How to Be a Better Human
How to mentally reset when you’re stressed out (w/ Dr Jenny Taitz)
04 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy, and I'm very stressed. Why am I stressed? Because I have access to the internet, okay?
Chapter 2: What causes stress in our daily lives?
I read the news. I know what's happening in the world. Also, I have young children and I worry about the kids and then sometimes the kids need things in the middle of the night, so then I'm up in the middle of the night, so then I'm tired the next day and I still have to record a video making an intro for the podcast, but there are these deep, dark circles under my eyes.
And also there's so much work to do. And speaking of work to do, there's always more work to do. And there's also always more laundry and always more cleaning and always more groceries and always more bills to pay. There's so much stress and it all just keeps coming. You know, all of us have stress in our lives.
And some of us handle it in healthy ways and others of us maybe in less than healthy ways. So I think that I know that I need to and I bet a lot of you also need to talk to today's guest, Dr. Jenny Tates. She is a licensed clinician with a doctorate in clinical psychology, and she is the author of the new book, Stress Resets, How to Soothe Your Mind and Body in Minutes. Now,
Soothing my mind and body in minutes. That sounds pretty dang good. I would love that. The stressors are not going to go away. They're always going to be there. But maybe I and maybe we can learn some strategies to deal with them. So let's find out how to do it. To get us started, here is Jenny reading a passage from her book.
Let's take an example that unfolded in my house. One morning when my husband, Adam, was tired and rushing, not a good combination, he dropped a full carton of milk on the kitchen floor. Fuming, he cleaned it up rather aggressively, then cut his hand on the cake plate at the bottom of our refrigerator. Unfortunately, we didn't have any bandages in the house.
So, feeling even more frustrated, he jumped in the car for a drugstore run. Agitated and replaying his horrible morning on the way home from the drugstore, he then got into a minor car accident. You can't make this stuff up. Of course, I have plenty of examples of how I've exacerbated an already stressful situation.
Years ago, exhausted and newly back to work after the recent birth of my second child, I began gnawing endlessly on my fingernail to the point where I found myself in the emergency room with an antibiotic-resistant infection that required minor surgery.
If I had only paused, observed my stress-fueled urges, taken a few deep breaths, and tried one of the stress resets in this book, I'd have spared myself hours in the emergency room and multiple follow-up visits with an infectious disease specialist. I'm pretty sure you have examples of your own.
I have many examples of my own and we are going to talk about them. But first, we're going to take a short break. We'll be right back.
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Chapter 3: How can Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) help manage stress?
You've got your thorny, impossible-to-solve cases of heartbreak or family discord, but then also these funny, weird little problems like the woman whose internal narrator never stops talking. Subscribe to Proxy wherever you get your podcasts. New cases every other Tuesday. Today, we're talking about how to handle stress with Dr. Jenny Tates.
Hi, I'm Dr. Jenny Tates. I'm a clinical psychologist and I'm passionate about spreading hope to a wide audience. So I often write about my favorite practices and my most recent book is called Stress Resets.
So Jenny, thank you so much for being here. And I want to start with probably the most basic question, which is what is a stress reset?
A stress reset is something you can do quickly, literally within minutes, that can change the course of how stress affects you. One of the most unfortunate parts of being human is that we have a knack for taking something minorly stressful, like imagine like almost like a little stain. And we have a knack for like trying to fix it in a way that just makes it so much worse than it initially was.
And so a stress reset kind of gives you this opportunity to keep it contained and maybe even make it better.
So what is actually stress then in the first place?
Stress is these moments when we feel totally overwhelmed. It's like this mismatch between our bandwidth and what we're facing. It's when you kind of think it's too much. I just can't.
So one thing that I really love about your book is that you talk about places where we can look at stress with our mind, but you also look at stress in our body. So can you talk a little bit about stress as it plays out in both of those realms?
You know, it's interesting when we're feeling kind of overwhelmed, we end up getting into a stress cycle. We start thinking thoughts that are catastrophic or negative. We experience stress in our minds like, you know, this is terrible. This is the worst thing that could possibly be.
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Chapter 4: What is a 'stress reset' and how does it work?
One of the things I talk about is also observing and describing your emotions. Like I could say, you know, this thing that happened to me on a zero to five scale is a two and being, you know, in a war zone right now would understandably be like a five plus, like on a, you know, five being the highest.
And so they're both things, you know, we don't want to minimize our experience, but we also want to have some perspective.
We could all use some perspective and we're going to get even more of it. But first, we are going to experience some podcast ads.
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We've all been there, feeling stuck with a problem because no one in our life can relate or because the one person we need to talk to won't or can't. That's where Proxy comes in. Proxy is a podcast that believes no one is ever completely alone with their problem because somewhere out there is someone who gets it. Maybe they've even experienced the exact same thing as you.
On Proxy, Yo-Wei Sha, former co-host of Invisibilia, scours the world for that perfect stranger for you to talk to and help you get less stuck. Plus, we just had Yo-Wei on our show, so if you enjoyed the episode featuring her, I think you're going to love her podcast. Proxy is a podcast that constantly surprises.
You've got your thorny, impossible-to-solve cases of heartbreak or family discord, but then also these funny, weird little problems like the woman whose internal narrator never stops talking. Subscribe to Proxy wherever you get your podcasts. New cases every other Tuesday. And we are back with Dr. Jenny Tates.
I'd love to talk about some of the specific practices because, I mean, something that, again, is so fantastic about you and your work is you are so grounded in what can people actually do. Like, okay, here's an actual practice that you can do. And your book is genuinely just full of practices for people to do. Yes.
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Chapter 5: How do stress and emotions interact in our bodies?
Like I am so, you know, people get really stressed about public speaking. I love to speak public. And some of that is just natural inclination. But some of it is like as I'm about to go out on stage, I like jump up and down. I move my body. I'm like, great, great, great, great, great. And I'm like, then it turns into I'm not stressed. I'm excited. But then.
People are often surprised to find out like if I'm going into a room like they had like a meet and greet at the preschool for my my son. And when I like walked into this meet and greet, which is just like a very friendly, low stakes thing, I'm not expected to do anything.
I was like my heart was pounding and I was so nervous to be like, I have to meet these parents and talk to them and I have to make a good impression. And, you know, I want to have a good relationship. It just didn't transfer for me in that way. So I'm curious, like, how do you transfer from one to another?
Yeah. Chris, I mean, can I ask what you thought when you walked into the preschool? Like you said, you kind of just alluded to some like I have to make a good impression.
Yeah, it felt like, well, I'm like, what I do now is setting the tone for the next several years. And it's not just me. It's like, how are people going to see my wife? How are people going to see my kid? Will we get to have play dates? Like, you know, I put a lot of stakes on it that I probably were not actually there.
And what would be like a more helpful way to approach the situation?
Well, I think probably the way that I actually approach, like if I was giving a talk to 100 people, you know, like walking into a room or a thousand people, whatever. I always say, like, whatever. Worst case scenario, they don't have fun. They'll never think of this again. If it's good, they'll remember it. If it's bad, they'll forget it.
No, and if you could dial up the positivity or the gratitude or the opportunity to savor even. I'm thinking of like, I'm about to walk into a room with people that are kids the same age. It's rare as an adult to be able to meet so many people that live in the same area that are going through a similar stage of life.
This is an opportunity to maybe connect with some people that are in a shared experience and a shared loop. like geographical area.
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Chapter 6: What practical strategies can we use to cope with stress?
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Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shankar, a cognitive scientist and host of the podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans.
I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change.
We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes.
You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance.
And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to A Slight Change of Plans wherever you get your podcasts.
Another example that I wanted to talk about is you talk about as one of these mind buffers, something that you can do regularly that can help you build your endurance and your stamina in the kind of mental sense around stress is you talk about untangling yourself from your negative core beliefs. Um,
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