A Busy Woman's Guide to Stress Management

Many high-achieving women feel like they’re constantly running but never caught up.

When you’re stretched thin and overwhelmed, advice like “take care of yourself” seems out of touch.

Who has time for one more task on an already full plate?

But not managing your stress comes at a price: your physical and mental wellbeing.

The good news is that you can activate recovery quickly, sometimes in seconds if you know which practices will truly help.

Today, I’m sharing 6 nervous system reset practices that will truly help you begin to recover inside your busy days without asking you to completely overhaul your life. 

If you would like more support, I'll be leading a free virtual workshop on May 27th called Transform Your Day: Three Simple Strategies for Stress Management. This is a 60-minute workshop for women who want practical strategies to reduce stress and create calmer, more intentional days.

You can get all of the details by subscribing to the Humans Leading newsletter. 

Join me for more over on social media:

• Blog: Humans Leading | Jillian Bybee
• Instagram: Jillian Bybee, MD (@lifeandpicu)
• LinkedIn: Jillian Bybee, MD | LinkedIn 
• Threads: @LifeandPICU
• Website: Contact — Jillian Bybee, MD (jillianbybeemd.com)

If you’re ready to kickstart your journey (or your team's journey) to a less stressed life, I’m ready to help you! You can get in touch about 1:1 coaching or inviting me to facilitate a workshop for your group, get in touch via my website. 

Transcript

Stress Management For Real Life

How Stress Works In The Body

Micro Breaks And Mindset Barriers

Practice One Breathing For Calm

Practice Two Move Your Body

Practices Three And Four Connection

Practices Five And Six At Home

Poem And Closing Reflection

Free Workshop And Coaching Invite

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello, and welcome to Humans Leading, a podcast for overwhelmed people looking to live less stressed, more satisfying lives. I'm Dr. Jillian Bibe, a pediatric critical care medicine physician, mom, certified stress management coach, and wellness trainer who uses my personal experience with burnout recovery to help others do the same. This podcast is for anyone who is feeling frustrated or overwhelmed with their current way of living and looking for practical ways to make an impact in their lives today. If you're looking to feel less stressed, less stuck, and more fulfilled in your life, this is your podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we'll be talking about stress management for real life. I know, like me, a lot of you are busy professional women with a lot of things to juggle, and you're not looking for solutions that take a lot of time because you don't have a lot of time. So today I'll be teaching you things that you can start to incorporate into your day without having to completely overhaul your life. Time can certainly be a barrier for us as we think about stress management and taking care of ourselves, but I think there are other barriers to consider as well. I recently had a conversation on a different podcast that will be coming out in a few weeks. And as I was talking with the interviewer, she said something to me to the effect of, well, we all know that we should be taking breaks and caring for ourselves. And as she said that, it was like a little bolt of lightning went off in my head. I could see clearly that the me who burned out earlier in my career very much had no idea about this. I did not think I needed to be taking care of myself. Instead, I thought I was invincible because I had been conditioned to be that way by medical training. I think a lot of us as professional women can find ourselves feeling that way. Like we are supposed to be more than humans, people who don't need any breaks or self-care. And I had to learn the hard way that that just wasn't true. And I've seen a lot of my clients and other people that I work with have to learn that lesson as well. So let me assure you, as a human being who juggles a lot, you need and deserve rest and regular breaks. Not just the rest that you might get on vacation or if you have a free moment, but the kind that is regularly scheduled into your day. And it doesn't have to take you a lot of time. One of the things I hear most often from my coaching clients about why they can't take care of themselves is they don't have time to do it. I think they have a misunderstanding about stress management and stress itself, so we'll address some of that in a minute. But before we get to that, I want to ask you the same question that I ask them. How's your current approach to stress management and self-care going? If I had to wager a guess, it might not be going that well since you've tuned into something called a busy woman's guide to stress management. And if that happens to be you, don't worry, you're not alone. You're in good company with me, a lot of my coaching clients, my friends, and many of my colleagues. But I do want you to take a minute and think, what is my current approach to stress management and self-care costing me? I once asked this question to a coaching client of mine who was feeling very burnt out, and her answer surprised her and stopped her in her tracks. When I asked her this question, without even missing a beat, she said, my sanity. And then we just sat there and stared at each other for a few minutes while the weight of what she had said settled on her. The good news for that client is that she was finally able to admit out loud what she'd known inside for a long time. She was feeling overwhelmed, stuck, burnt out, frazzled, and unappreciated at home and in her workplace. She wasn't really sure how to move forward, but that's when I assured her that she didn't have to do it all by herself. That is what coaching is for, having a non-judgmental place when you can say things out loud, and then you can start to make strategies that really work for your life. Because as I've said many times on this podcast and on my blog Humans Leading, if you want a different experience, you have to do something different. But the best part is you don't have to do it alone. You can do it with a coach like me, or maybe a mentor, an accountability buddy, or you can implement the strategies that you learn on this podcast. When I was first recovering from burnout, Emily and Amelia Nagoski's book Burnout transformed the way I thought about well-being and stress. In their book, they write, wellness is not a state of being, it's a state of action. In other words, wellness is not a place we reach. It's a set of actions that we take in response to the stress that we experience in our lives. So in order to stay well and avoid burnout, we have to routinely utilize practices that actually address our stress, including during the busy times of our life. I often say, if you feel like you're not able to take a break, that's a great sign that it's time to take one. But most of us haven't learned to truly address and manage stress. We often avoid it by pushing it aside, hoping it goes away. We also think that we'll reach some magical point in the future when we'll reach a point of feeling calmer, settled, and content, and then we can really start to live and enjoy our lives. I know that this is true because that's exactly what I used to do and believe before I experienced burnout. But I eventually had to learn this lesson the hard way. In order to get out of the cycle of chronic stress and prevent myself from burning out again, I needed to learn to build stress management activities into my daily life, no matter how busy I am. And so do you. The practices that are the most helpful and science-backed are not complicated. They're the ones that actually allow your nervous system to recover. And it's possible to build these things into your day so that you don't have to add one more thing to your plate. But before we get into those strategies, it's helpful to understand a little bit more about how stress works in your body. I do want to say that we have a misunderstanding about stress in our culture. It's really been vilified as the enemy, and many of the teaching and practices I see in wellness culture are aimed at eliminating stress. But we don't need to eliminate stress. We actually need to understand it, and then we can work with it. Stress is a series of chemical signals inside your body that occur as a reaction to a stimulus called a stressor. So you experience a stressor with one of your senses, or possibly with something that you think, and then your stress cycle, aka the hormones inside of your body, are activated. In some situations, this can be incredibly helpful and even life-saving. For example, jumping out of the way of a car, getting out of a potentially dangerous interaction, or running from danger. But stress is often more subtle than that. The stress system is the thing that gets you ready to take action. This is the helpful kind of stress, also known as challenge stress. It gets you ready, it improves your performance. So for me in my job as a pediatric critical care medicine physician, this is the type of stress I need in my day-to-day life to keep me ready for emergencies that come in. You can think of the stress response like the gas pedal. It's activated by the sympathetic nervous system and it activates us. It allows us to get going. This can be really helpful, but when it becomes overactive, you can think of it like flooring the gas pedal. Eventually, you're going to get burnout. So that's why we need to intentionally apply the break or do things that let the stress cycle end so that we can recover from our stress. This is what allows us to avoid burnout and also to have well-being in our lives, even during busy times. If the sympathetic nervous system is like the gas pedal of your body, you can think of the parasympathetic nervous system like the break. This is what allows you to get out of the cycle of stress and on your way with your day with more calmness and well-being. It doesn't take long to activate this recovery response. It can happen in as little as a few seconds. I often weave several of these restorative practices into my day via micro breaks. To me, a micro break is something that takes less than five minutes. But as I mentioned, you can start to activate your parasympathetic nervous system and your recovery response in just a few seconds with a few deep breaths. There are so many different ways to do this, but I decided to share just six of them with you today. These are the things that I use on a regular basis and the things that I teach other people in my workshops and my coaching that really seem to make a difference and are really easy to get started without a lot of time investment. Before we get into those six practices, I think it's important for us to realize that we can unknowingly or knowingly do things to keep us stuck in our stress cycle. The first of those things is just a lack of awareness that we're actually stuck in a stress cycle. Many of us are rushing through our days, which is fueled by our stress cycles, and we have no idea about how much stress we're experiencing. This is why I've done a practice of designing mindful check-ins for myself. It's something that I help my coaching clients and my colleagues with. We need to become aware of the fact that we're experiencing stress and that we might be having side effects from the stress in order to begin to address it. The second common thing is that we might have negative thoughts about the fact that we're experiencing stress or that we need a break. Many of the high-achieving professional women who I work with have a really hard time with the fact that they can't do everything. They start to judge themselves for that. And I'll tell you what I tell them if this is something that you're experiencing. You can do anything, but not everything. Part of the reason I named this podcast Humans Leading was because I needed a reminder for myself that I'm a human being with human limitations, and human beings need and deserve rest and self-care. We need time away. And so if you are experiencing stress because you haven't taken a break in forever, cut yourself some slack. You're just another one of us who's needed to learn this the hard way, and you can choose to do something different. You can actually get started on the first of the nervous system restoration practices right now while you're listening to this podcast. Take a deep breath in through your nose and then sigh it out through your mouth. Take a deep breath in through your nose and sigh it out through your mouth. This process of taking an inhale with a longer exhale activates the nerve that is the relaxation nerve. It's called the vagus nerve. It's part of the parasympathetic nervous system and it automatically puts the break on your stress whenever you're feeling it. I think this is a great thing for time-pressured people because it doesn't take a lot of time to take these deep breaths. If you want to go deeper on the breathing practice, you can do something called 4-7-8 breathing. That's where you inhale for a count of four, hold your breath for a count of seven, and exhale for a count of eight. This 4-7-8 breathing activates that vagus nerve by intentionally lengthening your exhale. You can do just a few rounds of it whenever you're feeling stressed and start to feel better nearly immediately. I want to be clear when I say better in this scenario. When I say better, I mean better than you were just a second ago before you started doing the practices. I don't mean better as in fixed. These practices that I'm sharing today will not solve all of your problems. And looking for an easy way out or an easy button is what often keeps us stuck in stress. We aren't willing to try small practices because we don't feel like they help enough. We're looking for something that will allow us to snap our fingers or wave a magic wand and feel better. None of these things will do that for you, and that solution doesn't exist. Because if it did, no one would have this problem anymore. And it's why there's a giant wellness industrial complex out there trying to sell you things to help you with your stress because no one has cracked the code, and no one will crack the code. The code is just taking small intentional actions again and again, like these breaths when you feel stressed, and noticing over time that you start to feel better as you build more of them into your life. Practice number two is moving your body. I'm really careful to say moving your body and not exercise here, because people seem to have a lot of different ideas about what exercise needs to be. It needs to be a certain length of time, with a certain intensity, maybe with certain equipment. And often those things that we think exercise has to be get in the way of us actually doing the thing. So when I'm talking about stress and nervous system recovery, I say moving your body because I just mean that. Moving your body could be stamping your feet on the ground. Doing a few minutes of feet stamping has actually been shown to activate your parasympathetic nervous system, lead to nervous system recovery. You can also move your body by moving it from place to place. Most of us have to walk from one place to another during our days, and this can be a great way to spend a few more minutes moving around. I like to go into the stairwell at work. Sometimes I put music on and I walk up and down the stairs for a period of time, especially if I'm having a stressful time or if I anticipate a difficult time coming forward. And this three to five minutes, or maybe even longer, allows me to recover in a way that I wouldn't if I was otherwise sitting still. Number three on the nervous system recovery practice list is laughing. I love humor. You might notice I'm a little bit sarcastic, and possibly that's what drew you to this podcast, but I like laughing. Laughing with people I care about, laughing at silly videos on my phone, sending memes to my friends. Laughing is a nervous system recovery practice, so finding positive ways to laugh during your day can be helpful. I keep saying positive because number four on this list is having positive social interaction. This could be with a colleague, a friend, a family member, or maybe your barista at your coffee shop. These positive social interactions allow the release of dopamine in our bodies, they allow us to feel good, and as a result of feeling good, our body gets a signal that it's able to relax and our parasympathetic nervous system is activated. It's also important to say positive here because often what we do, especially in workplaces, is we have negative social interactions. These are the things where we start complaining about something and then another person starts to pile on. Eventually, you've all complained about the workplace, and if you really stop to notice, you might feel even worse after that time than you did before you started. And so start taking notice of who allows you to feel good and who drains your energy. If you're feeling particularly stressed, being around those people who drain your energy and make it worse are not a good use of your time. These first four practices, breathing, moving your body, laughing, and having a positive social interaction, have the ability to be woven into our days, especially when we're in the workplace. Our breath is always available to us. We are often moving our body from one place to another. We can laugh at ourselves or other people or funny videos, and then we can have positive social interactions as they come up. These are things that I build into my day in multiple ways to allow me to have little pockets of recovery often, instead of waiting until I get home when I might not have the energy for recovery. They're also the things that allow me to arrive home with a lot more energy than I otherwise would. By just starting to build these four practices into my life, I was able to avoid burnout, even during busy times. That doesn't mean that I don't experience stress, I don't experience exhaustion. It just means that I don't get entirely depleted like I used to earlier in my career. The last two nervous system recovery practices are a little bit more challenging to do inside of your workday, and so I like to do them outside once I'm home or when I have a free moment. Those are creative expression and affection. For me, creativity has always been important, but when I was in medical training, I definitely put it to the side. In recent years, I've reminded myself how much I like painting and have recently bought myself some new painting supplies. I wouldn't say that I'm a master painter by any means, but I definitely have a good time mixing colors and seeing what comes. The final practice of affection is also easier at home. I have a four and a half year old who sometimes likes hugs, and so I can get them from him. I also have a husband, many people have pets. If you can find a way to get affection from other people or to give yourself affection, that is also a nervous system recovery practice. So, in summary, the six things that we talked about that you can start to build into your day, both during work and after, are breathing, moving your body, laughing, having positive social interactions, creative expression, and affection. By starting to figure out ways that you can incorporate these things into your day, you'll start to notice that your stress level starts to go down. You might feel like you are a little bit more clear-headed, you're a lot less likely to react negatively or impulsively, and you'll be able to free up a little bit of space for you to decide how you want to move forward in your life with other changes. To close today, I'm going to read you a poem by Alex Klingberg. It's called A List of Things to Remember. Most of the time, you can meet your own needs. Walking in the woods solves more problems than you'd think. Our hearts synchronize when we sing. Your inner voice is not cruel. Cruelty's voice is always someone else. Animals know things. We are animals. We can sense the rain, a storm, the change of the seasons. We have a symbiotic relationship with plants, and we need each other to survive. Rest and time fix many, many things. It's not too late to love your life. And with that, I hope it's a reminder to you that it's not too late to start to do things differently. You could make a change now, as you end this episode, to take a few deep breaths and think about what would help support you as you move forward with the rest of your day. If you would like more support and more practice learning about this and incorporating it into your own life, I'll be leading a free virtual workshop on May 27th at 7 p.m. called Transform Your Day Three Simple Strategies for Stress Management. I would love to see you there. If you'd like details, you can sign up for my humans leading newsletter at humansleading.substack.com. And for those of you who are looking to go deeper, I also have some spots available for individual coaching clients that are open. If you've been thinking about making changes in your life but have found yourself stuck, I'd love to hop on a call and see how I could help support you and if we're the right fit for working together. If you are interested in that, you can email me at info at gillianbibeymd.com. Thank you again for listening, and I'll see you here next time.