No Time to Meditate In The Fast Lane? Try These Proven, Real Time, Fast Acting, Zero / Low Cost and Time Alternatives Instead.

Life recently forced me (again) to upgrade my operating system and thinking around effectively managing stress and pressure.? There’s ?much truth and wisdom in the title of Marshall Goldsmith’s ‘What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There’. The challenge lies in recognising when you’re due an upgrade and knowing how to implement it.

The Bumpy Journey to My Most Recent Upgrade – Buckle Up

1990-2005. High flying successful lawyer, very much in the fast lane, way too much coffee and alcohol and way too little sleep. Rest and relaxation was for retirement. My thinking back then could be best summed up by the title of the compelling documentary about superstar DJ Steve Aoki ‘I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead’.

2004.? En route to a court hearing called by my consultant who insisted I come and see him that day to discuss results of some blood tests. He explained to me that I would be dead in a month.

Diagnosed with a rare, sometimes fatal, incurable autoimmune condition which had resulted in my adrenal cortex being shot to pieces and unable to produce cortisol. Although cortisol has a bad rap, we need it to live and navigate stressful events. A consequence of this condition means that a stressor can kill a person within hours. And there began my obsession with mastering stress...

?2005 -2008. ?You couldn’t make it up. Career as a lawyer in court comes to an abrupt halt and traded for many unplanned trips to the emergency room of the nearest hospital.

?My life had gone from being in the fast lane to being a car crash. ??

Back in the Fast Lane Again

2009-2019.?? Got my body and mind up and running again using tech, cutting edge supplements, stress management and mental performance strategies.

I reinvented myself as a coach and worked with some amazing individuals and teams including special operators, C suite execs and VC raising entrepreneurs.

Time For Another Curveball

I was back in the fast lane (ironically wrote a blog post entitled ‘How do to more faster’). And then life threw another curveball in my direction, in the way it does for all of us.

3am on 30th June 2019. ?? Aircon unit in our bedroom malfunctioned and caught alight and set our bedroom ablaze. We were asleep and didn’t stir because of smoke inhalation. But for Buddy (our dog) jumping on us and barking non-stop you would not be reading this post.

Within a minute of us staggering into the street, dazed and disorientated, our bedroom exploded, and the fire spread throughout the house. We sat across the street watching our home and all our possessions go up in flames.

We suffered serious effects from smoke inhalation, chemical poisoning, and PTSD. I almost died 5 days after the fire. We were unable to work and moved into temporary accommodation while we fought with our insurers to rebuild our house. Because of the pandemic and impact of Brexit on building materials, it took almost 3 years before we could finally move back home.

In 2020 I was designated ‘extremely clinically vulnerable’ and categorised as being high-risk for developing complications from Covid. Life felt shit. Even the state shifting mantra of Former Navy SEAL Commander Mark Divine didn’t help.

?‘I’m feeling good, I’m looking good, I ought to be in Hollywood’.

To say this was the most stressful time of our lives, would be an understatement. We had lost our home, mental and physical health, while being in the middle of the pandemic living in temporary accommodation. The need to be back home in our own sanctuary during this period was overwhelming.

?For my health to stay stable, to be able to resume work and project manage the rebuild of our home required shifting my focus from high performance to recovery and stress mastery. I could not afford to fall off a cliff again and end up back in hospital.

I took a deep dive into tools I was familiar with but had been mainly saving for retirement. These ranged from numerous breathwork practices to HeartMath and Yoga Nidra, along with wearable tech that was not simply focused on monitoring but devices that engaged the parasympathetic nervous system and increased HRV – while you worked. I tried them all and then some.

My Aha Moment - There is a Better Way

After a couple of months of introducing the recovery and stress protocols into my daily regime, something weird and unexpected happened. I started to feel more on my game than I had done in nearly two decades. ?To borrow the line from the ‘Six Million Dollar Man’, I felt ‘better, stronger, faster’. My cognition improved and my drive and energy returned and increased. ?

Until this point- achieving peak / high performance and recovery and stress management were largely in two separate buckets. I associated recovery and stress management with relaxation, avoiding challenges and proceeding in the slow lane. I believed this required at least 40 minutes daily meditation and working no more than 8 hours a day. Nothing wrong with that if that’s your lifestyle choice.

Some people, have no choice but to work 14 hours or more doing multiple jobs to put food on the table. Others choose to launch start-ups or go into demanding professions.

In my na?ve mind, you could have one or the other. You could proceed at full throttle, using a range of performance enhancing strategies, tools, technologies and supplementation or you could meditate, attend a yoga class, relax and sleep more, engage in some form of stress therapy and generally lead a slower, calmer life.

These tried and tested relaxation and stress management approaches would require additional time over and above a person’s daily routine, which many people simply don’t have. ?

You Can Have Your Cake and Eat It

Things have moved on, and we now have available at low or zero cost, real time tools and technologies that we can implement while we work and (in the West) have discovered Eastern practices like 20 minutes of Yoga Nidra which can repay a sleep debt of 2-4 hours. ?Give me Yoga Nidra over Modafinil any day.

In the field of stress management there are exciting mindset interventions that can rapidly bring about positive and permanent changes to how a person perceives and manages stress. For more on this topic, see the fascinating work of Alia Crum at Stanford. ??

Then there is the physiological sigh, a simple, fast acting breathing exercise, that can lower stress, improve your mood, and restore a feeling of calm in seconds.

Or how about the exciting, ever-increasing mountain of research demonstrating the stress reducing, performance enhancing benefits of a daily one-minute gratitude practice or cultivating and experiencing the states of awe.

Dacher Keltner, a Professor of Psychology at University of California, Berkley has established that when a person experiences a feeling of awe they experience an instant reduction in blood pressure and stress levels and improvement in their HRV. Just a walk in the local park or appreciating the beauty of nature and wildlife (even on film) can be enough to bring about a meaningful and positive shift your state. ?

?I could go on but by now you get the point. None of the above approaches require a commitment of time or money. Yet they are highly effective at rapidly reducing stress and enhancing recovery and performance.

So to Sum Things Up

1.??????? If you need or to choose to, you can work long and hard while dealing with life’s curveballs without suffering the sometimes deleterious effects of stress or worse still, reaching burnout.

2.??????? Extensive amounts of mediation, yoga, therapy sessions and money are not required to achieve this. There are plenty of low or zero cost, research backed, time efficient tools and strategies available that will help you master your stress and improve your performance.

3.??????? If you choose to meditate for extended periods and see a therapist etc that’s absolutely fine. I have spent many periods of my life regularly meditating, and practising Yoga and Qi Gong.

This post is not a pushback against those solutions- they often work. Rather it is a recognition of the reality that for many people time and money are very limited and a snapshot of some of the proven and effective alternative approaches available.