Reduce Stress By Being Prepared

Work-related  stress  most often is cited as the most negative stress that we experience on a regular basis, followed closely by the stress associated with unfamiliar experiences and locations.  The latter commonly is confused with fear, the former with former with job dissatisfaction.  Both have in common the element of control, or, more specifically, a lack of control. 

Job dissatisfaction occurs, however, when we our abilities are not exercised, or where the work environment itself is “toxic.”   Stress becomes involved when we are faced with challenges for which we are not prepared, or situations that have proven to be problematic in the past.  Indeed, anticipation of a stressful situation or experience creates its own stress.  Job dissatisfaction feeds that stress, but often is not stressful in itself.

The stress of unfamiliar experiences can be both positive and negative.  Equate, if you will, excitement with unfamiliar stress, and imagine those athletes that participate in extreme sports (such as helicopter skiing).  These extremely athletic individuals savour the excitement and the stress of the moment.  However, what we fail to factor into these experiences is that each of the participants have spent a great deal of time preparing for the sport, and  manage their risks well.  Certainly, there are those that do leap in, unprepared, but they are the exception, and often mask or submerge their stress by mentally blocking the risk factors.

What separates the good stress of athletic competition from the bad stress of the job, or facing the unknown?  The simple answer is “preparation.” Soldiers are trained and disciplined for many weeks before being thrust into unknown, challenging environments.  They repeat and repeat and repeat drills.  They simulate the confrontations and challenges that they will face, until they almost instinctively react to the unknown, by categorizing it with familiar rituals that they have practised.

Exam stress is a prime example of the benefit of practice and preparation.  Psychological studies have shown that learning  the material thoroughly is the best remedy to avert exam stress.  Yet, that is nothing more than preparation and practice!  A second dimension of exam stress reduction, though, is the principle of state-dependent learning.  As a parent, I used to simulate the exam room at home by setting up desks for my children, at which they studied, and insisted that they do homework in this setting, regularly.  However, I would also provide practical applications for the topics that they were learning, so that they could relate the learned material to a “real-life” experience.  This extra element provided a level of intimate understanding of the material, while the desk environment helped them to recall materials in the test environment as if they were at their desks at home.  They were prepared.

One of my great stressors was the doctor’s office, and, specifically, needles.  Such was my panic at medical exam time that I actually passed out while having my blood pressure taken, and, three times, while having a blood test.  Yet, I have had twenty-seven broken bones and severe injuries requiring medical intervention, have been involved in more than 1,600 fights, and have even eschewed having a broken wrist set and cast, because I had too much work to do!  Clearly, pain was not my problem.  It was a fear of the unknown: specifically, what might be in the needle, and what control was I relinquishing in the situation.  Ultimately, I chose to donate blood, reasoning that I had no right to be selfish, when a simple blood donation was needed by others with medical emergencies.  In other words, I shamed myself into overcoming my fear of needles.  It was my version of preparation.  Having donated blood multiple times, I not longer fear the process (but still don’t particularly care for it).

By preparing for and understanding circumstances and events, we can reduce or eliminate stress.  Lowered stress does not mean lower enjoyment, but it does allow you to more smoothly engage with situations that may otherwise prove too chaotic or disturbing.  In short, organize your chaos, and you will eliminate many of your potentially stressful experiences,.

Is The Stress Of A Clean Car Worth It?

If the average car owner spends an hour a week washing his car, then over 2600 hours over his fifty-year driving lifespan will be consumed simply in the act of washing a vehicle that is going to get dirty again anyway! That’s 108 days, or nearly one third of a year spent washing a machine. 

Although rainfall and snowfall frequency varies from region to region, consider that the state with the most clear days per year – Arizona – sees the sun only half the time: 193 days out of 365.  The average across the USA is slightly more than 110 clear days.   So, assuming moisture (dew, rain, snow, etc) occurs in 1 of 4 cloudy days, 40 days of the year will see precipitation.  In other words, every week that you wash your car, you are likely to see it get dirty as a result of precipitation.  Add in the number of muddy or dusty days, and your likelihood of having a clean car dirtied twice a week is enhanced.

Let’s now factor in the risk of accident, from outright collisions to door dings and minor scratches.  Over six million actual accidents are reported in the USA annually.  Nearly thirty times that number of very minor, non-reported incidents occur. There goes that clean car, again!

Now let us look at the benefit of a clean car.  Feeling of pride, right?  Being able to admire your efforts. But, for the most part, you are inside the vehicle, and it is others who gain the benefit of seeing a clean exterior of your vehicle.  Like owning a rich painting, there’s not a lot of pleasure derived if one must hide the painting in a closet.

The real issue, though, is the stress factor.  Washing and polishing your car may be a pleasure for you, but more likely is a chore.  While not stressful, there is hardly any stress relief occurring.  Now, each minute that you drive your car, you travel with the potential, and the worry about an accident, scrape or scratch on your baby. Every passing cloud offers the threat of mud and dirt.  Particularly in the minutes after cleaning your car, you fret about the next bit of dust, or the next stone chip.  This hardly seems relaxing, let alone therapeutic.

In total, your joy at having a clean car is offset, many times over with angst and stress over it getting dirty again, even though you know it to be inevitable.

What is not inevitable is putting yourself through the anguish of repetitive cleaning.

I owned an old 1977 Malibu, with nearly 220,000 miles on it when it was sideswiped by a newer Ford.  The passenger door was crumpled so badly that the door would not open.  It looked horrible.  However, on the inside, everything still looked fine.  For the next 80,000 miles, I drove the car without giving a second thought to its exterior.  I got plenty of stares, of course.  But inside, where the car was relatively clean and very comfortable, I did not experience a moment of stress over the car’s exterior looks.

The moral of this story?  How much time are you wasting in your life, creating stressful situations and enduring them, when you could simply reorient your priorities to minimize the stress?

Reach Out And Touch Someone. It's Psychologically And Physiologically Healthy

What is the value of a good massage?  For the surgeonfish, even a fake massage will do!  Marta Soares of Portugal's ISPA University Institute recently concluded a study using surgeonfish and fake cleaner fish, that mimicked the movements of real cleaner fish, to see if the draw of the cleaners was their scouring function, or the stimulation that the nibbling action provided to the bigger surgeonfish.

It is well known that many larger fish, including massive sharks, not only allow but encourage small sucker fish to “ride along” and nibble at parasites on the scales of the big fish.  It is a symbiotic relationship, in that the small fish gain protection, while the bigger fish get a good cleaning.  But seeking out these little stimulators for the sake of a good massage seems hard to understand.

However, the Soares experiment leaves little room for doubt.  First, Soares exposed the surgeon fish to all kinds of stressors, similar to what they would experience in the wild, then they were put in a tank with the cleaner wrasse.  The surgeonfish immediately sought out the cleaners, and positioned themselves in such a way that the wrasses’ fins provided the massaging action.

So how does this extrapolate to us humans?

Psychology Today reports that, when used to treat eating disorders, massage therapy had some unexpected benefits.  As expected, it boosted dopamine and serotonin levels, resulting a calming effect.  But it also decreased the patients’ dissatisfaction with their bodies and raised their self esteem.  This is the simple and powerful value of touch, as assessed by the University of Michigan Medical School.  They showed that there is a strong correlation between being touch-deprived and having an eating disorder.

Developmental psychologist Tiffany Field, Ph.D., claims that massage, for premature babies, helps them gain weight and improve health.  She also claims that touch-deprived babies grow up to be more aggressive than those that receive tactile interaction.

Diane Zeitlin, of the New Jersey Medical School discovered that touch therapy revved up the immune system in students at exam time, who were experiencing fatigue and anxiety.

And cancer patients under the care of Pauline King and Richard Jost, of Ohio's James Cancer Hospital reported less pain and anxiety as a result of receiving massage therapy.

More than just sometimes, it seems, the power of touch is all we need to improve our attitudes and responses, our day, and our lives.  Whether human or animal, massage and tactile stimulation are essential to our emotional, and physical health.

Your Bad Day Rarely More Than 5% Bad!

www.robertflee.com
So you think you’re having a bad day?  Perhaps, the worst in your life!  Hyperbole aside, bad days rarely are truly bad.

Think of your morning commute.  A fifteen-minute delay in traffic.  Perhaps a rude driver cuts you off.  10 seconds, at most. That’s a mere 910 seconds out of a day of 86,400 seconds. The “bad day” has consumed no more than 1% of your day.  However, the delay puts you in a foul mood for the entire forty-minute drive, and the first half-hour of your workday. In turn, you snap at a couple of coworkers, and may make a mistake or two because of your elevated stress levels.  This consumes another ten minutes to correct. You’ve added eighty minutes of “bad” to your bad day!  Not only that, you’ve helped to ruin a few moments of your coworkers’ days; perhaps even more than that.  One percent has become 6.6%, very quickly. 

Still, if your “bad day” has no more than six or seven percent negative in it, that’s far from disastrous.  93% is still okay to great, if you adjust to the circumstances.  Unfortunately, many of us let the bad moments fester, and our day goes downhill.  It is all a matter of attitude, and yours is leading to unpleasant experiences.

In 1986 (June 6, to be precise), I had a relatively bad day, that started at about 10pm.  At that time, I was heading to my house with my children.  When I arrived, I found the door locked.  A moment of stupidity followed, where I pounded on the leaded glass window of the front door.  Hard.  Very hard.  It broke.

My arm went through the glass, and then the glass went through my arm, with a sharp spear about six inches long in the bottom of the frame slicing into my forearm, precisely at the wrong point.  My instant, reflexive reaction was to pull back.  That raked the flesh, muscle, tendons, nerves, artery and vein back toward my wrist for a distance of about five inches, into a messy pile.  Blood spurted like a wildcat oil well.  My hand flopped wildly back and forward as I flinched.  That was bad.  Less than three seconds, and, including the angry moment, less than thirty.  Out of 86,400.

Now that bad day had potential to get a lot worse, with the vast amount of blood I was losing.

I rushed into the house, to my dresser (or, more precisely, to the last drawer in the dresser that did not contain my wife’s clothes.  Ripping open the drawer, I grabbed one of my cotton tee shirts to use as a tourniquet, wrapping it tightly around my forearm, and slowing the flow.

I thought it was my tee shirt.  My wife, unknown to me, had commandeered my last drawer, and I had used one of her white tops.  I heard about it from her.

This still had potential to be horribly bad.  I needed to get to the hospital, quickly.  And my wife was screaming at me for ruining her $15 top!  That was when the fun started, as I saw it.  It even seemed grotesquely funny at that moment!

My wife had been home, but was disinclined to unlock the door for me.  The good luck was that she was in the company of a friend, who saw the urgency, quickly got me back into my car and drove me toward the hospital.  On the way, we intercepted a police car, heading for, of all places, a snack shop.

Local police generally are not supposed to transport emergency victims to the hospital.  They are to stabilize the patient, while summoning the ambulance.  I was not going to wait.  I was able to get out of my car, and made my way to the cruiser, opening the rear door myself.  The police re-entered the car and looked at me.  Didn’t put the car in drive, didn’t look to help this profusely bleeding individual.  Just looked at me, one by turning around, the other in the rear view mirror.  I knew my colour was pale.  But when I fell against the side of the door in weakness, the male cop turned more white that I could ever have been.

“Drive, drive, drive,” he screamed at the female cruiser pilot.  She drove.  That, too, was funny.

Within eight minutes, we were at the hospital emergency entrance.  However, neither cop seemed to have the strength or will to get out of the vehicle and assist me.  Both, now, turned to stare, terrified, at me.  I was trapped in the rear, bleeding to death.  I could feel the air conditioning start at my feet and well up my legs.  I could not release my grip on my left forearm, largely because I could no longer feel my hands.  The top of my head felt air-conditioned.  I knew what was happening, and, somehow at that moment, the absurdity of the situation was not particularly funny.  It was, in retrospect, but not at the moment. 

My good luck was that the cops had forewarned the hospital that I was arriving.  An orderly was waiting at the entrance, and, after a minute, stepped forward to let me out of the car.  The cops sat there, and as I looked back at them, they were staring in revulsion at the bloody mess that I had left behind on the rear seat.  I found that slightly amusing.

As I was wheeled to the intake desk of this newly renovated emergency area, I took note of the bright carpet in the area.  So did the intake nurse.  She gasped, when she noticed the blood that I was dripping onto the carpet, and quickly wheeled me onto a linoleum-covered area.  That, I confess, was morbidly funny, and I pondered why any sane  administrator would put down carpet in an emergency entrance.

The rest of the night was a mix of bizarre, tedium and graveside comedy.  The only doctor-in-residence on shift that night came in an hour after I had been wheeled into a quiet area, a compression bandage applied, and painkiller offered.  I had declined, because I absolutely was terrified of needles.  The doctor entered, lifted the compression bandage briefly, shuddered, uttered “ugh,” and left.  I never saw him again!  That was both absurd and somewhat frightening. Ten hours later, at 8 am, my plastic surgeon arrived to begin the reconstruction.  He was introduced as Dr. Robert Grafton.  What a marvellous name for a reconstructive surgeon!

Nine hours later, I saw him again, as I emerged from the anaesthesia.

“What kind of job did you do?” I asked him.

“Not as good as you,” he replied.  It was intended as humour, and I laughed.

The next day, I met my roommate, who had been asleep when I had usurped his territory on the ward the previous late afternoon.  He was a marvellous character, who had had his left elbow shattered by a baseball bat when he went to the assistance of a young man who was being beaten by several attackers.  From his left ear to the tips of his left fingers, he was a beautiful, translucent purple, with the skin so swollen that it looked like the balloon that was his arm would pop any second.  He spent a great deal of time on Demerol.  Anyone who calls the centre of nerves at the back of the elbow a “funny bone” should discuss that choice of words with my roommate at the hospital.  I felt pain just looking at the injury!

That was Sunday morning.  The entire weekend had been a Monty Python marathon on television.  We both, it turned out, loved Monty Python, and we both devoured episode after episode all day, well into early morning.  Neither of us bothered with any painkillers, from early Sunday afternoon, until the next morning.  We laughed so hard, so long, so loud that the nurses frequently came into the room to threaten to evict us from the hospital. It was not that other patients were being disturbed, as our door was shut.  It was merely that the staff wanted to be part of the experience of these two patients, supposedly in extreme pain, enjoying the night so fully and vivaciously.  That day was one of the best that I had had in years, throughout my crumbling marriage.

I learned from that accident that I can do a great deal with only one hand, and practised for months at improving those skills.  Prior to the accident, I loathed sales.  Because I could not return to my old occupation for many months, I took training in sales, and became a very successful salesperson. 

I found, most of all, that bad days – even as supposedly terrible as June 6, 1986 – most often are not bad.  I had less that 2% of my day that could be categorized as “bad.”  I saw a lot of unique situations, and even enjoyed a lot of laughs along the way.

The day would have been bad, if I had not reacted to staunch the negative flow.  By interacting with positive experiences, my bad day became a great one (albeit mightily inconvenient), and I grew, as a person, as a result of what was supposed to be a bad moment.

Before you let that jerk who cut you off ruin your day, and the days of those around you, think.  How many seconds really have been ruined?  Then get on with enjoying the rest of your day, even with its few not-so-great moments.  Have a great day!

Friendship The Greatest Inconvenient Way to Relieve Stress

Friendship is inconvenient.  It is trying and often fragile.  Friendship frequently requires effort. Yet, in spite of all its impurities, friendship is the best salve for the fatigue of a hard day, the anxieties of a stressful experience or the melancholy of a tragic loss.

When one begins the search for his or her individual oasis away from the travails of everyday life, the single best place to search is in the company of a friend.

An apt adage declares that, “the best kind of friend is the one you could sit on a porch with, never saying a word, and walk away feeling like that was the best conversation you’ve had.”

Many of us find friendship difficult, either because we feel we are imposing on that friend, or that the friend may impose on us.  Most frequently, when we are despondent, our first inclination is to seek solitude.  It is less true that misery loves company than that gloom makes no room for others.  Yet, by interacting with people, we are less able to focus on our own distresses.  Intuitively, then, when we least want company is when we should seek it out.  How lonely it would be to struggle across that barren desert, searching for our oasis, only to be trapped at that abandoned waterhole, having no one with whom we could share our sanctum!

Friendship is inconvenient, though.  It requires that we be prepared to give of ourselves, and to be there for our friends in need.  Need arises at greatly inconvenient times.  So how do we justify giving of ourselves to friends (and strangers) in need?  Do we selfishly do so, expecting that whatever favours we grant will be repaid?  That is a certain route to disappointment and resentment.  Giving to and being there for a friend should be viewed as the reward in itself.  Attitude determines the colour of the world around us.  The pleasure we derive from the comfort that we provide to a friend should be the selfish reward we seek; consequently, we should be selfish often.

Friendship can be fragile, though.  Disagreements – trivial or intense – occasionally threaten the fabric of interaction with friends.  How we handle those fractures determines our own emotional security, more so than that of our colleague. 

A friend lost may soon be found in the ranks of those whom you count as enemies.  Yet, by allowing a man the privilege of being your enemy, you strengthen him and weaken yourself.  Aristotle said, “The antidote for fifty enemies is one friend.”  In truth, make as many of those enemies into friends as you can, for, like warm hugs, we can never embrace too many friends.  

Friendship, fortunately, is not fading as the television or computer screen replaces the face of a friend.  Yet, we need to be diligent in keeping human interaction in the forefront of our lives, if we wish to reduce the everyday anxieties that our fast-paced world throws at us.

Finding our individual oasis of comfort in life is less likely to be found in financial wealth than it is in the wealth of friends.  While friends may be found cheaply, they are the most precious possession we have in a stressful, combative world.

As Thomas Edison stated, “I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favour of the kings of the world.”

Friends are, in fact, the kings and queens of the world.  Bow to them.

Finding Your Oasis: Turning Life Into Luxury

We all seek a safe, pleasurable life, or moment in life.  We all seek an oasis of comfort, safety and well-being.  Finding our own oasis is a quest, and it is a quest that is individual.

This article, on finding your own oasis, is really about you, so to confuse things, and to appear completely narcissistic, I want to start by talking about me.  About what I regard as being important.  About what my dreams are.  About my beliefs.  About the things I do.  And, most significantly, about to whom I relate and love.

Actually, I intend to do very little of what I have just claimed.  Quite simply, I approach life with a maximum focus on living it, and a minimal focus on owning it.  I rent life.  And my supplier makes no promises to me!  That is the basis on which I operate.  Do, feel and live it now!  That is, be and do the best you can be, today.

What each of us deems to be “the best” is extremely subjective.  However, there are a few very definite principles that should guide our direction.  I would like, in this introductory article on “finding your oasis,” to elaborate on those concepts, and help you to discover that idyllic spot – figurative or literal – in this world that is meant just for you.  This quintet of canons are: 1) Know what is important to you.  We evolve throughout our life, so what is important may change periodically.   2) Have a dream.  Better yet, have dreams! 3) Believe in something, energetically.  Stand up for your beliefs, too.  4) Live life, and do so with commitment. 5) Love life, and the things in it.  Even love that which you hate.

I began by threatening to talk about me. I find that difficult, since I have been indoctrinated with the belief that I should always place others first, and that modesty requires that I not talk about myself.  It is a belief that I have analysed, and found that, even though it was impregnated in me as a child, by my parents, it still remains true.  That is the beauty of adulthood.  I can choose to embrace or reject those tenets and moral imperatives that others hold to be absolute.  I can make the choice as to what principles will guide my actions and thoughts.  It is choice , in itself, that impacts on our drive to seek a sanctum or haven from the rest of the world.

According to psychologist, Dr. Richard Lazarus, "Stress resides neither in the situation nor in the person.  It depends on a transaction between the two."  Yet, one of the primary reasons that people cite as to why they may want to escape from a situation, a circle of influence, a way of life or a job is that they are stressed.  And, combining a lack of control over our stressful situation with a lack of tools to deal effectively with stress seems to heighten that need to seek relief from the stressor.  Occupational psychologist, Cary Cooper, suggests that even the new technologies that should have been relief mechanisms for stress are contributing to greater stress on individuals.

So, since stress seems to play the pivotal role in our need to “find our oasis,” many of my future articles will examine ways to deal with that stress.

Much of the lives of many of us is spent doing things that we loathe, or, at least, would prefer to not be doing.  The majority of us, for example, count the seconds until the end of the workday, because we are labouring at a task that we do not enjoy.  We either have to “suck it up” and endure, leave the job, or discover ways to turn the tasks into fun.  That is the essence of one scene in the Mary Poppins musical.  We should, regardless of our job or circumstance, be seeking out those things that are important to us, and embracing them, while, at the same time, finding significance in what we do.

For some of us, ironically, the most important thing is money, and we are willing to endure unpleasant consequences in the pursuit of it.  My wife and I live a life of voluntary simplicity, living with the minimum of acquisitions.  In my blog on Lean and Green Living, I elaborate, though, on some of the stressors that such a lifestyle generates, even though the way of living is intended to reduce stress.  If money is that important, then you need to find ways to achieve the goal of acquisition, in order to find your own oasis.  However, a word of caution:  money, most often, is not the objective.  It is what that money signifies, so look deeper, to find the truly important things that you believe that money provides.

Hand in hand with discovering what is important to you is understanding and elaborating upon what your dreams may be.  Dreams are viewed as being distant goals, rather than immediate rewards.  In fact, dreams can be close at hand, or even instantaneous.  My dream is to share a way to live harmoniously, with every one of nature’s gifts, free of intolerance, and to live magnanimously.  While I have not reached that goal (and never will, since the goal constantly moves, and I frequently stumble), I have enriched my life by keeping that dream in focus.

The third tenet in finding our unique oasis is to believe in something, energetically.  I believe in the idea that, in everything I possess, ownership is transient.  Therefore, since I also believe that I am “my brother’s keeper,”  I should not waste or frivolously destroy what I have been given, and should, indeed, seek to improve what I possess before passing it on.  Tied with each of the other four canons of living, I spend much of my leisure time exploring energy and conservation concepts, in the hope that I can improve on what is available currently.  It may be vain, but it is satisfying.

How many of us live our lives with commitment?  How many of us passively watch our lives expire?  By doing little to rescue ourselves, we contribute to our stress and our feelings of being lost and helpless.  Stand up and be counted.  You may be standing up on the side opposite me, but that neither makes you right or wrong.  It makes you dedicated and enthusiastic about that which you choose to embrace, and that takes you a step closer to finding your oasis.

Lastly, we need to love life, and everything in it.  My severed finger, or my long-distant failed marriages, or my infrequent financial crises may not be pleasant, but they reveal to us that we are not observers of life: we are participants, and we should as eagerly endure these hurdles as we do those special, wonderful moments in life, that occur far more frequently than the bitter ones.

There is no one answer to how all of us achieve the goals and objectives outlined in our guide to finding our own oasis.  There are thousands of ideas and routes, as well as side trails and detours.  Nonetheless, when we set out on the journey toward our oasis in the desert, we will already have begun to find it.