From Chaos to Calm: How to Escape Stress and Build a Joy-Filled, Balanced Life

Are you living your day—or just surviving it? 

In this episode of One Life, Donny Raus invites you to pause and take a real inventory of your life. As summer winds down, so many of us find ourselves overwhelmed, overextended, and stuck in routines that no longer serve us. Donny shares his own recent spiral into stress—and how a simple act of awareness became the catalyst for profound change.

You’ll hear how burnout creeps in when we ignore our needs, skip self-care, and suppress the small joys that bring us alive. But more importantly, you’ll discover how to reclaim your energy and presence by making three intentional shifts:

1. Bringing awareness to your emotional state
2. Blocking time for self-care and fun
3. Planning something big that gives you something to look forward to

This episode isn’t about doing more. It’s about feeling more—in your day, your relationships, and your sense of purpose.

Reflect on this:
 – Where are you running on empty?
 – What rituals or joys have you been postponing?
 – What’s one simple thing you can do this week to reconnect?

Because life isn’t later—it’s now.

To subscribe, comment, or ask a question, visit www.donnyraus.com.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Most people spend their entire lives dressed without ever giving a single thought as to what it is they really want and what's important. I used to live the way the comfort job and I hate it. As a result, I am my little coffee company. I'm just coffee company. I like that you find it. But it's starting to be clearly, and it starts with the host money. One line. What's going on, guys? Sorry, got a little bit of a technical malfunction there, so I got booted off. Um, but we are back. So what's going on, guys? Downing Rouse here, and today I want to talk about your day. How are you feeling day to day? We are kind of fastly approaching the end of summer, and I want to know how's it going? Like, check in with yourself and say, how is this summer going? Am I enjoying it as much as I thought I would or wanted to? Or am I feeling stressed and overwhelmed? It's extremely important to get some perspective as well as to measure where we are in our feeling of this, because this is something that often can be kind of up and down. And then when we are in that down spot where we know we're not giving ourselves the time that we want or experiencing the things that we want, to take a step back and to say, well, what can I do differently? This podcast is inspired by my own experiences of the past week. And it's usually a pattern that happens over and over every single year around this time. And uh, but before I want to go into that, again, I want to ask you those questions like how is your day-to-day experience? I know I ask this question a lot in a lot of my episodes, but today it is going to be about recognizing, bringing awareness, and then creating some things for you to look forward to. And then when you've identified what are the patterns that you go into daily, and where do you experience these off moments? To go into the story. So let me share with you a part uh something from my own life. Uh about last week, or maybe it was two weeks ago, I was approaching a very, very stressful state where everything was just building up. Like in this moment in my business, around uh August, it's one of my busiest times where all of a sudden I'm doing production every single day and I can't keep up. And right now, in my company, this is just me. I do everything. So as a result of this later time in the year, I start to get really stressed out because all of a sudden I'm left with no time. It seems like there are too many things to do and not enough time to do it in. Can you relate? So last week I was literally hit a threshold uh like a tipping point. Like I had was having trouble sleeping, and it was really starting to affect every single area of my life. I would go to the gym and not really want to work out, and then would just kind of do some like high repetitions just because I was there and it was a habit that I had built in. And then at the end of the week, I said, something needs to change here. And which brings me to the first thing I did. The first thing I did, number one, was to bring awareness to my life and what was going on. Bringing awareness to your life means noticing the patterns that are causing you to feel stressed. When I looked at my life, I realized there were several things that were happening. One was I was never allowing my time to shut down or give myself some of the uh the self-care regimens, like blocking time for myself. Often, whenever I would block the time for self-care, like the business and all the things I had to do would kind of bleed into it. And all of a sudden, there was no self-care. I would just continue to work, work, work, and then I would get to the end of the day, and I'm like, oh my God, I like my body, everything feels tense. I can't even rest. And then there was the other aspect of the thoughts. Sometimes the most draining thing that you may experience are the recurring thoughts in your head because they are what is creating the emotion. I started to look at my thoughts and quickly I realized that they were going to things that I couldn't control. They were going to what other people's perceptions of me would be. And a lot of time it was just re-thoughts that were reoccurring over and over and over and over again without capturing on paper. They just seemed to grow into this giant, like this giant in my mind, when really it was probably like a little, a little dwarf, right? Because that's what happens when you allow things to just kind of spiral in your mind, they become bigger than they really are. So recognizing all these things, I said, all right, things need to change. Which brings me to step number two. I started blocking time. And again, this is something some months you might do this really, really well, and then other months or weeks or days, you may fall off that habit and you may not do it at all. But the key, the key is to recognize when you have fallen off. So this way you can get back on and start to make the positive changes, take the positive actions that make you feel your day. So again, looking at this, I one of the things I started doing was I started taking Mondays off. I never, I never take a day off. And even when I say I'm taking a day off, my mind is always, again, thinking about my business. This happened about a couple weeks ago, maybe three weeks now. And I was like, all right, Mondays are my day because otherwise I feel like there's no room for anything. Like my mind is always spiraling around my business, and it would just leave me feeling stressed. I just wanted a day where I didn't have to think about anything. So I met with my friend Matt, and we we spoke about the idea of just giving myself a day. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna commit to it. Week one, I started to do it, but then I started, I'm like, oh, but all these things need to get done. And I started doing some coffee work, and then week two, I did a little bit less, and now we're in week three, and I gave myself the entire day off. The only reason why I'm here with you now doing this, it's because this I believe is not I believe this is part of my purpose. So it's different because it doesn't feel like an obligation to me. This is something that fills me up, which is why I put it into my Monday. Another thing I started doing was I started to block time now and keep that time for self-care practices. One of the things that brings me the most joy is when I go to watch sunrise or sunset. And then um, when I'm watching sunset, all of a sudden I did it for a couple weeks ago. I did it for a full week, and I noticed that everything felt calm. Like it carried over into the following week. All of a sudden, my mind was slower. I was observing all my thoughts and just kind of letting them flow by. But then things got busy again, and I dropped off that that habit. And all of a sudden I started to feel it in my day again. So now this is me reconnecting with that that ritual and going out to watch the sunset this week. Another thing I started doing was I started just connecting with friends, saying, Look, all right, well, I need to start doing some things that bring more joy rather than saying my day off and go read, have coffee outside. I need to add more variety into my life because variety is the spice of life. Think about it. Like when you're in your day, like what are the things that you really remember? It's not the daily walk to the coffee shop, although those might are very important. It's the things you do outside of the routine that add to the spice to your life. So recognizing that, I started to make plans with different friends to do kayaking, hiking, uh, take some day trips. Because I know one that I know that it that will bring more spice to my life. And two, if you're gonna feel fulfilled, you have to have fulfilling relationships. So I block those things out, and now those are included in this week, and I'll carry you over to the following weeks. And then a third thing I want to do is to plan something big for your future. For me, I every year in November, I do a big trip. And I hadn't planned doing, I haven't hadn't planned the trip because I wasn't in the mindset of wanting to even travel because I was just so focused on doing the work. But then I started just kind of planting the seed. All right, well, let me just start watching some travel videos of Lao. Uh, and you know, as a result of watching those travel videos, talking to different people, all of a sudden it started to build momentum, this sense of excitement in me. And then today, my my commitment to myself is to book that flight in and out of Southeast Asia where I'm gonna visit Laos and uh Sri Lanka. The reason I tell you this is because now having this event out in the future, it gives meaning to everything else that I'm doing. And I'm like, I'm smiling thinking about it. And as a result of that, now I'm excited to work because I know that there's there's there's a payoff at the end. It just makes everything easier. So in closing, I want you to, again, the most powerful thing you can do is bring awareness to your life because the things that are important aren't going to interrupt you, right? The the demands of others, the emails, all those things you got to do are gonna continue to bombard your day. But the things that matter are those quiet whispers, those things that your heart is guiding you do to maybe maybe either guard guiding you down a different path or just towards something they your heart knows is gonna make you feel better. You have to listen to that. So, in closing, I want you to again look at those three things. What was let's get awareness. What was it that you were feeling last week or yesterday, right? Because we we tend to cycle through our emotions daily. We don't we have up days, down days, up weeks, bad, down weeks, up months, down months. But usually we we tend to have this norm that we follow. So if we could bring awareness to where we call our emotional home, then we can start to make changes and and bring bring some consciousness to it so we could change it and feel better going forward. Secondly, is the blocking of time, making time for yourself every single day, not skipping a day, right? You may be like, Well, I can't I can't do it. And yes, you can. Right? The first thing you say, if you say you can't, you stop yourself right there because you can. It could be a minute before you go into your doctor's appointment where you just maybe you do a little breathing exercise, and maybe just think about something that lights you up, right? Or maybe it's uh waking up five minutes early, losing that five minutes of sleep so that you can have that five minutes with your cup of coffee, listen to my podcast, and and just remember how beautiful life really is. Or maybe you do have like some some flexibility, but you've just been in your routine where you didn't allow yourself to break out of it. And so now it's like, oh, you know what? I've always liked painting. I'm gonna go take one of these painting classes. I may not know anybody, but I'm gonna try it anyways. Or there's hiking groups, right? Oh, EMS. I think they're EMS, E Surmount Sports, or whatever the one that uh REI, that's the one. Um, they do hiking, they have groups at hike. Oh, wouldn't it be cool just to get on a group, meet some new people, and go hiking, or join a run club. Find something you're passionate about, and then just pursue that interest and start to incorporate some new things into your life as well as new people because those relationships are going to be what feed you. And lastly, as I had mentioned, plan something big, something that really, really stirs the passion inside you. For me, that's travel. You don't have to be the uh, you know, someone that travels. Maybe it's going to like a knitting show, right? And and buying new yarn because you love to knit. I I'm giving shout outs to one of my friends, my friend Lynn. You know, she loves, she doesn't like traveling, she doesn't really even like leaving home. But you give her like a store with like different colored yarns, and she is beside herself. So find what lights you up and then just spend time, maybe block like a time out in the future where you get to just focus on something that lights you up. Because the truth of the matter is that again, life is happening now. I I feel in one of the things that I find most challenging at times is always to come back to that that that intention of realizing that there isn't a moment outside of this moment right here. So this way you can really just put intention into feeling your day, into feeling your relationships, into feeling life. The biggest changes we want to experience aren't gonna come from the things external. It comes from changing our relationship and how we experience ourselves internally. Fortunately enough, like sometimes it takes experiences to bring those realizations, right? And that's just kind of like a double wet a double benefit. But I want you to really start to go inside and really understand what your heart is calling you to do, what your soul needs in order to feel fulfilled, to feel happy. And just to start to let go of the chains that you put on yourself. So this way you can experience a more full, rich, and empowering life. So I hope you enjoyed this episode here. Uh thank you so so much for listening. If you did, please hit that subscribe button, leave a comment. If you have any questions, of course, you could always email me them. Uh, be on my website at www.donnierouse.com. Again, d-o-n-n-y-r-a-us.com. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoy this episode. I hope it just gets your your the brain juices flowing in a different direction because the the intention here is just to feel more of life, right? The ritual of coffee for me is to for me to give it to you so this way you are connected to your day, and you give yourself that moment before you're being pulled off in all the different directions. You're giving yourself that moment to steer your own ship of life. So that is all for I got for you guys. God bless you guys. Thank you so much for tuning in. And remember, you only get one life live fully, live passionally, and most of all, live now. God bless you, and I will see you again soon.