So when we talk about stress, it's that impact where it can be a good impact. And then what I call the bad and the ugly. So the good is where it gets us motivated and excited and energized. But the bad side is when it starts to have an impact and take us away from the kinds of things that we want to be doing to the illness side where we're experiencing depression, and we're experiencing things such as heart attacks and strokes and Crohn's disease and colitis and 80 to 90% of all illnesses have a basis in stress. Understand, what are your early warning signs, and for some people, it may be you know, you feel it in your neck and shoulders, everything tightens up and tenses up other people it may be in their breathing where they feel like somebody's sitting on their chest and they're having trouble breathing.

And so it's it's understanding what are your early warning signs and then what happens to you when you've been in stress for a longer period of time? Where do you start to feel it? And that's where we'll see people saying, well, that keeps me awake at night. And I can't sleep, or you know, my stomach. I've just, I feel like it's always upset that I'm popping Rolaids all the time when I talk about strategies for dealing with stress, I always use the SOS principle. And it was one of those things that I came up to help make it simpler for people to figure out what strategies to put into place.

So the first S stands for situation, what am I going to do about the things that are causing stress in my life? Can I delegate them? Can I simplify them? Can I say no to them? Can I problem solve them in some sort of way? The O stands for how do I make sure that I'm taking care of myself?

And that's actually two parts? Am I sleeping right? Eating right exercising? Am I doing the things that are healthy for me? But also, what am I doing to give myself a break from that stress? The last stands for support, who can you talk to who can you vent to who's been there and done that before you?

I think one of the things we need to look at when we look at how we structure our day, is to really understand that we can't continue to work an entire day at top speed and expect that our productivity is going to stay high. So we need these downtimes this rhythm in order to make sure that You know, we recoup our energy so that we can then put it all back into the next situation. And so those micro breaks, they don't need to be long. And I think that's one of the things that leaders need to be aware of too is that breaks don't need to be these, you know, half hour or one hour kind of rejuvenation centers, it can be just as simple as a little micro break where you stand up and you go for a walk and you get a glass of water, and then you come back to your desk.

So when you start to feel that stress, or when you start to feel like somebody's sitting on your chest or your breathing starts to get heavy, those are the cues that you need to put some strategies into place. And they can be simple strategies. Some of those simple strategies are probably the best one is just doing some deep breathing, that act of filling up your lungs and letting it go actually convinces your body that it's not stressed. And it lets go of even more stressed and so then you're able to focus. drinking a glass of cool water not only helps to relax you but it hydrates you and allows the blood to flow so that you can think more clearly. So there's little things like that.

Standing up and stretching your body helps to get rid of attention that builds up in your muscles