Thank you for joining us for episode 533 of Live Happy Now.

We're living in a time when many of us are feeling the effects of stress, but today's guest

is here to tell us how we can turn our anxiety into action.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm talking with Dr. Rebecca Heiss,

a stress physiologist, consultant, keynote speaker, and author of the upcoming book, Springboard,

Transform Stress to Work for You. Rebecca is committed to helping people fear less and live more

by learning how to rethink their life's stressors and leverage the energy

of anxiety instead of being overwhelmed by it. She's here to tell us how we all can learn to flip

the script on stress. So let's have a listen. Rebecca, welcome to Live Happy Now. Thank you so much

for having me on. I'm so excited to be here, Paula. It is so great to have you on the show because you have written a book that really captures the value of stress, which is not something that we normally think about.

So in a time when most people are trying to avoid it, you are actually encouraging us to embrace it.

And so let's talk, first of all, about why trying to eliminate

stress is actually counterproductive. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the advice that most of us

are told, right? Get rid of it, try and calm down, take some deep breaths. And in fact,

what you're doing there is you're fighting against your physiology. So first of all, you don't get to control your stressors. I mean, we were just joking. I had built in two hours of padding because we were about to record this podcast and I was on a flight and then my flight got delayed and delayed and I'm starting to panic and I'm going, wait a second, this is what I talk about, isn't it? We can't control. We don't get to control the stressors. They're brought into our life. So rather than fighting against the things that we can't control, how can we use that energy and shift it to something that is useful? Well, it's funny because, as you mentioned, we had just talked about this a little bit before we started recording. But then earlier today, I had a lot of things going on.

And then I made the mistake of looking at my news feed. And then I was like, okay, just calm down.

And your book started bouncing around in my head because it's like, okay, that you've already

told me that doesn't work. So I thought there's a lot of lessons, you know, a lot of timely things,

ways to practice this. Yeah. I mean, I don't know about you, but whenever I tell my adrenal glands

not to release adrenaline, they don't listen, you know, they don't listen. And so I think it's one of

the most unkind things that we've been sold is this idea of trying to calm down because the analogy that

I often will make is, you know, imagine telling your best friend something that you're really

...