Slow is Smooth, Smooth is fast

Tricks I learned at camp for dealing with stress

My friend got into a skydiving recently. He was asking the sky dive instructor if falling out of a plane from 10,000 feet up got pretty easy after doing it hundreds of times, and the instructor said "Yeah, jumping out of plane barely gets a rise out of me—but I still have to unwind from my job because so many people freak out and have full blown melt downs right before they jump out of a plane—and I have to calm them down or just grab them and jump out!" Being around people freaking out catches up to you and you need to get that all out of your system.

Vibes are contagious. When our nervous system is around other people who are dysregulated and stressed it has a way of being contagious. I was thinking about that story after working summer camp for the month of July, and supervising 50 little kids running around all day, playing in the gym, going to the zoo, getting into food fights in the cafeteria and so on.

By the end of most days, I wasn't stressed out, but I was still surprised to come home and find that I was just totally wiped out—like psychically zonked.

It's not like the youth camp was even physically that demanding, aside from being on your feet and outdoors all day. I figured out it was my limbic system that was tired and drained. I wasn't tired out from feeling my own emotions. Twelve-year-olds have a lot of feelings, especially in large groups. When I realized the stress wasn't my own, it was something external to myself, like the weather, it became a lot easier to deal with.

I even noticed that my nerves being all frazzled translated to feeling more social anxiety than was normal when I went to hang out with my friends, and I started having trouble falling asleep. While I was figuring out how to overcome this, I figured out a few tips and tricks that made being frazzled a little easier to deal with—and I want to share them with you.

#1

I was just open with people about feeling tired out and stressed. When I met up with my friend, and they asked how I was doing — I would be totally honest, "I'm kind of stressed and exhausted!" that made a big difference because I didn't feel like I had to fake that I was feeling chill. I could just be my zapped and frazzled self and they understood.

A lot of my friends are musicians. One of them, who regularly plays shows in front of thousands of people told me, "It's really important for me, before I do a big show that I just have some time to myself right before I go on stage, I just lay down in a dark room, for 20 minutes, you don't even have to sleep, it resets the nervous system." So, I started doing that when I got home after a hectic day at camp. Just lay down, dim the lights, and just chill for 20 minutes.

# 2

I found a mantra to get me through the stressful part of the day, and weirdly, it comes from the training tactics of the marines. The mantra is "Slow is smooth, Smooth is fast". I found that when there were 10 things going on at once, rather than run around like a headless chicken, I could repeat that to myself silently a "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast" and then take a deep breath, and take my time and move extra slow to do whatever needed to be done and get it done right on the first try. I found that the kids I was supervising responded really well to it. When I, the adult in the room, calmly and from a grounded place said things like "hey Liam, I need you to climb down from that bookshelf and apologize to Crystal for calling her a fatso chickenhead" or whatever, they would listen a lot better than they would if I had been speaking from a place of being angry and stressed out.

#3

I cured my second-hand-stress insomnia with a bedtime brew my wife calls the Sleepy Guy tea. There are probably a hundred variations you could do. I used a chamomile tea, with a squirt of Reishi mushroom extract, and a teaspoon of magnesium glycinate, topped off with tart cherry juice. The cherry juice adds a nice flavor. The herbal tea is calming, while the Reishi soothes your nervous system over the long term, and the magnesium has a calming effect on your brainwaves (you want the magnesium glycinate - other kinds of magnesium make you have to go to the bathroom which isn't ideal right before bedtime.) This brew doesn't just help you get to sleep quicker, it helps you sleep deeper.

Over all, like any trial and tribulation—I'm glad it's over, but I'm also glad I got the chance to learn a few more tricks to move through stress! Look for another newsletter next soon!

Until then -- head over to www.anthonyalvarado.net to keep up with my various projects and plots.