Imagine, since you were a baby, every time you feel stress, or any kind of negative emotion in your life, you collect a small rock to symbolize the negative distress.

You place the rock into a backpack you’re carrying on your shoulders.

You add one rock every time you feel stress.

Every time you cry – you add a rock.

Every time you feel anger – you add a rock.

Every time you feel hurt – you add a rock.

Every time you feel sad or scared – you add rocks.

Every time you feel guilt or shame – you add more rocks.

Every time you put your body under stress – you add more rocks.

For every negative experience you add a metaphorical rock in your backpack and you carry it around with you everywhere you go.

Years go by and you’re still collecting your rocks, and the backpack is becoming heavier and heavier.

We feel the intensity of carrying the backpack.

It affects our ability to move through the world easily and effortless. It effects how we think and how we feel. It even influences the decisions we make.

This is exactly what stress stacking looks like in our life.

We're carrying around metaphorical rocks of stress in our bodies instead of an actual backpack.

The energy that comes from all of these different stressors gets stored inside of us.

It’s physically stored in our mind, body and heart.

Stress stacking has consequences and create big problems in our lives.

This when we hit our tipping point. Like snapping at someone, getting sick or burned out to the point of exhaustion.

It can look like struggling to sleep at night because there’s so much frenetic energy on your mind, and thoughts and feelings whirling around.

It often leaves us in a reactive state. Unfortunately, it can shift us from a place of mental or physical wellness to mental or physical illness.

When clients come to us they have compounded so much stress that it’s causing big issues in their lives. For example, feeling overwhelmed with life, anxious, on edge, apathetic and/or depressed. Usually experiencing physical pain or tension too.

They've compounded so much stress over time, they feel paralyzed and don't know what to do.

It's affecting relationships with their loved ones, their work performance and their ability to achieve their goals.

We've been there too.

Almost everyone goes through this.

If you're experiencing this, you're not alone.

Human-beings are the only species in nature who tend to store stress. If we look at the animal kingdom, as soon as they encounter a stressful situation they deal with it and then physically shake it off to let it go.

We need to do the same, our health, wellbeing and performance depends on it.

We need to let go on 3 levels:

1. Discharge physical tension

2. Let go of emotion

3. Relearn mental paradigms

Here’s how to start.

This might sound like a lot, but chances are you’re already doing some of these really well and there’ll only be a few areas you personally need to focus on.

Often one of the most neglected areas of wellness but sleep yields a very high return for minimal effort. You can have the best nutrition, mindset and skills in the world but if your sleep quality is compromised it can cause suffering in the long-term. Easy wins here are fixing sleep timings, room temperature and lighting.

When we take as little as 5 minutes per day to pause, we reconnect with our mind-body. We reset our natural breathing rhythm which allows our nervous system to rest and recover. An easy place to start is to inhale though the nose for 5 seconds, slight pause and exhale through the mouth for 5 seconds.

Honouring our body, the way nature intended through movement. It helps stress to flow out of our system easily and effortlessly. Yoga, swimming, gym workouts and walking are all simple but effective.

Balanced food and water intake isn’t a diet. It’s a lifestyle choice which is sustainable and efficient. It gives your body all the nutrients it needs to function correctly. Simply optimising the times you eat and hydrating with clean water, celtic sea salts and lemon will give a massive boost.

Our energy is our greatest asset. For us to perform at our best we must learn how to utilise our energy in the most sufficient and resourceful ways. Taking time to ground barefoot in nature and work on something that gives us meaning in life is a quick way to improve this one.

Our self-talk determines how we feel. It affects our ability to make healthy decisions. Resourceful self-talk is critical to experiencing an enjoyable quality of life. Journaling will help to raise self-awareness here and highlight changes needed.

Our emotions are signals for us - what is good or not. It’s up to us to learn from them, accept them and let go of them. Acknowledging what we are feeling is the easiest way to prevent emotional suffering. Checking in with feelings daily will bring start to eliminate stress stacking.

In life, we’re either moving away from what we don’t want, stuck in one place or moving towards what we want. To live a vibrant, happy and healthy life we must grow towards what we want. Audit your life and look for areas which need a shift in direction.

How do you think you’re doing in these 8 areas?

We’ve put together a super simple (and free) assessment tool to make it easy for you to check.

Click here >> It takes less than 5 minutes to complete, you’ll get a personalised report and unlock a bonus game plan session with one of our wellbeing specialists.

Mastering the 8 areas above will already set you on a healthy path, but to guarantee lasting change in your life it requires deeper work. To truly master high performance, health and happiness, the following will take you to the next level.

It’s time to make your own rules about what truly works for you. What you thought was working – isn’t if you’re still struggling with stress.

Work with an expert in this field, there are many techniques. We use time paradigm techniques combined with breath-work as it’s a surprisingly enjoyable process for emotional release.

How do you want and choose to respond to life’s challenges? What paradigm of thinking and being do you need to adopt to handle stress in a healthy way?

It’s harder for stress to stack up when you take care of where it’s trying to live. Basic movement and nutrition will keep the wolf from the door but bio-hacking is where longevity lives. Biohacking is the goal of optimising your health, performance and life using modalities that we have all available to us. A few examples are retraining breathing, light exposure, re-mineralising the body, releasing tension and resetting on a cellular level.

Life gets easy when both your conscious and subconscious are singing from the same hymn sheet. Alignment in who you are, what you believe, choose, and stand for makes life way less stressful. This level of heart mind coherence creates a mastery level resourcefulness and resilience.

To discover even more stress solutions and to go deeper with more practical tips you’ll enjoy these podcast episodes:

- Episode 42, 3 Stress Busting Myths & Tips

- Episode 44, How to deal with overwhelm?

- Episode 46, Is stress really a choice?

Find links to the Stress Relief in Your Pocket Podcast on your favourite platform here.

You might be wondering, if this all really necessary?

Perhaps you feel ok most of the time and it’s just the random stressful periods that can get too much. If this is the case for you, please know that’s a form stress stacking in and of itself.

Unless you’ve already let go of the past stress that’s already been stacked, you’re only going to be adding more fuel to fire that could explode at any time. Especially you haven’t mastered the recommendations above.

Remember, stress explosions come in different shapes and sizes for everyone. From small conflicts, poor performance, lethargy - to the more serious such as: emotional breaking point, physical burnout to mental illness.

Just imagine the effects those would have on your loved ones, what it’d mean for your work life and for your own sense of health and happiness.

As Sigmund Fraud says “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways”.

It’s your choice.

Remember the backpack full of metaphorical rocks? Full of the stress and unresolved negative emotions and experiences from the past?

It’s time to put it down.

If you don’t, it’ll get heavier and heavier, your problems will worsen and the effects of stress will become greater.

Do you want to continue being a stress stacker?

If not, complete our scorecard and unlock your free 1:1 game plan with a wellbeing specialist... 

By completing the scorecard you'll get personalized insights on where stress is holding you back and learn how to turn stress into a tool for sustainable performance. 

In your game plan session we'll decode your results and walk away with a step-by-step strategy for success.

If you’re experiencing stress explosions and ready to eliminate stress from your world right away then let’s talk to remove all that stress stacking that you've already been doing up until now. 

Until next time,

Be Well, Mean Well, Make a Difference that Lasts,

Love Charlotte and Jonathan