Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about stress and how it relates to deer hunting and what we can all do to relax a little bit. This morning, I went to the gym after dropping the girls off at school. Throughout my lifting session, I talked to two of my gym buddies. Both of them were stressed out to the max.
One of them a woman whose son just got his license has already racked up a speeding ticket and hit a deer in his short time behind the wheel. The other buddy, coincidentally, is a canine police officer here in the Twin Cities, which, as you can imagine, with a lot of stress, and he was running on no sleep and started telling me about how his squad car keeps breaking down and a couple other things. In his life
that we're driving him a little nuts. Stresses everywhere, and we are all subjecting ourselves to more stressful news by the day. This affects our lives, and it affects our deer hunting success and enjoyment, which is what this episode is all about. People often conflaint stress with anxiety, and although they really kind of walk hand in hand, they
aren't the same things. Stress is a response to something that happens externally, say when you pull up to your favorite little public land honeyhole and see three trucks park there already. Anxiety is all about the internal, say, sitting on stand and hearing a stick crack and suddenly losing your shit because you're worried about missing the big buck that is just about to come down the trail. Neither are much fun, and both are pretty much standard issue
human emotions. Stress often triggers the body's flight or fight response, which developed when we all faced real danger throughout our lives. A consequence of feeling this way is that the brain will say that it's time to dump some serious adrenaline into the bloodstream now, cue the speeding heart rate, a burst of energy which actually doesn't usually feel that good unless you really need it, and then you know a
whole bunch of other physiological changes. Way back when we needed this response to avoid getting eaten by I don't know, short face bears and other predators, this system evolved to return to normal once the threat was gone. Pretty simple, really, not one point. We did need to suddenly be stronger and more energetic and more acutely aware of our surroundings while toggling between running the hell away from something or fighting to the death or a draw. But you can't
stay in that state forever for obvious reasons. But when we need it, it's there for us. The problem is that now a lot of us have chronic stress. We live in a generally heightened state, and we consume NonStop bullshit on our phones designed to anger us. We have too much access to other people, too many people trying to profit off of our anger and attention, and it's
really really not good for us. Chronic stress can lead to all kinds of bad stuff, like certain cancers, chronic pain, fatigue, heart disease, sleep disorders, depression, obesity, and a whole list of other stuff that I don't need to tell you about because I'm sure you get the idea. The biggest stressors in our lives are usually our jobs, our relationships, money, family, health, politics, or the general state of the world, as we are told by those pesky folks who want to profit off
of our anger and attention. So what do we do to de stress? Tell you what I used to do. I used to go sit in a tree stand and wait for a deer to walk by. If it wasn't deer season, I'd scout. If I didn't scout, I'd fish for trout or bass, or do something in nature. I'll bet since you're listening to this, you have similar coping mechanisms. But here's the problem with deer hunting these days. One of the biggest contributors to our stress lives in our pocket,
and we are all addicted to it. I don't know about you, but I'm having a harder and harder time enjoying deer hunting the last few seasons because it's so hard to unpluck. I'm convinced that's one of the reasons I love certain kinds of fishing and upland hunting so much. There's no way to do either without giving yourself to the pursuit there isn't idle time to go on Instagram or Reddit or whatever and consume mental junk food. Deer
hunting not so much. What's worse is that when you're not shooting one hundred and forty inch bucks and are instead staring at your phone while squirrels play grab ass around your stand and you're not even in the same section as a buck that big, you can see NonStop pictures and videos of people with deer that side in bigger hell. You don't have to try that hard to see seven year olds with bigger taxidermy bills than you'll ever have. That's kind of a compounding problem, and it sucks. Now.
I don't know how to help you with your phone addiction because I don't really know how to help myself with that problem. I think in fifty or one hundred years we might look back at this like it was a species altering mistake that really caused some downstream problems. But until then, there are ways to de stress your deer hunting and make it so you enjoy things much
more this season. The easiest way to do this is to look at what stresses you out or what is giving you anxiety about this year and this season, and then think about what you can do about it. I'll give you an example from my life that I've been thinking about quite a bit. I've had stress in the last few years about not hunting enough the way I want.
That way is going to just some random public somewhere and just trying to figure out some deer with some low standards in my heart and a full quiver hanging from my pack. So this year I'm going someplace new. I just applied for a Kansas Turkey tag recently to facilitate this. Without that tag, I'm less likely to go back down there and scout. The less I scout somewhere, the less I'll find that it'll just beg me to
go hunt someplace. So I just did it, and I'm also researching other states as a backup, which I've talked about in the last couple episodes. I also have anxiety over the spot I found in northern Wisconsin last year that was absolutely covered in buck sign. I'm worried I won't scout it enough, and when I go to hunt there this fall, I'll revert to the spots I know I can probably see a deer, but not go to
where I believe a big one will walk by. That's a dumb thing to worry about now, But I know myself. There's going to be a million basketball tournaments on the weekends for the girls, and they have softball coming up, and I'll have work trips and there'll be other distractions, and suddenly it'll be September and I'll realize I didn't do what I needed to. That's going to stress me out.
So my plan is figure out how to get over there, maybe once every other month until the season starts, and just get my bearings, just learn it better so that when fall does come and I walk in with a Camo diaper on and some stick strapped to my pack, I can just saddle up in a tree and feel good about it. Another thing that has given me a lot of stress the last several seasons is not hunting
a farm I really love. In southeastern Minnesota, there are some properties that just have a special feel, the ones you've hunted a long time and have served not only as a jumping off point for a good sit some random October evening, but absolutely tether your mind to something positive throughout the year. I think we forget about this part, but the woods. In our time out there where the deer live, isn't just a mission to kill something. It's
about getting away from life's bs. And that's one of the reasons I hate the messaging that to be a good deer hunter you have to leave everything alone until the conditions are right. So you do that and you kill a big one, that's awesome, But the opportunity cost on that strategy is that you stayed out of the woods a whole bunch, which is not nothing. That farm
in southeastern Minnesota is where I grew up hunting. That's where I spent so much time with my dad, just learning deer and turkeys and squirrels and bunnies and whatever. It's a place that speaks to me and something that,
as I get older, carries more and more weight. I get the same feeling walking into the woods there as I do when I step up to a trout stream in the bluff somewhere and look at the water and try to read just where they'll be laying, and I listen to the sound of that water, and I can smell the limestone as it hits me and reminds me of about a million hours spent on the same kind
of water. When when I was growing up, my buddies and I almost always had something to do because we could almost always get to water like that, whether we had to walk or ride our bikes or later drive a little ways. Those places are a natural remedy to stress if we fail facilitate the right kind of visit, if we carve out a little time to be there when we need to be. I'm reminded now of something I'm trying to do, which sounds dumb to a lot
of people, but I don't care. I'm trying to learn how to meditate, and I can tell you that if you think you have a relatively calm mind, you should give that a shot. It's like a gunfight during a coke fueled party at a disco in my brain. When I try to push the thoughts out, one tactic people try to do is envision a rock periscoping out of a river. Your thoughts are the water moving around it,
and the rock is your focal point. Got to forget everything else, But I can, because when I try to imagine that rock, my mind immediately goes to the water and the eddy behind it, and then I think about fishing, and then how I don't get to fish as much I want, and the whole spell is broken. Our brains are a work in progress, but we should be working
on them. With deer hunting. This means more than just getting to the woods because you like the woods, or sitting in a certain stand because you like that certain stand. Like think about your setups, for example, is there anything that stresses you out about your setups that you could remedy well before the season? Maybe your box, blind windows foga, what's the remedy or you know, the chair that you use in there is just as super squeaky, and you know ahead of time that you could fix both, but
you don't. That's a stressor and it takes away from the experience. The same goes for you know, not chriming, proper shooting lanes, or entrance or exit routes. Is there anything more stressful than saving a stand for the pre rut and then taking a day off of work to slip in there? Only sound like a herd of elephants trumpet through the woods while deer snort their disapproval all
around you. Maybe you do get to your stand just fine, but the sticks you used can't handle the smooth bark of a poplar tree, and so they squeak super loudly in a cold, calm morning. As you climb your way up or when you get into your stand, you look around and realize that the most likely approach to you that the deer is probably going to take is eye level on a hillside, and they are definitely going to
bust you. Not only do those things give you anxiety as you think about them throughout the year, but they stress you out when you actually experience them in real life. That sucks, and it makes deer hunting less fun. Let's look at another example. A lot of us have anxiety about hunting simply because we feel we are supposed to kill a mature buck. The judgment we expect to receive
if we don't gives us anxiety. It's palpable. Part of this is that there are just a lot of shitheads in our ranks who will make you feel bad for shooting a deer. They feel you shouldn't shoot, But really what they want to do is feel superior to you. It's not about the deer, it's about them finding a reason to be better than you. That's a real source of anxiety for a lot of us. But you know how I'm trying to look at it these days. I look at it like how my daughters get stressed out
about basketball. They won't take a shot they should because they're worried they'll miss, or if they do airball a shot, they'll perseverate on it to the point that it will affect their play. But at the end of a day of tournaments where they'll have played three games, I always ask them if they remember every mistake their teammates made. They're going to remember a few because it's fresh, and there'll be some big ones, but when the games are over,
they don't really care. Then I'll ask them if they remember any from a weekend before or two weeks before. They usually won't because it's not that important to them to remember someone else's mistakes. They don't really register with other people a whole lot. They stick with us personally, and when it comes to shooting a deer, you want
to shoot. Sure, some people might make a comment on your social feed that sucks, but those folks are going home to be miserable and stressed out themselves any and they probably don't kill a lot of mature bucks. By the way, they aren't thinking about you because they don't care about you and your buck. That stress is self induced, and of course we could all be better about that,
but a lot of us won't. It also doesn't matter if you have anxiety because you really want to shoot two year old bucks when it feels like everyone is preaching five year old bucks, shoot that freaking two year old. I bet your life actually only gets better because of it. Now, I know I push that point a lot, but I think it's important. I think it's really important for us to keep finding reasons to love this stuff and to keep coming back to the woods, even when the deer
kick our asses most of the time. I think one of the best ways to do this is by looking at what bothers us and figuring out what we can do about it. Now, this is where it gets a little tricky with deer hunting, or really life in general. We want to find the source of our problems and have someone to blame. We want to believe the Fish and Game Department plant a bunch of wolves in our backyard and killed the deer off because they are anti hunters at heart. Now, even if that were true, what
could you do about it? You know, why the deer aren't gone, and you certainly can't shoot down those black helicopters at night that are dropping off all the wolves. We want to blame the person who gives us permission to hunt but limits us to certain days or types of deer, or something like that. We want to blame the non residents for killing all the bucks on public
land before they have a chance to mature. When if we got off of our lazy asses and scouted a hunt and we'd see there's plenty of deer out there. We want to set fire to the rich guy who clearly inherited a fortune from his grandpa and bought the farm we used to hunt. But we can't do that, and we just need to figure out what's next. There are things we can't change, things we don't have control over that are just beyond us. I mean, they matter,
but they kind of don't. Forget about them when it comes to deer hunting, What can you do to de stress, relax and have a better time in the woods. How can you do something about having a better, more enjoyable season this year? When it's February, Bet there's something. I bet that something will take you into the woods to scout or just find some sheds something, and I bet not only will that help you out this coming season to be a little more zen, but it'll also make
you feel better. Now. There isn't anything good that's going to come out of doing nothing, because that's a breeding ground for anxiety and eventually stress, and the downstream effect of that is going to be that deer hunting probably won't be what you need it to be, and who wants that? I don't, But I also know this stuff is hard, but it doesn't require a wholesale change in
your action. In your activity. You don't have to go from no winter scouting to putting on dozens of miles every day while dropping a billion way points on on X just more than you did before. Is usually going to suffice. Just try to do enough to make yourself feel better about your prospects this season and maybe take
the edge off of life a little bit. Right now, you know that Monday is going to come around and your boss is still going to be a huge pain in the ass, and the usual stressors are going to be there, but they don't have to invade your hunting life, and better yet, you can use your wiring as a hunter, your call to be outdoors to your advantage to help
mitigate the rest of life stress. That's what hunting really does for us, or at least it certainly can, but it will never be that if we don't work on it a bit, which is exactly what we can do right now as we settle into the off season. So think about that, think about coming back next week because I'm going to talk about Chad Antlers and what they teach us and why you better get out there right now and see if you can find a couple. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been
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