#68: When Stress Hits: 3 Ways to Regain Control

There are moments when stress doesn’t politely knock — it barges in. Your heart races. Your thoughts scatter. Everything feels urgent. And suddenly, you’re not leading your life… you’re reacting to it.

In this episode of The Distracted Dreamer, I’m walking you through what stress actually is, why we default to reactive mode, and three powerful shifts that help you regain control in the moment. This isn’t about eliminating stress or pretending life isn’t heavy. It’s about learning how to manage stress by leading yourself through it.

If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed, tense, or stuck in the spiral lately, this conversation will help you steady your nervous system, quiet false urgency, and think clearly again — even when everything feels loud.

3 KEY TAKE AWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Stress is activation — and activation can be managed.
• You may not control every event, but you always have influence over your response.
• Feeling stressed doesn’t mean you’re incapable — it means you care.

If this episode resonates, share it with someone who needs a little steadiness right now. 

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Transcript

Speaker 3 0:01

You're never too busy, too tired, too old, or too anything to pursue your dreams. Welcome to the Distracted Dreamer Podcast, where you'll learn how to move all those never ending distractions aside and chase your dreams with confidence.

0:21

Hello my friend. Welcome back to the Distracted Dreamer podcast. I'm your host Carlene, and I am so glad that you decided to press play today. Um, before we dive in, I wanna ask you something. If you've been loving the distracted dreamer, if these episodes have been helping you think differently or make a little more room for what matters to you. Would you take just a minute to support the show? So wherever you're listening, click subscribe, or tap the Heart, leave a like, rate it, five stars, write a quick review. Whatever feels easy, because it really, truly helps more than you know. It helps me, it helps my family, and it helps me continue this mission of supporting you in your energy, in your dreams and your growth. Now this podcast, it's something I care deeply about, and when you engage with it, the platforms share it with more people who might need it too. So thank you, truly. All right, now let's talk about something that feels very real right now. Everything feels heavy in the world. Do you feel that too? It feels like we're all carrying so much and we're moving through our days. We're busy, we're overwhelmed, and yes, we are stressed. And that's what we're talking about today. Stress. And we're gonna talk about what to do when you are in the weeds, when your nervous system is amped up, when your heart is racing, when your thoughts are really scattered. When you can't focus and when you can't make a thoughtful decision about what the heck to do next. We're talking about when you are in it, not what to do next week, not what to do when you're calmer, not what to do when life slows down, but right there, right in the moment. So first we're gonna talk about what stress really is. We're gonna talk about our default for handling it. We're also going to talk about the difference between stress and overwhelm and why that distinction matters. And then I'm gonna give you three ways that you can respond to stress in the moment. Are you ready? Okay. Let's dive in. So what the heck is stress? Well, at its core stresses your body's response to a perceived demand or threat. It's your nervous system activating to help you deal with something it believes, requires energy, focus, or protection. Now stress, it isn't automatically bad. It's the biological survival mechanism. That's what it's, it's biological, you know, your, he beats faster to pump oxygen and your muscles tighten to prepare for action in your brain. It's scanning for problems to solve, in short, stress is activation, but most of us, we don't think of stress that way. Most of us think stress is I got too much on my plate. This is a very chaotic life. Oh my gosh, I have a very demanding job. We think about other people's expectations, or we think this is just what it means to be an adult and we treat stress like it's something happening to us. You know, it's like the bad weather. It's like we're standing in a storm with no shelter. And today I wanna challenge that because what if stress isn't just about what's happening around you? What if it's also about what's happening within you? Because here's what I've learned from years of coaching. Stress isn't just a life problem, it's a leadership problem specifically. It's about how you lead yourself when the pressure shows up. And that's what this episode is about. It's about how to stay out of reactive mode. It's how to interrupt the spiral. It is how to study yourself when everything inside of you feels very, very loud and chaotic. So let's get into the reactive mode here, because here's the hard truth. Most people spend their days stuck in reactive mode. So see if this sounds familiar to you. Reactive mode looks like replaying conversations in your head. Oh, I do that all the time. It also looks like turning small tasks into high stakes tests. Mm-hmm. Uh, reactive mode is chasing perfection. Guilty reactive mode is avoiding one important thing by doing 12 less important things. What about escaping pressure by scrolling or snacking or just numbing out? And you know what? It becomes a loop, you get stuck in the cycle. You feel pressure, you tense up, you overthink, you avoid, and the pressure builds. And that loop, it's exhausting. And what makes it dangerous isn't just the stress itself. It's the fact that when you're in reactive mode, you're not leading yourself. You're being led by urgency, by fear, by your stress voice, and you wanna know what's interesting. High performers, they don't eliminate stress. That's not the point. They train for it. Just like athletes train their bodies, they train their minds so they don't wait until game day to figure out how to breathe deeply. They do that before. But first, before we go further, I wanna separate two things that people mix up all the time, and that's stress and overwhelm. So stress is that slow kind of. Chronic buildup of unmanaged tension, it's kind of in the background humming quietly, it's just in the background humming quietly. It's the, I've been carrying too much for too long. Feeling overwhelm is different. Overwhelm is the sudden flood of, I can't handle this right now. It is the email that sends your heart racing. It's that unexpected bill, or it's the deadline you forgot about. Overwhelm is acute. Stress is cumulative, and here's the key, when you don't manage overwhelm in the moment. It hardens into long-term stress, and that's why this episode matters because if you can learn to handle the spikes, then you prevent the buildup. Now we're going to move into the three steps that you can take. When you are in the moment and you are like, oh my gosh, what do I do? I can't even think straight. If you do these three steps, you are going to work your way through these moments and feel so much better when you're on the other side of it. Now, when stress hits, most people try to think their way out of it. But that's backwards. Because step one is to reset the body. Your physiology leads your psychology. So the first move, it's not mental, it's physical. Right now, wherever you are, I wanna invite you to take a slow, deep breath in and hold it for a second. And now I want you to exhale slowly. Now, unc unclench your jaw and drop your shoulders. Maybe relax your tongue from the roof of your mouth. And you might not even realize how tense you've been. Your body sends signals to your brain constantly. And when your body is tight and embraced, your brain assumes there's danger. But when you relax your body, your brain gets the message, ah, we're safe enough so you don't need to meditate for 30 minutes. You need maybe 60 seconds of intentional reset. And you know what? High performers, they master this. They reset their bodies before they respond. Okay? That was step one, is to reset your body. Step two is to chunk the work. Here's what I mean. The second thing that stress does is it makes everything feel equally urgent, right? Like everything's important. And you know the saying, when everything is important, nothing is important because when your brain is overloaded, it stops prioritizing. Well, it doesn't know how to do it anymore. So you have to get very conscious about making this work. So you have to chunk the work. And how you do that is you ask yourself what absolutely has to get done in the next hour, and then ask yourself what can wait? And then the third question you ask yourself is, what actually doesn't matter today? Give your brain permission to focus on one thing, not five, not the entire week of to-dos, not your entire five year plan. Just one thing. Because when you reduce the scope, you reduce the threat that your body is picking up on. Overwhelm it. It thrives in that vagueness of, oh, I have so much to do. Oh, so much, so much calm. It thrives in clarity. Oh, I have this one thing to do. That's clear. I can do that. And here's something that's really powerful is finishing one small task. It interrupts the stress loop. Because what it does is it rebuilds agency. So you move from, I can't handle this to, I handled that and that really matters. Okay, now we're moving on to step three, and this is question the story. We're moving to the mind because stress, once it's there, it's fueled by the story you tell yourself about it, you tell yourself, oh, this is a disaster, or, oh, I'm so behind, or, well, here I am failing again. Or, oh my gosh, this always happens to me. But ask yourself, is this really a crisis or is this just a task? Most of the time it's a task. It might be an uncomfortable task. It's probably an inconvenient task, but it's not a crisis. Your stress voice exaggerates everything. It predicts worst case scenarios and it assumes failure. So you are more capable than that voice suggests. Yes, you are. And when you question the story, you create space between you and the stress. And that space is where the power is. But let's go a little deeper here because sometimes it's not just a passing thought. Sometimes it's a belief that you've been carrying for years and those beliefs, they shape how stress shows up in your life. Let me walk you through three common beliefs that we have about stress. And I call these limiting beliefs because they limit us. And the first one is stress is something that happens to me. And this belief, it puts you in the passenger seat. It sounds like. My job is stressful, my kids stress me out. Life is just stressful now. Now are those stressful situations? Absolutely. But here's the truth. Stress is not just what happens. It's how your nervous system interprets what happens. So the event and your response are not the same thing. Between the event and your response there is that space, and that space is called influence. It's not total control. It's not perfection, but influence. So instead of saying, this is stressing me out, try asking, how am I responding to this? And that shift alone, it moves you from victim to leader. That limiting belief of stress is something that happens to me isn't true. So what's the true replacement belief of that? It's, I may not control the event, but I can influence my response, and that's really powerful and it's accurate. And the second limiting belief about stress is, if I'm stressed, it means I can't handle this. I'm not cut out for this, right? If I'm stressed, it means I can't handle this. And this might hit really deep for you because when your body reacts, you know, you get the tight chest and the racing heart, that feels like proof that you're stressed and you're not handling it. But stress is not evidence that you're incapable. It's evidence that you care. It's energy, it's your body. Mobilizing the problem isn't that activation, it's your interpretation of that activation. So instead of I'm stressed, I must be failing. Try saying, my body is activated. Let me regulate it. That's leadership. The true replacement belief here is feeling stressed. Doesn't mean I'm incapable. It means I need to regulate and focus. You can be activated and capable at the same time. Both can be true at the same time. You know, athletes, they feel adrenaline before a game. Speakers feel nerves before they talk. Parents feel pressure when their kids are struggling. Activation doesn't make you weak. It's unmanaged activation that becomes all the chaos that you're feeling. Okay? Limiting belief number three around stress is everything is urgent. If everything feels important, everything feels like a fire. But urgency. Hmm. Guess what? It's often self-created. Yeah. We do that to ourselves. We create the urgency and your brain throws everything into the threat bucket when it's overloaded. But you know what? Just because that happens, that doesn't make it true. So instead ask yourself, if I did nothing about this for 24 hours, what would actually happen? I am gonna tell you often the answer is, uh, very little. And the true replacement belief here is not everything deserves the same level of urgency. So when you lower the false urgency, guess what happens? Your nervous system, it calms down because now it's not fighting 10 imaginary fires, it's just handling one real task. So here's the pattern that I want you to see. Stress intensifies when your beliefs go unquestioned. But when you challenge them very gently and very honestly, you weaken their grip a little bit and you have to understand that you do not replace them with blind positivity. That is not the point. That doesn't work. What you do is you replace them with a truth. A truth that's actually grounded. A truth that gives you agency a truth that allows you to lead yourself. And when you do that, that's when you create the space between you and the stress. And that space is power because that space is your influence. Okay? Remember what I said earlier that stress is a leadership problem. You know in that moment when your heart is racing, you have a choice. Do you let your stress voice lead or do you step in? Like, you don't have to be really loud about it. Leadership isn't loud, but maybe it's just taking that one deep breath. Maybe it's setting one small boundary about what you're gonna be working on. Maybe it's one small decision to listen to your body. This isn't a switch that you flip, you build this by practicing it in real time. So this is a skill. So every time you reset your body, you chunk your work and you question the story. You're strengthening that skill in those small shifts. They create massive shifts in calm for you. If you're in the middle of stress right now, I want you to hear this. Your body is trying to protect you. It's not something that you need to run from, and you are not a sitting duck for anxiety. You do not have to accept that you have more control than you think. So this week don't aim to eliminate stress. Aim to interrupt that reactive mode. Just by taking one breath, just by taking on one task, only one task. Just by reframing that story, you tell yourself about stress. Now in part two, next week we're gonna be talking about how to prepare ahead of time, how to build the systems that will keep you out of landing in crisis mode. So there is actually ways that you can prepare to be stressed. Isn't that great? But for today, I just want you to start right here. Take in everything that we've talked about today, and I want you to think about leading yourself. Leading yourself in those moments. You can do it. You can do this. Lead yourself because you are more capable than you've ever been giving yourself credit for. I believe that you can lead yourself in stressful moments. So if even one thing resonated with you today, please share this with a friend. They'll probably thank you and I will see you in the next episode. Bye for now.

Carlene 19:36

oh, and one more thing. This is the legal language. You know, the stuff that the lawyers put together, and they say that I need to read this to you. So here we go. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I'm not a licensed therapist. This podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professionals. Got it? Good. I will see you in the next episode.