The High Cost of Avoided Stress: Is Your Body Doing the Math?

Stress isn’t just what happens to you—it’s what you’re avoiding. While "glorious" stress drives growth, suppressed thoughts run like hidden background apps, draining your battery and wrecking your physiology.

In this episode, Jason and Jana Banana reveal why your body keeps a relentless scoreboard and how to interrupt the loops costing you sleep, immunity, and joy. Learn why the energy spent "not feeling" is the same fuel you need to build your dreams.

Inside the Episode:

• The Hidden App Metaphor: Why your subconscious is a computer with 100 programs running at once.
• The "Fungus" Effect: How avoided stress infects your relationships and "cellular soul."
• Procrastination Math: Why thinking about the gym is more exhausting than the workout.
• The Cortisol Loop: How to break the 95% cycle of self-repeating negative thoughts.
• The Journaling Valve: A 4-minute reset to surface truth and reclaim your North Star.

Stop bargaining with the loop. Your past isn't a cavity in your soul; it’s fuel for your next level.

Hit play to "close all tabs" and start Living Lucky®.

KEY NUGGETS

• Energy Management: The mental load of a task is heavier than the task itself. Procrastination is a massive energy leak.
• The Body is a Ledger: You can bypass feelings, but your nervous system keeps the receipts. Suppression is physical decay.
• Replaying vs. Thinking: 95% of thoughts are repeats from yesterday. If you aren't examining them, you're just looping.
• Curiosity is the Antidote: Putting thoughts on paper allows you to look at them rather than from them.
• Movement Dissolves Stress: Action processes the stress chemicals that stagnant thoughts produce.
  
  
• Living Lucky Journals on Amazon
• Book Reference: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

How does suppressed stress affect physical health?

Why is journaling effective for stress management?

stress management, personal development, journaling for mental health, limiting beliefs, Living Lucky, how to stop recurring negative thoughts, signs of background stress, benefits of daily journaling, the body keeps score summary, how cortisol affects decision making

Transcript

Create A Life You Crave

Jana Shelfer 0:00

Are you ready to create a life you crave? Let's spin that doom loop of negativity into an upward success cycle and start Living Lucky®.

Jason Shelfer 0:14

Good morning.

Jana Shelfer 0:16

I'm Jana. I'm Jason. And we are Living Lucky®.

Good Stress Versus Avoided Stress

Jason Shelfer 0:19

You are too.

Jana Shelfer 0:20

Stress.

Jason Shelfer 0:22

Glorious stress.

Jana Shelfer 0:23

I don't know if it's glorious. But you know, that would be the reframe of the century.

Jason Shelfer 0:28

Right? We've got so much of it all around us. Why not just make it glorious? And there is such a thing as good stress.

Jana Shelfer 0:35

There is because it does help us grow and it helps us become immune to it.

Jason Shelfer 0:40

Yes. Well, there's there's putting stress on ourselves that creates that that drive or that push motivation. Yes, that push to move into our uncomfortable zone.

Jana Shelfer 0:53

All right. Well, the kind of stress that we want to talk about today is the kind that you're avoiding.

Jason Shelfer 0:58

Oh.

The Body Keeps Score

Jana Shelfer 0:59

Because your body's not avoiding it. I'll tell you that. Your body is always keeping score. In fact, there's a book which is entitled Exactly That's the Body Keep Score.

Jason Shelfer 1:11

And I can't remember the author's name, but it's so powerful.

Jana Shelfer 1:14

We'll put it in the comments when we have a chance.

Jason Shelfer 1:16

Yes.

Jana Shelfer 1:17

I read it years ago, and when I read that book, it was an aha moment.

Jason Shelfer 1:21

It just gave me goosebumps because one of the things I love where you've been making journals for the last several months, and actually for a long time, but we've gotten very intentional about it because journaling has been a huge process and just a stepping stone through the whole Living Lucky®. It really has. And when you don't examine your thoughts, when you don't get a chance to look at them, it's so easy to just push them down, push them under the rug, or just ignore them completely and just bypass them. Uh-huh. And if you don't look at them, they're just sitting back there wreaking havoc in the story that you're telling us.

Negative Thought Loops And Cortisol

Jana Shelfer 2:00

It's almost okay. Here's an example. Jason and I had to sh we had to switch computers yesterday. And I opened his computer and I was like, oh my gosh, how does he even work programs running in the background? At least 100. It wasn't that bad. It was one nope, it was 100 programs.

Jason Shelfer 2:23

My desktop looks like a Dewey Decimal System library card folder.

Jana Shelfer 2:29

And that's what stress is in our body. It's a program that's just running in the background. Running, running, running, running, running. And we may not be paying attention to it. We may be thinking, oh, you know what? It's not bothering me, but it's still running in our subconscious mind. It's still running on a cellular level. It's almost like a science experiment in our actual physiology.

Jason Shelfer 2:55

Well, and this makes sense because even in our minds, when the research shows that we have all these thoughts, we have thousands of thoughts every day. And 80% of those are a lot of times negative.

Speaker 2 3:09

It's just human nature.

Jason Shelfer 3:10

And 95% of those thoughts are reoccurring.

Speaker 2 3:14

Are the same thoughts.

Jason Shelfer 3:15

So they're the same thoughts that we had the day before. And if the the thoughts we had the day before, 95% of those were reoccurring. So these are thoughts that we just haven't taken the time to process, reexamine. So this is just a loop that's happening over and over and over again because we aren't sitting down and saying, okay, well, what is what is the story? What is happening underneath here? And then we we don't take the time to create the more empowering story, or we're just kind of playing this loop over and over and over again. And it's creating this cortisol, all these stress factors that are compounding over time.

Jana Shelfer 3:56

And you know, we've often referred to it as a beach ball that eventually it will pop up and bust you in the mouth. And you bust you in the mouth. However, what what we didn't we didn't make the connection, or where we didn't make the connection, is that while you have pushed it downward and imported this beach ball deep down in your soul, it's actually a fungus.

Jason Shelfer 4:23

It's a fungus, it's a virus, it's infecting all these different areas. Yes. And it's it's affecting your sleep, it's affecting your immune system, it's affecting your relationships, joy, it's affecting your joy, your decision making.

Jana Shelfer 4:42

All of those higher vibrational emotions, it's literally decaying those.

Jason Shelfer 4:48

Oh, that's a good word.

Jana Shelfer 4:49

It's like a cavity that is deep down in your soul.

Jason Shelfer 4:53

And the thing we don't realize is it takes so much energy to not process these thoughts because we're taking the energy to ignore them.

Term Papers And Gym Guilt

Jana Shelfer 5:04

And that's the other thing. When it comes to energy and stress, if you only knew how much energy it takes to deal with stress, even if you think, oh yeah, I got this, I got this, it takes energy. It takes energy, energy that is keeping you from building your dreams. Yes, energy that is keeping you from being in a loving relationship with your family, with your spouse, with your neighbors, with yourself, with God. It is it is keeping you from your destiny, from your North Star without you even knowing it.

Jason Shelfer 5:43

These thoughts that we don't process remind me of high school when I would have some some kind of like term paper or something due. Yes. And I wouldn't do it over the time period. Well, yeah, I wouldn't do it over the time period. So if like if we if we had six months to do the term paper in. Oh, I would wait until the last three days. But I would think about it the whole time. Oh, me too. It would weigh on me. Me too.

Jana Shelfer 6:06

I'd be like, oh my god, I got this paint period to do.

Jason Shelfer 6:08

And if I just did it. And I would say, Oh, but this would be so much more fun to do right now. You know, I would be like, I want to go play, I want to go do this sport thing, I want to go swimming, I want to go do these other things. And that turnpaper would weigh on me.

Speaker 2 6:22

You know, that's such a great example.

Jason Shelfer 6:24

And so these thoughts are weighing on us in the background, in the in the on the back screens of our computer systems in our body.

Jana Shelfer 6:33

And if we just do it and if we get it done.

Jason Shelfer 6:50

I often do that about the energy that we want to go into the next day.

Jana Shelfer 6:54

This is such a smaller example, but I often do that about going to the gym. Right. I often I'm like, oh, I don't want to go. And then all day I it weighs on me. Like, I should have gone to the gym. I still need to go to the gym. I still haven't done that. And then at the end of the day, I'm like, it's too late to go to the gym. Now I feel guilty about not going to the gym. But on the days that I gotta do it tomorrow. Now I gotta let go of it. Now I gotta work through these feelings.

Jason Shelfer 7:19

I gotta just let it go. And on the days that you do go to the gym, it's that that movement towards the gym is is hard. But once you make the move, it's like, I'm glad I went.

Jana Shelfer 7:30

I process and in the meantime, that stress chemical is doing like some sort of it's like an alchemist experiment in my body.

Jason Shelfer 7:42

Not in a good way if you don't process it through it.

Journaling To Break The Loop

Jana Shelfer 7:46

Oh my gosh, thank you for bringing this to my attention. I really needed this today.

Jason Shelfer 7:50

Well, I really did, and I and this is why I love the journals that you're making, because it's provided a space where I can just get my thoughts out, put it on paper, look at it, and I don't have to fix anything, I don't have to do anything else. I can just look at the thought, give myself a chance to get curious about it and say, okay, is this true? Is it could there be another possibility? What's more important? Yes, and then I just get I get it out of that repetitive loop sucking the energy away from it.

Jana Shelfer 8:23

So that is one action step that we can do, and therefore we empower ourselves.

Jason Shelfer 8:29

100%.

Jana Shelfer 8:30

We empower ourselves. Grab a journal. If you need a journal, go to Jan's journals, they're now on Amazon. What we're so excited. We've been working so hard. I mean, this has been a it's just been a little project and dream project we've been working on for four years now, and it started where I started taking my artwork and we took them to a local printer.

Jason Shelfer 8:56

Trying to figure out how to make it affordable.

Jana Shelfer 8:58

We had we had journals in our garage. We were trying to take them to our speaking engagements, and it was costing us a fortune to get them out to begin with. It was plus, it then we became the people who had to like the marketing team to brand them, ship them, it was printing and shipping them, and so there was just a lot of little details along the way. However, we have really, really gotten focused in the last two months, and you can now buy two of my journals on Amazon and many more to come. So if you are working, if you have stress that is maybe weighing on you, grab a journal and just start writing. There's science that proves just getting it out of you will help you eliminate a lot of what we've talked about today.

Jason Shelfer 9:50

I'm gonna start a blog series on just journaling because journaling has been such a powerful thing for me and for I think for a lot of the clients that I've worked with. And even though with some of them have been very resistant to journaling, but just writing with a pen on paper has been so powerful. I'll I'll I'll do a small series on journaling with Jana.

Jana Shelfer 10:14

With just journaling with Jana and Jason, just journaling with Jana. And Jason and Jason.

Closing And Where To Find Us

Speaker 1 10:19

Oh, I love it. Thanks for joining us. Keep Living Lucky®. Bye-bye. If the idea of Living Lucky® appeals to you, visit us at LivingLucky.com