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March 13 - May 28, 2019
The opposite of stress is not total relaxation or sleep, but the active feeling of being in control.
People who are truly in control of their lives can’t dictate exactly what happens or how everything works out, but they can think in a way that allows them to effectively handle whatever life throws at them.
When shocking, frustrating, or miserable things happen, however, we all tend to feel stressed. Along with the stress, we often feel so confused or emotionally amped up or shut down—remember both are normal stress reactions—that thinking clearly becomes difficult.
your brain’s alarm is like a two-year-old who feels insecure.
Helping any two-year-old recover when they feel extremely upset involves calmly communicating reassurance that everything is going to be all right because you know how to help the child get what he or she wants.
Most of us have spent our whole lives trying to identify, prevent, or correct problems, ranging from the trivial to the life-threatening. We’ve been living in survival mode because we’ve been taught that’s how you get ahead and achieve success. But such striving induces stress.
The alarm can’t tell the difference between real danger and perceived danger.
what makes life fulfilling is the ability to know how all of our actions, abilities, and experiences add up to something bigger than any single talent or accomplishment.
First, get rid of the have-to’s.
Most of the time we run around doing what we have to do. We’re inviting you to stop that method of thinking and living. You don’t have to make everyone else happy. You don’t have to solve every problem at work. You don’t have to make your children the next president or superstar.
A normal stress reaction occurs when the alarm and the thinking and memory centers work together. The adrenaline rush dissipates naturally because the learning brain recognizes the true nature of the threat—the traffic isn’t putting us in danger.
Even in normal stress reactions, it’s important to realize that an adrenaline rush does cascade through the body. It may take a few minutes to feel comfortable again, even when you know everything is all right.
the common denominator is shifting your thoughts from what’s wrong or what you “have to do,” to what is truly most important.
We all have an alarm in our brains, and if we don’t know how to recognize and deal with the alarm, it will keep us perpetually stressed.
Signaling your brain’s alarm that it doesn’t need to worry because you recognize its concerns and are able to handle the situation requires a shift in focus. The shift moves you from being driven by the problem messages to choosing to focus on what you want you learn.
We can always borrow a learning brain from a friend, family, teachers, coaches, and therapists when our alarms blare. Whether we want to learn to do something new that scares us, or remove the pain of stress in a busy life, we don’t have to reclaim our brains and their ability to focus alone.
What we can do is change the way we respond to trauma and stress and the way we restore our lives after traumatic and stressful experiences.
Therefore, most of the people that we’re around most of the time are having or on the verge of having alarm reactions. They’re not bad people, they just don’t realize how their alarms drive their lives.
you can intentionally use your optimal brain to help them and you. Not by giving them a lecture about how their brain’s alarm is making your life miserable—that would be your alarm taking over. Instead, you can reset your alarm, and show the other person that it is possible to shift from survival mode to feeling calm and thinking clearly.
SOS stands for Step back, Orient, and Self-check.
To prevent stress reactivity, in which your brain’s alarm gets out of hand like the Hulk’s, you need to train your mind to prepare for stressful situations and see stress coming before it triggers more than a mild and easily manageable stress reaction. SOS is also an intervention to interrupt and calm alarm reactions when they occur. Your alarm is designed to alert and protect you by reacting. Your alarm knows that trouble can occur in your life, and it wants to make sure that nothing bad happens to you in the future—or at least that you’re ready for future stressors if they can’t be
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To orient is to make a single, clear—but not easy—choice. The choice can be found in answering this question: what is the one thought that expresses what is most important to you in your life right now?
Living in the optimal world, you may be stressed and have to work hard at coping, but you can also choose to focus on what you care about.
The first action of SOS is actually to do less. It is to begin letting the learning brain tell the alarm that we recognize what’s happening and have it handled.
Orienting means we choose to focus on what truly matters to us instead of living distracted. The high-speed roller coaster of modern life—modern technology, virtual reality, and social networking—is not wrong; it takes us for a ride that constantly activates our alarms, and that’s not wrong either. What’s wrong is that most of us never realize that the alarm is running our lives.
The more you step back and orient, the stronger the neural pathway in your brain will become, helping you remember that you’ve been stressed before and can handle it. Every time you remind your alarm you’re in control, it slows the flow of adrenaline to your body and raises your learning brain’s ability to feel in control.
Personal control derives from being able to think clearly so that you have the confidence of knowing you can handle whatever happens in this moment and whatever comes your way. Not perfectly. Not without effort. Not without ups and downs. We want to handle stress well enough to feel hopeful, to be able to step back and realize that our lives have purpose and can be fulfilling even when we feel stressed.
when you look at stress mainly as a problem, instead of as a breakdown in the relationship between your thinking and alarm centers, the solution to stress is to stop feeling it.
Personal control is your confidence that at this moment you can think clearly enough to make good choices and handle the challenges you face.
A trigger is something that causes us to react quickly and negatively without thinking.
Difficult experiences don’t have to trigger us even if they raise the level of stress in our body. The problem is that we don’t differentiate what’s really triggering us from other parts of an experience that are unpleasant.
When we connect our learning brains and our alarms in the long loop, the learning brain immediately recognizes any triggers that need to be dealt with.
Triggers don’t necessarily mean that something terrible is happening. Most often, they are simply situations that need some attention.
If you wait until that point of no return to recognize the trigger, your alarm reaction often will be so strong that you feel unable to think clearly and control your actions.
The alarm also doesn’t distinguish past, present, and future. If something was a problem in the past or could be a problem in the future, as far as the alarm is concerned it is a problem right now.
We can be triggered by specific things people do specific things people say places activities times of day, dates, seasons, or anniversaries bodily feelings like fatigue, pain, or gut reactions
Clear thinking is what we need to do in order to handle a trigger that’s set off an alarm reaction.
Your triggers are usually attached to personal values or goals, and the trigger is your brain perceiving that something or someone is stopping you from experiencing what’s important to you.
When you intentionally recognize your triggers, however, you let your alarm remain on until you determine what caused it to send its messages (the stress reactions).
You can literally choose the emotions and thoughts that guide you when you focus your mind on what is most important to you rather than reacting to where you are and what’s happening to you.
Every stress reaction triggered by your brain’s alarm brings with it a bundle of emotions.
We try to talk ourselves out of feeling the way we do. We just want the feeling to stop. These common reactions are exactly that: reactions. They are following the short loop and living according to the messages of your emotional brain.
They used negative emotions as a reminder to purposefully recall other emotions that gave their lives a sense of importance. The act of recalling the full range of their emotions, not just the alarm emotions, created new memories of how rich their emotional life was.
But the thinking center can’t force the alarm to accept an optimal emotion, without actually dealing with the threat (whether it is real or imagined). If the alarm is activated, it will escalate its distress calls rather than accepting and enjoying the positive feelings.
When you pay attention to emotions, you empower yourself by noticing the parts of life you need to prepare for. This allows you to activate your thinking center and quickly understand what’s going on. If you notice emotions when a stress reaction starts (or is about to start), this empowers your thinking center to make a plan for what to do. Emotions don’t cause you to overreact. Emotions prevent overreactions by the alarm. Emotions are a wake-up call that allows us to recognize that we need to pay attention. If we pay attention to them, they serve a clear purpose: to ensure that a situation
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It’s a mistake to take the commonsense approach and try to ignore or minimize the messages sent by our brains’ alarms. Remember, that only causes the alarm to up the ante and increase the volume of its demands for attention. Like triggers, emotions can get blown up into major crises or catastrophes by the alarm when we don’t take the alarm’s caution signals seriously. On the other hand, when the thinking center responds by showing respect for the emotions generated by the alarm, the alarm turns down the volume of stress chemicals.
Emotions are neither right nor wrong, but many times we treat them as if they are good or bad. We judge our emotions because they cause us pain or pleasure.
In every moment, using your thinking center to focus, you can reach into your memory center and find the emotion that is most important for you to experience in this moment.
Your feelings do not always have to be reactive. How you feel does not have to be dictated by the triggers that surround you. Or by the fears and worries that preoccupy your brain’s alarm. When you notice a negative emotion, you can empower that feeling as a reminder to focus. When you focus on what you want to feel, you empower the memories of past emotions that can turn down your alarm in the present.
When you practice orienting to emotions you want to experience, you can wake up each morning aware that you choose the way you want to feel.
