Dealing With Stress & Anxiety As An Online Entrepreneur – With Nirasha Ramlugan

Shownotes

Today we are talking about stress, anxiety and depression. This is not going to be a podcast of doom and gloom, but this, unfortunately, is something that all of us, at some point in our lifetime, are going to experience. 

In this episode, we have Nirasha Ramlugan as our guest, who is going to talk to us all about this space of stress, anxiety, and depression and how we can deal with this in our lives.

Nirasha is the founder of Just Simply Change in the UK, and is qualified in this area of stress, anxiety, and depression. Nirasha will be telling us a little bit about how we, as leaders, as experts, as course creators, can push ourselves through times and moments of darkness.

Watch the video:

Resources

• Narisha’s course – My 3 A.P.P tips to eliminate Stress in your life
• Just Simply Change website
• Narisha’s Facebook
• The Smiling Guru Podcast
• Just Simply Change on Instagram
• Narisha’s YouTube channel
• Just Simply Change on Twitter
• Narisha on Linkedin

Subscribe To My Podcast

Transcript

Human emotions cannot be controlled

It’s really easy for us to look outside of us and look at other people. We cannot feel other people’s feelings, so it’s really easy for us to simply judge what we see. And when people look at me, I know for a fact that people see this kind of unwavering confidence. This person who seems to never get knocked down, never not have a smile on their face, and just seems like life is perfect every single day. And yet there’s a part of me that I keep hidden a lot of the time, and this is kind of this more personal side. I feel that as a professional my job is to turn up here and help course creators, business owners, authors, experts, and so on succeed. So I feel like there’s not been a lot of room, really, for me to talk about my personal life. 

In this episode, I share some of my personal experiences, because it’s so easy for us to feel like we have to be indestructible to be successful. We feel like we have to look like people who look like they have everything perfectly down pat and have their whole life in order, in order for us to be successful. And the truth is human emotions exist, human emotions cannot be controlled. We can learn how to control how we deal with them, but I really want to share with people that despite the fact that this exists for me, I have found ways to manage my life, manage myself, and manage how I deal with my up and down emotions to continue to serve the world. To continue to live a very full life, to continue to enable moments of feeling on purpose and feelings of success and like I’ve achieved something for a day, which keeps me afloat a bit longer, lifts me up a bit higher a tiny bit and keeps me going. 

Your life experiences are the key to your success

It never ceases to amaze me when I hear people that have gone through terrible traumas, that find a way to not only release themselves from that darkness, but to then actually use that pain, use that experience, use that agony as a way to help other people. As something for good, as a stepping stone to take their own lives forward and to do that with other people. I’m always saying to people, your life experiences are the key to your success. They are what life has trained you for, for whatever it is that you could be superb in. 

One of the many things course creators can do to pick their topic is to draw their lifeline up on the wall. I always make sure my students put their date of birth at one end, today’s date at the other end, and we break it down by one year, one year, one year. Above the line, write everything positive that’s ever happened to you. Every success you’ve had, every achievement you’ve had, anything you’re proud of. Underneath the line, everything that’s been a challenge. Everything that’s been a negative experience, anything that’s really broken you to the core of your soul. These all put together are the secrets to our success. They are who we are, and they are a magic set of ingredients for changing the world in our own special way. 

What causes stress, anxiety and depression?

Stress is the first kind of response. So we take away the external environment and how we process it internally, and if we find ourselves becoming overwhelmed and freaking out more often with little things that’s happening around us, then our lives are becoming stressed. 

Now imagine you have this plate. Put down everything you have on this paper plate. So write down everything, everything that’s overwhelming you, everything that’s freaking you out at times. And when you feel like you look at your plate and you feel this heavy heaviness in your chest, that means everything that you didn’t deal with, that was a stress served on your plate. And because you haven’t dealt with it it’s now giving you this heavy chest. It’s giving you this illness in your body. And that’s when the stress then becomes anxiety, it’s how your body is reacting to all of those stresses. 

And if we take that anxiety and take that stress and shelve it, and you find that that shelf is collapsing and it’s coming down, then you are slipping into depression. And when you are slipping into depression, I always look at life as a spiral. So we’re all on this spiral, we all have our spiral of life. And life is such where you go up and down the spiral. When business owners and entrepreneurs and people get to the bottom of that spiral, that is where they find that bottomless dark pit. Some people, they might hurt themselves. Some people might be really, really bad, where they just stay away from everybody else. 

So I think of stress, anxiety, and depression, if you don’t deal with the stress, your body responds differently, so that becomes anxiety. And when you don’t deal with your anxiety, it just slips into an even darker place. You’re coming down that spiral without any brakes. You don’t know where the brakes are and you come crashing down. And when you are there it’s very, very scary. My clients come to me and they get that help to get them back up that spiral. 

I teach them the tools to get them back up there and I use a lot of hypnotherapy. And the reason why I do that is because in fact, we use less than 1% of our conscious mind. It’s done within the unconscious mind which is, if you think about an iceberg, it’s the deepest part of the iceberg that we can’t see. And not many people can actually dive that deep and get rid of all the garbage or the emotional trauma, or the emotional baggage. When you can empty that emotional baggage, you get to your destination quicker. 

What to do when you feel stressed?

It’s one of the critical starting points, to recognize when we are not our usual selves. When we are not okay. And obviously for all of us the stress will begin manifesting in very different ways for us all. And I think one of the first things we can all do is grab a pen and paper and kind of think what are my coping mechanisms when I’m stressed out? Do I overwork, do I snap at people? Do I suddenly have trouble sleeping? Do I try to distract my mind from my emotions by smoking or drinking or something else? What is it that we do or don’t do anymore when we find ourselves in a place of stress? And I think as soon as we can start pinpointing what those are, the easier it’s gonna be for us to take the next steps, which is to then remove some of those triggers or causes of the stress itself. The next part is to be comfortable talking about it. 

Prevent ourselves from getting there in the first place

There are three reasons why people have issues, or people have breakdowns and problems and suffer with stress, anxiety and depression. And these three things are not feeling good enough, not feeling loved, or wanting something that is unavailable to you. And a third thing is being different. When we feel these three things, there are bound to be issues or problems that we are going to be experiencing. Emotional problems, mental problems, social problems. 

So what actually stops you from going down the spiral? Number one is self love. This brings lots of my clients to tears when I ask them this simple question: do you love yourself? And when I ask them this question and they look at me with tears welling up, they know the answer to that. And when they know that they don’t love themselves, how would you be able to do loving things for yourself? 

When you put yourself first, you will start to recognize your emotions, how you tick. You’ll start to get to know yourself in such detail. So when you are feeling sad, you don’t like that feeling in your body. So what would you do? You’ll go out for a run, or you won’t comfort eat because comfort eating doesn’t help me. It’s gonna make me feel quite bloated and quite unhealthy. So you’ll start to put things in place that wouldn’t pull you down your spiral but would actually pick you back up. 

Check in with yourself

I’ve found one of the ways that I can check in with myself is when I am stressed, I know that I’m not prioritizing properly. What I simply do is I will just sit down and go, what is my main goal? What is my main mission? What is it that I, the one main thing I’m trying to achieve? And what are the three most important things to achieve that? Nothing else matters, everything else can wait. This is not a life or death situation. I am not gonna lose the roof over my head or anything else if I make some things wait a while. So that’s the first thing I do is if I’m stressed, I’ve not prioritized properly. I sit down, I prioritize, and I remind myself that the world isn’t going to explode if I don’t answer Jeffrey’s email by tomorrow. 

Then when I get anxious, I know that I’m thinking too much about the future. When I have anxiety, I know I have got myself in front of myself. I’m not present but I’m worrying about what if. What if I do this, what if I don’t do that? What if I don’t do that well enough? So one of the first check-ins I do with myself ‘okay, I’m here, I’m right here and right now I’m in now’. I’m not in tomorrow, none of those things have happened. What’s the one thing I can do to be sure that I’m doing the best I can right now in this present moment to make sure that tomorrow is as best as it can be? 

When I am feeling down and depressed, I know that I’m way back in the past. I’m thinking about what I wish that had happened instead of that had happened. I wish I had done this instead of done that. And it’s a really interesting time for me to then sit down and go, “Well what would I have changed from my past?” Often there’s not a great deal. But what do I want to have in the future? And we always hear this saying ‘if we don’t change anything, nothing changes at all’. You keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. So I will say, okay, well what is it that caused the things that I’m unhappy about today? And how can I make sure I don’t do any of those things again today, so that they don’t come along in my future, and I keep repeating those past things. 

Meditations

I think we can find ways that work for us, and one of the things I love to do is when I’ve kind of acknowledged, am I stressed out, am I anxious, am I depressed today, I then like to go and find a meditation. There are so many free meditations on YouTube. A lot of you might be like, “Oh, woo-woo, not the meditation thing! My brain’s like a crazy volcano, how am I supposed to make it quiet for five minutes?” It takes practice, but if I can, anyone can learn, too. 

You can just go to YouTube and type in ‘guided meditation for stress’. And you find these amazing meditations come up. If I’m feeling a bit down, I will type in ‘guided meditation for joy’, or ‘guided meditation for clearing and cleansing’, ‘guided meditation for realigning your energy chakras’. There’s so many different things that you can type in for you. It’s amazing how it can change your mind. It can start with just one minute a day. One minute of meditation, of just being quiet or taking your mind to just one focus. 

Do you know an average person has between 50 to 70,000 thoughts a day? So you’re looking at roughly about 1300 thoughts, around there, a minute. So when we cannot control our thoughts, it becomes like a traffic jam up here. Now when you’re scared stuck on one thought, you press the brake and there’s a pileup of thoughts. So you know that inner dialogue in us? If it’s gonna be negative and pessimistic, we’re gonna attract the same things in our lives. So we have to change the dialogue. When we wake up in the morning, what words are we telling ourselves? What language are we speaking? Are we using words and language that is going to lift us up, or are we using words and language that’s gonna crumble us down by midday? 

Login to yourself

All of these things are so important, and I can’t explain how exercising and eating properly, can contribute to us being stress free, being calm. There’s certain foods that can actually help us to do this. Taking time out, romancing yourself, all of these lovely tips. And as business owners, and if you own your own business, you end up working more hours than you would in a normal nine-to-five job. And we need to know when to switch technology off. We need to know when it’s time to log off and then log in. So log off there, but login to ourselves. And I think that is just so imperative.

Procrastination used to be one of the biggest demons I had. “Ugh, I don’t wanna do that thing, I’ll save it for another day.” And it sits there and eats at your insides, because you know it’s there. I love that concept of eating the green frog for breakfast. The green frog is this icky, yucky, slimy, wet, cold thing. No one wants to swallow one of those fellas, right? People always say, if you eat the green frog for breakfast, i.e. do the task that you least want to do, everything you do after that is gonna feel like a gigantic favorite cake of yours thereafter, in comparison to eating a wet, green, slimy frog. 

When I sit to do my meditation, the answers just pop into your mind. Where are the answers coming from? It’s coming from within you. And if we are suffering with stress, anxiety, and depression, we need to become problem solvers instead of our life’s problem makers. Because the more we start to look for problems, and the more we allow people to judge us, it’s going to take us down our spiral. So it’s how we rise above it. We rise above it by loving ourselves, by learning that we are more than enough to do anything in life, and to love the person you see every morning in that mirror.