Moment 179: How To Stop Stress From Hurting You: Mo Gowdat

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Mo Gawdat (0:54)

The sources of stress in your life. The sources of stress in your life. We call them a ton of stress. T-O-N-N. And you know, trauma, obsessions, nuisances and noise. Trauma happens from outside you. It's a major change in your life. And it hits you so hard and it breaks you for a short time. But believe it or not, 91% of people will face at least one, but often several PTSD-inducing traumatic event in their life. That's like the loss of a loved one or, you know, losing your job so unexpectedly to the point you have to suffer or whatever. Okay? Being in a war zone and so on. Believe it or not, 93% of them will recover within three months. Trauma is not what breaks us. Right? The interesting stuff that breaks us is the long application of obsessions, nuisances and trauma and noise. Obsessions are macro issues that you tell yourself. Don't exist in the real world at all. Okay? Like, I have a belly, a little belly so no one will ever love me. You can obsess about this for the rest of your life. Right? And make it your life story and basically create a lot of stress as a result of that script that you told yourself. Okay? You know, nuisances are the little ones, the little forms of that. You know, things that are triggered every day by you passing in front of the mirror as you walk out of the door and you go like, oh man, you're still that or whatever. Right? Believe it or not, most of our stress, however, comes because of what we call nuisances. Nuisances are stressors that don't break you. They're not trauma. Okay? But there are so many of them that you include in your life, so many of them. When Alice wrote the limit bit of the chapter, she wrote a beautiful script about the first five minutes or ten minutes of your day, and she started to count the stressors that you trigger in your life in those minutes, from the very loud alarm, right? To the, you know, opening your social media and seeing something upsetting, or, you know, opening WhatsApp and getting a message you don't like, and so on and so forth, right? And this is five minutes, 10 minutes, before you even had your coffee, you get 10, 15 stressors.

The trick is, how beneficial for your life have those been? And if we're aware, if we're able to look at those stressors and say, hold on, I'm going to take an inventory of all of the things that stressed me last week, okay? A genuinely honest inventory. And I'm going to tell myself, oh, by the way, I don't need this, I don't need this, I don't need this, I don't need this, right? My commute. If I leave 10 minutes early, would it be easier? If I leave 10 minutes late, would it be easier? If I take music or The Diary Of A CEO Podcast with me, would it become easier, right? And if you actually attentively, deliberately look at all of the nuisances in your life, how many of them can you limit? Countless, I promise you, you can limit countless nuisances. You can remove that friend that's annoying you.

By simply texting them and saying, I don't want to be your friend anymore. Or simply winding down the conversations. Or when they send you something or talk to you about something, you go like, oh, very interesting, right? Instead of engaging in those things, can you limit the amount of junk food you let into your life? Can you limit the amount of restrictions and control that you apply to yourself in your life? And millions of little things.

SPEAKER_1 (4:35)

Practically, though, how does someone who's listening to this now that has built that life, you know, where they're in the corporate world and they're the managing director of this fund or whatever they are, they're listening to this now, they're on the way to work on the tube or the plane or the train or whatever, and they've built up all of these like commitments. So they're getting the WhatsApps, they're getting the emails, they're getting the Pilates instructor checking in, they've built that noise into their life. How do they set about unpacking it without like destroying their life?