#Clockedin with Jordan Edwards

#203 - Mastering Stress Through the Wim Hof Method

• Jordan Edwards • Season 5 • Episode 203

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Imagine transforming your daily stress into a powerful force for personal growth. Join us as we sit down with Matt Soule, an expert in high-stress management, who reveals how his tumultuous childhood and overcoming early adversities laid the groundwork for his unique approach to stress resilience. From grappling with domestic violence to finding a sanctuary in sports and martial arts, Matt’s story is a testament to the healing power of physical and mental discipline.

Discover the secrets behind the Wim Hof Method, a transformative practice combining cold therapy, breathwork, and mental fortitude. Matt shares how a jujitsu injury led him to this life-changing method and the profound benefits he experienced, such as enhanced energy and mental clarity. We dive into the practical applications of breathwork, categorizing it into upregulating, downregulating, and coherence techniques to optimize performance and relaxation. Learn how you can integrate these practices into your life to manage stress more effectively.

Building meaningful relationships is another cornerstone of stress management. Matt emphasizes the vital role of surrounding ourselves with supportive individuals who elevate our mental, emotional, and physical well-being. We also explore the concept of choosing constructive stress to transform daily obstacles into opportunities for growth. Plus, get excited about an upcoming trip to Alaska designed to equip you with practical stress management tools. Listen in for actionable insights and an invitation to join a vibrant community of global stress practitioners.

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Speaker 1:

Sounds good.

Speaker 2:

Hey, what's going on, guys? I got a special guest here today. We have Matt Soule. He's a high stress expert, Matt, so grateful to have you on the hashtag clocked in podcast For you. Where did this come from? I thought stress is something we just live with and then different people can manage it differently. I didn't even know until we met a few weeks ago about all of this. So tell me, how did you even what is stress and do we have control of it?

Speaker 1:

Well, let me just start off by saying thank you for having me here. Jordan and I'm really excited to share this topic, because many of us have a lot of different definitions of stress, right, everybody's got their own sort of thing about what triggers them and what makes them feel that stressed response, but the reality is we have very specific pathways in the body that actually show up for stress, but it is a nonspecific demand to any response, right, and that's what the father of stress originally termed it, as that's why it's so nebulous. But the deal is is what we're going to get into today. I'm going to be sharing with your audience a lot of insights about how to reframe their ideas about their stress and then, more importantly, what they can do about it to have the outcomes and solutions thereafter.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely. I'm hyped about this, guys, because I'm telling you, me and Matt had an intro call probably a week or two ago and before that. I'm like what's a stress expert? Like someone who's always busy, someone who's always overwhelmed, and in our call, matt just dives in and he has actionable tips. So I'm excited for everyone to hear these and apply these to their life. So, Matt, where did you get started with all of this stress talk? Where did you even? Where did this journey begin?

Speaker 1:

Well, I think I formally recognized it about 15 years ago, but the story traces back even farther. So I grew up with some domestic violence in my home. I was dealing with a lot of anxiety, disruptions to home life, things that are really survival based, and so you know I really struggled in daily life at an early age and my outlet was sports, athletics, just pouring myself into those things, and that was helpful, but it didn't eliminate a lot of that deep, you know, insecurity that I felt, and so I was looking for modalities and ways to address it, and some of the early things were like little breathing exercises that were taught to me actually by my dad. The domestic violence was from a stepfather, so totally separate household. My dad was a wonderful man, but then he passed away pretty early.

Speaker 1:

Another big stressor, right, that early grief that I experienced as a teenager was another, you know, really major stress in my life. So, looking for these ways, the first thing that really resonated with me as a practice was martial arts. So I'd studied a little bit of martial arts as a kid but didn't really follow through with it. I really got into it and deeply understood it in my 20s and when I recognized that it sort of informed the loop. I was like, oh my gosh, this is a way to actually quell the anxiety, to feel capable, and I started to understand stress through a different lens.

Speaker 1:

But what really topped it off, jordan, was you know, carry that picture, you know several years forward and in my early 30s, I came across a method called the Wim Hof Method, which is really just a practice of cold, you know, cold therapy, breathing exercises and a mindset that reframes our relationship to stress in general.

Speaker 1:

And this is where I really understood oh, all of this is about leveraging positive stress. Right, this is stuff we can choose to do and it helps to eliminate all the stuff we don't get to choose, all the stuff we have to meet that are obstacles, barriers and and cause depression, anxiety and any number of other, you know, illnesses as a result of stress, because it'll break the body down if we don't manage it well. So I would say that those two pieces were the major linchpins in understanding it, and I've just been on the path of how can I figure out what are the root stressors in life, what are those base things that form the tree, and then everything else is just a branch or a flower right, and really that's what I was after.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. I love that and I think the thing that kind of came to you with MMA and let me know if this is right or incorrect or correct, because I've been doing Muay Thai recently but I've also ran marathons so I think it kind of comes down to that ability to make progress in the gym, which means you're getting better at whatever the activity is, and I've seen that help people mentally a lot, because when your body's getting moving it really does help you a lot. And it's when you're training consistently, when you're working towards a mission, working towards a goal some people do different fights, different things it gets them thinking a little bit differently and you start to see what you're capable of. And I feel like a lot of the time when we're just going to the gym or just getting a workout in, it's like we're not seeing it working towards a goal, so sometimes it doesn't feel like we're really moving along. But I just know progress equals happiness, so that's something that's always related to me.

Speaker 1:

No, I think you nailed it and you brought up a few really good points I'd like to touch on and expand on. And one is you brought up Muay Thai, which is a fight, basically a martial art, and you brought up endurance stuff, marathons, running. So think about that's one of our primary root stress pathways, which is the fight or flight response, a lot of equate fight or flight to all stress, and I don't think that's terribly accurate, right, I want us to rethink it just a little bit. But just in the specific domain, that's a really big deal. And so by doing that, you don't just go through the motions in a martial art class.

Speaker 1:

It is designed so that you build a skillset, you're battling, you're developing mental grit and toughness. As you go to class every day and experience those exchanges, you learn trust and cooperation with people. Right, you got to trust your training partners, otherwise you're not going to be in a good place and you're not going to be able to continue training. You know you've got to build competitiveness, but in an appropriate setting. You know you can go hard, but you also got to find cooperation so that you learn and progress better. That is a wonderful thing, mentally and emotionally, so you develop all of these like subsets of skills that will support your life, and gosh, it translates to a zillion other things Like all of a sudden, you negotiate for a raise better because you have more confidence and you're used to dealing with the nitty gritty and negotiating how to be a good training partner. All of those things step out of the gym and into real life in a thousand settings, and so I think that's one of the biggest platforms.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, 100%. I was literally talking with my men's group yesterday and we were talking about what pressure we have, and a lot of them had the pressure of am I spending my time correctly? And I'm like you got to reframe this. It's not about spending correctly, it's about realizing that everything we're dedicating time to, we're actually building those skill sets, and those skill sets, just like you said, carry in different areas.

Speaker 2:

Because if we do that, then it removes the stress of oh my God, I'm running a podcast, I need to make millions of dollars today on it, or I running a podcast, I need to make millions of dollars today on it, or I'm a loser. You know what I mean. And when you put these things in where it's like, completely reframe it and I'm just sharing this because the audience there's so many things that we have in our life where it's, hey, we have to make money or we have to do this deal, or we have to do this thing, and it becomes a desperate thing where, when it's not achieved, you feel terrible and it's not a good feeling. So you want to remove that by doing some of these reframes.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, a reframe is a really big part and the other part is the recognition of you're going to perform a lot better if you don't overstress, right? I was with my jujitsu crew the other day, for example, and I was training some guys on breath work and we were going. We do a lot of live sparring sessions, sometimes things called shark tank, where you just do one sparring session after the other. You know you just trade partners after every five to seven minutes and you get a minute break and you grab a new partner. It's just sparring constantly, right, and when guys are stepping on the mat, that produces anxiety, it produces worry.

Speaker 1:

How am I going to perform? What if I'm a higher belt than the other guy and I get submitted by a lower belt? Right, they're having like all of those insecurities like racking through their head. Tons of guys have this. This isn't like a one-off thing, right, and you start to get to like, is this going to be how you perform your best, worrying about every individual experience, or can you approach it a little bit different? Be playful with it and understand it's incremental and some days you're going to win and some days you're going to lose. But you're always going to learn right. And if you can approach your training that way, gosh, not only is that a hell of a lot more enjoyable, you reduce your stress, your unnecessary stress load, but then you perform a hell of a lot better right. So, taking those strategic approaches to reframe and then just get in the mix and and let it be where it is and just giving it your all, I think you're going to be better off a hundred percent and you're just getting the reps.

Speaker 2:

So for you, how did wim hof? How did that program, how did that energy? And, and who is william? And how did you even discover him? Because I know he lives in, I think, like Poland or something, and he does some interesting stuff. So how did you even get involved with him?

Speaker 1:

So Wim is dubbed the Iceman and he had done a number of extreme feats for years, getting television and media attention and so forth for doing pretty extreme endeavors and media attention and so forth for doing pretty extreme endeavors. And actually my martial arts teacher had come across him on one of the documentaries that were produced about him, I think, one where he maybe run a half marathon at the Polar Circle without any shoes and shorts he's like shirtless, he's doing a barefoot, crazy stuff like that. He was always doing really extreme endeavors, but the purpose behind it, I think, is more important, right, the ultimate purpose for this was to demonstrate that we, as humans, are way more capable than we often think we are. Right. So, rather than having these limitations, these predetermined limitations and so forth which is probably the number one biggest negativity thing, this killer that we all invite in in our lives is doubt. Right, we always have these doubts, and so what the method is really designed to do is overcome a lot of those doubts. And then what I train people to do just as a separate thing before I dig deeper into the history is to help people understand what is an appropriate way to push limits and not get injured. Right, I like to operate on pushing and using high threshold tools for benefit. You know, expanding comfort zones over time, being disciplined in your activity to maximize productivity and have all these wonderful benefits as a result. But there's a process to the madness, right? Wim was all about showing the madness you know, just to demonstrate we are badasses. We are capable of so much more.

Speaker 1:

So the reason I came across Mike actually got an injury in martial arts doing a competition for jujitsu and I was looking for something because nothing was working. I was going to doctors trying to get relief. I was building a lot of inflammation in the body. Nothing was working. But I came across this method in terms of, you know, dealing with cold therapy, learning breathing exercises and having a mindset about reframing this idea of stress, and I found it to be incredibly valuable and changed the way my physiology responded in the course of just a couple of weeks and the benefits didn't stop after two weeks. Right, I kept getting them over and over, feeling better, more energy.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I was telling everybody about it. I was like man, you got to try this. They're like what Getting into cold water? Because at that time there weren't videos. There's not all this tons of media attention. Not everybody was ice plunging and doing all this stuff. Most of us looked at us as like that weird individual that's going off the deep end, you know. But as people started to get on the train and realize, oh my gosh, this is helping my energy levels, my mental clarity, I feel stronger than ever. You know, it's grown to what it is today, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

And what year was this? What year were you starting to see Wim and starting to see everything he was doing? Because I understand he travels around the globe. He does things very intensely, like you said. Like even there's a YouTube video that me and my fiance have done a few times where it's the 15 minute breathing exercise, where it's 30 in inhales that, and then it's you hold for a minute and then you hold for a minute and a half and then you hold two minutes and you're like start to feel a little different. You're like, whoa, it's intense.

Speaker 1:

Yes, yeah, it is intensity, you know. So I first got in, bought Wim's book in 2013. So that was you know about 11 years ago is when I first picked up a copy and, based on my other training, I had some previous training in Qigong and Tai Chi and some different yogic practices and so forth around the breath practices and so forth around the breath, and so when I first tried to read his book, his books got sort of a manual of the method, but it didn't really make a lot of sense. You know, it was a. It was hard to wrap my head around, partly because it went counter to many of the things that I had been learning over the previous decade, but also because the way he was talking about the practice was also very new and so I didn't quite understand understand it.

Speaker 1:

So it took me a couple of years before I actually saw a video of of what he was doing. They came out with a 10-week course and when I saw that 10-week course I was able to follow along and once that was the case, everything clicked in the understanding, the practice and I was able to take it on. You know, prior to that I would just sit in the cold shower just trying to fight it and be like I swear there's a, there's gonna be a fire belly. You know that's gonna roar inside of me. It's all you know. I was like this isn't working. This is miserable.

Speaker 2:

That's how I feel. That's how I feel when I go in the cold shower so you're doing it wrong.

Speaker 1:

Right, that's how I was doing it at the beginning, and, and if you don't do it in a proper order, the experience could be kind of miserable, you know.

Speaker 2:

Yes, yeah, exactly, and everyone's like so. Are you not feeling amazing cold punching and I'm like I don't know man, I'm not sure Like it's cold.

Speaker 1:

It's cold, but if you approach the madness with a method right, it doesn't have to be a complicated thing. It's actually a pretty simple and direct thing where you start off with some breathing exercises the ones you described just a minute ago, for example, 30 deep breaths and then an exhale hold for a minute, and then round two 30 deep breaths, exhale hold for a minute and a half or whatever. It is the longest that you can go until you get that strong urge to breathe and then a third round of that. What that does is two things. Jordan One is that when you're taking the deep breaths, if you're doing them in sequence, fully in pulling from deep in the diaphragm, letting the ribs expand, opening up the chest, not forcing it, but a nice deep breath and then a passive exhale. If doing that over and over triggers a stress response, but it's a positive stressor because you're directing the experience and so you move into that, and then, when you go into the breath, you steer down to a rest response. And so this does two things.

Speaker 1:

One, it gets us primed and ready with adrenaline in the body, but with a calm mind and a calm, like a calm centeredness, that pairs with it, and that's a very rare combination.

Speaker 1:

That's the hallmark of a high performer in any number of settings and we can get into that in just a moment, but I'll finish this here. So you get that pairing where you've got high adrenaline, your body's primed in a stress response, but your mind is calm and you're feeling good. And then you step into the stressor of the cold. The cold water hits, you get a little bit of cold shock response and all your job is is to adapt by extending your exhales and being calm amidst the stress. And if you do that, after about 30 seconds for most people, you know it can be a little bit less or a little bit more, depending on how habituated you are, but you start to have this calmness in the midst of the stress and you feel at peace because your body adapts very, very quickly. If you prime it with good breathing exercises before and good breathing, nice and calm in the shower, during or the cold plunge, whatever it is, that's the magic. Doing it in sequence and building it up gradually, you'll have transformation man, it'll change everything.

Speaker 2:

Wow. The reason I'm saying wow is because you start to realize that this comes into play in so many factors it it comes into factors of like when you're in school taking a test, like you're freaking out, and when you start to get into that freak out stress mode, you don't show up correctly. Or you've got a sale going on and you start freaking out and the sale doesn't go correctly. Or you're about to do a deal with someone and you're too stressed to even deal with someone and you're too stressed to even calm yourself down that you can't show up correctly. Or it's the Super Bowl and you see these people like and they're so stressed and they can't even show up during big games. It happens all the time to us. So the more powerful we get in control of our stress, it changes everything.

Speaker 1:

A hundred percent. There was a great study that was done looking at Navy SEALs, for example. They were obviously high performers, right, really good special operators, and they looked at blood markers with adrenaline and cortisol. So these are two stress hormones. Most of us have a negative association with cortisol, but it's actually quite important. It's just very ill balanced in today's world, but in a high performance standpoint, you want adrenaline and cortisol to work together, and so what happens is cortisol and adrenaline start rising and then, in an ideal setting, cortisol starts to level, adrenaline keeps going up, and that's the hallmark of a good performer. So they took these Namby seals and they measured the chemicals in their blood and what they saw is that exact thing. They saw adrenaline and cortisol rising when they're waiting to get the mission, and then, as soon as they got into the chopper and they're heading out, cortisol leveled, adrenaline keeps rising and they're in go mode, right.

Speaker 1:

Well, we saw this same thing under observation in the Wim Hof method when they did the endotoxin test. That actually put this method on the map for the world, right? This is where they basically you know Wim had done a study back in 2010 showing results of where he could influence his autonomic nervous system and he, by being injected with an endotoxin, going through his breathing method and the cold exposure and seeing what the results were. And it was a very similar thing. There was a lot of inflammatory markers that shifted and a lot of other positives, but just in terms of this adrenaline and cortisol, what happened was his adrenaline and cortisol rise. Adrenaline kept rising, cortisol leveled off much more quickly and he didn't experience the bad symptoms. Right, he got the hallmark of good performance. And then that study was repeated by the average person where he trained them for four days. They trained on their own for six, so just in a 10-day period they got the same results, whereas the the control group for a lot of that kind of stuff, like they get injected with an endotoxin, everybody's sick, with all these horrible symptoms for many hours feeling like trash, right. So that hallmark exists across any number of domains. Right, we could look at basketball players, we could look at the Navy Seals, we could look at, in this case, a medical establishment that's trying to, you know, manage a high stress thing from an endotoxin. So it's really it's across the board.

Speaker 1:

And one of the things, jordan, that I think will help your listeners really understand this relationship is that you were talking about. Hey, you don't show up good if you're feeling really overstressed. That overstressed feeling is when cortisol and adrenaline are up and they stay sustained highly for an extended period and you just get this awful feeling. An analogy I like to use is that if you want moonshot results, right, you need cortisol, which is the rocket boosters, and adrenaline, which is the rocket they go up. They need all that pressure, but at a certain point those rocket boosters need to drop away to let the rocket go all the way to the moon. Otherwise it's going to drag the whole thing down and crash and most people that feel really poor in stress it's because they've let the system crash. They didn't have that relationship dialed. So doing practices like the cold, like martial arts, and doing it with an appropriate mindset, will allow you to rebuild and reframe this relationship and act and live your best Wow.

Speaker 2:

So what do people say? I'm not going to an MMA gym, I'm just an average Joe and I'm just living my life and I don't want to impede too much, but I know that I'm overly stressed. What are some tips and tricks that these people can do to allow this rocket ship and this moonshot to occur? Because when you start to hear about it, you're like whoa, like. So you're telling me I'm going in the right direction, I just need to drop one of the things and let the other one keep running. Like sounds easy enough, it's, it's crazy.

Speaker 1:

Well, you end up having to pair a physical thing and then the mental and emotional thing, right, so there's lots of things that can leverage stress. You know you mentioned you like to run marathons, right, so people like to run. You can do this running right, you can learn how to be calm and get through all of those difficult things as you learn to breathe. Well, you could do it sitting in your living room, simply with breathing exercises and reframe this relationship right.

Speaker 1:

So, that's a separate dimension that you can do and carry anywhere, anytime, and in order to do that, you need a couple of different breathing exercises. There's three different categories, you know. There's one that's going to upregulate your system to give you more energy, and you'll focus with a calm mind with it. There's another one that's downregulating, where you can bring everything the system down and really focus and meditate. And then there's the coherence breathing, where you can match even exhales and inhales, and then you can play with sort of where a bridge is in between, and so good guidance for that. That's pretty accessible for everybody. Others want to go into the gym and hit it hard All right. So, taking a mindset of incremental progress and doing, you know, whatever it is CrossFit or some other gym exercise or Pilates you pick your thing right. So there's ways to practice this. So I think if you've just got an understanding of what contributes to better performance and what pulls you back, I think that's the important part.

Speaker 2:

So it's pretty much this idea of our breath is going to lead us to a stress-free life.

Speaker 1:

That, yes, I would say it starts and ends with the breath. The breath covers and overlaps to all of these things. You know during the others and I think it'll help clarify for your audience the other five, the other stresses of the five roots. You know we talked about the fight or flight response. There's another one that has to do with food and fasting. Food can stress you or fasting can stress you. Both can be beneficial or negative depending on the approach, and so that's another way to leverage that to show up and deal with abundance and scarcity and having a good, clear mindset around it and getting that balance.

Speaker 1:

There's another one to do with the thermogenic training. So some people, you can use a cold shower or you can go into nature and do cold exposure, or you can do sauna or hot yoga a lot of hot stuff as well. That's another way to leverage these things with a clear mind. You have good relationships. You know. Focusing on good relationships is a fourth one, but the breath is what unites them all and everything that we do, and that's why I always say this the breath is what unites them all and everything that we do, and that's why I always say the breath is the beginning and the end of stress right, it's in every moment you can show up to stress a different way.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no, it's fascinating. It really is, because when you really sit there and think about it, each of those activities, like when you run, you're obviously going to breathe more. When you're doing a Muay Thaiai, you're going to breathe more. When you're doing crossfit or pilates or anything like, you start breathing more and you start getting that going and it starts to become really interesting.

Speaker 2:

So if someone wanted more energy because I know nowadays everyone's lacking energy how? What would that breath work exercise look like? What would someone do if they're like I want to get pumped up for this meeting? Because the reason I say this is because I have so many people that I know who played college or high school or sports in general, and they used to get pumped up before a game. You see the NFL players they get pumped up before a game. No one today gets pumped up before their activities. They should be. They should be getting pumped up. So how can people pump themselves up before a sales call, before teaching a class, before a podcast? Like what is some of this breathwork exercise that could be done for them?

Speaker 1:

Well, for the very simple one, because there's a little bit of a range. But to understand, like, how to do it, it's basically deep breaths and a little bit quicker, typically right. So for your listeners, breathing in through the nose in this way at the beginning is going to give you a lot more control. So I would start there. Eventually there are other protocols with a quality mouth breath. I make that distinction because not all mouth breathing is the same. Actually, we need quality mouth breathing if we're going to include it and for short adaptations that it could be really beneficial. But for what you're talking about, just pumping up deep breaths through the nose, expanding, you know, through the diaphragm and the chest, and passive exhales. That's going to focus your inhale and steer you to a more action-oriented response. So I'll give your listeners this.

Speaker 1:

Like every breath, every single breath we take in, when we breathe in, our heart rate speeds up and it's a little bit more of an action-oriented response in our nervous system. Every single breath in, every single breath out stimulates a more rest-oriented response. So you can imagine that you're walking through the woods and all of a sudden you see a bear that jumps onto the trail. Most of us we're going to take that breath in and be a little bit startled, right? Well, what's happening in our body, our body's stimulating an action-oriented response because we might have to run, fight, whatever we might have to do, right? So that's on the more extreme end, but on even on the every moment, and every breath in stimulates that, whereas you can think about another time when you're just feeling relaxed and ease after, after something maybe difficult happened, and you sigh.

Speaker 1:

Well, that's the resting response on the more extreme side, but every breath out stimulates that. So if you google, you know breath work or whatever like common protocols, you're going to see things like oh, you should do a four second inhale and a seven second exhale to calm down, right? Why? Because that four second inhale is stimulating but it's shorter than the long seven second exhale, which is more rest oriented. So it's basically a calming you down type breathing. So if I want to get energized, I'm going to concentrate more on that inhale and just little bit of exhales, as I'm passive.

Speaker 2:

So I love that. Yeah, no, it makes so much sense where you really simplify it, where it's the more time spent going in versus the time going out is going to get us more action oriented. And when you think about it, most individuals, when we're just sitting there, it's just like very passive breath, so everything's super passive. So the resting state would be more exhaling than it would be energizing ourselves.

Speaker 1:

That's exactly right. You don't want to spin off the rails, right, so you don't want to take yourself. You're already getting stressed because you're coming on to a podcast or you're gonna go do a big meeting. You don't want to energize and go too far where you can't control it, right, you want to find that balance and that's why something like you know the Wim Hof Method breathing is so valuable, because it kind of pairs both of the best worlds. It's like we get this stress response through the deep breaths and the passive exhales, but we also get the rest response in terms of the breath hold right, and it amplifies that situation in a positive way, and so you end up feeling energized and calm, and so there's some magic to that, right, so I will encourage something like that. There's the other. Oh, no, you go. Well, I was just gonna say like. There's the other side, which is sometimes you don't have time to do 30 deep breaths before you're going into something, right, absolutely, oh, I've got this protocol.

Speaker 1:

I call the mini berserker, and so the berserker breath like these guys. What they used to do back in the day, these vikings, before they would go into battle, would be these really heavy, big breaths prior to fighting because it jacks your system with adrenaline right. So they would do that, they would yell, they'd do all these big things. Well, I've got the mini berserkers, just five or 10 of those really powerful, full, deep breaths. You know, man, boom, you're awake and alive, you're ready to go, you know. So there's lots of ways to sort of hack the system and steer it the way you'd like.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, and I just want people to realize this, that they are in control of a lot more than they think. But without this information, we're going to sit there and think, oh my god, I'm just lethargic or I'm just not there. So let's dive into these five roots, because what do these roots have to do with the stress? Do they lead to some stress?

Speaker 1:

They're all fundamental stressors and they've got specific stress response pathways in the body. So, quite literally, there are different circuits in the body that are triggered along the stress pathway. So, not to get too much into the physiology, I'll keep this really short and simple for your listeners. But we've got a part of our brain called the hypothalamus that's basically a master governor of everything that's happening. It's sensing information, like it's gathering a lot of information, that sends from the body and then sending out the proper response so that body makes adaptations and adjustments to show up to whatever demand you're facing right, both externally or internally, and that sends triggers through the body, a pathway. And so in the fight or flight response is the hypothalamus to the pituitary, to our adrenals, right, our kidneys, but those adrenals atop our kidneys that are going to produce adrenaline and some of those stress hormones, cortisol and things like that. And so that's one right. That's a root. Well, all these roots have a slightly different sort of pathway in parts that it triggers. So it helps us adapt and show up. And so you know, if we talk about the fight or flight response like we did, that's one.

Speaker 1:

Another one is food and fasting. You know Food and fasting. Well, when we eat and we're in a proper resting sort of digesting space, a lot of blood is going to be routed to that, to that viscera, right, in order to help us digest food better. That's the exact opposite of the stress response. I'm sorry. That's the exact opposite of some of the other things in the fight or flight right, where the blood is being pushed out to the bigger muscles. If we think about cold and heat, well, there's a different stress response. Sometimes, in the cold, what we're going to do is we're going to get blood flow that's going to be constricted from the peripheral shell and rerouted to the core. So that's a very different stress response. Right, it's not to the muscles and so forth, it's actually conserving body heat. Is that stress response? And so our body's designed to show up to all of these things and have those short adaptations.

Speaker 1:

And my view is let's leverage these individual pathways so that we can maximize the positive experiences from them and limit the negative. You know, if we're in the fight or flight response because we're at work, for example, negative. You know if we're in the fight or flight response because we're at work, for example, where blood is being pulled away from our viscera and to bigger muscles all day and even when we're eating, we're not going to get proper digestion, for example. You know, it's like these are not working together. So we've got to put in the time in to shift these states, and the way we shift them is through these physical experiences and a lot largely through the breath. Right, yes, direct management.

Speaker 2:

It's fascinating because we do it every single day and no, very few people are very intentional about their breath because there's so much going on, so there's so many things that are holding us back. So you, I know the other one's good relationships. What does that have to do with our stresses? Obviously, relationships can be a massive stressor.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so I'm doing interviews for actually another book. So I recently came out with this book. I'll just mention it and plug it real quick Stronger Through Stress Mastering Stress for High Performance and Restored Health. That was a. It's a great book and it talks a lot about what we're doing here. It'll give you step-by-step guidance and really break down each of these tools specifically.

Speaker 1:

But I've got another book coming out called the stress paradox and I was interviewing one of our Olympic coaches and I asked them you know, what are the things that you see are the most important things for performance, for your athletes? One of his athletes took silver in this 2024 Olympics. So high level coach right, and relationships was one of his top one. He's like I always check with my athletes How's your significant other? When I see performance slightly off, I'm always asking what's going on with that person. And the reason is because it does.

Speaker 1:

It taps into all of our mental and emotional stress and it can drag us down physically if we're choosing the wrong relationship, if we're having a fight with a loved one, if we're inviting toxic people into our lives. You know, if we're missing the warning signs, that kind of thing, or if we're not showing up with integrity to the people around us. If we're not treating our friends, family, co-, coworkers, intimate others properly, that also stresses us in a negative way, but in the positive sense of it, you know it starts with your intimate relationships. I would say, really, it starts with ourselves, like your relationship with yourself, your integrity, how you're showing up for yourself, and then your intimate relationships. So that's a really big piece.

Speaker 1:

Are you selecting the person that's right for you or are you just accepting anything? Are you taking care to look out for that person and invest in the relationship so that you're getting the support that's possible? And are you giving the support that's possible? You leverage that and it becomes wildly positive For those that don't have an intimate relationship. Don't feel like that's the only way, though. I've got a consulting group. I consult for two people and they're leveraging an incredible business with me, and so one is a world-class speaking coach. He helps people get on TEDx talks and that sort of thing. The other is a financial advisor that's been in the top 1% of money managers in his field and they're trying to leverage their relationship to do a new paradigm in the financial industry, to just disrupt that paradigm entirely, and they're using the positive relationship and core values between them to leverage it. So there's lots of ways to do it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and it's it's super important. I actually got introduced to this idea from one of my mentors. He's a this guy, howard Gordon. He's like 79 years old and he he mentioned to me that he's like Jordan, you can only really have like five ish really emotional partners, and he's like by that I mean like business partners, relationship partners, whatever you want it to be. You can really only have five, so pick them wisely. That's kind of what he said, because it is really important. There's so many relationships and as your life goes on and on and on, it becomes more and more and more complex, so you have to choose the ones that are actually really important to you, and how do you want to foster them or feed them or support them?

Speaker 1:

Jordan, you nailed it, man and if you choose wisely I mean, we know from a lot of science-based stuff, studies and so forth, that we're basically a collection of the five closest people around us. So if we're investing in those five, we're basically a reflection of that, you know. And so we want to make sure that we're pulling people into our lives that are going to support our aspirations, support our dreams, that are going to check us when we're out of line, that are going to tell us like truly like hey, this is not right, you know, so that we can really understand how to be our best in the world. And if you do that, you leverage a huge positivity in that sense. And so if here's the deal at the most base level, my idea is that if we can choose, like, the best and the most difficult things in our lives on a daily basis, then anything we face where we didn't choose, all the stress that comes in, that was unexpected, we can weather.

Speaker 1:

It Doesn't matter what it is. So if I've chosen all the best people to be around me, you know, like I've got solid relationships of people that support me, I've got a good network, and then I choose to do the hardest thing by getting into my cold plunge at you know, 39 degrees and first thing in the morning for a couple of minutes and breathe calmly amidst the stress, like I've just chosen the best thing and the most difficult thing in my day. I can take on anything. I can take on any obstacle. I'm going to be having the right body chemistry to show up to any demand. I'm going to learn how to face all of those things with calm, with focus, and be disciplined in it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, one of my favorite things about this podcast is realizing that we constantly have to simulate challenging things for ourselves. I didn't realize I was doing it and I never correlated it to that, but it's like every time you work out, you're simulating a challenge. Anytime you're doing something out of the norm or something you don't feel comfortable with, you're simulating a challenge. So each time you simulate this, then you start to build comfort and you start to build an understanding that, hey, I'm going to go talk to that stranger, I don't care. Talk to that stranger, I don't care. I'll pitch people in whatever regard I do, because I am proud of who I am and I'm not going to let someone else's opinion of me hold me back from going after what I want to go after. So I think it's spot on. It just keeps adding to the fact that the more we work on ourselves, the better we're going to get and the more conditioned we're going to be to be successful.

Speaker 1:

And I think you've nailed it. Yeah, so that's the idea. It's like all those simulations and what happens if you don't like. Life is hard for no matter what. Right. So it's like choose your heart and use a lot of difficult things then, especially difficult things that are challenging, that also give you the reward of feeling good after, and all of my stress tools do that's another little piece. It's like the cold water is hard, but afterward you feel amazing if you did it right, right. So that's a good part.

Speaker 2:

No, absolutely. And people got to realize this that when you're doing stuff, you're not always going to get paid in money. Sometimes you get paid in other ways. So, as you start getting paid in other ways of like, oh my God, I feel incredible, oh my God, like, take inventory of that and make sure to do that activity again. Like I love the sauna, like I go in the sauna because I'm like I feel great afterwards. And it's these different things where you start to realize like, hey, it's not that hard to live an incredible life. It's just the intentionality that has to come with it and maybe the misinformation that we might not have, which is why we're having Matt on the pod today.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, filling in those gaps will really shift the whole thing, because I think a lot of times people don't necessarily know why they're training. They're like, oh, I'm coming to the gym because I think I'm supposed to right. I think we started the conversation with kind of going through the motions. I'm not really seeing progress because I'm just showing up, because I feel like I should be showing up, like I should exercise or I should do these things, rather than like just having the idea of no, I get to do these things and not only does it help me in this space right now, even though it's difficult, I get to push through the difficulty, I get to feel better afterward. That's a positive, but actually it will affect every other part of your life right In a positive way and you get to building that resilience.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and it carries, and it carries. So you would say, to overcome the stress. It's really three things, and let me know if I'm wrong or right Is it the breath, work, the cold and then also mindset, or is it?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so I would broaden it just a little bit. So I would just say the breath is is number one, mindset is number two, and whatever physical activity that you're engaging in, whatever physical stressor, right, oh I love that yeah, it could be your workout, your martial arts, it could be.

Speaker 1:

You know your, your fasting routine, right, that's a stress, you know. Going periods without food that's a physical stressor and I show up to it with calm. I get mental clarity and I learn how to breathe in the midst of the stress right, so I get all the benefits yes, and it gives you that positivity of I don't really need this food.

Speaker 2:

I'm strong because I'm hyper aware of the food eating process and you're like whoa, that is so different, um than something I I haven't really came up with, so for for you, Matt, I want to also get on. I know, with Wim Hof, you've done over, you've trained the trainers, you've helped out over 10,000 people. What has this done for people Like why should people take this advice and why should they start implementing it? I know it's all free, but why should they care about this? Like what are the progress? Like what's the difference?

Speaker 1:

people are going to see. You know, I would just say I've seen people from across the board, so I'll give you a global and then I'll give you a couple of specifics. So I've seen people that have overcome conditions like ulcerative colitis or any number of other autoimmune disorders. I had another client, a Fortune 100 top level manager. She came, she had chronic fatigue, was just tanked, you know, working 100 hours a week and just struggling like crazy. She restored her entire energy levels and feels vibrant after starting.

Speaker 1:

You know, a cold practice. I've had people that have dealt with chronic pain and overcome it. Now, all of a sudden, they're not so bad with their family, they can go back to work well, and these are people that are affected across every economic spectrum. People, like I said, that work for the top corporations in the world as well as just your average guy that's working in construction or anything else. So, no matter where you are, we're all dealing with something. Whether we're trying to get better strength, you know. We're trying to get a better focus, reduced anxiety, you know, eliminate depression. There's so many thousands and thousands of people are dealing with depression. I've seen them being lifted out by establishing some of these practices. I've seen people overcome horrible grief by having these practices. So there's going to be something for everybody in there.

Speaker 1:

And what I would just say is, whatever your thing, you know you choose the right stress.

Speaker 1:

Choose the right stress for you and it can help lift you out and restore your body, get you back on track, reduce the medications that you're taking, you know, wake up feeling grateful and excited to meet the day, instead of like that deep sinking feeling where you're like I don't even want to get out of bed, but I have to, like that's the transformation that I see.

Speaker 1:

And then, on the on the upper side, I've also worked with professional athletes that are looking to get that higher edge in their game, or military strategists that are trying to level up one more right, that optimal side where you're humming pretty darn well, but I want to bump Well, including some of these practices give you that edge. All of a sudden, you're performing better breath. That all of a sudden are going to the world's championships and doing way better than they did before, simply by learning breathing exercises for an activity that they've been doing for half their life, right? So there's stuff in there. That's the reason that you should be looking for some of these tools to include Whether you're trying to restore health, trying to manage the day-to-day, or just trying to turn your daily stress into daily strength, or trying to gain that edge in whatever field that you're in.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely. It's so important for us to realize this because there's so many of us that just live in our day to day and then sometimes we just got to wake up, and I'm hoping this podcast is a wake up for us to realize that we can choose our stress. We can choose how we view this and how we experience this activity, because it doesn't have to be. Oh my God, I'm intimidated of the world. It could be. No, I'm excited about this opportunity. I've done my breath work and now I'm going to go do my exercise, whatever that may be, and I'm excited for the day, and I think that's something that we can all look forward to.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's a really big deal. Your relationships go better, your general feelings are better. You start to be really aware of some of the negative voice, or the resistance voice. I don't know if you've heard of this book, but there's a book that was written that's called the War of Art. The War of Art so not the Art of War by Sun Tzu, which is also a great book, but the War of Art, and this one is all about our internal resistance to things.

Speaker 1:

You know how often does that come up where we're procrastinating and resisting or, if you know, for those of us that are entrepreneurs, you know, trying to find that daily motivation and discipline to maintain and push through the resistance and learn the necessary and new skills, the stuff that we're often avoiding.

Speaker 1:

You know that we know is going to help us, but we avoid because it's difficult or we're not quite sure how to deal with it, and so we end up abandoning that to do things we're good at and we don't overcome right that level of resistance, and it happens across many spectrums. You know, learning to overcome that and being aware of that voice gosh through a practice, like every time you get in the cold shower, the voice comes up like, oh, you don't need to turn it cold, Not today, Right, and just being able to override that voice, turn the dial, be calm amidst the stress and start to overcome obstacles. My gosh guess how many times that shows up in your life. Every time that you start to become aware like, oh, that voice talks to me a lot, I hold back in a lot of these places that I shouldn't hold back in. We start to reframe our relationship. You know, day after day, Wow, no, that's profound.

Speaker 2:

I love that, because I didn't even the relevance of everything being connected and everything kind of showing up in the same way and it's like you're in the meeting and your boss is there and you have a good idea but you don't want to share it, and that's the same thing as facing the cold shower. Or you have a client that you want to reach out to but you're scared of their no, because they told you no a week ago and you're like I don't want, but maybe you have something valuable to share with them and you have to share, but maybe they're looking for that opportunity today. So it's as we can get a higher level of mindset and as we can get a better level of facing our stress, we can go to those actions and we can continue to take them. So I highly recommend what Matt said here where we should do our breath work, we should do our stress.

Speaker 2:

Matt, where can people learn more about this? Where can they learn more about you if they want to get more involved in breath work? Or I know you're taking a crazy trip soon, but maybe they can hear about that as well. What is this trip?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so let me dive into the trip real quick. Well, you can find me at mattsoulcom that's M-A-T-T-S-O-U-L-Ecom, and I've got access to all kinds of good tools and workshops and retreats and other materials that people could be interested in free newsletter access and that kind of thing where I give daily, bi-weekly tips, I should say, to manage stress and leverage it in your life. I'm also all over social media at MattSoulSR5. So you can find that just about anywhere X, instagram, facebook, et cetera, youtube. But I've got an upcoming trip For those that are just like I want to take the plunge and really do two things One, have an adventurous experience and number two, be able to walk away with practical tools that you can implement for the rest of your life and keep gaining value. I encourage you to come to my Alaska trip. So this is a fun deal.

Speaker 1:

I do an annual trip where I take people to Alaska. We fly into the Ted Stevens Airport in Anchorage and I rent a big house, a nice house that everybody stays in together and we eat gourmet food prepared by a private chef. I take you on daily outings into the cold where we get to engage in going into ice holes, cut into ice holes and get into cold water rivers, go on shirtless hikes. It's really an amazing experience. We also have sauna. I backpack saunas on site so that we can play in the elements and I teach you how to do this all safely right, I've had people that have literally gone there without ever having seen snow.

Speaker 1:

That was their first time to see snow. And then I've had people that are very advanced practitioners, that are looking to just continue to explore their practice and advance their skills, and everybody in between people from all over the world come. We've got we've had people from Ethiopia, switzerland, you know, all over the place come to these things United States, canada, mexico, etc. States, canada, mexico, et cetera and so it's really a place where you can come and interface with some incredible people from all over the world, learn practical skills and have an adventure of a lifetime. If you're interested in diving into something like that, I'd encourage you to check that out and come join us.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely Sounds incredible. I'm going to put all the stuff in the show notes. Matt, you've been absolutely amazing. I appreciate you and this has been awesome and I hope everyone got some value. Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Jordan, thank you so much for having me, and I wish your listeners all the best in leveraging stress in their lives.

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Jordan Edwards

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