286. Understanding Stress Triggers and Learning to Respond Instead of React with Sara Nakamura

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This is happiness solved with America's happiness coach, Sandee Sgarlata.

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Hello and thank you for joining us today. I'm so happy you're here. Happiness solved is the place where we explore everything you need to become the best possible version of you. This is Sandee Sgarlata, and today I've got some exciting news for our dedicated listeners. We've just launched our exclusive members only portal.

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This is your ticket to a world of additional content designed to deepen your understanding and engagement with the happiness solved mission. To learn more about all of the exciting benefits, stay tuned until the end of the episode where I will explain in greater detail. For those interested now head over to happinesssolved supercast.com. Today is another amazing conversation, so let's get started.

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Sara the stress expert. I love it. Got to be careful. I just said that and I was like, I hope I said stress expert and not the other alternative thing I could have said because this is a clean podcast. But so great to see you today.

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How's everything going? Great to see you too, Sandy. Things are going great and I'm in massage therapy. So if you had said the other word, I've heard that before too. Yeah, well, because actually I've interviewed a couple of sex experts, but I think a stress expert is more important because it covers so many areas of your life.

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So before we jump into it, and I want to talk about your book, stressed out and don't know what to do, how did you get to where you like, what is your backstory? My backstory is know as probably so many of your listeners can relate to. After college, I got into the corporate world again. I live here in Las Vegas. So I was born in the relaxing state of Hawaii, but grew up in the glitz and glamour and the 24 hours town of Las Vegas.

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And so things go very fast in this town. And after I got out of college, I started checking off all those success boxes like a lot of people did. And I was in the corporate world, corporate management. I happened to be in food and beverage and marketing. And I had a long term relationship.

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I was climbing mountains with my trusty dog. So my life looked great from the outside, but what was happening beneath the surface and going on the inside was very different. And when I started to take a step back and I started to realize that stress was actually breaking my life while I was busy making my life. And if you ever have that feeling, you know what that is. But if you've never experienced it before, you don't have the words for it and you don't know what's happening.

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So I was caught up in that corporate cycle just every day, just on that grind. And I thought that's what I was supposed to do. But when you spend so much time at work, when everyone else next to you is stressed out, and it just seems like it's normal. And that's what happened to, you know, Sandy. When I went to my office, I started having palpitations, and I was breathing so heavily, my hair was falling out.

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And I didn't realize that I was having panic attack, that I was having stress induced hair falling out. I had no idea until I started to get an autoimmune disease. And so I started to get the white spots like Michael Jackson had. And so my pigmentation started to be, you know, I was a kid growing up in the sun, outdoors, and know, had a tan most of the year. And so when that started affecting my psyche, it started affecting my whole body.

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But the catalyst for me to make this change out of the corporate world was I was working so much that I actually got a phone call that my dog died while I was at work. And when something like that happens, you go, wait, what am I doing? And so I took that step back, and I realized that there was so much happening, like I said, beneath the surface. And what was really going on was my relationship was hanging on by a string. I was about to lose my home when my dog died.

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I didn't know what to do. And then the exhaustion, the burnout, just the overwhelm started kicking in, and I went, oh, my gosh, what do I do? And for me, I personally went into massage therapy. The least stressful thing you can think about, right? Yeah.

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When you're massaging another person, that's calming in and of itself. Exactly. So that's what I went into. So I did a 180, Sandy. That's how I got into stress relief.

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And you know what? Quite frankly, that's very normal, because when we're feeling like we're backed up against a wall and you don't know what to do, sometimes you do the thing that nobody would ever expect you to do, that it sounds fun. I was doing all this stuff that I've been doing for 34 years, and at one point, I was like, I want to be an esthetician. And people are like, are you crazy? I'm like, no, I think it'd be kind of nice working on people's faces.

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I want to be an esthetician. And people talked me out of. They were like, no, because it was. It was a little far fetched. It was kind of, you know, if I said to my husband to I'm going to close up shop and I'm going to know, live in India in an ashram for six, mean, he'd be like, are you?

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Like, what is going on? Right. Because people don't make those drastic changes. But that's not that. Yeah.

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And sometimes we just have some kind of catalyst that changes the trajectory of our lives. And that's what it happened to be for me. And getting into stress relief management, I was getting my body relieved. I had so much tension in my own body. I started realizing, okay, I need to get rid of all of this.

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And through school and receiving massages, that's what started happening. But then I started realizing, getting into the massage career, that there's also the emotional component. I still didn't feel fulfilled. So I started getting my certifications in neuro linguistics and understanding my emotions and how the brain functioned and how our mindset fit into all of this and got my personal training, certification and nutrition. And I just started grasping at everything I could learn because I realized that the more I talked about what was going on for me, which I'd been really reserved in the past, that more people started saying, Sara, I was going through something similar, and we were all suffering in silence.

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And it's tough to see that. It's tough to see so many people around us that are suffering. And I thought I was alone in my journey. And until I started telling people about it, I was going to be wrapped up in my little shell for years and years and years. Yeah.

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Oh, my goodness. So I had a psychologist on a couple of years ago, and he suggested the idea that stress is an illusion, that stress is something that back in the 20s, they put a label on it. What is your take on that? That's an interesting take. I've studied stress in so many different ways, and I think my come from is slightly different.

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And so many people talk about thoughts become things and the law of attraction and the secret and all of those different things. And I think those are very valid points. And our mind is a really big catalyst for what we do, and our mindset is and how we get in from our conscious mind to our unconscious mind. But the integration between the two is really important. And sometimes we're in our head about things.

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Sometimes we act from emotion. Sometimes something comes from the outside and somebody tells us something negative, or those thoughts are already swirling around in our head. So the stress cycle that I have in my book, and I wanted to make it really simple is that these triggers come from the inside, come from the outside, like I just talked about. But I put into a simple format. It's called beat.

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What's going on in your body, what's going on in your emotions, what happens in your actions or inactions and as well as your thoughts. And so when stress is kind of swirling around, it can be like a game of pinball bouncing around. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. And you're trying to keep this ball afloat, and you're trying to get things going, but the biggest part of it is the second t of beat is the triggers. Where are these triggers coming from?

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And so it can be an illusion. It can be something that we make up, but a lot of times, we buy the lie, and we tell ourselves so many times that that's what it is. Yes, that's what it is. I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough.

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I'm not good enough because of some kind of either small t trauma or a big t trauma that we've had in our lives. And then we incorporate that into our neurology, meaning into our body, into our mind. And so, yes, it can be an illusion, but we've bought it, so now it becomes part of us, and now it's real. Right. And for so many of us, it's real.

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And your stress is different than my stress, and your triggers are different than my triggers. So anybody out there, you're triggered by different things. And the way we create our awareness around different things is all different also. So let's say for when I have a massage client on my table, and they're telling me that their pain is coming from their neck, well, I can address their neck, but what's really typically happening is there's some kind of motion that's associated with the pain that they're experiencing, and those emotions get trapped in our body. And if we don't express them or bring it to full circle to let them go, it gets stuck.

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And sometimes we can get it out physically, but a lot of times, we have to get rid of it emotionally. So hopefully, that answers the question, oh, I love it. I love it. Because at the end of the day, if you're buying the lie, it's your perception that you're buying into. And we always have a choice to shift that perception.

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It's just when you've bought the lie and you've told yourself the lie for so many years or months, whatever, it's really hard to undo that. Absolutely. And many times, the lie comes from our caregivers, and they don't mean to. They're doing the best that they can. They bring us up the way that they're either taught or tried to do whatever they, you know, the first thing that comes to mind, know we all bought that Santa was real.

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So every know or know, this guy's going to come down our chimney and he's going to give us presents. Well, the time that I heard my dad go, ho, ho, ho, I went, wow, Santa sounds like my dad. I was kind of disillusioned at life, and I went, wait a second. He lied to me. So then where does the trust factor go?

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That's right. And we do it because we think it's normal. We do that to our kids. We've had it done to us. So it's sometimes unintentional.

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Yeah, for sure. So when it comes to stress, and there was a point that I wanted to make just now, oh, what does expectations. Okay, how do the expectations that you put on yourself or on others affect your stress? Because if you're expecting another person to behave in a way that they don't know about, right, you're going to be disappointed. And they're like, what?

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I didn't know. I just find that so often that so many people, like, I hear stories with my girlfriends, and they had this little quarrel, and I'm like, well, you expected her to do this, and she had no idea you were expecting her to behave like that. So how can you be mad at her if she doesn't know? But it's causing this all sorts of stress and drama in her life. Can you address that for a second?

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Sure. Of course. And it happens daily, doesn't it? Whether we're in grade school or it's happening currently with our friends, or we see people around and it's in the media quite often, and some of those conflicts that are kind of created to create drama, it lights something up in us, right? And sometimes, wow, there was some drama.

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Oh, my gosh, did you hear about so and so? It sometimes gives us that fuel, and we like it. So there's that factor number one. But getting back into that self awareness part of it, what are my expectations? What is my friend expecting from me, or what am I expecting from that person?

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So when you kind of figure out, okay, one, how is my learning style? So, for most of us and entire world, communication is 6% of our words. So much of it is body language, our tone, our inflection, all of the different things. So sometimes if you're texting somebody, well, you're going to have a different expectation because they're not getting your tone, you're just getting a few words. So there's a lot of miscommunication that happens when we're texting.

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A lot of miscommunication happens in emails and if we're face to face with our friends, what's their body language like? Are they in a good mood? Are they kind of relaxed or are they just so anxious about what's happening? Again, a lot of times we miscommunicate. So having an expectation that you're going to be as excited about my good news, is that realistic or is just my expectation?

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Because I want you to be all excited that I'm on this wonderful podcast and I get to share my stories with all these amazing people. But you might be like, hey, I do this every day, calm down. Right? So my expectation is different than yours. And so if we communicate and we go, hey, if we both get excited about this, what's our outcome?

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If we look toward the pain, pleasure. If we look toward the pleasure of the outcome, great. We're both going to be able to have a great conversation. Wonderful. Now we're both in this elevated place and we're on the same page.

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I think a lot of times that's what happens. We're on a different page with people for sure. Well, yeah, because my reality is different from yours and the next person is different from the next person. So, yeah, that totally makes sense. So what is something that people can do right now to apply in their life to help them reduce their stress when they're feeling that sense of, oh my gosh, everything's going out of control, what do I do now?

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And what you can do is first of all, go back to the basics. A little box breathing, a little count in, hold for four, out for four, hold it for four. Very simple and easy to do. But when you do it intentionally, that's what makes the difference. And then when you start to get that breath under control and you start to connect again the mind, the body and our thoughts altogether.

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So if you take two fingers, your index finger and your middle finger, you run across your forehead, all the way across to your temples. And if you don't know where your temples are, it's the soft spot around your head and you just make little circles. And sometimes we start to get that tension headache when we start to get stressed out, don't we? Doesn't it? It relieves some of that tension and it relieves the tension in your thoughts.

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You correlate to that. And then you bring those two fingers down to your jaw, and you do little circles around your jaw. That's our masseter muscle. It's the strongest muscle in our body. And guess what?

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It's our most important because it helps us communicate, helps us to say the words that we want to say or not. But this little muscle right here that we're rubbing and doing circles around, that creates the tension all the way up to the back of your head, too. So when we combine those two things to help to release, it helps to relax your mind. It helps to relax what you're saying and get clarity of what you're about to say. And then the third thing is to bring one hand across your chest and make little circles just in the middle of your chest here.

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This is called the CB 17 point. And you do this to little kids. We do this to animals, don't we? We rub their chest. Everything's okay, but we don't do it to ourselves too often.

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So when we combine those three things in just a matter of seconds, we can get grounded, we can get clear of our thoughts, and we can get clear of what we're about to say. I love it. And for me, that was such a good reminder, because I used to have TMJ, and I tend to clench my jaw in times of stress, and then I become aware of it because I can just feel something, and I'm like, oh, okay, chill.

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But that is a huge stress reliever right there, because I find myself at night just because it's like I'm not, because that tends to be one of the places where I hold stress in my body is right here. Yes. And many people do tend to hold stress in a specific part of their body. A lot of people, it's their neck and shoulders. For you, it's around your jaw.

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When we address those different things, what happens, too, is a lot of times, as you know, we're anxious about the future or we're having some type of somewhat regret about our past, and we don't live in the present moment. So when you do something like this, it allows us to get back into our bodies and go, okay, where's my emotions? Where are my thoughts? Where are my feelings? I'm in a good place.

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And just in a few seconds, you can do that. Yeah, I love the breathing. That's the first thing that I do, is the breathing exercises. And I've taught my son to do that because he gets a little anxious. He's in his early 20s now, but a lot of kids these days in college find themselves feeling anxious, and the breathing has helped him.

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I love that. Exactly. And especially because you're not able to communicate with him in person, with him being in college, you're over the phone. So your tone, your breath helps to him to mirror what you're doing and to create that calm. Oh, yeah.

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If anybody out there has children, you know how if I answer the phone, I'm like, hey, what's up? And if I don't have that tone, he's like, bomb. So I have to remember to get grounded so that I don't feed into his anxiety. Right. And to just be there for him and that support.

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Exactly. And that's where the self awareness comes back around. Because when you're doing 1000 different things and you're answering that phone, how are you with him? And it's going to set the entire tone for your conversation. Just like going back to the conversation that you were talking about with communicating with your girlfriend is okay.

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How do we set that expectation? It's the way we're being and that's where we start. Oh, my gosh. So much value. I tell you, this has been amazing.

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There's so many golden nuggets that people can apply right now. Is there anything else that you'd like to share before we finish up today? Just real quick. I think that a lot of times we feel like we're out of control, especially these days with so much coming at us. We're in such a fast paced world.

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One of the things that I share in my book is called the eye care system, and it's an acronym. And the eye is go inside of yourself. C is contain the problem, whatever problem you're having. A is have an awareness of yourself, just like we just talked about. R is realign your priorities, what's important to you.

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And then e, when you make your decision, whatever that is, get behind yourself 100%. Have that e, energize your decision and just go with it. Oh, my gosh. I love it. I love it.

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Sara, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm going to be pausing the recording and we're going to do another interview. We're going to be talking about burnout, but that's going to be just in the membership community. So I'm excited for that conversation as well. Thank you so much, Sara.

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