Entries Tagged 'Optimizing Stress' ↓

cheerfulmonk. Creative Commons license.

That red almond-shaped spot in the diagram is our amygdala…from the Greek word for almond…the part of the brain that can send us into the fight-or-flight reaction. When it believes we’re in danger it shuts down the thinking part of the brain and orders the body to take action. Clearly in some situations that mechanism can save our lives. If we’re crossing a street, say, and a car suddenly comes barreling down on us, we don’t need to contemplate the situation, we need to get the heck out of there.

On the other hand, it can cause us no end of grief if we explode in anger when our emotional buttons get pushed. We need to understand what’s going on.

How It Works

How does it work? The above graphic and the following information is courtesy of changingminds.org.

1. Sensory data is sent to the thalamus, which
2. Sends the data to the amygdala and to
3. The cortex (the thinking part of the brain).
4. The amygdala does a quick assessment, based on what information we’ve stored about danger, to see if the danger is immediate.
5. If it decides the danger requires a rapid response, it shuts down the thinking part of the brain, and
6. Tells the body to take immediate action.

This system works great when the amygdala makes correct assessments. Unfortunately, in modern life going into the panic mode or exploding in anger is apt to make the situation a lot worse. So if our amygdala fires in the wrong situations, we need to retrain it. Jason Zweig at the Wall Street Journal just learned how to do this. He writes about his experience in How to Control our Fears in a Fearsome Market. (At this link he also talks about it in a video interview.) He spent an afternoon in a neuroscience lab practicing “cognitive reappraisal”. He learned to look at gruesome images, for instance a hand with the fingers chopped off, and change his reactions by questioning his thinking, by coming up with alternate ways of explaining the picture. For instance, it could have been modified in Photoshop, it could be a prop from a horror movie, etc.

Retraining Our Inner Nut

Being one who could never watch horror movies, I wouldn’t like to take that particular workshop, but I do something similar almost every day. When I look at our daily newspaper I don’t completely avoid distressing articles, but I do limit my time reading them. And I use them as chances to practice stress management. Mainly I slow down my breathing to relax my body, and I remind myself of the secret of happiness, which is simply to ask myself every day:

1. What’s good about my life?
2. What needs to be done?
3. How can I get this done and enjoy the process?

That puts the distressing news in perspective, and it keeps me from wasting time on things I have no control over. It also reminds me to live my life to the fullest, by enjoying what I do.

The Traits of Stress-Hardy, Resilient People is another powerful resource…we’re not helpless in the face of adversity. Our deepest fear is always that we won’t be able to handle what the future will bring. The only antidote for that is to keep learning and growing and developing our inner strength.

So that’s what I do to train my inner nut. What do you do? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Elizabeth Thomsen. Creative Commons license.

If you do a Google search on mindful eating, you will find quite a few links. I recently did the search because I read a Wall Street Journal article entitled Putting an End to Mindless Munching. It’s an intriguing idea…many people who are overweight don’t enjoy their food…they’re often thinking about the next mouthful rather than savoring the present bite. I’ve noticed that I do that at times, and the easiest way for me is to slow down is to think of this delightful picture by the constant skeptic

the constant skeptic. All rights reserved by owner.

 
This picture tickles my funny bone and encourages me to wake up to the present moment. I mean, if a squirrel can do it, why can’t I?

So, that works for me. What about you? Do you savor your food or do you rush through it? What works for you? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Thanks to bikehikebabe, Robert and Tracy for commenting on last week’s post.

Thanks also to the constant skeptic for permission to use the picture.

Photo of Bentley courtesy of The Daily Puppy.

We hear a lot these days about how happy people not only have more fun in life, they also live longer. Does that mean we should worry about our health when we’re unhappy? A recent WebMD article indicates it’s best to lighten up. It’s not being happy every single minute that counts, it’s knowing how to be proactive rather than being a passive victim in life.

Basically it’s the first three items in The Traits of Stress-Hardy, Resilient People

Don’t forget, too little stress is as harmful as too much stress. Don’t try to live in a little cocoon of completely positive thoughts. Notice what’s going on in the world and in your life. Sure, that will cause you some stress at times, but the goal isn’t to eliminate stress it’s to optimize it. Notice what things you have control over and what you don’t. Focus on those areas where you have some influence. Know what you truly value in life and use the energy of stress to help you express those values in the world. That’s the attitude that leads to both health and happiness.

So, what about you? How do you focus your energy and your attention? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Thanks to Sue, Ellen, bikehikebabe and Joseph for commenting on last week’s post.

I’ve been browsing the photos at Flickr the past few days, looking for some bright, cheerful images to counteract the dark and somber ones of the future that have been haunting my mind lately. birdyboo’s pictures of geese were more than I had hoped for. I had an “aha” moment when I read her comment that waterfowl spend a lot of time preening, keeping their feathers in top condition. Of course! That’s just what I need to do, spend more time preening my thoughts. When waterfowl preen they remove parasites and clean, waterproof, and smooth their feathers. What I need to do is to go through my mind and clean out the old garbage and the fearful thoughts that sap my energy. And I need to notice inner conflicts and resolve them so they don’t keep me from doing what I want to do.

When I was a kid a favorite saying was “He/she doesn’t have the sense that God gave the goose.” Well, the new year is coming and my 2008 resolution is to keep birdyboo’s geese in mind. I plan to spend more time preening my mind. In other words, I plan to start having the sense that God gave the goose.

What about you? How much time do you spend preening? Please share your thoughts and experience in the comment section.

Pictures (1, 2, and 3) by birdyboo at Flickr. Used with permission. All rights reserved by owner. Thank you!

Thanks to Robert, Joanna, and Shirley for commenting on the last post.

I’ve been studying/practicing personal development most of my life, and got into stress management about 16 years ago, when my husband and I were both threatened with downsizing. It was scary, but also one of the happiest times of my life.

My husband and I worked in different divisions of the same company and drove to and from work together. When we got in the car at night we would share stories about the latest idiocies of management and laugh. And we would discuss our options for the future. It was a shared adventure.

I take full credit for marrying someone who would do well in a crisis. I cheerfully admit this doesn’t sound very romantic, but if you believe marriage is for the long haul, not just temporary excitement, pick someone who will weather adversity well. You won’t be sorry.

Anyway, we both liked what we were doing, so we decided to make the most of our present jobs while they lasted. I had been working about 60 hours a week and dropped that down to 40. I had a lot of autonomy at work, which I loved, so I kept developing my writing, programming and people skills. In my new free time I joined a second Toastmaster’s Club and became certified in NLP (neurolinguistic programming).

When I looked around the division I asked myself one of my favorite questions, “What’s the opportunity here?” The answer, of course, was to become an expert in stress management. So that became another part of the adventure.

As it turned out, our jobs lasted another couple of years, when we were offered great severance packages. By then I was already prepared for my next great adventure, teaching/leading groups in stress management.

So, what did I learn from the experience?

• Be optimistic and have a sense of humor
• Always keep learning and growing
• Be patient and bide your time when it’s appropriate
• Generate new ideas and opportunities for yourself
• Enjoy the adventure of life and have friends to share it with

What about you? What life lessons would you like to share? This site is about sharing, so please tell us your thoughts in the comment section.

Picture from The Daily Puppy

This post is being submitted to Middle Zone Musings´ What I Learned From . . . Group Writing Project.

Related page: Traits of Stress-Hardy, Resilient People

My time-management system is easy. I mentally have a list of things I want to do, and I keep it in my head unless/until my mind starts feeling cluttered. Then I write the list down. Each item in the list goes into one of four categories:

1. Do it,
2. Delay it,
3. Ditch it, or
4. Delegate it.

The secret is to love what I’m working on…I have no trouble at all doing the things I love. And it’s easy enough to delay the other things or else decide I’m not going to do an item at all. I just ditch it. As the saying goes, “It’s easy to say no when you’re saying yes to something more important.” Some people might think putting things off is a bad strategy, but on the whole it works for me. If it needs to be done, sooner or later it will cry for attention. Then I’ll do it as efficiently as possible to get back to the things I love doing.

One thing that was on the Delay list for quite a while was cleaning up the coding on my two blogs. As I mentioned in About Jean, I jumped feet first into blogging, hardly knowing where to start. I learned just enough HTML to modify my WordPress theme. I played around and did whatever worked to get my two blogs looking the way I wanted them to. It was a bit risky, but it seemed the best strategy until last weekend. At that point it got bumped up in priority for two reasons:

1. I now like the way the blogs look, so future revisions should be more minor, and
2. My Cheerful Monk blog suddenly didn’t work correctly in Internet Explorer.

I tracked down the mistake but worried there still might be some sloppy coding that would cause problems. I want to learn more HTML, but gradually, and cleaning up the code needed a lot of expertise…right now. Then I came across Peggy Collins‘ site. Peggy is the author of the book Help Is Not a Four-Letter Word, and among the first words of the site are “Okay, so you’re responsible, hard working, and independent. But you’re also stressed out, overwhelmed, and reluctant to ask anyone for help.” I wouldn’t call myself stressed out and overwhelmed. Yes, I’m over my head, but on the whole I’m handling it well. She is right, though…I was reluctant to ask for help. I should have been able to do this myself.

What nonsense. So I went to Google and found Karen Blundell. I contacted her Thursday evening, and Friday morning we spent 2 1/2 hours on the phone and on our computers and cleaned up Cheerful Monk. In the fullness of time I’m incorporating those changes here. The best part of the experience is I now have someone to ask when more questions come up. Bless you Peggy Collins and Karen Blundell! You reminded me of a crucial part of time management…it is all right to use Option 4. It is all right to ask for help. It is all right to delegate.

This site is about sharing, so please tell us your thoughts in the comments section.

Related posts: Do What You Love, Live Your Own Life, Loving What You Do.

This blog posts weekly, on Sundays.

This video clip from Facing the Giants encourages us to push ourselves, to do more with our lives…to stop cheating ourselves by setting our sights too low. That’s probably true for a lot of people.

But it’s also true that some people are ruining their lives by pushing too hard. A large fraction of automobile deaths in this country are caused by sleep-deprivation, by people attempting more than they can handle.

Another example of overdoing it was shown on the national news the other night. The program showed two videos of a harassed woman. The first video was taken in the morning, by a surveillance camera at a convenience store. The woman had just bought something and was rushing off to work. The second video of her was at a police station that evening. She was devastated, dissolved in tears, saying she had tried so hard to be everything to everyone. She was the assistant vice principal at a school, and when she got back to her car that afternoon she found her baby…carefully fastened in his car seat…and thoroughly dead from the heat. Apparently this was only one of 19 such incidents this year.

We can do more. We can achieve more. Those words are inspiring… they can motivate us to improve our lives and the lives of our loved ones. But because they are so powerful, we should use them with care.

What do you think? This site is about sharing, so please tell us your thoughts in the comment box below.

Thanks to Kim at Escape Adulthood for pointing me to the video clip.

The news program about the mother pointed out the unintended consequence of putting children in the back seat… it’s easy to forget them when people are overly stressed.

This post is stored under Optimizing Stress.

You only live once. And sometimes not even then.
– P. J. O’Rourke.

There’s a story about a monk meditating every day in the village square. A businessman would hurry by, going about his business and sometimes frowning and shaking his head. Finally one day he could stand it no longer. He asked the monk, “How can you waste your life just sitting there in a trance?” The monk replied, “But my son, it is you who is in the trance.”

My last post, A Habit Is Just a Habit, talked about how much of our behavior is automatic. We’re complicated creatures and couldn’t function if we had to do everything consciously. But if we never learned to step back and re-evaluate our habits, it would be like living in a trance…we would be acting like sophisticated robots, mere victims of our programming.

Adam Kayce suggests we set up an automatic system to remind us to take awareness breaks. We can set an alarm or use cues in our environment to mentally step back and check our emotional and physical states. If we’re worried and tense, say, we can briefly take corrective measures. As Adam points out, a small investment in time can do wonders for our productivity.

Of course, the monk in the story would say there’s more to life than just goal-achievement. If we’re changing our automatic reactions just for the sake of efficiency, then we’re simply acting as self-programming robots. We’re still not fully alive in the present.

The good news is we don’t have to sit and meditate all day to put that extra dimension of spirituality and joy into our lives. Some periods of meditation or reflection often helps, but those simple awareness breaks Adam suggests can do wonders. Only instead of taking them just for the sake of getting things done, why not use them to tune into your surroundings, your body and the life force within you and be grateful that you’re alive? People who have survived cancer or other life-threatening experiences will be the first to tell you…life, the present moment, isn’t something to be taken for granted.

As an ancient Sanskrit poem puts it:

Look to this day, for it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course lie all the realities and truths of existence,
The joy of growth, the splendor of action, the glory of power.
For yesterday is but a memory
And tomorrow is only a vision
But today well lived makes every yesterday a memory of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day!

Picture by tiseb at Flickr. Creative Commons license.

Other relevant posts: Happiness, The Purpose of Life? and Linda Salazar’s Falling Awake.

Self-massage is an easy way to tune into your body.

For short meditation breaks, Tammy Lenski recommends The Meditation Room.

It’s been a fun week. For the third year in a row I was “assistant headmistress” at the local Hogwarts (Harry Potter) one-week vacation school. The school was 1-5 p.m. Monday through Friday, plus an overnight Friday night and Saturday morning. There were 34 children from grades 1 through 6, divided into four houses. In addition there were six middle- and high-school leaders… four prefects and a head girl and head boy. The school has been occurring for five years now, and its success is probably best measured by the fact the older students, volunteers all, are eager to come back.

The above picture shows some of the students about to participate in the Triwizard Water Competition, one of the fun activities. These planned activities were a great success, but there was also plenty of “house time”, when the students came up with original projects to present to the whole group. I was really impressed with the teamwork in the houses, which included cheerfully cleaning up when that was required.

It was a delightful combination of structure, creativity and just plain fun. The memory is a precious resource, one which I can use throughout the year if my energy and enthusiasm start to wane.

In the past, fads and commercial hype have turned me off. But I’m changing my mind about that. The picture on the left, courtesy of Wikipedia, was taken outside a Borders store in Delaware for the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. There is every reason to believe the crowds will be just as long for the July 21 release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Yes, there is a lot of commercialism involved. And I don’t plan to be waiting in line at midnight for our copy of the book. But J. K. Rowling is bringing joy to millions of people. The other day I read a quote from a woman in a nursing home: “We all need something to look forward to.” Rowling is certainly giving that to people all over the world.

What do you look forward to? How does that anticipation enhance your life? Increasing the joy in our lives is an important part of optimizing our stress.