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

by Brian King

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. If you are going to get all worked up over traffic, consciously or unconsciously, living in the world of what could happen rather than what is happening, you might as well watch out for unicorns.

Sometimes you just have to sit in traffic. If you are facing a threatening situation and there is something you can do about it, then you should do that. But if there is nothing you can do about it, what is the point of allowing yourself to get stressed?

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

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.

There is something about stress that brings out the behaviors we are trying to avoid.

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. If running and fighting are relatively similar in their potential value, but one has a slight advantage over the other, this mechanism helps make sure we pick our best possible option, even when our conscious mind would say, “Ah, whatever.” This means that when we are in a stressed state and navigating through the world, any time we encounter an opportunity to do something our brain prefers, we are more likely to do it. It probably has absolutely nothing to do with alleviating our stress, but the brain doesn’t know that. All it knows is that we are stressed and that a chocolate chunk cookie would taste really damn good right about now.

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.

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

Part of being an optimistic thinker is suppressing negative thoughts. As I previously mentioned, optimistic people have pessimistic thoughts all the time, we just don’t dwell on them. One thing that helps is something I have already mentioned: redirecting your train of thought to something else. Literally, anything else. It works for worrying, and it works for all negative thinking in general.

wanted to live my life to the fullest at every age and when people asked me about the best time of my life, I would have no problem pointing to the present. I did not want to yearn for the past or point to a possible future.