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

by Brian King

Our brain gets used to the tried-and-true behaviors that served us well in the past, and is often resistant to putting forth the effort to acquire new ones. This is why we need therapy.

Sarah’s piano education still requires perseverance and dedication. Yes, I would imagine that it is harder to quit worrying, or to quit getting angry all the time. Yet, just as people can learn how to play the piano, people can learn to cope with and manage behaviors related to stress. Science shows that we have the capacity for change, it is just really hard. Like jogging.

It is never too late to change how we cope with stress.

Stress decreases the production of a hormone called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which is needed for neuroplasticity. Even more reason to learn how to get a handle on it.

Every parent has moments like that, but what occurred to me was how resilient she was after her initial setback. Unlike some adults, she did not sit around feeling sorry for herself after her first failed attempt. She did not seem angry, frustrated, or sad, and I am pretty sure she did not consider herself a failure. Instead, she moved on from the event and went back to it with a new plan of attack. It was a thrill to watch her set a goal for herself, learn from her failed attempts, and ultimately triumph.

Resilience is our ability to recover from adversity, to bounce back or return to equilibrium after experiencing an adverse event. It is a major component in coping with and recovering from stressful events.

Children are naturally resilient; it is part of the job of being a kid. Unfortunately, resilience is a trait that I believe some of us lose as we grow older.

Most adults face greater challenges than having to crawl up a step, but her perseverance, her refusal to get frustrated, and her reluctance to give up are all characteristic of being resilient.

Recovery time following an adverse event is often used as a meas...

Think about this: in general when something bad happens, how quickly do you bounce back? Do you get over it relatively soon or does the n...

After the third punch the man says, “You just don’t know when to give up do you?” to which Steve replies, “I can do this all day.” That response could be stubbornness, but I like to think of it as resilience.

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.

Psychological resilience is very strongly associated with happiness. If you are happy, you are managing your stress well, and if you are stressed you are probably not happy. It is hard to imagine being stressed and happy at the same time. Both experiences are functions of activity in the prefrontal cortex. However, it isn’t activity in the entire prefrontal cortex that relates to these experiences, but rather when there is more activity on the left side than the right side. When there is more left activity than right activity, people report feeling happy and appear calm.

the thoughts that help you cope with stress are the same thoughts that make you happy.

Earlier I mentioned that if we have the right kind of activity in the prefrontal cortex as we enter traffic, it can prevent our brains from feeling threatened in the first place.

There is evidence that happiness and resilience are p...

each of us has a general level of happiness.

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.34 Happiness and resilience may be partially genetic, but we have a lot of potential to modify our emotional state.

Psychological resilience is our ability to overcome a challenge, to bounce back after an adverse event, or to cope with stress. Resilience is highly related to happiness, and both are functions of how we think about the events we experience. Skimming is the best way to read a book. Totes.

I made $3.35 an hour and was grateful for it. Not a lot of doors swing wide open for high school dropouts.

whatever I said stuck in this guy’s head long enough that he thanked me for my advice years later. He had momentarily lost sight of his long-term goal in the midst of taco stress.

Having something to look forward to can really help us endure a lot.

I had a goal that I was working toward. College gave me a sense of purpose and, as I have since learned in researching happiness and resilience, having a sense of purpose goes a very long way. As long as I knew I was making progress on my education, I felt I could endure anything life threw at me.

I was resourceful.

I never had to put this plan into action, but just imagining that I had a possible solution helped me cope.

I knew that if things truly got unbearable, I had a safety net.

My strong sense of purpose, willingness to use the resources available to me, and having a plan for the worst-case scenario kept me from feeling all that stressed out throughout a very stressful time. Again, every single one of these components—goal pursuit, probl...

Resilient people approach life by thinking and planning; they see their problems or adverse events as temporary and/or solvable. That was definitely the case for me in my early college years—I fe...

It would suck, but it was doable. Thankfully, a simple phone call to Sarah’s friend solved the problem, but if it hadn’t, we had a plan.

negative emotion can interfere with our ability to think by restricting the range of options that we will consider. Sometimes being able to come up with a good plan requires creative thought, and is better accomplished when we are calm and thinking clearly.

Resilience is a state of mind, ...

When the problem feels out of control, they get stressed. It just might take a bit longer and a much greater th...

Telling someone who is enraged, anxious, or hopeless to just relax could be perceived as dismissive at best, and at worst could stress them even further. Depending on the situation, I usually try to validate the person’s feelings instead.

Perhaps she was disappointed that I did not join her in an argument. The time to develop our stress-management skills is not when we are jacked up full of cortisol, that’s when we need to exercise them. We need to work on our problem-solving, planning, and other positive cognitive activities before we find ourselves facing that bear. Otherwise, the sound of our own wheels just might drive us somewhere we don’t want to go.

Other than having a checkbook, I felt completely powerless. I had no control.

Resilient people approach their problems as if they are sitting in a Jeep holding a tranquilizer gun. The brain has connections between the prefrontal cortex and other areas that mediate the stress response, which effectively allows the conscious mind to shut off the stress response.41 It is as if the brain, after assessing the level of potential threat it is facing, suddenly says to itself: “I got this.”

When you feel like a problem is something that you can handle, it no longer causes you stress. Again, resilience is an attitude.

when we feel in control, all of the negative effects of stress are reduced or eliminated. Feeling stressed is really feeling out of control, to put it very simply. Every stressful situation is really just a si...

Feeling in control is not the same thing as being controlling.

We can feel as if we have some ability to influence the outcome of a situation, even when other factors also have some influence. The more we feel as if we have influence, the more stress we can handle.

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. Resilience is not an either/or type of construct, but rather one that varies along a spectrum. We all have a limit to what we can handle, but some of us have a higher limit than others.

On the other hand, there is the low end of the spectrum. No job groups come to mind at this end, but I imagine people at the low end of the spectrum to be the kinds of people who are really negatively affected by traffic.

What I was trying to help him do was reframe the event.

“Look, you endangered your own life, for five miles, because nothing happened.”

The reaction was not a rational one made by the prefrontal cortex after weighing the pros and cons of each alternative course of action. It was a completely irrational response motivated by stress and anger, with the intention of retaliation. Retaliation for nothing happening.

All of these incidents would fall into the category of overreacting, and the vast majority of them were probably reactions to nothing happening.

I personally believe that nothing happening is our biggest stressor. Think about all the times you have gotten stressed or angry or upset and it turned out there was no good reason for this.

misunderstandings, the overreactions, and all the worr...

“Excuse me!” I asked what about and she went on, “You almost hit me, with your cart!” I didn’t, but that’s not the point. I answered with a smile, “So what you are saying is . . . nothing happened?” I thought to myself, Did I hit you? No. Did you get hit? No. What do you want me to do, apologize for not hitting you? Next time I will aim better. Literally nothing had happened, even less than in the road rage story, and she chose to get stressed.

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. That is a lot of cumulative impact on a person’s quality of life. Living in a society, we are always going to encounter other people.