Name: How Men and Women Manage Stress Differently
Uploaded: 2024-09-23T13:00:47.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How Men and Women Manage Stress Differently' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-09-23. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How Men and Women Manage Stress Differently' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-09-23. Transcript available.

but i think there's just a lot of stress in the world it feels like especially
here in the states
i feel like everybody's stressed out um do you notice is that something that
you're noticing in
you guys's field or is that even something you guys look at so i changed career
actually around
the time of the global financial crisis and i went from being a psychiatrist in
the national
health service in the uk to becoming a stress um expert and advisor for very
senior leadership
people in financial services at that time we were seeing a lot of high-profile
suicides
and heart attacks that were caused by stress even if you weren't overweight or
you know had
high blood pressure or smoked or something like that so that was a time where a
former psychiatrist
kind of could really find a niche in a new career to help you know highly
stressed people then things
seem to sort of calm down a bit but i think the new normal was just that we're
kind of chronically
stressed all the time and then the pandemic happened yeah so unprecedented
levels of stress
health anxiety um actual illness um and you know potentially people dealing
with death so just took
things to the next level and meant that all of us we're more stressed than we
should be all the time
and the brain is constantly monitoring out like our stress levels there's a
hormone called cortisol
yeah when that's high all the time the body literally goes into survival mode
and and i just
feel like that's how so many of us if not all of us are at the moment yeah it
feels like that it feels
like everybody's in survival mode it feels like why are we like this right now
what's going on is it really
happening that people are more stressed or is there just so much more awareness
around it that we're also
taking it on as like a um placebo type of thing i really don't agree with the
latter because remember
i've been a psychiatrist for seven years before i even started coaching in this
field so you know
there were reasons for people to be stressed and us to know about it for a long
time i think what's
really changed at the start of the pandemic i actually predicted this was going
to be a mental health crisis
i also said it could be an opportunity for some kind of spiritual revolution um
and i think that's
happening for some people people who are deep into that are really kind of
getting a lot out of it but
for most people the pandemic happened we came out of it and we thought okay
everything will just go
back to normal but actually everyone's social circle shrank we're more lost
lonely and disconnected
than i think ever before in the history of humanity i think the genders have
become very polarized in a
way that's not good for either gender and i think that people are really
struggling with what to do
about that and often doing exactly the opposite of what they should be doing so
using your devices more
when actually you should be connecting with people face to face more for
example um kind of also because
of devices and you know let's say dating apps for example just using people as
pieces of garbage that
you can get through really quickly instead of forming actual deep meaningful
relationships that could
nurture both parties well it makes sense i mean say if you're looking on amazon
and you see different
items you're like i don't want this one not this one maybe this one let me read
up on it nah yes
and then you are looking on the same thing and it's people it would make sense
that you start to
um treat them the same way in a way without even realizing it maybe you know uh
especially because
of that you know some of that phone access what effects do we see when we're
really stressed out
that people may not notice i had an experience years ago where i was extremely
stressed some people
i couldn't even talk to some of my close friends just because of the volume or
the speed they
communicated at i just i was like it's too i just couldn't handle it i was so
burnt out and i thought
though that i just wasn't working hard enough that was my first thought i was
like i got to do better
i'm not doing well enough and that just burnt me even more um what's the best
way to recognize when
you're somebody that's at the brink kind of before you get there i guess i
always said that one of the
most cruel aspects of any kind of mental health issue is that the first symptom
is loss of insight
so that means that the first the first thing that happens to you you actually
lose the clarity
that something is going wrong so being aware is really important and sometimes
this will come
from your friends and family saying theo what what's going on like you're
working like a maniac and you
don't really seem well um or it could come from if you've had previous
experiences so maybe if you
ever got into that place again now you might recognize it quicker because you've
been through it before for
sure um and something like journaling can really help with that as well for you
to kind of have a
tangible thing that you can read saying i'm not sleeping well and that's
usually a sign that i'm
getting burnt out or you know i've withdrawn from my social circle so yeah some
kind of reflection of
yourself yeah yeah once you know what that is i used to have in my journal a
list of things to do when
i'm stressed because i would find that when i get to the point of realizing
that i'm stressed i don't really have the
higher mental functions of working my way out of it but now i don't need to
look at that list i kind
of and it's very simple things talk to a friend have a square of dark chocolate
take a nap go for a walk
you know nothing kind of too extreme um so once you've started doing those
things a little bit then it's
obviously also important to um address the the cause of your stress so if for
you it was working excessive
hours then trying to do whatever you can to you know minimize that in the near
future or if you possibly
could like take a quick digital detox break over a long weekend or something
you might feel a lot
better yeah one of the things i learned is that if i just take two days of kind
of you know drinking
lemon water in the morning and just kind of you know slowing down and eating
really clean that it can
make a big difference in just two days if you say you know i can't take proper
time off for two
months but i can do this two days you might be able to reset yourself and i try
to share a lot of
information about resetting your nervous system so there are two modes we can
be in um fright flight
fight or rest is that three modes or no fright flight fight that's one of them
that's one of the
okay that's one mode has three parts yeah it's like you know you get a shock
you want to run away or you
have to attack a predator kind of thing and the other mode is rest and digest
and that's the nice
feeling you get after you've had a nice meal and you just feel a bit lazy and
really calm and so we
want to be in in the rest and digest mode more of the time but we tend to find
that we're hyper
vigilant like looking out for the next threat um and actually if you're willing
to share i have some
research to share about the way that you grew up in that kind of environment um
so there's a lot of
breathing exercises that you can do to move yourself into the restful state for
me things like going for
a long walk in nature really helps me to to get into that state so people have
to identify what it
is that for you can reset your nervous system really quickly but it's up to you
it's up to us right it's
like i think sometimes we're all looking for something to fix us or a certain
medicine or a
certain tea or a certain you know we're looking for something to get the job
done for us but in the
end you really have to take uh control of it yeah i mean you mentioned
medication and i didn't even
respond to that because to me that's the absolute last resort um but i think
culturally the uk and
the us are a little bit you know different oh yeah we're pretty peeled up over
here we're like
our pills you know yeah does stress affect men and women the same this is a
really interesting one
so there are different forms of stress one is called adaptive stress and it's
actually a very
healthy response to a short-term stressor like a deadline or a podcast
interview or something um and
then there's the chronic stress which is bad for us because it starts to erode
our immunity
um it causes a lot of inflammation throughout the body but the differences
between men and
women aren't with regard to those it's with regard to um how we respond to
being in either of those
situations so men and all of this is based on population norm studies so it's
most men and
most women but men are very good at reacting to a crisis and you know releasing
all of that cortisol
and adrenaline and fighting off the monster or whatever it is but they have to
rest afterwards
women can actually find ways to recoup resilience during long periods of stress
so they'll still be
dealing with the stressful thing but at times they'll find you know whether it's
speaking with a
girlfriend or taking a bath or you know going for a walk in nature they find
ways to keep their
resources topped up so they don't have that crash that like more men tend to
have i wonder sometimes
if a lot of like um because we have so many everybody feels so stressed out and
it seems like it's such
a thing you know um i wonder sometimes i think like it used to be we had to
literally like be weary of
like a lying attacking us you know it was like really fight or flight like it
was um but now that's not the
case right but i wonder i wonder if that that thing that was worried about
everything out here just
started to go inside of us because there wasn't anything else out here to fight
really yeah absolutely
the biggest threats to our safety now are psychological threats so things like
your partner leaving you
you losing your job your friends not liking you anymore yeah the fears started
to become internal as
opposed to external and i wonder if we're partially just in a phase of that you
know like we're evolved
you know it's almost like an evolution because yeah the lions now are the fears
inside of us like you're
saying our partner leaving us or us losing um our ability to feed our families
or um a goal that we
have not working out or something losing a job yeah yeah the things that you
need to kind of keep your
basic life on on the road that it's on you know not lose the things that make
you feel psychologically safe