How to grow stronger and more confident through stress and challenges. Research-backed 4-pillar framework: train it, reframe it, release it.

Stress can hit like a wave, but it doesn’t have to overflow your day.

I’m breaking down a 4-pillar stress management framework that goes beyond the usual advice and gives you a practical toolkit you can test in real situations, from work pressure to family stress to that quiet, constant hum of anxiety.

We start with the body, because your nervous system is the fastest on-ramp to relief. Then we talk about something that sounds backwards but works: training calm through controlled stress like high-intensity intervals, cold showers, and sauna, so your body can activate without your mind spiraling.

From there, we move into the psychology of overwhelm. 

Finally, we build emotional resilience with two reframes, “I’ve got this” and “I get to do this,” then close with environmental recovery tools like nature exposure, social connection, and sensory experiences that help you unload stress and rebuild capacity.

If this helped, subscribe, share it with one person you’ll practice with, and leave a review so more people can get a little calmer and a lot more capable.

Transcript

Welcome And The Four Pillars

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hey guys, and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Shorina. I'm your host. I'm your guide in personal and collective transformation, your master health, sleep stress management, and executive coach, and just someone who is really passionate about human potential, what we can do with that, and how to unlock more of it using science-backed tools, time and people tested strategies and different methodologies, including designing and organizing our environment and probably these days AI. Today, guys, we are focused on stress management, specifically on a whole range, a four-pillar stress management framework, a whole range of stress management tools that are not mentioned that often. You see, stress is a physiological phenomenon, but it's also a psychological phenomenon. And the way we think about certain situations in life can stress us more than those actual things. And depending on how we think about different stressors in our life, they're gonna stress us out more or less. And because of that, we're gonna deal with life either more or less effectively. And today you're gonna learn how to combine and use different tools that are in the realm of our biology, how to control your biology for better stress management, how to manage your biology. It's in the psychology part, how to deal with your emotions through uh cultivating a certain kind of internal dialogue. And also it's about designing our environment and using certain experiences to help us relieve and manage and unload stress a lot better physiologically and psychologically. Right? Humans are what it's called biopsychosocial creatures. And things in all of these areas, biology, psychology, and our environment in our social life, uh affect how stressed we are, how chilled or relaxed we are, and how we deal with different challenges that life throws our way. And so today it's a stress management toolkit that is more complete than what you usually would get in a workshop or reading certain articles. And by the end of this podcast, you're gonna have a whole range of tools. And my assignment for to you for you is gonna be to try out different tools for different situations and see what ultimately works for you. Because what stress researchers all agree on is that there is really good research confirming the effectiveness of the tools that you're gonna learn today, all of the tools. But the toolkit that works the best for you in a very specific situation is gonna be either slightly or a lot different than what works for somebody else. And the best way to figure

Breathwork To Shift Your Nervous System

SPEAKER_00 3:30

out what works for you is to actually try it and experiment with that. So let's dig into that. The first is the physical side of stress. To when you release, learn to release stress physiologically, you also release a lot of it psychologically and emotionally. Your body is not separate from your psychology, from your nervous system, through your nervous system. And because of that, when you learn how to release stress in your body, you will also be releasing emotional and psychological stress, a lot of it. So, what is that? What are some key tools that are the most effective for releasing stress physiologically? One of the key tools is breath work, specifically a long exhale focused belly breathing when you inhale and then slow down your breathing out process. And you do it for three minutes, for five minutes. I usually recommend doing no less than five breath cycles, just really slowing down your breathing. And that's the whole idea is to make your exhales and the rate of your breathing a lot slower, and that would help to change the state of your nervous system from fight or flight to rest and digest, and all the recovery processes getting activated, and you physiologically again your cortisol goes down, your blood pressure, blood sugar normalizes, you feel psychologically and emotionally better. So, all of these things happen when you change the rate of your breathing because it also changes the rate of your heart rate, and that basically changes everything else. So, breathing that's tool number

Body Scan To Find And Release Tension

SPEAKER_00 5:18

one. Tool number two is what's called body scan and release through nervous system, because of the connection between your psychology, your emotions, and your body through nervous system, when you get stressed uh psychologically because of you know something is happening, you're thinking that it's stressful and you're feeling it, so your body gets tensed in different areas. So, exactly what areas, you know, it's gonna be quite individual and gonna depend on you. Some people hold it in their upper back, some people in lower back, some people in their hips, etc. And so when you learn how to scan your body, you literally close your eyes and you feel into your body and see where you hold tension. Is it again your shoulders and upper back? Is it your lower back? Is it your chest? Is it your neck? Is it your maybe hips or somewhere in your legs? Where do you feel stress? So when you find it in your body, spend a little bit of time releasing it and relaxing this area. I often recommend breathing into this area. So you breathe in, you combine it with breath work, you breathe in for the count of four, let's say, and breathe out into this area for the count of eight, really trying to relax it. So that is another way to release, really good, research-backed way to release a lot of stress physiologically, and by doing so, relax your psychology and change your emotional state as well.

Training Calm With Controlled Stress

SPEAKER_00 6:49

And then the other part of helping yourself to deal with stress better, not just physiologically, but also psychologically, internal dialogue and emotions, actually stressing your body through certain practices to make your body feel okay going through stressful experiences and not trying to skip it, not freaking out, but instead staying calm when you feel stress in your body. What do I mean by that? Doing things like exercise, especially high-intensity intervals, it's it's a lot of stress on your bodily energy systems, on all of your systems. And that's a stress for your body. Your cortisol actually goes up, your blood pressure goes up, your blood sugar goes up, and it's like all of the things, including your immune system, are activated. Yeah, it's kind of like somebody's chasing you, your body is umped and ready. But at the same time, because it is a controlled experience, after a while, your body gets used, your mind gets used to not freaking out when your body is under the stress. And that is very helpful when, for example, you're going through a stress at work and your heart starts racing, and you know, maybe your cheeks get red, and maybe your palms start sweating. But at the same time, you're gonna be able to think clearly, and instead of reacting and maybe regretting some responses after, you actually will be able to think through and respond calmly. That's what this kind of experience does to you. Another couple of experiences that do the same work and available to most people, cold exposure, like taking a cold shower every day and doing a sauna. Those are also physical experiences that deliver stress in a managed form, so then you can learn how to experience stress in your body physically and still stay calm in your mind. So, three practices on the physiological level of stress management. We had your breath work, you have your body skin and release, and then we have physical stress in a managed uh form, which is uh some form of high-intensity exercise, cold exposure, sauna, and similar experiences.

Fear Setting And Overwhelm Reset

SPEAKER_00 9:12

The second layer of managing your stress uh has to do with psychology. And there are a few sort of ways how we tend to put more stress on ourselves psychologically more than it there than it has to be, and in a way that doesn't allow us to be effective in line in life and dealing with the stress at the same solving at the same time solving problems. Overload, catastrophizing, feeling overwhelmed with things happening in your life. Whenever that happens on a psychological level, here are a few things, three things that can help you to deal with that a lot better. Number one, fear setting. Whenever you're going through a situation, and I learned the stool from team furries, look him up, very uh fascinating individual, and he popularized this exercise, which is actually used by a lot of psychologists, therapists, and different people dealing with anxiety and overthinking things. So, fear assetting is uh very useful when you start thinking about uh worrying about all the bad things that can happen, or you unable to take action because you think about all of the you know bad things that can happen, or negative consequences, or things that you are unsure, uncertain about. So, what is fear assetting? It's asking yourself, what's the worst that could happen if I take this action or that I'm worried about, right? What's the worst case scenario? And then you ask yourself, what's the actual probability of that happening? Besides me catastrophizing and thinking it, of course, it's gonna happen. But what's the actual probability based on your experience? And you might even ask your AI agent, like, what's the probability of this scenario actually happening based on your sort of analysis? The third question is, if it did happen, what would I do? Like, how would I get back on my feet? And the fourth question is what can I do now to reduce the probability of that worst case happening? And when you walk yourself through uh these four questions, what's the worst case scenario? Uh, what's the actual probability of that? If it happened, what would I do? And what can I do now to prevent it from happening in the first place? Once you walk yourself through the sequence of questions, that again exercise is called fear setting by team Ferris, you get a lot commer because you realize a worst case scenario is not that likely to happen, and even if it did happen, it wouldn't be such a big thing, and you'd be able to get back on your feet, and you can do a lot to prevent it, right? So this is number one. Number two, again, in the same uh layer of uh over being feeling overloaded, overwhelmed, and catastrophizing, take stock and delete. And I learned this from Alisa Apple. She is uh she has a PhD, uh, I believe in stress management, uh, mindfulness, and just learning how to regulate our emotions and psychology. So she has this exercise in her book, Stress Prescription, taking stock and deleting, whatever overwhelms you, whatever stresses you out, whatever you catastrophi. I think just write down everything that's on your plate, and then look for the things that are unnecessary to carry. Look at the things that you don't have to worry about right now. Look at the things that you can delegate, look at the things that you can ask for help with. Believe it or not, you don't have to resolve everything right now, today. You can deal with the most important things and put the rest of it either on hold or ask somebody else to deal with it, saying, Hey, this is what's on my plane, and I can't really effectively deal with everything. Can you help me with that? Right? So that is a very helpful practice. And the third practice in the same layer is worry window, again, also by Elisa Apple in the stress prescription. And it's all about delegating, or not delegating, scheduling specific time, like 20 minutes a day, usually at the B, not well, not necessarily the beginning, but not right before. But you spend 20 minutes by writing about everything that worries you, and then what it helps you to do is during the day when something worrisome comes up in your mind, something you are anxious about, you're worried about, you can just write it down in the app or in a notebook and say to yourself, hey, I'm gonna worry about it and think about that in that window. And that action alone allows you to be again calmer, more focused, more centered on the present moment and what you can do now, instead of being having this scattered attention because you have all these things to worry about. Believe it or not, again, when you dedicate a specific time every day for the things that you worry about the rest of the day, you're actually gonna be pretty calm and focused. So at this layer of be feeling fearful, overloaded, overwhelmed, catastrophizing, three tools fear setting by Tim Ferris, taste tech, take stock, and delete by Elisa Apple uh from stress prescription. Like you don't have to carry everything that you feel is on your plate, at least not all at the same moment, and then worry window, dedicating a specific time window, like 20 minutes every day, to think about, think through, and worry about things.

Reframes That Build Resilience

SPEAKER_00 14:57

Now, the third layer or the third level of stress management is all about building more psychological and emotional resilience or being able to bounce back from challenging things or deal with challenging things a lot more effectively, feeling psychologically and emotionally empowered, not overwhelmed by this stuff, and getting stronger and more capable going through challenges, which are usually your growth opportunities. So, two things I'd like to mention here. We kind of talked about physical resilience, right? High intensity interval training, sauna, cold exposure. And in this layer, we're talking about reframing, changing how you think about challenges and stressors on your plate. Two tools. I've got this. So this is also from Alisa Apple and the books, The Stress Prescription. And the reframing is all about when you think about a stressor, a challenging situation that is happening or about to come up in your life. What you do is you stop and you think through and list, make a list of all the hard things that you already overcame in your life. You literally write it all down of all the things you thought that you couldn't handle and you did handle, all the stuff that came into your life and you were able to live through it. You are alive today, you went through a lot of hard stuff, and I know that with 100% certainty. So, how about focusing your brain on that and understanding that in each case, when you're faced with a challenge, it feels impossible, and you somehow still do it. And again, looking into your history, not trying to bullshit your brain, is the best way to uh create the sense of certainty that yes, I've got this, right? And you also remembering that there are people that you're gonna ask for help, and there are again all the other resources that you haven't thought about. So you've got this, like no matter what, you've got this, and you'll be able to move through just like all the other times you did before. So, this is tool number one. I've got this. Tool number two, I get to do this. What I mean by that is very often when we are presented with a work challenge, or we are presented with challenges on our in our personal lives, like we need to take care of our families, or we need to do something for our personal self-care. We forget that our that it's an opportunity to be able to be useful either to other people or to yourself, or to have this challenge at work that's gonna grow you and gonna open up so many new opportunities and doors for you. It's a growth opportunity, like you get to do this, you get to be alive. You know, every Friday we go and hike a mountain. I used to be a little bit on a lazier side, I'm like, oh, I have to do this again, and then I realized so by what through watching some documentaries and people who are not able to even walk, and I'm like, I have all my capacities and I can freaking hike a mountain every single day if I want to. What a beauty it is! Right? I get to do that, so that helped that completely changed my experience and helped me to lean in and get stronger and challenge myself more while hiking that mountain, feeling really, really good about that. So, two tools to build psychological resilience or your ability to bounce back from challenges and handle them more effectively without them stressing you out, but instead feeling empowered that you can take them on. The first reframe is I've got this, thinking about all the hard things that you overcame, thinking about all the resources and people you can ask for help, right? You've got this, you've gone through stuff like that. And then I get to do this. You don't have to do anything, but you get to do challenging stuff because you are a capable human. So these are two fundamentally transformational tools that will help you to transform your psychology, which will transform your biology and your emotional state. And the stressors will make you stronger without stressing you out all that much.

Nature, People And Sensory Recovery

SPEAKER_00 19:31

And the last but not least are the environmental and essential tools that help you to unload stress, release stress, so then you can build more capacity, you can be better psychologically and emotionally and physiologically, and be more effective with handling all the stressors or challenges that are coming into your life. Nature has been shown to be one of the most effective stress releasers, the deeper than nature, meaning, let's say, compare an urban park, park in the city, and a park like completely in the wilderness, right? So the deeper the nature exposure, the better it works. But even things like listening to rain sounds, bird sounds, or putting pictures of nature, beautiful scenery in your office or in your apartment or on your phone, even those things also help. So micro-dosing and macrodosing in nature is helpful. They even prescribe it in some countries for more, I guess, advanced countries. So when it comes to non-traditional methodologies like you know, New Zealand, Japan, they prescribe going into nature to deal with or prevent burnout, anxiety, overwhelm, stress, worry, etc. Right? So nature, number one, including animals and plants of all kinds, socials, number two, we are biopsychosocial creatures. The right kind of relationships are very stress-releasing, they help us to stress less and manage stress a lot better. So use that. Whenever you feel things overwhelm you, don't hide inside by yourself. Talk to people you love and you care about, go and meet with friends, go for walks with friends, do something communal, whether that's volunteering or just do something, go to a community market, right? Or maybe do some training together with your local gym community. So the right kind of social connections are very, very stress, the releasing and stress. What is it? They basically make your stress a lot less stressful. So don't hide, but get out there and connect with the right people. So nature, socials, and then sensual experiences like taking a hot bath, like listening to your favorite music, like Cooking your favorite food and enjoying it with other people, like maybe I don't know, enjoying some very, very tasty your favorite like dessert, very slowly savoring it, or maybe like smelling some essential oils and for doing something with your hands, like all of this, you know, sensual experiences, going for massages and that kind of you know, spa treatments, also very, very good for your body and very, very good for your soul. So, don't forget that they are very good tools for releasing your stress and making you just a little bit more relaxed and chill and comfortable in life. So, nature, socials, nature, socials, and sensuals, if I were to sum it up, three tools in this like environmental and experiential part of our stress releasing toolkit.

Build Your Stress Prescription Plan

SPEAKER_00 22:54

So, today to sum it up, before we sum it up, guys, and I'm gonna give you additional trick to get better with stress management. Before we sum it up, please do me the biggest favor that there is, share this podcast with at least one person who you can discuss it with, practice together, keep each other accountable, perhaps even doing some social naturing or sensuals together, or share it with at least one other person, re-review this podcast so we can reach more people and we all a little bit chilled and a little bit more empowered for the stressors in our lives, right? So please do that. And let's sum it up. First, before we're gonna sum it up, how I recommend practicing it. A, notice what stresses you out, that's gonna be your stress trigger. And whenever that trigger happens, depending on the situation, use or prescribe yourself to use one of the tools, right? If it's at work, then probably something with breath work, or maybe going for a walk might help, or psychologically thinking about all the resources that you've got to get through this, or maybe doing worst-case scenario exercise, the fear setting by Tim Ferris, right? So, first stress uh signal, or what's what usually stresses you out, and then prescribe yourself one or a couple of tools that you're gonna do to help you deal with that better and be more effective with life, and then enjoy your life after it passes a lot more and a lot faster. So, stress signal plus choose your stress prescription and put it on your calendar as a reminder so you don't forget, maybe even as a daily reminder, so you build a habit of using that. And then let's sum up all of the uh tools that we talked about. Layer one, physical release. It's your breath work, one of the most convenient tools you can use for any sort of stressor, which helps to switch your rest and digest part of the nervous system that will help you to relax. Then we have scan and release, where do you hold your stress physiologically, release that, and then train it? Uh high-intensity interval exercise, cold exposure, sauna. So when things physiologically feel stressful, you stay calm in your mind. Kind of like imagine if you were to jump out of the plane skydiving, but you still can't stay calm in your mind. Even for the body, it's quite a stressful experience. Then we have the situation where you feel overwhelmed, overloaded, catastrophizing, worrying too much. We have three axes either, fear setting by Tim Ferris, worst case scenario, taking stock and deleting. You don't have to deal with everything at the same time. Worry window, dedicating specific time window to worry about things and think about worrying you things. The next layer is all about building psychological resilience so you bounce back better, faster, and so psychologically you feel empowered, not overwhelmed by the experience. So, two frameworks. I've got this, in list all the experiences, hard things that you went through in your life, and all the resources that you have in your capacity to deal with what's on your plate. And then I get to do this, right? You and awesome human that get to go through challenges to grow to experience a richer side of life. So these are two reframes to make you more resilient psychologically and emotionally. I've got this and I get to do this, and then the last but not least: the environment and physiological experiences, naturing, socializing, and all kinds of sensual experiences to help to relax yourself a little bit more and feel a lot chiller, so then you get more capacity to deal with whatever life is gonna put on your plate. I hope this is helpful, guys. I enjoyed doing this podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in and listening. And till next time, stay chill, keep distressing, and keep growing.