Stop Wasting Your Energy
I don’t know about you, but I have always been pretty exhausted at the end of my day. Years ago if you asked me why, I often didn’t have a definitve answer. However, I have come to realize my that exhaustion was mostly due to my incessant mental activity trying to prepare for problems and reassess events that were long over. I know, if you are reading this, that you are exactly as I used to be—burning through your emotional and physical resources everyday by hashing and rehashing the same presumptuous fears, hypothetical “what ifs”, and concerns from the previous day. Living in your virtual reality of possible disasters. Regardless of the fact that you have persevered through everything life has thrown at you, you still continue to waste your precious energy by reacting as though you are about to be crushed by the “next thing”.
So my first question to you is — if you have persevered thus far in your life, then why doesn’t your brain recall those moments to reinsure your security, safety, and resources to handle what might be next? Because your brain’s job is not to reassure you, but rather to prepare you, and that means prepare you for the worst! Your brain will react as if a crisis is already happening in real life, causing your body to release stress hormones. Stress does not happen to you, it is your reaction to these hypothetical “what ifs” stemming from your virtual reality. Let’s see if this sounds familiar: You leave the office after a stressful day at work. You are so happy it is over and can’t wait to get home. However, by the first traffic light you are back at work, going over discussions, comments, and attitudes from co-workers that ticked you off. Then the phone rings and you are asked to stop at the store. This should be no big deal, but because you are still dealing with work in your virtual reality, it feels like a total inconvenience, and that comes through loud and clear over the phone. This is not the atmosphere you want to come home to. You want to be greeted with open arms by those who love you! I mean, that is why you go to work in the first place, to provide for loved ones.
Seventy-seven percent of the US population suffers from physical symptoms related to stress. Stress is our reaction to disappointments and problems, both real and imagined. It originates from within us, so it is there that we have to begin to fix it, and thankfully science is offering us the tools to do just that. Stress and worry are the culprits robbing you of a happy life. Up until now, it has not been your fault, but rather your default. But you are responsible for what you know. So if you like being miserable, anxious, and feeling like a victim then don’t read any further, because once you do you will have no more excuses. Here I will give you all the control you need to dissolve your stress. Maybe you have been promised this before, but now you will learn where that control has been hiding and how to use it to regain some of your energy and vitality.
Being wasteful with any resource is usually a direct result of ignorance. If you don’t know that leaving a window open while running the air conditioner will raise your utility bill—you waste money; if you don’t know that leaving your car running while you go into a store will waste gas—you waste money; and if you don’t know that your brain will rehash 90% of the same information as you thought about the day before—you waste precious energy. But now you will learn how to break this vicious cycle so you can save your energy for more important tasks—like real problem-solving and creativity. I call this cycle the Worry-Go-Round™ because it gives you the illusion of making progress when in the end, you realize you haven’t moved at all.
Why we ride the Worry Go-Round™ to begin with used to be a mystery to the world of science, but now, thanks to technology, neuroscience tells us that it is part of an internal outdated warning system that was used to keep us alive thousands of years ago. This broken system leaves us exhausted at the end of our day with no sense of happiness or wellbeing in sight. Which is asinine when that is the reason behind everything we do; If I hurry, I will get more done and feel better— If I stay up and finish this project, I will feel like I am caught up— If I only take a half hour for lunch and my boss notices, I will feel more secure in my job— If I run this yellow light I will shave minutes off my schedule, giving me a sense of extra time. We charge at the “next thing” like a linebacker trying to get past a blocker. It is our ass-backwards way of chasing happiness and peace. Now, here is the reason it doesn’t work: Your brain does not care about being happy. It is not wired to seek happiness and does not even place it on your priority list. Of course, you may be thinking, “Wait a minute—I absolutely care about being happy; it’s why I am reading this!” But that is your mind talking, not your brain, and your mind and brain are not the same. Your mind is the consciousness that resides within your brain. The part of you that chases happiness in all its forms. However, your brain’s number-one job for the past ten thousand years has been your survival, and to this day its primary goal remains keeping you alive at any cost, even if that cost is your happiness. How it does this is by obsessively looking for danger, which to your brain is anything that might threaten your life in any one of these five areas: love, money, status, health, and security. Anything that can threaten these areas can threaten your life as far as your brain is concerned. This has turned your brain into a magnet for problems both real and imagined. It is that constant echo of, “Careful, oh no, watch out!” ringing in your ears. That’s its job—your survival. It cares about danger, not about your emotional state of mind. So your pursuit of happiness winds up being you attempting to secure every one of the five areas I just mentioned, and by doing so you run your physical and mental health into the ground.
We Are Making Ourselves Sick
Even if you don’t feel overly stressed, don’t think for a moment that you aren’t at risk for health problems. The chemicals at play in your body are wreaking havoc with many of your systems; over time, that can do long-term damage. No amount of stress is OK on a long-term basis.
Sad to say, the majority of people know very little about that three-pound mass above their neck. We let it feed on any thoughts, images, or emotions it wants and we often disregard its need for sleep and nutrition. We walk around oblivious to the signs that it is in trouble until it is too late.
Then we waste a whole day, lacking productivity, because of a bad mood that we will blame on outside events. We spend our days living for the weekend and vacations and hate the days in between. We waste precious energy trying to manage the awful feelings and physical effects of stress. It is why we overeat, crave comfort foods, drink too much, sleep too much or not enough, take risks, sleep with people we don’t know, and beg our doctor for prescriptions to stop the pain.
We perceive our moods as something mysterious, and believe if we can just figure out the magic recipe of behaviors, diet, and sleep, we will find happiness. We assume being happy should come naturally if we do the right things—but nothing could be further from the truth. It is time that human beings learn the fundamentals of how the human brain, the most sophisticated machine in the universe, works. In my book Wired to Worry I don’t get too technical with a huge vocabulary, but it would be nice to at least know how to use your own brain to be a happier person. Sure, there may be a few terms that you have not heard before, but that is part of learning something new. You had no idea what an iPad or GPS was fifteen years ago, but you know them now and understand how they work. It is no more logical to ignore new discoveries about the brain than to ignore new technology and expect to stay current with the world. We spend more time in a given year learning about our new smart phone than we ever do about our own brain. Well, it’s time. In Wired To Worry you will learn a few fundamentals about your brain that will change your life. No more living on autopilot, guessing at why you are in a good mood or assuming why you are in a bad one. You are going to learn how to make conscious decisions that will control the performance of your brain and mind. This stuff is as basic as understanding why you turn your lights off and take your keys with you when you exit your vehicle.
Did you know surveys have shown that many healthy individuals are less happy than cancer patients and people in wheelchairs? In the absence of these difficulties, we should be waking up every morning singing to Pharrell Williams’s song “Happy.” Americans spend almost $700 million per year on self-help books. The topics vary from becoming a better communicator, parent, or spouse to losing weight. Categorically, we can define our intention to feel better, act better, or be better together as the common goal—therefore reducing our stress level in some way and becoming a happier person.
Our misery starts with a false belief that our natural emotional state is supposed to be one of happiness, with happiness defined as a sense of well-being and contentment. Most of us believe that if all of life’s problems just left us alone, we would be happy. We believe it is only because we are disrupted by the everyday pressures of life that we are stressed out. Therefore, we spend most of our time trying to fix the “next thing” in an effort to find some peace. When we believe this, we could not be more mistaken. Science has now revealed that it is the opposite. Being happy is not our default state of mind! What is our default state? After about four years of age, our default state starts to evolve into one of shyness, insecurities, caution, and defensiveness. So genuine happiness can only be found on the inside because that is where our perception of problems start. Otherwise, most of our efforts toward self-improvement are akin to giving our car a new paint job when it really needs a tune-up.
We come hardwired to be prepared for the worst-case scenario, and this negative focus has all of us walking on eggshells, waiting for the crap to hit the fan 24/7. It never allows us to relax or be too happy, and it even downplays good events with the proverbial, “Yeah, but…” or “What if?”
All your misery or lack of joy and happiness is due to your brain’s five basic fears. These control 90 percent of your brain’s thoughts; loss of love, money, status, health, and security. Did you catch the key word here? Fear, an extreme emotion over what might happen! We live in fear of losing any of these five things even when we have an ample supply of them. We all know that rich guy who is always saying he’s broke. So we chase more love, more money, more status, more health, and more security so that we can finally be happy. Some of us even try to reject these comforts and riches in the hopes that doing so will free us from this chase. The problem with trying to accumulate more and more is that the brain will never, ever tell us that we have enough! Never. This is the harsh reality that smacks most rich and famous people in the face, causing them to spin out of control. After they travel down this illusionary road for the promise of bliss, they discover that their brain is still not satisfied and continues to torture them with the fear of loss…which, to the brain, means loss of life. This is all part of our survival instinct; it is hardwired into the most primitive area of the human brain, not a switch we can just turn off. In essence, the brain is obsessed with chasing misery/problems both real and imagined in every area of our life—present, future, and past—in an effort to preserve love, money, status, health, and security. To your brain anything at all that could or might even graze those areas is reason to panic.
Until you understand how this happens, you will continue wasting precious energy chasing happiness, where it can’t be found. But hang in there, it will make sense soon.
The Proverbial “Panic Button”
So which part of your brain actually sounds this alarm warning you of impending doom? It is a small, almond-sized area in your brain that evolved over thousands of years called the amygdala, also known as your lizard brain. Pronounced ah-mig-da-la. This part of the brain has been around forever, and every animal has it. The amygdala is no bigger than your fingernail, but it is the hub, or control center, for your emotions and determines what emotions to trigger, from elation to temper tantrums and worrying yourself sick. It is the switch for FIGHT or FLIGHT. It also does several other jobs, though, so unfortunately you can’t just cut it out and go on your merry way. It helps you determine whether the face you are looking at is sad or happy, motivates you to find food when you are hungry, and helps you decide whether Eggplant Parmesan or a big steak will put a smile on your face. This little almond-shaped area helps you understand and process emotion both in you and around you. People who have been exposed to any kind of childhood trauma are likely to have a larger amygdala, with thicker connectivity to the areas around it, making it even more prone to emotional outbursts.
Something no bigger than your fingernail is responsible for all of this. You may hear some call it your lizard brain because it is in the oldest area of your brain, the part called the reptilian brain. These are all terms used to make it easy for you to remember it. However, the focus of this book is its role as your ALARM BELL. This personal warning system alerts you to problems real or imagined by making you feel horrible, by triggering stress-related hormones, such as cortisol (a hormone that, in excess is bad for your heart but good for adding belly fat—YUK!) and adrenaline. These hormones’ job is to bring you to a heightened state of UH-OH or OH CRAP! along with sensations of muscle tension, anxiousness, sweaty palms, heavy breathing, and rapid heartbeat. That is your brain’s way of telling you to STOP doing whatever it is you are doing!
For thousands of years, our amygdala functioned very well at keeping us alive in the wild by sending waves of these stress hormones such as adrenaline, cortisol, and epinephrine through our bodies as soon as we saw a lion in the bushes or a dangerous snake. It did that so we would do one thing… run like hell. Not worry, evaluate, or analyze it.
Back then, people’s lives were in constant jeopardy, either from physical harm or from becoming a social outcast. Ten thousand years ago, if a woman’s mate seemed unhappy with her, the woman’s alarm bells would scream because if the man left, her family would have no food or protection and her offspring would die. The same happened when people were shunned by the other members of their tribe, causing them to become outcasts. That was a death sentence within hours. So it was not only the lion in the bushes but also the treatment they received from their inner social circle that meant life or death.
Now, here you are today with a brain that is still interpreting any problem as a life-threatening situation! Your superior annoyed with you, a fight with your spouse, car trouble, or being late for a meeting—all of these are often interpreted as life threatening as far as this little amygdala is concerned. It focuses on what will kill you—not on what keeps you happy—and therefore, so do you as you board the Worry-Go-Round™ trying to stop, prevent, hold off or hang onto whatever it is you “think” you need to be content.
Although 90 percent of our problems in the twenty-first century are NOT life threatening, they trigger our amygdala. We need to reprogram the brain so that it doesn’t hit this panic button simply because we received one hundred e-mails or because someone decided to do forty miles per hour in the fast lane. The human brain doesn’t know that the coworker who gets snippy with us isn’t life threatening. It senses a violation and sounds the alarm so that we come out swinging. Just knowing that we won’t die from a dirty look is not enough to stop the alarm bell from telling us to prepare to pounce. We all see people overreacting to the slightest irritation—fights breaking out at sporting events, road rage, and so on—and we all know a hothead. The problem with employing common sense during these events is that this much older area of the brain responsible for emotion does not understand words and thoughts because it does not process language. It sees images and then judges, according to our past experiences, whether they are good for us, dangerous, or simply threaten any of those five areas I mentioned earlier. Once the brain sounds the siren, telling ourselves to calm down is pointless.
Like a gladiator jumping over a wall into the middle of a battle, that uneducated, ancient part of your brain has the final say regarding what you need to do to survive. Simply trying to think your way out of a panic or temper tantrum will not help. Once the amygdala releases those fight-or-flight hormones into your system, it is all systems go! Have you ever tried telling someone who was yelling to calm down? A lot of good that did, right? While these chemicals are in play, you will feel very justified as you yell or have a tantrum, but then when they dissipate, you wonder, “Why did I react like that and get upset over something so trivial?” You did it because your brain thought your life was in danger, and in the blink of an eye, you reacted instinctively. How many times a day or week do you overreact because of situations that did not really warrant it? Can you see now the amount of energy you are wasting?
We all have genuine situations to deal with, but at those times, when your brain pushes the panic button over something small, I can assure you there is something else going on in your mind, and probably something unrelated. At the early stage of getting upset, you generally have an inaccurate perception of what is angering you. Underlying thoughts and memories from the past often attach themselves to the things happening in the present, causing you to overreact. You may be ruminating on something upsetting that took place yesterday when you suddenly spill something and let out a stream of expletives. All the while, you are completely unaware of what really triggered your outburst.
Wired To Worry will teach you to separate an upsetting event from your ongoing undercurrent of worrisome thoughts. Only then will you be able to figure out what you are really feeling, and therefore how to feel better. Because that’s your brain, a never-ending stream of what ifs and worry about how life did or will go wrong. Welcome to the Worry-Go-Round™
Worry-Go-Round™—The time you waste going in circles rehashing the same fears, concerns and memories you had yesterday with no change. — Painted horses optional.
Here is a quick trick for you: The next time you are ready to explode before you slip into a rage stand on one foot, close your eyes, and count. Even if you don’t count, try to maintain your balance, and your mind’s attention being drawn to keeping your balance will calm down the release of cortisol and adrenaline. Open your eyes each time you feel yourself losing your balance. When you regain it, close your eyes again. This is like “force quitting” a frozen program on your computer. When a program just gets stuck you have to take control and shut it down. That is what you are doing here.