The Art of Taking It Easy: How to Cope with Bears, Traffic, and the Rest of Life's Stressors

by Brian King

Comedians frequently open a joke by saying, “And now, a little about me,” so let me start by telling you a little about myself. As the book cover says, I am Dr. Brian King, although I really only use my title as a stage name. I am a pretty casual guy so I usually just go by Brian. Besides, I’ve never been comfortable calling myself “Dr. King”—that name has already been taken.

We all feel stress—we all understand it from an experiential perspective and, in fact, some of us may be feeling it right now—but beyond our experience of it, I think it is important to understand stress in its basic components. The simplest description I have ever come across is that stress is our brain’s reaction to a perception of threat. That’s it, and that’s all.

Ultimately overcoming stress and managing its impact on our lives depends on this basic realization: most of our stress is from percieved threats, not clear and present threats.

Remember, stress is not our reaction to threat, it is our reaction to the perception of threat. If we only felt stressed when we were truly threatened, then stress-related illnesses would be less prevalent than they currently are, and I would not be writing this book.

When stressed we should ask ourselves, is this an actual threat? If it is an actual threat, then can I do anything about it?

Worrying is nothing more than internally generated stress—stress we impose on ourselves thanks to some particularly troublesome thoughts.

I often speak out against worry, and I do so for the reason that it is a really bad habit and one that we may not recognize as such. As a form of mental behavior, worrying too much, over a lifetime, can be a major contributor to developing an emotional disorder like anxiety or even depression. It is a behavior that we can change, and doing so is probably in our best interest. And yet, we all worry. Maybe not all the time, but we all have moments where our negative anticipations consume us and cause us stress.

And that’s the thing about worrying, it does nothing to prevent bad things from happening. Worrying does not affect the outcome of a situation, it doesn’t make adverse events less likely to occur, it just makes our life less great.

Concern, at least the way I use the word, is not the same thing as worry. Both imply a form of caring, but worry can be unnecessary and anxiety inducing: I am concerned for my daughter’s life, but I don’t worry that she’ll be mauled by bears.

So now you can imagine that inactivity is an uncomfortable condition for the brain. You may not experience this condition as uncomfortable, you might just label it as boredom. Usually, the outside world provides the brain with plenty of stimulation, but sometimes it does not and the brain has to stimulate itself. Worry is one way that the brain can generate its own activity. Yes, worry relieves boredom. And I believe this is why most worrying occurs.

When it comes to happiness, the genetic component is thought to be half. Fifty percent of how happy you are right now is attributed to your genes, about 10 percent is due to your circumstances, and the rest to your behaviors and thoughts.

Think about all the times you have gotten stressed or angry or upset and it turned out there was no good reason for this. The misunderstandings, the overreactions, and all the worrying over nothing. Nothing is our most common stressor, and it is neither traffic nor bears. It is literally nothing.

When we feel rage over an incident, such as road rage, it is important to reframe our thoughts by examining the actual outcome. We need to learn to react to what actually happened, not what could have happened or what we thought was going to happen. When it comes to our own health and safety, there is no benefit to allowing ourselves to be affected by things that did not happen.

if you don’t like the way you feel, change your thoughts.

In the past few decades there has been a significant increase in the amount of academic research on happiness. As a result, we now know a lot about what makes some people happier than others and how we can become happier. One behavior that happier people engage in more often than less happy people is expressing positive emotions. Love, for example, is a very positive emotion and most of us feel it for people in our lives. However, not all of us are equally expressive of that emotion. Some rarely tell others how they feel, whereas there are some people who are extremely expressive of positive emotions. We have a word for people like that, we call them “happy.”

Verbally expressing positive emotions, such as love or gratitude, to others can make us happier and in turn help us manage stress. Keeping a gratitude journal, specifically listing three things we appreciate about each day, can also make us happier.

Having a sense of humor means being able to understand things in multiple ways, and this is incredibly helpful in overcoming stress. As I have mentioned, inner areas of our brain may misinterpret a stimulus as a potential threat, thereby engaging our stress response, but our prefrontal cortex has the ability to override this system by thinking differently. I know a guy who wrote an entire book on the mental and physical benefits of humor, but from my perspective this is the exact purpose of humor.67 It helps keep the brain from becoming unnecessarily stressed. Most theories of humor are consistent with this view as well, whether it is believed to reduce tension or to serve as a defense mechanism. Humor is even used by some other species as a means to help reduce aggression in social settings.68 There are a lot of benefits of humor, but I believe stress management is the most important.

In addition to redirecting potentially negative brain activity, humor also has the nice benefit of inspiring us to laugh. You have probably heard the phrase “Laughter is the best medicine.” It gets tossed around a lot, and people don’t put too much thought into it. Because I am a comedian with a degree in psychology and have written a book on this very subject, people often ask me if the saying is true. As much as I would like to say it is, of course it’s not. Laughter isn’t going to help you beat the flu, it isn’t going to cure your toe fungus, and it most certainly is not going to fix your broken arm. However, laughter may help you prevent or recover from cancer,69 it may help you avoid cardiovascular disease by lowering your blood pressure,70 it might help you manage your diabetes,71 and it will certainly help manage your stress.

It is difficult to think positively all the time. Whether they are bears or unicorns, bad things happen to all of us and negative thoughts are unavoidable. It is perfectly natural to have negative thoughts pop into our head from time to time. In fact, our brain seems to be somewhat disposed to seek out negativity and hold onto it. Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as the “negativity bias.”77 Basically, if we encounter two stimuli, one positive and one negative, our brain is more likely to notice and be affected by the negative stimulus. It sucks, but it’s how our brain is wired.

Deep breathing is universally recognized as an excellent calming tool, and is a major part of meditation practices. You have heard of it before because it works.

Physical activity, any physical activity, is going to help get your body to calm down pretty quickly. This should make perfect sense if you have been paying attention at all throughout this discussion. Stress is the brain’s reaction to a perception of threat and it gets the body ready for action, so give it some action. Technically speaking, physical activity is what stress is designed for. All that fighting and fleeing the body is preparing for? Yeah, that’s exercise. Exercise is the absolute best way to quickly and effectively reduce stress.

There are a few studies that show we can elevate our mood by tricking our brain into thinking it is smiling. One way that works well is to hold a pen, pencil, or similarly shaped object in the mouth sideways with the teeth.79 This creates a facial configuration similar to a smile and immediately elevates mood in most people.

The fact is, research seems to confirm that money does not buy happiness for most people. Incremental changes in income do not correlate with incremental changes in happiness.

However, once we remove the stress of poverty or debt, additional income does not bring about additional happiness. This is counterintuitive to a lot of us because we have firsthand experience that a little more money brings joy. Early in my career, I remember every tiny increase in my hourly wage, which started at $3.35 an hour because I am that old, as putting a huge smile on my face, and my first salaried position after graduate school had me dancing in the streets. Those experiences are enough to train our brain into thinking that lasting happiness has a price tag and someday when we hit it big in Vegas (or the lottery), everything will be awesome. However, the happiness we feel when we get a nice shot of cash is a fleeting, momentary happiness. Eventually, we get used to it and need more to feel momentarily happy again.

It is true that money does not buy lasting happiness, but living with money in the bank and with minimal debt is a great way to reduce stress. Without all that pesky stress getting in the way, you are free to pursue the things that actually bring about happiness.

Who do you think would give you better advice on how to lose weight, the person who has devoted their life to researching weight loss or the person who has personally managed to lose one hundred pounds? Of course the expert is going to provide us with advice that is more likely to be applicable to our lives, but that doesn’t stop the examples from writing books. Trusting an example rather than an expert is a common fallacy,

Having a family makes people healthy—the statistical evidence says as much. On average, married men live longer than single men and people with children live longer than people without. Partners care about our well-being and encourage us to make healthier choices, and children keep us physically active in a time in our life where we have a tendency to be sedentary.

We soon realized how many people out there seemed to think childbirth was like hitting a giant pause button on adult life. It is not, and it certainly does not have to be. Figuring out how to incorporate children into activities requires a whole lot of problem-solving, which I hear is good for the brain.

Usually the cities we tour are only a couple of hours apart, but we had an unusual situation when I was scheduled to speak at Rutgers University in New Jersey and again exactly one week later in Newport, Oregon, which, if I remember this correctly, is nowhere near New Jersey. To put even more strain on our travel, I scheduled a book signing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in between these speaking gigs. This gave us five days to drive over twenty-six hundred miles, which seemed really doable when I booked these gigs as a hardworking, hard-partying father of none. As we soon learned, two-month-old babies do not have a high tolerance for long drives. However, we adapted. Sarah invented an activity we called “truck stop tummy time” and on our third day, I noticed that we seemed to be stopping for diaper changes way too frequently. Because I am a research scientist at heart, I started keeping track of our “miles per diaper” and found that we were averaging about twenty-seven miles per Huggie. We were going through diapers faster than normal and at the rate we were stopping to change them, we were not going to make it to Oregon in time. Then it occurred to us that Alyssa’s brain may have learned that every time she let one go, we pulled over and Mommy would pull her out of the car seat. She got changed, but she also got company, which was probably more important to her. Her behavior was receiving both negative reinforcement (removing the soiled diaper) and positive reinforcement (...

The first time I visited Hawaii, it was for a two-week vacation. During that time, I saw about thirteen Hawaiian sunsets. I usually don’t make an effort to take in the sunset, it sets every day regardless of where I am. But for some reason I felt compelled to watch the sun go down over the ocean in Hawaii as often as I could. Why? Because I only had so many opportunities to do so before I left. The vacation mind-set helps create an urgency to take advantage of opportunities for joy.