First off, I know the title of this blog sounds pretty brutal, but bear with me because it’s extremely relevant and important. 
 
In today’s fast paced world that we live in, we’re constantly under pretty high levels of stress from various different sources. For example high pressure performance based targets in our careers, fears of job security, pressure to close deal after deal or make up quarterly sales quotas, pressure from superiors to meet deadlines in less and less time… the list goes on. 
 
These high pressure scenarios slowly drip feed the stress hormone cortisol into our blood stream.

What does cortisol do?

In evolutionary terms, cortisol is designed to activate the “fight or flight” response. It injects glucose into the muscles so that we’re ready to move at the first sign of danger, it rapidly accelerates the heart rate, and it increases the effectiveness of all of our senses so that we can spot the “danger”. 
 
However cortisol also puts a stop to bodily functions and processes that aren’t deemed vital for our survival in that moment. Things such as our fingernails growing, or more importantly; our immune system. 
 
When we’re in a constant high stress environment and our bodies are drip feeding cortisol into our blood stream keeping us in a highly alert state, it’s actually stopping our immune system from working. Definitely not good if we want to live a long and healthy life.

What can we do about it?

The main thing that we can do about it, is to start to develop habits that make our jobs and our lives far less stressful. Rather than me trying to explain the number of amazing ways that you can do this through the magic of automation, leverage, and outsourcing, I’m just going to let you know the source of where I found this information. 

It was a book called the 4 Hour Work Week, by Tim Ferriss. He completely re-framed what I thought was possible, and once I started actually putting his techniques into practice, I realized just how highly strung I was beforehand!

I hadn’t even realized that I was regularly getting waves of anxiety for no apparent reason, I wasn’t sleeping well because I’d be going to bed while still in a ridiculously focused state, I was finding it very difficult to wind down, and worst of all I was feeling guilty for taking time off because I was viewing it as “unproductive”. 

 
Even after quitting my sales career to start my online business, I was still operating at a ridiculously high pressure level of “efficiency” – because that’s what I was used to doing for the last 5 years. Turns out that my “efficiency” was actually making me far more unproductive. I’ve now realized that I can get about 90% of the result, in less than 1/10th of the time… and no that’s not an exaggeration believe it or not. Pretty ground-breaking stuff. 
Whether you want to convince your boss to let you work from home, and then achieve bigger results in a fraction of the time, or leverage other people’s talents for a minimal fee and completely free yourself up to do whatever you want, or build a business that runs almost completely on autopilot to the point where you can run it successfully for less than 4 hours work per week… It’s all in the book.
 
You can get the 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss here.
 
Hope you find it as life-changing as I did. 
 
To your success,
 
Dan