Reduce Stress, Raise Hope EP 297

Welcome to Daily Dose of Hope. I'm Phyllis Nichols and I'm glad you're here. Today I want

to talk about how we can reduce stress and raise hope just by really trusting ourselves,

right? When something's feeling uncertain or when it's feeling overwhelming, our natural

instinct is often to avoid it. So we delay, we scroll, we sort of numb out doing some

other things and we try not to think about it. But sometimes trying not to think about

it and avoiding something actually stays on our mind, right? It's just that thing in

the back of your brain that won't quite leave you alone. Every time you kind of get

a quiet moment, it kind of pops back up again. And the stress kind of gets louder and

louder. It feels the problem can feel even bigger if you let it go for a few days because

it doesn't disappear. It just sits there kind of still bugging us. So I want to remind you

that when we take action, even in perfect action and we start moving, it shifts our brain

from that worry mode and that sort of avoidance mode to problem solving mode. Like when we're

in that worry mode, we really can't even see possibilities. But once we take a little

bit of action, our brain pops back into problem solving mode and it starts shaping maybe

some possibilities. We have some things now that we can recognize. We have maybe options

will start to appear where we can actually take action and it doesn't have to be a perfect

plan. It doesn't even have to be a whole plan. Maybe it's just a place to start. Hope

grows and stress reduces when we remind ourselves that we have the power to influence what

happens next. And the simplest way to do that is to take action and move forward. So remember,

stress grows when we avoid the things that worry us most and it goes away when we start taking

action. We don't have to solve everything right this minute. We do need just keep moving

forward. Hope will show up. Options will show up. Help will show up. Resources will show

up. But you need to do the first part. You've got to move out of worry and doom scrolling into

a positive place of action. This podcast is part of the Sound Advice FM network. Sound

Advice FM. Women's Voices Amplified.