeffsanders.com.

Remember that glorious action step this week.

Let's keep this real simple.

Breathe.

Just breathe.

You may or may not agree with my interpretation that stress is a choice.

I know it's a bold statement, but if you embrace that idea, if only for a moment, just long enough to catch your breath before you move forward, you can lower your current stress levels and take the action necessary to have a calmer demeanor.

So try it sometime.

Try it right now.

Just breathe.

Now, of course, if you'd like to subscribe to this podcast, I would love that.

You can do so in your favorite podcast app.

Or if this podcast has become a part of your routine and you'd like to go to the full VIP status, I would love for you to join 5am Miracle Premium.

It's an amazing service that offers an ad-free version of this podcast, as well as exclusive bonus episodes and a whole lot more.

You can learn a lot more about that and sign up at 5ammiraclepremium.com.

That's all I've got for you this week here on the 5am Miracle Podcast.

Until next time, you have the power to change your life.

And all of that calm begins bright today.

And early.

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