Tuesday Tips: Tip for Managing Stress During the Holidays

9:00AM Dec 6, 2022

Speakers:

Tracy Matthews

Keywords:

breathing

breath

alternate nostril breathing

felt

thrive

meditation

spend

practices

stressed

smoking

breathwork

exercises

rating

talk

anxiety

tracy matthews

product

smoke

jp

instagram

And these two exercises can be a game changer in calming anxiety, helping you get clear headed, getting focused, I had not felt clear after that. Welcome to thrive by design, the podcast for ambitious independent jewelry brands, looking to profit from their products, get ready to make more and sell more doing what you love, without spending every single waking minute doing it. Hey, and if you're a creative fashion or product based business, I want to welcome you to the show. I'll be dropping big tips on launching, growing and scaling your business. So you could spend more of your precious time using your creativity to make money. You ready? All right, let's do this. Welcome to this Tuesday Tip episode of Thrive by design. Hey there, it's Tracy Matthews here. And I wanted to pop in today to talk a little bit about a holiday. distressing tip. That is something it's not something I forgot about. It's just something that I hadn't been doing on a regular basis. That has significantly helped me reduce anxiety. So on Thanksgiving, this year, I released an episode and I want to thank everyone who reached out to me to tell me how that episode impacted them. And I want to thank you, if you did reach out to me. And if you haven't listened to the episode, it's definitely worth it. The concept of the episode is all about finding gratitude when it feels like everything's falling apart around you. And I shared the story about how over the last couple of months, I was in a downward spiral, I'm finally out of it. And it was really, really hard dealing with it because I felt like my relationship was falling apart. And that impacted me in my business. And I felt like I wasn't able to like grasp on to anything, and it just felt like everything was burning down around me. I'm out of it. That's why I can talk about it. But I wanted to just share with you one of the techniques that I used. It's not that I forgot about it, it's just I haven't been using it. And you know, you hear a lot about meditation, journaling, sleep, like all those things to reduce stress, and they're great, you should keep doing those things if you're doing them and keep on going. But there's one thing you know, it's funny when I was a younger person, younger human, in my early 20s, like late teens, early 20s, when I was in kind of like college time I used to smoke and I would just socially smoke. But I found that when I would be really stressed in LA traffic, I'd want a cigarette and I would sometimes smoke a cigarette on my commute. And I'm like, why am I doing this, like smoking is disgusting. Like I didn't even really like it. But at that time I like was partying a lot. And my friends were smoking when they were drinking. So I was like sure I'll have a smoke while I'm drinking kind of thing. And I realized that the thing that I loved about smoking, I'm not endorsing smoking for stress reduction is that you're actually breathing and you're slowing your breath down enough and consciously breathing. And so I it's funny, like when I actually quit, I would take a straw and start breathing through the straw. And I'm doing taking singing lessons right now our voice lessons to actually help with public speaking and singing as well because I love singing. And one of the things exercises that she's having me do is to use a straw either to breathe in and out through the straw and also to breathe up in over the straw to help control my voice. And as I'm singing, using the breath moving out instead of in over my vocal cords because I've been talking basically, and projecting the wrong way my entire life. And it's part of the reason why I lose my breath. So with that being said, I was in Texas at a Texas hoedown for a group by man baby bathwater. My friend JP was there. And he could tell that I was super stressed. He's a good friend. He's close to me and Jason and I had shared with him a little bit about what's going on. And he's followed our journey and stuff like that. And we were kind of towards like that end, the end phase of like resolving our differences and stuff like that. And JP was like, hey, so do you want to come meditate with me? And I was like, Sure he's like, Well, we can't we have two choices. We could do like breath work and meditation. Or we could just do meditation. And I was like, let's do the breath work and meditation because I've been meditating. And it wasn't really doing much for me because my mind was like a monkey mind all over the place. And I was feeling super stressed. So we use an app called Insight Timer, which you can easily download. You can find this online, you can just YouTube it and we did two yoga breathwork practices that I used to practice all the time. One is couple of bottIe. I used to teach that. And the other one is alternate nostril breathing. So Breath of Fire and alternate nostril breathing. You can google both of those and find them so it's couple about de that's the breath of fire or naughty showed Inna, which is the alternate nostril breathing. And these two exercises or any form of breath work really can be a game changer in calming anxiety, helping you get clear headed, getting focused, I had not felt clear after that it was a 15 minute practice, we did eight minutes of breath work, and eight minutes of meditation after. And I'd never felt clearer than I had in in months. And I'm like, why am I not doing this on like every single day, this will change my life. And even if you just sat down and did one round of alternate nostril breathing, super easy exercise, you just breathing in and out through the alternate nostrils, you plug one, the other one, do it for eight rounds, think it's eight rounds or nine rounds. And then you just sit and breathe. And you will notice your nervous system completely calmed down. Three rounds, four rounds better. But like, if you could just do one, you spend just a couple of minutes a morning doing it, your game will be changed. And if you want to follow some more structured breathwork practices, my friend Zack Rader has classes that you can buy and join online. So if you want to check that out, I'll have a link in the show notes. Or you can just use something like the Insight Timer or Google breathwork practices on YouTube to help you get through it. So what I want to remind you is that when things get stressful, remember to breathe, stop, slow down, close your eyes, even if it's just taking a few deep breaths in and out, let the anxiety and energy go. This is why practices like yoga, meditation, all those things are available to all of us is because there is a connection between mind body and spirit. And that connection starts with the breath. Everything is focused on the breath without the breath. You die, right. And I love this quote. Fear is just excitement without the breath. So what if you could transform all of your fear into excitement and positive energy and co creation and creativity? By just breathing? What do you think? All right, this is Tracy signing off for today. And I just want to mention something, we are taking enrollment for our traffic on fire accelerator, which is starting in January. And we do not want you to miss out. So if you're someone who would like to optimize your website by getting more organic traffic to your website through SEO, Content Strategy, which is really powerful for getting traffic to your website, this is something that I feel like a lot of makers are overwhelmed with. And so we're going to help you create structure into planning that marketing and getting your content out in a way that makes sense for what you're trying to do in the objectives of your company. And then we're going to walk you through all sorts of paid advertising, including Google, tick tock Pinterest, and of course, Facebook and Instagram. And I'm excited to have our girl, Nicola Doddridge. Teach us all about this, it's going to be amazing because she has a strategy that is getting her clients a seriously legit low cost per lead. And this entire strategy that she's going to be teaching you is going to optimize your business, even if you don't have a big huge advertising budget to spend. And the reason why I mentioned that is that for most people who advertise products are just straight advertising their product and not thinking through, like how can I get the best customers and also get spend the last on at least on ads, I should say. And the strategy that she's doing has gotten one of our coaching clients because I've referred her over there a 10x return on investment for ads, which is insane, it just doesn't happen. So Especially not now on Facebook and Instagram. So if you want to get that for yourself, if you want to pay $1 and get $10 out. Let's talk we want to help you. So head on over to flourish, thrive academy.com forward slash momentum, you're going to fill out an application right there. If you have any questions, you can email us over at support at flourish, thrive academy.com Or just shoot us a direct message on Instagram and we'd be happy to chat with you. And I also want to thank you all for rating and reviewing this podcast. I popped in and looked at some of the ratings lately and I'm just super stoked that so many of you are enjoying what you're hearing. So if you haven't done so yet, if you wouldn't mind just giving us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you so much for listening to this Tuesday Tip. I hope that you start breathing. Take a deep breath in right now and let it go. Ciao for now.