Won Body Won Life, Ep 4: Decrease Work-Related Pain, Stress, and Anxiety

In this episode, I'll be covering how to reduce work-related pain, stress, and anxiety using my 4 step formula known as the DOMS break. We often take breaks at work, but they're rarely utilized correctly to help us live pain-free or stress-free in our work environment.

Scroll down for the show transcript.

Ep 4 Transcript

Welcome to the Won Body Won Life podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jason Won, lifestyle physical therapist.

And if you haven't yet, go ahead and click that subscribe button so that way you never miss out on any of these episodes. And at the same time, if you do enjoy this, please leave us a review. I greatly appreciate if you can help grow this group and share it with more people so that way other people can benefit from the content I'm going to be putting out on every week on Wednesday.

Today, I'll be talking about how to alleviate work-related stress, anxiety, and pain using my four-step process.

If you're somebody that deals with a lot of stress, or you're always feeling like you're always on the clock, and as a result of your stress, you often feel tired, lethargic, or you're at pain sitting at the computer. This is going to be a podcast episode that you're going to listen to time and time again, because I'm going to share with you four key steps that you can do in order to alleviate that stress.

So I call it the DOMS break. And you're probably wondering, “well, DOMS that's actually delayed-onset muscle soreness, what are you talking about Dr. Jay?”. And so I've coined what I call the DOMS break, so many of us feel like a lot of times when we take our breaks, we're always using it strictly just to reset ourselves.

And the version of how we reset ourselves as some people either take naps in their car, some people will either just get onto their phones and scroll social media, realistically, these while they can get our mind off of work-related things. It's not the most conducive or the most productive, and you want something that's really going to be effective, you want your break to feel so good and so energizing, that actually alleviates your mood, it gives you better energy and it could alleviate the pain from your body.

So DOMS, D-O-M-S, stands for Detach, Outside, Motion, and Social. And let me break that down for you.

So number one - Detach. Many people when they are either a practitioner or a clinician and engineer, regardless of what it is, we often feel that during our break, we're still actually at work. And it doesn't mean that we're actually in the work environment. It's just that we're thinking about what's the next thing I have to do.

‘Okay, I have this project deadline, should I get this done? Should I get this done?’ Realistically, that keeps us in high alert, that keeps us in a very sympathetic state, which means that we're always in fight or flight. We want something that's going to keep us more of a parasympathetic state, which is going to help us to rest and digest.

So how I do my DOMS break is I want to do something that completely detaches myself from any work-related activity. This does not mean mindlessly scrolling social media, there are a lot of different, better strategies that you can use to completely detach from work. And if you do detach from work, then you're giving your brain a chance to rest, you have less chances of getting headaches or chronic tension in your neck or lower back.

So you do want to make sure that, hey, create those boundaries. I used to work just time and time again, work through my breaks. Whenever I was at break, I was constantly like doing social media stuff. I was working in my business I was eating but I was also like, you know, looking for what I should do for my clients. So it wasn't a good quality of life. Because when I took those breaks, my mind was still thinking about work. And when that happens, that leads to burnout. So detaching from work is number one.

Number two - Outside. You need to get outside. Now if you're somebody that lives in a cold environment, totally understand. But there are still ways to get good air to get good breathing in, and also to get good sunlight. So if you didn't know is that many of us as you're even watching or listening to this podcast right now, you're probably not even breathing, right? Maybe you're just breathing enough just to stay alive, but you're not actually breathing in good air. Getting outside actually gets a new environment.

Sometimes it creates a new stimulus in our brains that actually can dramatically improve our mood. If you didn't know the benefits of sunlight, obviously, in moderation. Sunlight helps to reduce bad LDL so it reduces bad cholesterol. It also converts cholesterol into vitamin D. So it actually gets better. We actually get more energy as a result of that.

And not just that, but the more time that we spend in the sun, we're actually going to secrete more serotonin. Serotonin towards our brain. So that means that we're actually alleviating our mood when we're out in the sun. And guess what happens when we spend more time in the sun? That serotonin that we've gained actually gets converted to melatonin later.

So when we get at least a 15, 30, or even an hour break outside, or let's say you take your lunch outside, that can be extremely beneficial towards your sleep quality, which then sets you up for the next day, having better sleep, gaining much better energy as a result of sleep, and you wake up feeling a lot more refreshed or you're not going to work, dreading work or going to work feeling stiff, or lethargic.

So getting outside, there are so many benefits outside of that, right when you're outside and you're either talking with people or you're completely detaching from work, that can be extremely beneficial for overall mental health as well. So many people are actually going through more mental disorders as a result of working from home. So it's actually been proven that people that are working from home are starting to gain are starting to undergo more work-related stress and anxiety, because we can't separate ourselves from work, and our home or our family life. So getting outside will create more of those boundaries.

Alright, so number three - Motion. Now motion. Obviously, as a physical therapist, I am all about getting more motion into our bodies. Now you don't have to wait for your break. Obviously, at when you're at your computer, you can think about for every few emails that I write, I'm going to do perform some sort of movements.

But at the same time, if let's say you're undergoing some really big projects, you still want to think about when I take that break, I want to be outside. But I also want to gain more movement. Because if you've been sitting still from eight to 11am, or less even sitting still from eight to 12pm, you want to make sure that you balance it out by getting a good amount of motion, whether that's walking, or getting motion back into the areas of stiffness, or you have neck pain, getting in some stretches, or some strengthening exercises for your neck, you got to get in that motion because your life literally depends on it.

If we spend 30 to 40% of our life, at work, we want to make sure that work doesn't become the thing that creates a lot of chronic ailments and disease later on in the future. So movement, I can't stress that enough, it shouldn't just be a part of your break, it should literally be a part of your life. And moving should be a part of your everyday work setting.

So I like to create things like the habit stack. So for example, if I know that I'm going to get onto a client call. So my program the Pain Free Academy, I'm on a client call and I'm talking with them. So every time I press the red end button on my Zoom call, I'm going to perform XYZ stretches. So I always perform foam rolling followed by a couple different exercises.

Because if I see, let's say four clients in a day, I guarantee that I got at least motion in four times a day. At my work. I didn't wait till the end of the day to get into movement, or to get in some stretches when my byes are feeling really bad. I got in enough movement at work during my break so that when I'm off work, I feel refreshed. I don't feel half as bad as I usually do. Okay, so number three is Motion.

The last one is - being Social. As much as many people think that they're completely 100% introverted, extroverted, the reality is, is that actually all of us are actually ambiverts, there is nobody that's 100%. Ambiverts means that even though you're introverted, we still rely on social behavior. Even though let's say you're on social media, hey, if you're looking through other people's stuff, and you're gaining and you're getting influenced by it, or you're liking or you're commenting, you're still socializing.

So at the end of the day, socializing, ideally, being away from a computer as best if you can't, and you're completely isolated, getting on a phone call with somebody, or let's say texting while walking outside, I mean, you can still get in that movement, get an outside, but also be texting or webcam, you're FaceTiming somebody so you get in that social interaction.

If you don't get in that social interaction, which I actually did when I first started my business, constantly just on Zoom calls with my clients, constantly just building out stuff for my business. I really wasn't separating myself, so not detaching at all, but I wasn't being social. So I isolated myself from my friends, my family, I was like, I'm gonna build this business. But that actually got me into a state of depression, my neck pain started coming back.

So as a result of not socializing, that led to a lot of depression, anxiety, and also depression, anxiety, very strongly correlated with chronic pain as well. So getting in a social behavior, ideally, if you have like a spouse, or a kid, interacting with people in person, hugging, getting in the touching and feeling and actually being with people in person, that is most ideal. And if you can't get that at least getting onto a phone call, webcamming people is at least second best.

Alright, so number one is detaching from work. Number two is getting outside. Number three is getting in movement at all costs, like your life literally depends on it. And number four is social interaction.

All right. So hopefully you found that helpful and that can be a good thing to help you get in those DOMS breaks doesn't have to be once a day, can be one to three times a day. But hopefully, the DOMS break will be something that you can remember forever, at least until the day you retire. So that way by the end of retirement, you're feeling more refreshed because you've incorporated more DOMS breaks into your day.

So if you found this helpful, definitely leave a review and don't forget to subscribe, but also feel free to share this on Instagram and also other social media profiles. I'm very prevalent with the name @Flexwithdoctorjay. If you can share this, share the audio or share this onto your social media platforms. I would greatly appreciate that. And I'll see you on the next Wednesday podcast.