Jennifer Taitz
speaker
46 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jennifer Taitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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A huge downside to being human is that we have a knack for taking stress and majorly multiplying it. I mean, we take something that's somewhat stressful and then we add on to that thinking even worse than what's actually happening.
Hi Mike, it's great to talk to you.
You know, Mike, a huge downside to being human is that we have a knack for taking stress and majorly multiplying it. I mean, we take something that's somewhat stressful or very stressful, and then we add on to that thinking even worse than what's actually happening.
And the more that we think in ways that just disempower us, our body does a number on us, and then we easily judge our body's response, then we cope in ways that totally backfire. It's like you're stressed about a work demand, and then you start procrastinating or trying to get things perfect in a way that
prevents you from getting the deadline met, or you feel like you need to fall asleep at night. And rather than having faith in your body, you tell yourself, if you don't fall asleep right now, tomorrow's going to be terrible, which just makes you tense. And then maybe you pick up your phone, and then there's no way that sleep is going to come.
So there is very real stress in the world, and in our lives, of course, especially right now. But we have a knack, unfortunately, for just taking it and making it that much worse and then spreading it all around us, making the people around us also experience what we're feeling and feeling like we're dumping it and making it contagious.
It's kind of upsetting, but it's also incredibly liberating because if we appreciate the stress cycle of knowing what our minds do that makes things that much worse and appreciating this habit of overthinking and ruminating and how that takes
something that was upsetting for a couple minutes and makes it stressful for hours and days and years, or taking something ambiguous and making it that, you know, horrible, we can free ourselves.
There's so many ways we can free ourselves at different points, whether with our minds, in our bodies, or through behavior, so we don't spread stress to the people that we care about and take work stress and lead to turn that into relationship stress.
I think as people, there's a famous book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. I think as people, we just have this knack for thinking and overthinking and getting lost in language that just makes things super judgmental and chaotic. But again, if we understand what we're doing, we can entirely change our relationship and improve our quality of life.
I just want to start by normalizing. I can't begin to imagine the pain that people are going through. And I actually can sort of imagine because I'm working with people that have lost their homes. And so the pain is really, really real. But telling yourself not only do you lose your house, but you're also living through an apocalypse is just taking it and making it so much bigger than what is.
And I'm also really... profoundly moved by people's resilience. I just actually saw a client last night who lost her house and I have a daughter, a similar age to her daughter, and I ran over to where she's staying and brought her some clothes. And I was struck by her resilience.
And she said something that I don't know if I could have had the courage to say, but thank God we're alive and home is where the people that you love are. And of course, emotions come in waves and they're certainly going to
to be expected to be waves of tremendous grief and loss and panic, but also there are waves of being able to enjoy a meal with loved ones sitting across from you, even if it's not in your home and appreciation for the people around that are trying to help. And humans are notoriously bad. It's what's called effective forecasting or predicting how they'll feel in the future.
And people ultimately are able to cope with difficult things far better than their minds let on.
It feels like the end of the world. And one thing that we can all do is... you know, half of the time we're not in this moment. We're thinking about something that happened in the past or something that's going to happen in the future. But we know that the more present we are, the more likely we are to be happier. And 50% of the time our mind is going elsewhere.
But if we can come back, anchor ourselves, feel our feet on the ground, what am I thinking? What am I feeling? What am I doing? We can feel a lot more able to manage and navigate. And I think the people that are really, and again, I don't wanna minimize, this is a really big thing that people will be thinking about for years and decades and maybe for the rest of our lives.
But even if someone does go through a traumatic event, I'm blown away by exercises that I do with my patients that significantly improve PTSD in a matter of five sessions. And so there are things to do that are different than what we might normally do that can offer hope even in the hardest of times.
Absolutely. So I talk about first and foremost, our stress mindset, what we make of our ability to cope with both stress and emotions. If we believe that we can't cope, that it's just too much, I can't, and that our body stress response is going to kill us, that we're going to, you know, heart palpitations mean that we're at risk of heart disease and premature death, that does a number to us.
That becomes a negative self-fulfilling prophecy. But believing that you can cope. The most common measure of stress is actually called the perceived stress scale. If you believe you can cope and that your body's stress response is serving you, it's helping you prepare for action and it's adaptive and
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