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

by Brian King

The traffic was real, but it was your own beliefs, values, and expectations that made the situation into one that you found stressful.

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.

Learning how to increase the right kind of prefrontal activity, or thoughts, and being able to

consciously redirect choices made by other areas of the brain, is the key to living a less stressful existence.

Either way it went, his worrying all weekend did absolutely nothing to influence the outcome of the exam. He wasted his weekends,

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.

“Can I do anything about this?”

“If there is nothing I can do about it, then why am I worrying about it?”

If we can’t do anything to change a situation, what is the point of worrying about it?

In many cases, we become enraged over incidents where nothing serious has actually happened to us (e.g., we may have been cut off in traffic, but there was no car crash). Learn to react to what has happened, not what almost happened or what could have happened.