Grace Over Grind: Cultivate Grit & Energy to Relieve Stress & Improve Work-Life Harmony

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Are you drained with brain fog? Strung out with caffeine and sugar to get by? There are alternatives to boost your energy and concentration naturally and still have the convenience demanded by your hectic and busy life. Cultivate grit and build resilience naturally so you can have the physical reserves to better cope with stress. Let's see how close I am to understanding your current choices.

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I meet many people that fit this general profile. Less than six hours of sleep, caffeine and sugar to push through the exhaustion, and acids and aspirin to get through other discomforts. A little bit of alcohol, maybe a half a bottle or more of wine to wind down and sleep aids.

Breakfast is to go eaten standing in the kitchen, in the car, or at the desk. Convenience and easy to eat is the top priority. Lunch, sometimes you skip it because there's usually not enough time or it's partially eaten while you're working.

So dinner really is the main meal of the day and often later in the evening based upon your busy work schedule. You sit most of the day and probably don't have a lot of time for exercise because you're working 12 plus hours. This sound about right? Does that sound like you? So when you're drained and exhausted and all that's going on in your life, it really won't take all that much to begin feeling differently.

Just a little bit more sleep, more water, whole foods, a bit of stretching, slowing down to chew instead of gulping your food. It'll make a significant difference. Trust me.

So today let's go over a few simple substitutions that you can make in your eating patterns and how to improve your nighttime routines with small adjustments to get better sleep. So before I jump into that, let's go ahead and start with prayer. Lord, thank you for bringing my dear friends to listen today.

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A demanding and stressful career and a hectic and busy lifestyle have stressed and stretched my friend too far. Please help them ease their stress and cast their burdens on you. Provide the strength and energy for them to adopt small changes so they can feel better, enabling them to have a more fulfilling life.

I pray you can help every listener achieve their goals to be healthy in body, renewed in mind, and strong in spirit. As they reduce stress and improve work-life balance, may they know your will and your love. In Jesus's name, amen.

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Hi, I'm Sharon McCall with Whispering Fields Wellness. So great to meet you today. Early in my corporate career, I'd been where you are, figuring out how to naturally boost my energy and offset digestive discomfort from chronic stress.

Honestly, I was drinking more coffee and wine than water. Skipping meals was a regular thing because I just didn't have the time for it, or just grabbing a bite whenever it was convenient, just so I could squeeze in more work. It was just a way of life for me at the time.

Short nights with restless sleep left me waking exhausted and dragging the next day, which meant more coffee and more stomach irritation from not eating. It was just an ongoing cycle. So eventually, with my passion for nutrition and holistic wellness, I figured out a way and learned even more along that journey that I want to share with others now as a stress recovery coach.

So today's topic is one of my favorites. It's about how to build those inner reserves so that you have the grit, the resilience to handle whatever comes your way. And it's one of my favorite topics.

In the interest of time though, today I'm just going to keep it to water, whole foods, sleep, and then we'll go through an exercise at the end like we normally do. Because there are so many different ways to make minor changes to naturally boost energy and improve concentration. So we're just going to keep this to physical activities, things you consume, and things that you can do in today's discussion.

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But building reserves is a key way to better deal with stress. So last time, you may remember, we talked a little bit about halt. That when you're feeling any of these four things, hungry, angry, or anxious, lonely, or tired, it just makes everything so much more stressful.

You just, that emotional state that you're in, it just makes you so much more susceptible to stress. So if you aren't hangry and you're not tired, you're going to naturally feel that you're less stressed because you've got more capabilities internally to deal with it. So your body's less likely to get triggered in that stress response.

So some of these things then are, of course, sleep and hydration, whole foods, caffeine and sugar really play into the stress cycle. So you want to reduce those. Focusing on eating habits that aren't rushed and bad for your digestion and building energy and slowing down enough to make sure that they're helping you.

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Getting enough movement. It doesn't necessarily have to be exercise, but just moving your body more than you currently are with as sedentary as you are with work. Getting some sunshine.

It really makes a big difference to sleep and it naturally boosts up your energy, just getting that little bit of sun. It allows your body to naturally produce some of the vitamins it needs. And then getting some breaks and rest.

It's really not a lot of different things that comes with building your physical energy reserves. And all it takes is just a couple of small adjustments to improve concentration and to boost energy. So as you think about it, you, like many people, probably already know what is the next step on the spectrum of better for you.

You just need to implement it. So maybe some of you have already made some small steps. We've talked a little bit about the snack drawer before, someplace convenient in your office that you've put in some different snacks just to make sure that they're there, they're convenient so that you eat.

You just need to make sure that it's not full of just candy bars, that you've got some protein, fiber, meal replacement bars, some things with some broader nutrition portfolio than your typical quick, convenient snack, like a bag of potato chips or a candy bar or a bag of cookies. Just making that small change can make a huge difference because it helps start to take you off that energy roller coaster as you're picking some of those things out. And DoorDash these days, honestly, has opened up so many convenient food delivery options that maybe you're already picking some healthy and better for you items to be delivered to the office.

So you're not living off of whatever's in the vending machine, which is pretty convenient when I was at the worst of my stress, to give you many more healthy, convenient lunch options. And we're just looking for better for you, whatever is that next tiny step. So maybe you've done some of those already.

And then, or maybe you've picked frozen food and you're bringing in one of these little frozen meals. Don't know about you, but when I tried that for a while, that just didn't work because I couldn't find the time to get to the microwave. And let me tell you, thawed out, cold, frozen meals, no.

Those are horrible. Just don't do it. So if you do do that path, just make sure you actually get to the microwave and don't try and compromise and just eat it because it was convenient.

So, but for purposes of today's discussion, I'm just going to keep working with the scenario that I described earlier, where you're getting very little sleep, you're working 12 hours of a day, you're roughly spending about two of your hours prepping for your day. You think about it, you probably got a 30 minute morning routine from the time that you get up to when you get to your desk or you get to your car, depending on whether you're commuting or not. Dinner, you're making it, eating it, super short period of time, and just running the household stuff that takes about two hours.

And that running the household stuff includes things like your coffee prep, your plan for dinner, laying out your clothes, if you're bringing lunch, prepping it, following up on any personal business or communications, which just leaves you then three, four hours of discretionary time for loved ones and yourself, depending on your commute. So the reason you probably found me is because this lifestyle, it just doesn't, it's not conducive to work life balance. In that little bit of three to four hours a day, you're just not getting a fulfilling life.

Yet you're exhausted because of everything that you've got going on and that you're constantly on the run. So with these time constraints, boosting your energy may seem very difficult. But today we're going to focus on how you can do this and still stay as busy and hectic and crazy of a lifestyle that you currently have, and let you deal with making choices so that you can improve your energy while you're working on figuring out how you're going to end up reclaiming your time so you can have more family time and more balance.

So these strategies we're going to cover today are really just all about building those physical reserves and doing those immediate short-term wins to boost energy and to improve concentration just to get rid of some of that brain fog that comes with the exhaustion. So the first thing I want to kind of cover is cut the crap. C-R-A-P.

That's my secret to helping you cultivate grit, boost energy, and improve concentration. So let's go over what the crap is. C is for caffeine.

R is for refined sweeteners, flours, and starches. All of these things get you on an energy roller coaster. Alcohol, because often many of you as you're really stressed out and exhausted, you get so wired with everything that's going on and that high pace that your life is that you find yourself drinking a lot of alcohol in the evening, which negatively impacts your ability to get sleep.

And then the P is processed GMO seed oils. So these are like the generic vegetable oil, cottonseed, corn, canola, rapeseed, etc. You probably aren't reading labels, which is fine.

That is one of the things though that makes a long-term difference. It is a little more of an advanced item, and I'm not really going to get into that. Another bonus area that you can take a look at if reading labels is kind of up your alley is getting rid of artificial colors, flavors, and sweeteners.

A lot of these artificial colors, for people that are sensitive to them, they trigger ADHD-like symptoms. And so they feed into that stress and that I'm constantly moving and worrying and in that cycle from that standpoint. So that may be one of those things, just as you continue on this journey, that you might need to take a look at cutting as you're looking to boost your energy and to reduce your stress and improve work-life harmony.

But we're going to keep this simple today and really focus on the highest impact, which is water and just focusing on whole foods. That way you don't have to focus on any label reading whatsoever. Well, maybe a little bit on the sugar part, but that's a really easy one to do a direct comparison on.

So why start there? You want to avoid the hangry, just not get hungry and angry, and make sure that you can get off that energy roller coaster. Because every time you have something sugary and caffeine, your energy, it peaks up, but then that crash that follows and it seems like it almost takes more sugar, more caffeine to get you back to normal so that you can continue on with your day. And that gets compounded when you're not taking your breaks and allowing your body to reset naturally as you go through the your energy ebbs and flows through the course of the day.

So the first thing you want to do is focus on water because dehydration feeds into all of this. So many times you get a hungry signal and it's actually you need some water. Sometimes you're feeling really down and your energy's low, you need some water because you're pushing on dehydration.

So to be properly hydrated, some estimate that you take your body weight, you divide it by two, and you have that many ounces of water, and that's enough to keep you hydrated. But to stay hydrated, it really all depends on what your other consumption patterns are. Every glass of alcohol, caffeine, it increases your water content that you need to have to properly flush these things through your system.

So it's really easy to get dehydrated if you're not focusing on regularly drinking your glass of water and having it right near you. There's a point in time when seriously I was drinking more coffee than anything else and then probably in the course of the day I was only drinking maybe a total of 64 ounces and almost none of that was water. It was like 30 to 40 ounces of coffee, a couple glasses of wine, and maybe one glass of water in the morning and at night.

So I was running dehydrated and I could feel how exhausted I was. I kept taking more and more caffeine because of how tired I was. I didn't realize it was dehydration until I started having some other issues.

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As I ended up deciding to make improvements on this, just slowly switching out anything after 1 p.m. started to make a big difference for me, going to the half-calf, going to decaf, diluting the coffee with water, making water more accessible. So I didn't necessarily feel that I was making big changes but just slowly incorporating more water in the course of the day and my access to it and reducing the caffeine. Switching out teas, all of these had huge benefits on my exhaustion and brain fog.

It can be really hard to reduce the caffeine because of how tired you are and your body also gets accustomed to really high levels of it and can create a dependency on it, which is why when you may have ever tried to cut caffeine before you get big headaches and you feel terrible and you just go ahead and just pick up the coffee again. So you might need to find alternatives to help you keep your energy up, particularly as you're slowly weaning yourself off of caffeine and finding other beverages that better suit and keep your energy up. So for example, you might want to try a B-complex vitamin.

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Getting that natural boost from this supplement can help you feel a lot more energy. B12, a lot of these other B vitamins that are necessary for your metabolism so it can work more optimally. So it's a really simple, easy way to boost your energy.

And it's really easy to tell if you're getting the right amount of B vitamins. So if you take a B vitamin and you're drinking water with your B vitamin, you'll feel better about it. But as soon as you're done using it because it's a water-soluble vitamin, you're going to piss it out.

So if you're regularly finding that right after you take a B vitamin, you are overly yellow to say that you're taking more B vitamin than you need to and you can cut it back and dial it back in. But if you're getting clear, it means your body's using all of the B vitamins and you can end up increasing your dosage. So just a quick way to identify another means of boosting your energy as you're weaning yourself off of caffeine and helping to get your body into a better spot.

And this is not something that's going to make a significant difference on your busy and hectic life. So moving into the next topic. So once you get yourself fully hydrated and switch up your beverages so that they're helping you, you want to take a look at whole foods.

So for whole foods, just keep it really simple. Whole foods, I mean things that look like produce. So fruit, dried fruit, nuts.

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Find foods that still look like foods that aren't completely processed in a factory. And you'll find that there's less additives in it and less crud that keeps you feeling slow and weighs you down. So an easy thing to tackle is if you have that snack drawer that you've maintained for any of these convenience items, like we talked about before even, is pick things that have less sugar in them.

So even if you normally have a whole thing of Snickers bars in there, well it's pretty easy to get a slightly better for you option than the Snickers bars. So just slowly change your grocery shopping habits to include items that have less sugar and more fiber in them and it will help you maintain a better control of your blood sugar. Actually eating breakfast and lunch will really help you too.

Even if you are having higher quantities of sugar, the protein, the fat, the fiber that you get with a well-rounded meal helps even out those highs and those lows. Not that you want to stay on those high levels of sugar that you're probably consuming right now, but it helps to buffer them if you have proper proteins, fats, and fibers to make it so that you're not getting these huge swings. Another super simple way to boost your energy with your food is actually to focus on eating it and slowing down.

You may not realize it, but your digestion is tied to your senses. Your brain and your gut are both required to digest food. So when you slow down and you can smell it and you can enjoy the taste of it and you chew it down to small enough pieces and enjoy the full sensation of eating, you also digest better.

So instead of feeling like a rock sitting in your stomach or because your digestion is not working as well since you're in a stress mode, it allows you to a relax more and two your digestion is working better and more effectively to get the nutrition out of your food. So just even if you make it for five minutes, three minutes, however long it takes for you just to eat that apple and just enjoy it, it will help you feel better. So minor changes.

That's all we're taking a look at. Things that can barely have an impact in how much time you spend on what you consume. And since I did mention supplements before, I do have a philosophy in regards to I typically recommend whole foods or freeze-dried supplements just because they contain so much more than just individual chemicals that get isolated out.

So if you're going through your day and you need to boost something up a little bit more, protein powders, green powders, other whole food supplements like freeze-dried organs, fish roe, psyllium or chicory root powder and maybe some cultured dairy. If you can add these things into your diet, even if you're not making major shifts, grabbing a handful of pills of these supplements, it's easy to fit into your day but it also gives you all of these nutritional benefits. Put a little bit of protein powder in with your milk and your coffee.

Again, you're getting that great boost. A little bit of fiber powder, same thing. So just figure out what those right small things are for you to get that next natural better for you step.

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So on that topic, what is the next better for you step? I don't know what it is that you're eating on a daily basis. So it's all kind of up to you personally. Is it replacing a diet soda or a cup of coffee with a glass of water? Is it using whole milk or cream instead of sugar-laden non-dairy creamer? Maybe it's just picking a lower sugar or less fried snack, half-calf, saying grace and just eating your food and just taking a moment to breathe and enjoy without multitasking.

Any of these are great places to start. So what is your next better for you step? And maybe it's not a food swap. Maybe it's an activity swap.

One of the things that I realized over the years is that I had a pattern of a 4.30 p.m. reward. I needed something to celebrate that I had gotten through all of the meetings that I had for the day and I was getting into quiet time. The nice thing about working in California is that everybody on the East Coast is done with their office hours and you get a quiet period of time.

So I developed this habit early in my career. It is everybody was done on the East Coast and logged off, I was finally able to get into doing my work and would take a moment to celebrate and reward myself with that afternoon candy bar or a cup of coffee. And really, I just needed a different type of reward.

So switching out that activity to a quick call or text exchange with a loved one, stepping outside for a moment, it can give you that moment of comfort, celebration, joy. Then that item consumed and maybe that's not, you can replace a food item with an activity. One of the things that worked out really well for me is when I checked in with home that late in the day, it reminded me I need to be going home, not spending two more hours getting everything wrapped up in the office and then going home.

So see what you can turn that 4.30 p.m. snack, if that's what your holdup is, to something that's more fulfilling and that helps you with your idea of work-life balance. And even just a mental shift and for me that at 4.30, that was instead of beginning my time to do my work, but that was my time to be wrapping up for the day, that made a big difference. So whatever works for you to help you boost your energy, improve your focus, and make sure that all of this is supporting your long-term goals of work-life harmony.

So what's that right next step for you? Moving into the next category, sleep. Sleep, honestly, I get it. It is probably one of the hardest things to do is to increase how much sleep you're getting.

At less than six hours a night, you've already kind of sacrificed back as far as you can because you're squeezing in as much as you can into your day. So it is probably the hardest, but honestly, it is one of the biggest impacts. If you can get yourself an extra hour of sleep on a regular basis, it will improve so many of your issues that you have in regards to energy and brain fog.

But if you can't, because I know it's hard to free up that time, let's talk about some of the things that can help you improve the quality of the sleep that you're getting. So let's take a look at evening routines. A couple of key things to keep in mind is you set up your routines to help you, and these still may be a little bit challenging, don't get me wrong, because it's going to take resorting your whole evening, but it's probably easier for you than trying to figure out how to get an extra hour of sleep.

So if you have no food or alcohol three hours before you go to bed, it helps your digestion to be done so that you can get, it can, your body can prioritize your brain and the rest that you need instead of being so focused on your belly. If you reduce the blue light exposure from your devices, it helps your body to start naturally winding down. All of this light that we get exposed to inside, it really throws off our circadian rhythms and particularly the super bright light from devices.

So the more that you can reduce that exposure or eliminate it at least an hour before bed, figuring out what are in that hour before you go to bed, how can you do more calming and soothing activities? Maybe it's some simple prep for your next day where you can reduce that lighting as you do them, journaling, prayer, Bible reading, snuggling with your partner. Any of these things help set you up in your routine to have better quality sleep. Another thing that you can do that helps you get better sleep is first thing in the morning.

Resetting your circadian rhythms so that you're connected with the light and darkness cycle that God designed us for and so that you can get the best sleep possible. You want to get a little bit of sunshine on your skin early in the morning in that first half hour of the day if possible because the sun is not like any of these artificial lights. You get so many more frequencies and different energy from that sun that helps you.

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We already know that when you're in the sun, your body makes more vitamin D and I'm sure that because we are electromagnetic beings, when you look at subcellular level, that there's probably other benefits to it as well that we just don't understand and they're coming. So just getting some of that sunshine that God designed for us to get exposed to on a daily basis will help reset your circadian rhythms so you can get better quality sleep at night. Another thing that I find that a lot of my clients do, like I mentioned, alcohol to wind down.

Some people use a lot of sleep aids, Z-Quil, NyQuil, they're kind of on the regular consumption list to help wind down and get better sleep. Switching these out in your evening routine for calming herbal teas like chamomile, lavender, any of the sleep combinations that the tea companies sell. If you're into supplementation, again, magnesium, glycinate in particular, low-dose melatonin, these can help you sleep.

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Do watch for melatonin because you can get a dependency on that and if you overtake too much melatonin, it'll be really hard in the morning to get going. It kind of feels a little bit like a hangover because your body's got to make so much more extra serotonin to overcome the melatonin in the system. That has to do with that sleep-wake cycle thing.

So just be careful in terms of what you're selecting and don't necessarily pick something at too high of a dose or become too dependent upon it. Any of these things can improve the sleep that you get. Getting good nighttime and morning routines resets those circadian rhythms.

So get it and then when you're ready, focus on getting more sleep. Get the games that you can with improving the quality of it and trust me, with better quality and a little bit more sleep, you will find yourself so much more productive, creative, strategic as you're working and you get through your day. But you do have to figure out where that extra time is going to come from and it's totally worth it.

Every single person that I've worked with and talked to that has figured out how to get that little bit more sleep in their life, there's physical, mental, relational work benefits that translates from those and carry into other areas of your life. So I've covered a lot really fast but I hope you get the idea. Super tiny little changes that you can make in your consumption patterns and the way that your routines are and your sleep.

So these are things that don't impact how busy you are, how crazy and hectic your life is. These itty bitty tiny little things you can swap out and to make small adjustments that you can easily fit in your schedule. This is the way to help you boost energy and improve concentration and focus.

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So as you think about this, I guess we've already talked about, you probably know what that next right step is for you. So what's holding you back from implementing it? What is preventing you from a better for you swap? So let's simplify this even further. So don't worry about changing any of your routines.

Don't try and pick up anything else. You already know when you eat, when you don't eat. Just change access.

Often it's just one time you change what you're picking up at the having more water bottles instead of sodas, the snack drawer, the mini fridge, changing out your K-cups so that they're half-calf or decaf, having a large volume water bottle in your office next to the coffee pot. Just some of those small changes. You're not making anything different in your day-to-day.

You're just swapping things out so it works seamlessly with the way that you live your life right now. Does that make it more accessible? So that you can make that small, tiny next step?

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I know I ran through these exercises pretty quickly so if you have any questions please email me sharon@whisperingfieldswellness.com. Next week I'll focus more on building physical resilience to stress as part of your stress management.

So it's all about building your grit. How do you increase your reserves and your tolerance and resilience? For in summary this is all about getting in back in tune and in rhythm with how God designed us and it gives us a lot of simple ways to restore energy and to improve that stress tolerance and they work perfectly with tiny habits. I hope this video has given you plenty of ideas for your stress management plan as you are do-it-yourselfing your stress recovery journey.

Click the link to download my worksheet on building tiny habits. You can effectively make change in your life with seconds a day. You can get started on this in five minutes or less.

It is that simple, I promise. If you've been working with this worksheet for a while and watching the videos, if you want to work with me so you can put these stress recovery tools together better and go deeper, click the services link below. As a Christian stress recovery coach, I'm here to help you explore more of what underlies your stress and imbalance, to ensure that you have the motivation and accountability to make the changes that you desire in your life.

I can come alongside to support and encourage you and share a few strategies and tools to help you with mindset, lifestyle, and diet changes. See you next episode. Have a blessed day.