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

by Brian King

Forty-five years old and this was my first pregnancy. Well, it was her pregnancy, I just inspired it.

Learn to assess your stress. Learn to tell the difference between bears and traffic.

But if there is nothing you can do about it, what is the point of allowing yourself to get stressed? Now, not only are you going to be late but you have got yourself all worked up with no action to take. You are sitting there just marinating in your own stress. Try not to get any on the seats.

I mostly worry about my daughter, like how am I going to provide for her future, am I helping her to grow into a happy and healthy woman, and will she be attacked by bears? Definitely the bear thing.

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.

Realistic concern and worry are not the same thing. There is a big difference between “There might be traffic” and “Oh, man, I am totally going to be late because of traffic.”

Even the Black Panther froze (and his sister made fun of him for it) despite the fact that he has super powers and advanced technology!

In fact, if you do feel like reproducing when being attacked by a bear . . . man, that’s an unfortunate fetish.

We could add it all together as I did above and perhaps conclude, I am afraid of that bear. A simple, and probably a common, reaction. We could even go a different direction, wondering, How dare that bear threaten me?! The nerve of this bear, does that bear know who I am? and get mad. Or, we could even think to ourselves, Oh man, why do bears always attack me? That’s three times this week! What is it about me that makes bears want to attack me all the time? and feel saddened by the encounter. The point that I am making is that fear, anger, and sadness are all negative emotions and can all be caused by stress.

Unless I can take a different route, I can’t do anything to change my situation while in traffic, so now I’m just sitting there with an elevating heart rate, marinating in my own cortisol. That’s not good meat.

Our stress response should be engaged only when it can help us.

Nobody can tell you what your bears are. Only you can decide what is worth stressing over.

However, when we are stressed and facing multiple options, any small advantage that one has over the other is amplified to help the accumbens decide. Suppose we are generally indifferent about Coke or Pepsi, but we have slightly better past experiences with Coke. That little bit of edge becomes amplified when we are stressed, increasing the likelihood that we will go with our favorite. This is an adaptive mechanism that helps our brain make a tough choice under pressure.

Note though that stress does not solely catalyze unhealthy behaviors. If I had lived life differently and trained my brain to really enjoy jogging, then under stress I would be more likely to go for a jog. Too bad I never learned to like jogging.

In a previous section I discussed how my brain loves chocolate so much that I sometimes order cookies without thinking about it, and how it is too bad my brain never learned to like jogging. Guess how many times I have gone jogging since writing that sentence? If you guessed anything above zero you are incredibly optimistic, and I thank you, but unfortunately you are wrong.

Resilience has been shown to be a function of the prefrontal cortex, which I previously mentioned is the part of the brain that we think with.32 Put simply, our thoughts make us resilient. How we process information and what we think following an adverse event has a great deal of influence over how quickly we will recover.

Skimming is the best way to read a book. Totes.

At one point during this period of my life, I was essentially homeless. I slept bottom bunk with my best friend above me at his family’s trailer in the country. The few belongings I had were stored in another friend’s garage. I worked a series of low-wage jobs and took classes at the community college, but I never let it get to me. I find it funny that when I meet people now, they know me as an educated comedian/speaker with a loving partner and an incredible kid. When I talk about handling stress, it’s because I have handled some stress.

I refer to our stress threshold as the point at which we stop feeling as if we got this and start feeling a bit overwhelmed. I also refer to our stress tolerance as the amount of stress we can handle before being pushed over the edge.

When you are jumping out of an airplane, you are not in control (the wind and this invisible force called gravity are in control), but, with knowledge and experience, you know that there is something you can do to influence the outcome of the situation.

We all have our moments, but just imagine being that sensitive to get stressed over a potential shopping cart collision. Imagine all the other encounters in life that could be stressed over.

Learn to react to what has happened, not what almost happened or what could have happened.

We drove the entire eighteen hundred miles in a single trip, taking turns at the wheel, with very few stops. In hindsight, I am surprised the car made the journey because shortly after arriving at the summer camp the engine caught on fire.

Laziness probably factored into both of our decisions, but ultimately, it was my sense that I didn’t want potentially being shot at to be a part of my job description that kept me out of the armed forces.

being resilient means having the right kind of activity in the prefrontal cortex so that your amygdala doesn’t react to everything in our world as a potential danger.

(By now you might be wondering if my drive to overcome writer’s block took me past Christmas decorations and a gym. Umm . . . maybe.)

Stress management is all about reducing the problems in our life, so how can we practice problem-solving without adding to our stress? Easy, we need to find problems that are not life-threatening or do not have any negative repercussions should we fail. Because, let’s face it, we are talking about a need to develop our nonexistent or underdeveloped skills. We are going to fail a few times.

stressful events are problems that need to be solved, and the better your brain is at solving problems, the more likely it is react to the next one as if it is something that can be solved.

The only part of your brain that you have voluntary control over is the activity of your prefrontal cortex, your thoughts.

Stating that something is simple is not the same thing as claiming it is easy. And it is important to understand the difference.

Do you imagine a utopian world that has solved all of the pressing issues such as overpopulation, resource distribution, waste management, pollution, and transportation? Or do you imagine a dystopian future where these have become so problematic as to make the world practically unlivable? In other words, is the future you imagine more like Star Trek or Wall-E?

We have survived plagues, world wars (two of them, I hear!), global economic depressions, the release of The Emoji Movie, and all sorts of natural disasters, and each time we come out swinging like a collective Captain America saying, “I can do this all day!”

If you are prone to worry you probably aren’t very optimistic (or happy or resilient), but don’t fret (any more than you usually do)—you can become optimistic through practice.

As a comedian, I believe that any subject can be a source of humor but I completely recognize that not every person is ready to laugh at any subject.

When you are broke, then yes, mo’ money equals mo’ happy. Simply put, money makes poor people happier because it helps to relieve the stress of poverty. When you are concerned about basic needs like food, shelter, and safety, it is hard to be happy all the time.

I remember when I was still a poor high school student trying really hard not to peak. I remember having to walk five miles uphill to school, both ways, sometimes knee-deep in thick central Texas snow; also I had no feet. We couldn’t afford feet until I was a junior, so I had to compete in the jalapeño-eating contest on stumps.

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,

I know well-traveled people who live in San Francisco and have been to Europe but have never been to Alcatraz. I know Chicagoans who have never been to the Art Institute. I know people in Minneapolis who have never seen the St. Paul winter ice castles. And there are people in Oklahoma who have never read a book.88