Lindsay Troxell: Hi, this is Lindsay Troxell with Janus Henderson Knowledge Labs Professional Development. In a previously recorded podcast with UBS, I spoke with Dan Cassidy about how stress can affect both our minds and our bodies. I shared some strategies to help manage the stress we all experience in our lives, such as learning to recognize our stress triggers, practicing gratitude, and using breathing exercises to heal our nervous systems – all of which can actually allow us to harness stress as an opportunity for growth. I hope you’ll enjoy listening to this special edition of Development Matters from Janus Henderson.

Dan Cassidy: Hi everyone, Dan Cassidy here. Welcome back to the UBS Conversations podcast channel. Today’s conversation is all about stress management, as my guest will outline some considerations when it comes to how to best navigate stressful periods or occurrences in both their personal and professional lives. Joining us for the conversation from our partners at Janus Henderson Investors, glad to welcome Lindsay Troxell. Lindsay is a senior director with Knowledge Labs professional development. In this capacity, Lindsay provides performance coaching and consulting to financial professionals and their clients. Lindsay has an unapologetic commitment to being curious and challenges her clients to manage their minds, which makes her a sought after coach and keynote speaker who disrupts the industry with her ideas around a mindful and integrated approach to wealth and health. Lindsay leverages her experience as a Certified Life Coach, executive management consultant, previous financial professional, and Next Gen leader to coach clients on intentionality and bring valuable insights to wealth management.

Lindsay, it’s great to be with you today on UBS Conversations. Thank you for dropping by spending time with our listeners, our clients on this very important topic, looking forward to diving into it with you.

Troxell: Dan, thank you so much for having me. I’m looking forward to it as well.

Cassidy: Absolutely. So, Lindsay, as many of us know, you think about the past few years, many of us have been impacted by stress from, let’s say, unprecedented or unanticipated sources or series of events. So, first off, Lindsay, could you speak to what can stress lead to and what may serve as the warning signs to be mindful of?

Troxell: Absolutely. First off, I think it’s really important for your audience to understand that stress has both a physiological as well as a psychological attribute to it, meaning both our bodies and our minds experience stress. When you ask the question, “What can stress lead to?” what you’re referring to are really some of the negative results that stress creates stemming from our non-conscious thoughts that we have about those unprecedented events that you mentioned. When we feel stress, the actions that we take are what caused our outcomes. So when we feel stress, for example, we may overeat, or we might favor some foods that are linked to an outcome of high blood pressure or heart disease, diabetes, or even obesity. When we feel stressed, we may stay up past our bedtime. We might binge watch Netflix or Doomsday for All, and scroll social media. Or we might lie awake in bed ruminating on thoughts of worthiness, all leading us to a result of insomnia or lack of focus and energy the following day.

It’s really interesting, the American Institute of Stress, the study that found that 75 to 90% of medical visits are stress related. What that means is that if you show up for a stomachache or migraines or insomnia, skin rash, shortness of breath, there’s a good chance that stress is causing it, or at least making it much worse. Now, the good news is that it’s not actually those unprecedented or unanticipated events that you mentioned there that are causing our stress, but rather what we’re choosing to think about those events.

Now, the second part of your question is, “What are some of the warning signs to be mindful of?” Now, Dan, everybody has different warning signs, so it’s important for you to really become curious and observant of your own personal stress signature so that you can then use that information to support your own stress journey. I like to think of these warning signs as similar to the smoke alarm inside of your house. It’s there to warn you that maybe there’s some danger and it allows you to take the action before something bad actually happens, right? When that smoke alarm goes off, you don’t just sit in bed and hope that it’s going to stop on your own. You at least get up to remove the battery, don’t you, Dan? Absolutely, absolutely right. So I’m curious, Dan, do you have any warning signs yourself that stress is high or on the rise, something that happens to you that kind of gives you that inkling that, gosh, I’m a little bit more stressed than maybe I was a week ago?

Cassidy: Well, I was going to make mention it’s really relatable. You pointed out how when you’re trying to sleep, especially when that clock rolls around to the 2 AM or 3 AM hour, I’ll jolt myself out of sleep. I’ll think about something which at the time seems like a big deal, though a few hours later I’ll be wishing I got that sleep. It’s really not as big of a deal, but nonetheless it it does creep in when you do try to sleep. It’s funny how that seems to happen consistently.

Troxell: Yeah. Those ruminating thoughts, right. And in the middle of the night, the way that we interpret those ruminating and thoughts is that they’re incredibly important and that it’s like the thing that we need to figure out in that moment. So we just sit there and think about it and think about it and think about it. And then the next morning we wake up and we’re like, “Oh, gosh, either what I was thinking about makes absolutely no sense or it’s completely irrelevant.” Exactly. You know, there’s really nothing that I could have done in that moment, right? Yeah. So interesting, so interesting.

So I’ve got some of those kind of warning signs myself. Mine are pretty interesting. You know, the back right of my neck, that right levator muscle in the back of my neck, it becomes very inflamed. I tend to find that I’m more fatigued than normal. I get some sugar cravings. I don’t know if this happens to you, Dan, but the pesky warnings on Netflix, like, are you still watching? That’s one of my warning signs. It means that I’ve been sitting on the couch for a little bit too long. So, you know, it wasn’t that funny, right? You know, that’s just an actual, real world, like, “Hey, are you still watching? Are you still sitting here if you’re still sitting here?” [It] means that you’re probably avoiding something because you’re stressed. So it’s really important again for us to take our own inventory and ask yourself a couple of questions. So for everybody that’s listening, here are some of the questions I like to ask myself: What are some of my stress triggers? What are the warning signs that stress is high or on the rise? What are the negative behaviors that I have in response to those warning signs? So, you know, when I get those sugar cravings, it’s because I’m actually more stressed. I’ve started to produce more cortisol inside of my body, and my body is responding to that. And so my sugar cravings are the warning. But the action that I take is that I go and I eat sugar. And so that’s one of those negative behaviors that I have in response to the warning sign, which then just ends up creating more stress in my body. And then another question is, what happens to me when that stress goes unmanaged for too long? And then finally, what are the things that have helped me recharge or reset in the past? So those questions, those five questions, are really helpful to build your own inventory that will help you to recognize your own pattern that then you can leverage to learn.

Cassidy: Well, it’s very interesting. There’s a lot here I’m sure our listeners, our clients, can relate to. And the triggers as you pointed out, Lindsay, they they sound very circumstantial, very tailored perhaps, and as important as it is to understand the triggers, it’s important to understand what one can do to manage or combat stress. I know we want to move into this a bit, spend some time today talking about just that. Lindsay, your firm Janus Henderson Investors, this is through the work Knowledge Labs has developed the Managing Stress for Success program. So Lindsay, can you speak a bit to the genesis of this program? How that all came to be.

Troxell: Absolutely. It’s a great question. It’s almost like we knew that 2020 was coming and we were getting prepared, isn’t it? But in all seriousness, back in 2019, we partnered with the Financial Planning Association and Investopedia to release a study on what was keeping financial professionals and investors up at night. And the research showed us that 63% of investors, people like you and me, and then 71% of financial professionals, were experiencing moderate or high levels of negative stress, so we wanted to help them understand how they can manage that stress more successfully. The fact is we can’t actually manage the circumstances that are outside of our control as individuals. One can argue that we can’t manage things like the stock market and what it does, or the pandemic, or that chronic illness that a loved one has, or what we did or didn’t do in the past, or what’s happening at work with our boss. Even at the school with our kids. We’d like to think that we have some control over other people and what they say or what they do, but the truth is, those outside events, they’re not the problem. You know, they seem like they are, but they’re not. And as a society, we’ve really been conditioned to believe that those outside events are the source of our stress. So instead of looking inward at what we can manage, we try to control the outside world with very little success, leading us to feel more stress. Have you ever asked somebody who was stressed, “How are you feeling?”?

Cassidy: Absolutely. And I feel just acknowledging it and lending a helping hand in the way of being a listening ear that that can go a long way in alleviating stress.

Troxell: Yeah, absolutely. When you ask them that, what are some of the things that they say to you when you say, “How are you feeling?”, how do they tend to respond?

Cassidy: With, well, sometimes they’ll shake it off as if nothing’s wrong, or sometimes they’ll open up and maybe expand the bit as to what’s on their mind, triggering the stress.

Troxell: Yeah, exactly. That’s such a key, what you just said. What’s on their mind? OK. What’s on their mind is what’s actually triggering their stress. It’s really interesting. The next time you ask somebody that question, and I urge everybody to truly ask the question, “How are you feeling?” and see what people say. For a lot of people, they’ll respond with something like, “I feel like…” and then they’ll tell you something, right? “I feel like I never have enough time for my family, or “I feel like my boss doesn’t value me.” OK, so they don’t actually tell you what they’re feeling or the facts about what, let’s say, their boss did. What they told you is what they are thinking. To your point, what’s on their mind, right? Their thought that their boss doesn’t value them is what is actually causing them to feel stressed, not what their boss did or what their boss said. It’s that they’re thinking that their boss doesn’t value them, OK? So the reason we built this program is to help people recognize what they can control being their thoughts about what they’re making those events mean, and then therefore the amount of stress that they’re carrying.

Cassidy: Lindsay, it’s an important point to emphasize: knowing the limitations of what they can control. I want to dive a bit deeper into the program. I know, Lindsay, you do talk about how one responds to stress really matters. And earlier you mentioned how doing nothing or ignoring stress is not necessarily…it might be a common practice, but not necessarily the correct practice. So can you talk to us a bit, Lindsay, about that and some best practices when it comes to managing stress?

Troxell: Yeah. Well, I think the key word that you said and there was response, right? Responding rather than reacting really implies that we’re using our prefrontal cortex or our human brain to decide how we want to interpret what’s happening. The problem is when we react from our primitive brain, it sometimes doesn’t know the difference between what’s mildly uncomfortable versus actually dangerous. Now, this was helpful when we lived in caves and we had things that were trying to kill us around every corner. But now that we’ve evolved and we don’t have lions or tigers or bears living outside our bedroom door, our fight or flight response can become triggered unnecessarily if we don’t learn how to control it right. I like to think about…do you have your phone next to your bed?

Cassidy: It’s my alarm clock.

Troxell: Absolutely, it’s your alarm clock like everybody else, right? So the first thing that happens for a lot of people when they wake up in the morning is they reach for their phone before they do anything else. And when that happens, our primitive brain is designed to scan around us and search for things that are dangerous or that could hurt us or the people that we love. So when we pick up our phone as the very first thing and we get a text message. When we start reading the news or we get an e-mail from a client, whatever the case may be, if we are reacting from our primitive brain, we can put ourselves in a very dangerous situation. We can set ourselves up for going throughout the rest of our day being primed to react from our primitive brain. I’ll give you another example here. Let’s use the stock market. So there’s, you know, some some ups and downs in the normal ebb and flow of what happens in the market, right? When the stock market goes down, if we react from our primitive brain because we’ve interpreted that dip as threatening, we might be inclined to ignore our financial plan and pull money out of the market before it has a chance to recover. However, if instead of reacting from our primitive, instinctual brain, we learn to move ourselves into our prefrontal cortex, our rational thinking brain, they might then decide based on experience and reasoning that this is just what markets do and therefore we follow our financial plan and we ignore the market. Now, Dan, this does take some practice, so I’d like to share a couple of techniques that people can use to make that shift, if that’s OK.

Cassidy: Please do, absolutely.

Troxell: Fantastic. So, one way for us to get ahead of our stress reaction is to practice gratitude. I think this is probably the greatest bang for your buck. Takes the least amount of time and it packs a huge punch. Any chance that you practice gratitude on a daily basis? Dan?

Cassidy: I try to. I think we all do.

Troxell: Fantastic. Is there any technique that you use or is it just, you know, trying to be grateful as being the way that you show up in the world?

Cassidy: Well, just always trying to appreciate if others do something nice for me and not knowing what’s going on in other people’s lives. Always take that into account before I perform any actions or convey anything. You never know what goes on in other people’s lives.

Troxell: Those are a brilliant way to show up and and just be appreciative and to, you know, focus on the heart, right.

Cassidy: It’s being heart forward.

Troxell: Instead of being judgmental, yeah, I love that. So for those of you out there that don’t practice gratitude on a daily basis, one way that you can get started is just by simply writing down three things, five things…you know, anywhere in that three-to-five range, really, that you’re grateful for every single morning or evening. Doesn’t really matter. The point is to get it down on paper and that act of writing it down and really sealing the gratitude as you’re writing it down, these things don’t have to be overly complicated. But when you do this, what ends up happening is our brain releases dopamine and serotonin and those are feel good chemicals and we all want a little bit more of that going on. And the other thing that happens at the same time is it reduces our stress hormone, cortisol, which is absolutely toxic on the brain when we have too much cortisol built up in the brain over time. What it does is it has a shrinking effect on our prefrontal cortex. That’s the human thinking part of the brain that I mentioned earlier. It also has an enlarging effect on our amygdala, and that’s the part of the brain responsible for fight or flight. So by practicing gratitude and reducing the amount of cortisol in our brain, we end up operating from a healthier, more balanced place to begin with. So this is a little bit of, like, getting ahead of this situation.

Additionally, practicing gratitude, it also rewires the brain. It literally creates new neural pathways that allow ourselves to develop resilience to emotional setbacks. So what you’re talking about, Dan, is the way that you show up in the world. Because you’ve been practicing gratitude, it allows you to show up in each of your situations with a little bit more grace because you’ve created these neural pathways for resilience to emotional setbacks. It was really interesting, I was having a conversation with a financial professional. We were hosting events on stress for their clients and one of the clients actually came up and they said, you know, I practice gratitude on a regular basis. And I thought that at the beginning of the pandemic, the change of coming out of the work, out of the office and having to then work from home was going to be much harder than it actually was. And I realized that I had been practicing gratitude for about a year, and that that emotional setback prior to practicing gratitude would have completely thrown me for a loop. But because I’ve now been practicing gratitude for this past year, it wasn’t as much of an emotional blow as I think it might have been. So it’s really just very fascinating that something as simple as just jotting down three things in the morning could actually change the way that you show up.

Now, one other technique that I’d like to mention before we move on to this to to our next point here, is that I love breathing exercises. I know it sounds simple, but breathing in for a count of four and then having a longer exhale, let’s say a count of six, will actually switch us from our sympathetic nervous system, so the fight-or-flight, into our parasympathetic nervous system, our rest and digest. And that helped move us from our primitive brain into our human thinking portion of our brain. So really, those are my two favorite techniques that we all can do at any time to help us manage our stress more successfully.

Cassidy: All small steps, Lindsay, though they sound to make a great impact and something everyone can apply to their own lives and get behind, and just running with this a bit further as far as achieving not only results but sustainable results. So, a solution not only working once, but continues to work on an ongoing basis. When it comes to stress management practices, Lindsay, can you expand the bit? I know within the program you you have what’s called the mastery formula, so a series of considerations or practices that one can apply to their day-to-day lives. Can you take a few moments here to walk us through those?

Troxell: What we do from our stress experiences, how we really grow and evolve from those experiences is what really allows us to become masters at managing our stress in the future. This is what allows us to be better prepared and equipped to respond rather than to react to those circumstances that may have negatively triggered us in the past. So there are really four practices that will help us to develop that mastery and allow us to learn and grow from the stress that we’ve experienced. So journaling, storytelling, learning to recalculate our stress formula, and then developing a recharge toolkit. These are all areas, all four of these, that I believe are really powerfully tied together, so I’m going to talk a little bit about each of them.

Now, when we use journaling, what we do is we really start to grasp the details of the situation that we’re experiencing. So questions that I usually ask myself when I’m journaling about my stress experience, I ask myself, what are the facts? I also say, what am I making this mean? What am I feeling? What actions did I take and then what results did I get? So by journaling my experience, we can learn what patterns might be forming that might actually be helpful for us to eventually unpack. Sometimes we also then tell ourselves stories about what’s happening that don’t serve us now. We believe these short stories so deeply that we actually think that they’re facts when they are not. This is fine, so long as the story isn’t painful or causing problems in our lives. Ultimately, without a story, the facts don’t hurt. The trouble is that we use our past experiences, our thoughts, feelings, actions, results, all to create evidence for why that old story should be considered as truth. By examining these stories, we can decide what we want to believe going forward. And once we’ve made that decision, we have the ability to recalculate our stress formula for the situation we’re in, ultimately by asking ourselves what’s the new result that we want to get in this situation. Then in order to get that result, what are the new actions that I need to take? And in order to take those actions, what do I need to be feeling other than stress? And finally, in order to feel this other feeling other than stress, what do I need to be telling myself? What’s that new story? When we start believing that new story that we’ve created, our brains will actually go out into the world and start searching for the evidence to make that new story true. Here’s the deal: Our brains are powerful, but they’re also very lazy, and they don’t like to be wrong.

Finally, what I like to do is create a recharge toolkit that I can pull from whenever I find myself feeling stressed. Now, what I want to say is that, if anyone is looking for help developing your own recharge toolkit, I highly recommend you reach out to your financial advisor to help you identify the events that you believe to be causing your stress and then ultimately some of the techniques that you can use to manage that stress more successfully. Dan, I want to check with you. Do you have anything that you pull from as a recharge toolkit when you find yourself stressed?

Cassidy: I try to keep things in perspective. I know that maybe at the time something seems very important. Not to discount the importance of something, but I find maybe when I step away from it or at a later time, put it in perspective, I come at it from a different frame of mind, and that could help versus in the moment when you might be stressed out, you’re not always thinking clearly and exercising the best judgment, so to speak.

Troxell: Absolutely. And part of that comes from, when we react from our primitive brain, we’re going from that instinctual place. If you’ve ever found yourself in a situation where you think about it, you know, maybe even a couple hours after a situation where you’re like, “Oh gosh, I wish that I had said XYZ, or I wish I had handled it in this particular way”… If we’re reacting from that primitive brain instead of responding from our prefrontal cortex, that can be totally the case. So again, some ways that we can, if we are in that moment, one of the tools and techniques that we can pull from is that breathwork. If we breathe in for a count of four or five and then have that longer exhale of six, what it will do is move us from our primitive brain into our prefrontal cortex. And therefore we can actually respond with something that might be a little bit more in line with what we want. Otherwise, as you’re saying, like taking a break, walking away, being able to give ourselves some time to just think about the situation instead of just feeling as though we have to respond right in that moment, such a great technique that we can use. Couple of techniques that I love: Checking in, asking yourself the question, “Am I safe? Am I loved? What can I learn from this?” Again, that really taps into the different areas of our brain that, you know, is answering the question, our amygdala, or rather that primitive brain that is mammalian in nature, and is just trying to make sure that we are safe. So if we are able to say, “Yes, I actually am safe,” then the limbic system… what am I feeling? What are the emotions involved in this? And then finally that prefrontal cortex: What can I learn from this? So it’s really tapping into each portion of the brain that is involved in this stress experience.

Another thing that’s very helpful is grounding. So, taking ourselves outside, taking off our shoes, connecting directly with the Earth. Essential oils are great. You can kind of disrupt that stress response by breathing in essential oils. Using something like a mantra, I am calm, I am safe, I am grateful. Exercise is another great one, releases endorphins, reduces our stress hormones. And then finally my favorite, which isn’t always a popular one, but it’s such a fun one to talk about: cold showers. Have you ever engaged in either doing some cold plunging or cold showers in order to reduce stress hormones, Dan?

Cassidy: I can’t say I’ve ever participated, though I will say I’ve heard a lot of positive feedback on that exercise. Though it would take a lot for me to dive into a cool tub, or a a body of water, or a shower for that matter.

Troxell: Yeah, it’s not always a popular one. I mean, it’s definitely got some great followings out there and…definitely, you know, advocates for the youth, right? You could also just splash cold water on your face.

Cassidy: Or…

Troxell: Under cold water, yeah. Yeah. So, does the same thing. Obviously, the cold showers are sometimes a little bit more on the extreme side. But what we’re trying to do here is just regulate the nervous system and lower our heart rate and bring us back into that rest and digest state. So if you’re not for the cold plunge, go for just the splashing of the cold water on the face. It works just as well.

Cassidy: Well, Lindsay, I have to say the psychology and the science behind all of this is quite fascinating. A lot here to consider and, as I pointed out a bit earlier in the conversation, a lot here that our listeners, our clients, can relate to. As you pointed out, I do highly encourage our clients of UBS listening in, if you do want to learn more about the program from Janus Henderson Investors, you have a follow up conversation with your financial advisor. Lindsay, you’ve left a lot for us to take away. Before we close out our conversation, any final thoughts you would like to share with us?

Troxell: I would just say it’s impossible to completely eliminate stress, nor do we want to. And that’s because if we care about anything or if anything is important to us, we all have the potential to experience stress. However, we also have the ability to manage that stress if we choose. The way we do that is by managing our mind around what we are making those circumstances that we face mean. So, as Dan mentioned, if you’re an investor and have questions about how to manage your stress more successfully or get your hands on our stress load audit, please reach out to your advisor. We really appreciate this time, Dan.

Cassidy: Lindsay, it was an absolute pleasure having you join our listeners, our clients, our advisors here on UBS Conversations. Very valuable, practical conversation. I look forward to putting the tips you’ve shared with us to work, and there’s a lot here we can all take away and learn from. So Lindsay, thank you again for your time. Really appreciate it.

Troxell: Thank you so much, Dan.

Cassidy: As a firm providing wealth management services to clients, UBS Financial Services Inc. offers investment advisory services in its capacity as an SEC registered investment advisor and brokerage services in its capacity as an SEC registered broker-dealer. Investment advisory services and brokerage services are separate and distinct, differ in material ways, and are governed by different laws and separate arrangements. It is important that you understand the ways in which we conduct business and that you carefully read the agreements and disclosures that we provide to you about the products or services we offer. For more information, please review client relationship summary provided@ubs.com/relationship summary or ask your UBS financial advisor for copy.