Stress is yet another big disease with a little name. And while there’s so much to learn about its sources and treatments, a great place to start is with 10 key ideas around stress. And the value of paying more attention to it.

 

1. Don’t Assume You’re Not

Even if you don’t think you’re stressed, you might very well be. Things that you’ve taken for granted, have learned to live with, assumed are an unavoidable part of your wiring or job might be completely unnecessary stress that can be unwound.

2. Even If You’re Not, Pretend That You Are

Stress management techniques can create a lifestyle that makes everything in life so much better and much of it lies in the connection between stress management and brain health. These techniques have been shown to improve mental and brain health, decision making and memory, happiness and optimism, and even your chances of a more successful career and life.

3. Chronic Stress Harms Everything

It’s connected to the top six causes of death in the world. It can kill brain cells and reduce the size of certain and very important parts of the brain, it can hurt the heart, the gut, your sleep, your sex life, not to mention happiness, joy, motivation, optimism, and your career.

4. It’s Almost Completely Avoidable

No matter how much stress you have in your life, which all start as stressors, stress can be almost completely eliminated. At the very least it can brought to its least harmful level, and often just by changing the way you think.

Stress is mainly a disease of thinking, because you fail to properly process the negative thoughts created by stressful things around you. Learning to process those thoughts properly, to rewire your caveman thinking, can be very effective in taming stress.

5. You Have So Many Good Choices

When it comes to managing stress you have more than a dozen good options, to choose from. They’re all very natural to we humans, they’re easy and even enjoyable. They all have solid research behind them some including thousands of studies going back decades. And I’ve tried them all on my decades of chronic stress and they really do work.

6. Metacognition Might Be The Most Important

As I just alluded to, because stress is mainly a disease of thinking one of the most powerful treatments is metacognition, thinking about how you think, hacking your thinking.

One of the most important statements I heard during my research into stress was that while you are not your thoughts, you are not what you think. But you are absolutely how you think.

And I’ll be going into that in a lot more detail because its benefits ripple far beyond stress management. And again, it was a life saver for me.

7. Calming Stress Becomes Second Nature

Because the brain loves habits and routines as soon as it feels something is working, like a breathing exercise, it files it away in a response library and automatically triggers it when you need it.

So when managing stress you’re not burdened with yet another set of routines you need to find time for every day – it quickly becomes automatic. It’s just the brain protecting itself. And you. Which are the same.

8. Learn From Hackers

The DAM system that I created and which evolved from the cyber security hacker mindset is not only excellent in figuring out your stress, but everything else around you.

It gives you an opportunity to take a god’s eye view of your life and everything in it and determine what’s really important to you. A taking stock that cleans out a lot of the toxic exhaust of life and one we should engage in regularly.

9. You’re Also Hacking Your Brain

Through the process of hacking your stress you’re also hacking your brain, and we all need to do that. Your brain is absolutely everything about you but like most of us, you probably haven’t spent much time figuring out how it works, how you might be hurting it, and how to get the best from it.

By hacking your stress you’ll learn so much more about how you can think yourself into a much healthier, more content, and even more successful human.

10. An Investment In Your Brain Capital

Finally, and yet more good news, hacking your stress and your brain is a massive investment in your current and future self. Economists now widely agree that our future and especially in a world of ai requires a serious focus on brain capital – the right mix of brain skills and brain health. Hacking your stress is a powerful tool for brain health.