AUDIOCAST TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to the Aging with Strength audiocast. I’m your host, Paul von Zielbauer.
I recently had a life-changing conversation about managing stress that I want to share with you — because all the evidence out there right now, in real life and on my digital screens, suggests that our society, almost to a person, is struggling with an ungodly amount of stress and its profoundly negative consequences.
One of the more disturbing features of this stress is that it’s often insidious, showing up in our behaviors in small ways that we often don’t notice. But others do. Others we love and who love us.
This isn’t normal, because the sources of this stress are increasingly systemic, not idiosyncratic. They feel existential and not reframeable if we each just adopt a better attitude. I’m talking about things like the growing instability of our financial, social and political futures, and our growing hostility to perceiving those who exist outside the bubbles that we live in as our equals who should be heard.
Stress begets anger. It ends friendships and starts wars — or Twitter threads that start them. It’s our job, though, to manage our stress, which of course first requires understanding it.
I wasn’t doing my job very well, which led to that life-changing conversation I mentioned at the start. Perhaps you’re not handling the source of your stress so well, either, right now.
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Maybe you’re struggling with a painful, chronic injury or disease. Maybe you’re managing a parent in the grip of dementia. Or trying not to panic about money and being able to afford life as you know it. Maybe our government’s willingness to act less as a public steward and more like a vaccine-skeptical kleptocracy is forcing you to think about your future in ways you never imagined.
Well, then, let me tell you about that life-changing conversation.
It was with my 10-year-old daughter a few weeks ago, and it was came after she’d asked me the same question on 3 separate occasions during the previous two weeks:
“Papa, are you stressed?” So I knew something was up. And I sat down with her, on a late Sunday afternoon, to ask her what she meant, exactly.
I call that conversation life-changing because it forced me to change a couple things in my life, to better manage that stress.
Because she often sees me working on AGING with STRENGTH, my daughter naturally assumed that the stress signals she was registering from me were a product of my writing, podcasting and publishing those short #WorkoutWednesday videos. To a sharp, empathic 5th grader, that made sense.
This Substack was not the source of the deeper veins of life-influencing stress, and I knew it. I remember what one of my Columbia Graduate School of Journalism classmates told me after she became a mom: She said, kids are emotional tuning forks — they don’t miss a note.
Well put.
So as my daughter and I talked on the couch that late Sunday afternoon about what, exactly she was picking up on, it suddenly dawned on me: the SOURCES of my stress — finances, career, relationships, the state of the United States, and so on — hadn’t changed so much as my ability to regularly purge them. Through exercise.
You see, in May I underwent surgery on my shoulder to repair two torn tendons, a long-term solution that had short-term consequences that, by the way, the medical system simply never warns you about. Which is not being able to physically exercise, at all, for months.
That matters because the way I regulate and dissipate stress and emotional pain is by moving my body — most often with gym workouts, swimming, tennis or surfing. I meditate, too, sometimes, but the way I hit the emotional reset button on almost any problem has always been a hard workout. Many of you are the same way, I’m sure. But for months after shoulder surgery, breaking a sweat wasn’t possible.
And so, sitting on the couch with my kid, I realized that my stress levels were building, like liquid inside a blister with nowhere to go except sideways, in the wrong direction for the wrong reasons. And I wasn’t noticing when that was happening. But my 10-year-old tuning fork sure was.
So, I told her that I think I just figured out what she’s noticing. And it’s the consequences of a necessary surgical intervention that I hadn’t anticipated. The emotional plaque, so to speak, that builds up from a lack of movement — Physical movement. Bodies were meant to move — sometimes even bodies on the mend. It was time to start moving my body again, in whatever way I could, to burn off the stress that had begun to bleed into my time with my child.
There was one other revelation I received as a result of that daddy-daughter sit-down. On a table by the couch, I keep a personal journal. As we spoke, I realized I hadn’t written in my journal in weeks. Maybe months. Anyone who keeps a diary knows how effective writing out one’s thoughts is in managing stress — emotional and physical. Writing out your mind is absolutely therapeutic.
I’d done it for years but life gets busy and things fall away and you lose sight of small ways to clean out your emotional clock and just keep it ticking.
So, I told my daughter I needed to start not only exercising again but also writing in my journal, daily. Tomorrow morning, I told her, I’d wake up early and write. She said, “Okay.”
The next morning, a school day, I woke her up. She sat up and asked, “did you write in your journal?”
Yes, I said, I did. I’m not a morning person, AT ALL, but I set my alarm for 6:30am, got up, made myself a coffee and wrote. And I’ve been doing that damned regularly ever since then. And that felt right and good. Because I was doing my job.
