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

by Brian King

If you don’t see any problems that need to be addressed and your prefrontal cortex could use a boost, create problems to solve.

I am saying that 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. In other words, the more confidence you have in your abilities, the less your reactions will be influenced by feeling stressed.

If we wish to improve our stress management, we should also develop our problem-solving skills. Problem-solving skills can be improved by mastering any challenge that requires strategizing.

problem-solving skills, like most acquired functions of the brain, have to be maintained.

You don’t want to put all that effort into developing your cortex just to have it go the way of your high school Spanish. The phrase “use it or lose it” refers to this phenomenon.

this is another reason it is important to challenge ourselves and learn new things throughout our lifespan.

Resilience may be partially hereditary, but only about half can be attributed to genetic factors. That is the so-called “nature” side of the nature vs. nurture distinction. The other half comes from a combination of nurture and circumstance.

Modeling. How do you teach a child how to

The best, and most important, way to raise resilient children is to be resilient in their presence. Period. When you blow up and overreact to traffic, think of that person sitting in the car seat behind you and the lessons they are learning.

gets absorbed by the little sponge inside their heads, and all of it has the potential to become part of the way they interact with the world.

Children look to us, not just for guidance, but for examples on how to live and how to handle the different situations they might encounter. If we want our children to grow up to be able to handle whatever life throws at them, then we need to be able to handle whatever life throws at us. I am not saying that we can’t let our children see us stress or lose our temper, but they need to see when it is appropriate. They need to learn the difference between bears and unicorns. If they see us freak out, get angry, get upset, fight, yell, or socially withdraw every time something doesn’t go our way, then we shouldn’t be surprised when they struggle with life as adults.

we have to model good problem-solving, as well as healthy coping techniques, like taking time out for ourselves, participating in hobbies, exercise, and socializing. It is important for them to observe us setting boundaries, being flexible, managing expectations of others, and challenging ourselves. You know, all of the things that make us healthy.

we should learn to manage stress ourselves. However, if we don’t handle stress well and want a better life for our kids, we need to fake it.

Fake it for your children. If you are unable to suppress your reactions, at least try to hold them in. Keep your expressions of anger or worrisome thoughts to yourself as much as you can in the presence of your little sponge-brain offspring. Fake it until they make

she told me that when my brother and I were younger, she used to worry about us all the time. She must have realized the need to keep it to herself because I never knew.

she kept it from me and I would ride home blissfully and completely unaware of her turmoil, ultimately growing up without developing the habit of worrying.

We were allowed, and encouraged, to pursue multiple interests throughout our lives. The one thing they would always say was that we could do whatever we wanted as long as we were happy;

Nobody wants their kids to suffer or experience pain, but there is value in working through difficulties. There is value in having to deal with adversity.

This is a girl who knows how to face her fears, and that behavior is something to foster.

The best way to teach a child how to handle stress is to model resilient behaviors in their presence and try to keep our worry or anger to ourselves. Allow children an opportunity to solve their own problems. Provide assistance and support, but give them a chance to attempt things on their own, and the opportunity to fail.

countries all the time, but we do need to change our experiences. The more we experience, the more our brain learns to overcome and cope with the problems it encounters. Encourage your child to try out a sport for a while, then maybe learn a musical instrument, then learn to paint or research a subject of interest.

of adjusting to a new school, I saw an opportunity and I took it. Ultimately, this event probably helped plant the seed of what would later influence my life a great deal. I developed a taste for public attention (and spicy food), and this contributed to my career as a professor, presenter, and ultimately an entertainer.

The more we experience, the more our brain also learns to solve problems.

Sometimes life deals us shitty circumstances. Sometimes you can’t do anything about those circumstances. But you can change how they affect you.

Your thoughts influence both your behaviors and your emotions, and it is important to understand this in order to make any changes. If that sounds really simple to you, that is because it is. The key to making some pretty significant changes in our lives is to adjust the way we think.

We tend to think that our lives, our problems and issues, are extremely complicated and overcoming them requires a complicated solution. Making changes can be simple, it just isn’t easy.

So many of our problems have simple solutions, but they are difficult to implement.

the key to losing weight is simple: eat less and exercise more.

This isn’t a book on smoking cessation. The point being that 100 percent of all smokers know exactly how to quit smoking, it is just implementing that knowledge that is really, really hard.

The answers are simple, carrying out the answer is what’s difficult.

more resilient is a simple answer, but it definitely ain’t easy. Among the things that I have discussed so far, we need to learn to tell the difference between an actually threatening situation and one that is just annoying or inconvenient, feel as if we are in control, and develop our problem-solving skills.

It would be wonderful if there was some magical secret, but for weight loss, stress resilience, and most forms of change, the answer is staring us in the face, it just isn’t pretty.

Three ways positive thinking can help you become more stress resilient are: Teaching you to become more optimistic. Teaching you to be more appreciative of what you have. Increasing your appreciation of humor.

E? If you imagine a bright future, you probably tend to be optimistic, and if your image of the future seems bleak, well then, you probably don’t.

Well to start, optimistic thinking is positively correlated with happiness. Optimistic people are happier and happy people are more optimistic. Optimistic people are also more resilient, are less affected by stress, and worry less often. All of this should make sense to you in the context of everything I have discussed. Resilience and happiness are a function of the types of thoughts we have and optimism is a way of thinking. So yeah, optimistic thinking contributes to both resilience and happiness.

Worrying is a form of pessimistic thinking. Depending on which is more frequent,

have pessimistic thoughts all the time. The most optimistic people among us are still plagued by negative thoughts, the difference is that they don’t dwell on them or ruminate.

He will probably be home soon or when he gets hungry.” Same exact stimulus, with two very different responses. You don’t have to worry.

If you are prone to worry you probably aren’t very optimistic (or happy or resilient), but don’t fret (any more

you can become optimistic through practice. And, as I mentioned, it is not that difficult. I want you to imagine the future, only this time imagine that everything has worked out for you exactly as you want it. What does that look like? Be as descriptive as possible. Now write that down in a journal and repeat this exercise again next week, focusing on a different aspect of your life (such as career or relationship).

“the best possible selves activity” originally presented by Dr. Laura King (no relation).59 This activity, which involves nothing more than writing in a journal once a week, has been shown to increase optimistic thinking.60