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Episode 33: Stress Management
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dr. Lyle we are now in fall solstice how you been doing I'm doing good you know with with the changing of the weather's you know I'm I'm always interested to see if human behavior changes just like last time we talked about human mating seasons and and and I just always curious how I always imagined that in a Stone Age humans around this time are starting to like collect a lot of food for the winter and all this other stuff but given what you said last time that most of our history was in the desert or was in the Sahara sub-saharan Africa you know there goes that idea I don't think there's any doubt that the change of seasons will bring a halo towards the fall and winter will bring a low-grade anxiety to the system there's the possibility of famine and as a result that's why Paul has that little mod wouldn't feel good mmm-hmm well let's not it very much so yeah let me check the audio with you because it seems like you're a little further away okay hold on my lighter top of my microphone okay Oh fantastic okay fantastic yeah so is does this explain why we have the fall holidays and winter holidays like Thanksgiving and and Christmas mister etc no marker those are another shot totally modern thing you said nothing to do with Natural History all right well today our topic is going to be stress management how to manage stress a variety of different ways we get to that but we we had a couple of listeners that emailed me and again listeners are more than welcome to email me and we go over the questions before we get to the topic so a couple of questions this has to do with a listener who's a talented musician so he you're he's asking doctor dr. Lyle I'm a talented musician according to most I've gone through several different financials situations in life and for a decade I was making a very solid six-figure income and as a result I attracted the data tons of attractive very attractive high-value women more recently though I left the corporate rat race and focused on other areas of my life namely music but in doing so I've taken a huge pay cut and I realized my success with women went out the window when I stopped making good money now I'm good-looking agreeable socially adept and so forth but I understand now that because of evolutionary drives women might be largely attracted to material wealth especially after their 20s question our music and art careers essentially a poor evolutionary strategy for men of limited means the more I reflect on this the more I believe this is the case of course there's a tiny fraction of famous artists who can attract high-value women but I'd argue much of that is due to their commercial and financial success whereas financial success in the arts is like a casino there's no guarantees of being successful regardless of Talent when I look around I noticed that most boring average guys with good careers have functioning families and somewhat fulfilling lives on the outside few artists I know have very stable long-term relationships and I noticed this even among famous artists almost none have children I'd be extremely interested to hear your insights into this topic dr. Lyle a lot of good thinking there the last few things he's thinking are just sort of his own eyeball observations and won't stand the scrutiny but it could be but that's neither here nor there the truth is is that this this listener is thinking very very clearly obviously he's experienced this process the what let's sort of break this down as to why this works this way the what what the arts are and athletics are these are what we're going to call fitness indicators and so fitness indicators are are sexually attractive features of an organism that that that the OP sex uses as yardstick to measure one member against the other so think about women's breasts and their hips and their lips and the their the arch of their eyebrows etc think about men's chests the their torsos think about men's athleticism how high they can jump etc think about people's hair and how how freakish it is to people to lose their hair because hair is is a sexual ornament and we're a fitness indicator so this is so it turns out that the Fitness indicators that are also purely neural circuits so it's going to turn out that you know how you sing how you dance whether you know what skills you have inside your head whether you can do chess or math problems etc these are also Fitness indicators and so the what I and they are particularly things like the arts these are Fitness indicators or what you might call ornaments they're like a little thing that dresses up the Christmas tree to make it particularly attractive and they kiss indicators or ornaments make terrible careers and let me explain why they make terrible careers it isn't that they might not make a fabulous career in fact in principle they could make the most incredible fabulous careers that you would ever see but let's talk about why they make in general very lousy careers the reason is is because a fitness indicator what suppose you're a singer okay so singing winds up being a fitness indicator for the reason that the human voice is a mechanism to detect the degree of masculinity or femininity in the person on the other side of that voice so it turns out that voices are sexually attractive to varying degrees some people have terrible voices some people have great voices and and that winds up being a fitness indicator probably because it winds up being the voice itself winds up being a quite a good mechanism for detecting or a variable for detecting testosterone and estrogen levels so highly exercised female has a very soft beautiful high voice and a billion testosterone eyes male has a deep resonant voice and so and those are sexually attractive so people with extraordinary voices are this is enhancing their sex appeal fairly substantially and so much so that you can make a career out of it and if it turns out that you know in the old days you didn't have to be really attractive because they didn't have television so you could just be a tremendous voice these days you better have it all you've got to be great-looking and have a great voice or you're going to be out of luck in all probability so the about it any event any event the the display of sexual ornaments is the most direct mechanism by which to impact the opposite sex and increase your market share and therefore to get the very best deal that you could possibly get this is why girls would let the models and actresses boy would that be fancy in other words if I was so beautiful that I could be a model what could be better than making money while I'm displaying my my fitness indicators for god sakes what could be better for a young man to be a professional athlete for goodness sakes nothing unless you're going to be a rock star that's even better so if you can sing or dance or do athletics these would be it's almost an incredible if you think about it that what would have been a glimpse and a part-time process in the Stone Age after you've gone all the trouble of beating the kids making sure the Predators don't get your your kids making sure you get fed etc then you go out there and try to secure a better mate or trade up or just get what I made by displaying your fitness indicators if the little local dance or whatever that the thing is so little spirit throwing contest that happens you know once a week so instead people in the moderate environment look at this and they say well you know I feel like I should follow my dream you know my dream is to is to be an actress well fine the bottom line is is that you and everybody else has that same idea because in principle nothing could be as genetically efficient as spending your time you're the core part of your of your time on earth displaying your extraordinary fitness indicators okay if you could do such a thing it would be an incredible thing to do because it would be such an unbelievably efficient smart thing to do everybody with any talent wants today and as a result there's a tremendous supply of gorgeous females out there that will all like to be models and that's what almost none of them get to be and of those that get to be the most of them make about $13,000 a year trying to do this full-time and then there's a few as the man said it's like the casino there's a few that happen to hit it niche and happen to get lucky and just have you know one less mutation in the next person at least when it comes to their face and it winds up that they wind up making a million dollars a year same thing with athletics the auto story I was working in the probation department at Gallup in the 1990s and I had a guy come in he was on he was on probation and I don't know what he did I if I remember he beat somebody up and he was a big guy this guy walked in the door and he was about 62 and about 250 pounds he was just just big and strong and unbelievable athletics looking and I asked him I said hey well did you play sports yeah I said do you play football he says yes I did I said where'd you play he says well I played in the USFL which was poor Football League they competed with the NFL for a period of time and pretty fancy and you had had at NFL tryouts this guy had I said where'd you go to college he said Oklahoma State I said Oklahoma State said where who who is in the backfield there with you did you play my thesis no I didn't play at all good how is that well in front of him in the backfield with Oklahoma State were two running backs by the name of Thurman Thomas and Barry Sanders who are both in the Hall of Fame I understand okay this guy couldn't get off the bench at Oklahoma State but he almost made the NFL because he was the number three running back on the depth chart at Oklahoma State that guy is one mutation away from being a 50 million dollar guy hey instead he was a Fudd in Dallas you know holding up liquor stores or whatever the hell he was doing okay so the bottom line is is that Fitness indicators or sexual ornament made terrible careers and and so this this man's trajectory here makes complete sense sounds like he's very bright very competent made a really good living in the corporate world which is where we all dig and trudge and do the best we can to try to try to be as efficient as possible giving people what they want so that we can spend more time doing what we want that's what making a living is the and then when you try to make is Fitness indicator into a career it turned out you took a big dive and and of course females are looking for provisioning and it's going to be a very important thing for women to look for provisioning because they're going to be trying to see how on earth they're going to get the bills paid and and to have a nice $50,000 SUV to protect the children that they're going to have and so suddenly a musician knocking down $18,000 ears and getting that done so absolutely all correct and yeah however I would also comment about something else that he said tip it seems that the musicians that he's seen and artists don't have stable relationships that because they are inherently adventurous people that artists are in almost by definition very open to experience and as a result they are going to have a strong tendency to be open to sexual experience which means they're not going to make very good care of on these generally and as a result that that's an additional reason why you're going to find so much instability in those arenas that isn't to say that everybody's that are highly artistic has that bent but there's certainly a very significant correlation between the artistic personality and and low fidelity yeah interesting you used to oh there's a buzzing there behind and in the background but it's interesting you say that on the two-year anniversary of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie getting married and then now they're splitting up pretty soon so yeah all right so that somebody wasn't quite good enough yeah so we have another question on that same vein but we're going to actually live it to the very end so we're going to continue with the the stress management section for today today we're going to be going over what what the truth is behind stuffed stress management we're going to be going over an article on help guide org about tips for getting your stress under control for good and we're going to we're going to read what they say and then we're going to get the commentary from you dr. Lao oh okay tip number one identify the sources of stress in your life for example do you explain away stress is temporary even though you can't remember the last time you took a breather or is it an integral part of your work or home life do you blame your stress on other people or outside events or is it entirely Norman unexceptional a stress Journal can help you identify to the regular stressors in your life wow what a patty-cake thing that is but obviously like most people don't need a stress Journal to figure it all right so some sympathetic guys writing an article and he's a little bit overly structured but fair enough let's continue on and see what the other side alright tip number two learn healthier ways to cope with stress so think about ways you currently manage and cope with stress in your life like you can use your stress journal that can help and are your coping strategies healthy or unhealthy helpful or unproductive many people cope with stress in the following unhealthy ways they smoke they use pills or drugs to relax there's a lot of interference there on your end dr. lout can you check on that Wow okay I don't have no idea what that would be where would be from that sound like that's shifting around yeah it's much better it sounded like there was like crumpling a paper or something okay it's alright unhealthy ways of coping with stress smoking drinking too much sleep be much benjin on junk food procrastinating watching TV for hours on end and withdrawing from friends family and activities and taking out your stress on others yeah okay whatever kitchen sink no insight let's continue see what else she has to say okay alright the third tip for managing your stress is get moving physical activity put key role in reducing and preventing the effects of stress but you don't have to spend hours in the gym or be some elite athlete just about any form of physical activity can help relieve stress and burn away that anger tension and frustration yeah not too bad alright there's Phyllis I said anything with any intelligence in it keep going okay tip number two tip number four connects to others social engagement is a quickest most efficient way to rein in stress forget it we'll get over that that's really part of it it's really done go ahead okay you're going to love this one practice the four days the five days avoid unnecessary stress the second one is alter the situation the third one is adapt to the stress or and for accept the things you can't change alright I haven't how cute is that I see so they all begin with a yes yeah yes here's what's wrong with all this is that obviously as we would expect there's no there's no high level analysis of understanding this so let's let's get to this this is kind of like somebody with cardiovascular disease and we are telling them well you know when your heart hurts you know sit down and relax and don't deal with people that are upsetting you know because they're they're going to hurt your heart like nobody's talking about the person's diet as the genesis of this okay so yeah so we are not actually getting to the root of anything here we're just sort of talking around the symptoms so let's let's get down to the core of what stress is how it works and a comprehensive essentially theory of stress management and from within that theory we then have a playbook that can be adapted to any situation in any personality where we have you know where we're experiencing a lot of stress the stress is is a response it's an emotional psycho physical response to the possibility of loss that's what stress is so stress is you feel stress if you are playing the Super Bowl and you are trying to win because you could lose and it's stressful you are you are stressed if you're making a presentation at work and you could result in a promotion or you've been on the edge for losing your job or you're just always worried about your general position etc and your esteem in the company or your showing off or somebody that you're attracted to or whatever in other words the results of this and what people think are of value to you and there is a variable and outcome that might would that you have judged to be significant and therefore there is something to lose the you are stressed if you are on the way to the dentist and you are late and they may be upset with you and so therefore you you could lose the skiing with the dentist people so this is uh while we are getting some noise is that you or me or do we know I'm not getting any more yep okay you're not getting any no so now I am okay well we'll just talk through it so um so stress is stress is about it's a it's the possibility of loss stress is in fact what's under stress is anxiety and anxiety is the signal of possible loss so stress comes when you are uncertain as to whether or not you are going to be able to complete something so there is a there's a statistically there's statistical possibility that you will not be able to accomplish it if I told you that your job is to tie your shoelaces within the next five minutes there would be no stress at all none okay if you had had a stroke two days ago and you are having a hard time moving your fingers and I said it's very diagnostic let's do as to whether or not you can tie your shoelaces within five minutes right now and that will tell us a great deal about your future you would be stressed about this and as you are working very hard on trying to tie your shoelaces you would feel stress okay because there would be less than 100% possibility that you could pull this off so stress is about the perceived probability of success that is what stress is about when when the perceived probability success is 100% there is no stress when the perceived probabilities of success is zero there is no stress it is only between 0 and 100 that we have a stress reaction and we have the amount of stress reaction is directly proportional to your brains estimate of what the potential loss is with respect to the situation if it's a loss of your career a loss of your mate a loss of your health then you are very stressed about this ok if it is a trivial loss like you may or may not get your get to the 7-eleven on time to turn in your your lotto ticket for 2 bucks then you know etc I guess there 24 hours but in principle the then you're not you're mildly stressed as you you try to you know get to the window so this is all it all depends upon your brains computation as to how many or to what degree the survival and reproductive genetic chips are on the line and of course everything in life is being judged according to their their relationship to deep biological values so your brain is magnificently computing these values as it also magnificent country computes yeah you will perceive probability of success of achieving whatever it is so it's going to turn out that as you the genesis of a stressful life is the following that you're designed by nature to always be trying to acquire status either could could be to require resources so therefore you can show off and waste those resources with fancy house and car and clothes in order to get status but ultimately be what we are angling for is esteem and so it's going to turn out that the the more we are engaged in in interactions with other people then the more steam we can get so think of a social worker who can essentially do her own schedule yeah she works in an agency that's pretty slow and she can actually request from downtown more or less people so she might request for people a day not too stressful has nice job but dependent upon a personality we could easily have a situation where downtown Hall says wow you know you're just so good and people like you we've got a little person here that's just got a lot of troubles could you see them and she says yes and then she's got five people and they say oh gosh you're just so good we got these these little triplets they're both 14 years old and they're all having such a hard time and they can't talk to each other very could you see them - well yes okay so now we started finding out she starts cramming more and more in her day now why is she cramming more and more her day because she likes to get it steamed and so as we're all designed by nature to compete with each other in the village for who brings the most to the village in fact we're designed by nature to compete to be the most valuable person in the village we are the MVP of the village we are by definition the person in the village for them the village would give up the most total resources in order to save so the most valuable person in the village is by by definition the safest person in the village so what people do in order to be safe is they give as much as they possibly can and so what happens is our little social worker will keep saying yes gang now because she may not she may be disagreeable because she's got other people that are more valuable to help and she tells one person no until the other person yes okay so so it's going to turn out that people are all angling for more and more status or esteem in their particular village and as a result they are esteemed to the extent that they do more than other people do in this lifetime so it's going to turn out that that the more you do the more steam you get at which point this becomes a competition as to who can be the most efficient at churning out the most esteem worthy activities okay now that being the case it's going to turn out that people are going to try to be as efficient as possible to cram as much in as they can so now now we're going to take a look at the average housewife so now we're going to you know stereotypically make it that she works part-time so she at let's not do that let's suppose she works full-time so she works full-time at a job and she's quite quite pleasant and agreeable and she's got a pushy boss who often needs her to stay after in order to help him because he's got some things he wants to do because he wants to be senior vice president next year and so he needs his people to outwork the competitors people so that his reports look better and he has accomplished more than his competitor so he needs to lean on his people in order to turn out more our role does some of that at the same time though she's got three kids and each of those kids her job is to see to it that those kids are as competitive as possible with respect to their own survival and reproductive ascension and so they've got they've got soccer practice to go to and everything else in the Sun and they've got violin lessons etc she's got a husband she's trying to make sure he sticks around and keeps provisioning the children so she's under a little bit of stress there she's supposed to cook dinner that's her job okay um etc is she joined member of a church where she volunteers some time to the pastor who of course has his own dominance hierarchy and he's got his own needs to be a fanciest pastor of the Episcopalians in this local hamlet and therefore he wants to have a better show than the other guy on the other side of town with another you know with another Church so he's climbing his own dominance hierarchy because the local deacon is going to be visiting these little shindigs in the next three months and he wants his shindig to be the other than better than the other shindig and our girl has volunteered why cuz he asked for volunteers and passionately describe how important this was for the community that's such a a wonderful thing okay you see what's happening happening is is that she keeps saying yes to things in order to gain esteem and to not lose the opportunity to gain more esteem by having to say no so she says yes what happens is she puts more and more into her day as she puts more and more into her day we start reducing the perceived probability that she's actually going to be successful pulling it off okay what can easily be done in four hours cannot be done in two hours so now we watch her rushing in the kitchen to get dinner on the table okay man while she's watching the clock because one kid needs to get down to the violin lesson and we're going to have to get it all together here pretty quickly okay and guess what happened it gets sacrificed what gets sacrificed is her own personal goals that don't involve anybody else like an exercise program we're getting to sleep on time okay those get thrown right out the window those are tend to be the first things to get thrown out the window any any time when you can just sacrifice yourself without pissing off anybody else that you're having to say no to those would be the very first things that we go so now we start looking at a life and stress okay so we could talk about what sometimes happens to people sometimes people will turn out all drugs so forth but that's really not the main thing and that is not that is not the quote horrible coping mechanisms of our time the horrible problem of our time is the stress itself the the problem is is that the person is over committed okay you've only got two choices in this life if you're stressed almost all stress incidentally comes from time pressure and the time pressure comes from over commitment and the over commitment comes from trying to get too much esteem from too many different people and those people are not having line of sight on each other so they are they cannot see each other so the pastor cannot see the boss in the Stone Age the pastor could see the boss so the pastor and the boss fought it out and they argued about where our little girl Nellie is going to be spending the day working okay but in the modern environment the village has been fractured so as a result the potentates of the village do not have line of sight on each other and each little peasant ate each little little little King as its own kingdom and within that kingdom they don't do not see the other villages the other people in our little persons village as a result they don't care about them they don't actually don't think that they're of any worthy merit and shouldn't even be considered for god sakes so as a result people very often find themselves in the crossfire of different little Napoleon's each of which has their own dominant hierarchy each of which considers our individual to be part of that team or hierarchy and therefore they should be sacrificing their lives according to our little Napoleon's view of what would be the most appropriate thing for that person to be doing unless appropriate thing for that person to be doing most of the time is to be volunteering some of their time and energy so whatever Napoleon has in mind it's good for Napoleon so the this is the genesis of the world that we see so the distress that people have has to do with the fact that the Stone Age village is fractured that people have competing demands from groups where the conflict of interests between those groups is is having to be adjudicated by the individual themselves rather than the code tates that would otherwise be fighting it out with each other in the middle of the village square so as a result of this are individual now who is very likely the overwhelming majority of the world is not alphas the overwhelming majority of the world is followers so as a result the vast majority of people are following and they are following in multiple hierarchies as a result of following multiple hierarchies they are inevitably in conflict over which a hierarchy is going to get most of their time and energy in any given instance and it's going to turn out that they will sacrifice their own goals including their own sleep and their own exercise programs and an actually decent diet at the time that it takes to do that their own lives will become disordered their debts will be a mess and they they will essentially make multiple sacrifices that result in a sense of low-grade chaos and they will be time-pressured rushing around apologizing and begging off feeling guilty because on the other side of this whenever they whenever they are late or they fail or they have to essentially get out of a commitment it's going to turn out that the little potentate is going to be very stand out of shape and put out and essentially upset that they that they did this to them so the root of the problem here is going to be conscientiousness and agreeable personalities that make up these unbelievably valuable people in our world and those people will have a strong tendency to wind up overburden stressed-out under way too much time pressure trying to answer too many multiple demands and and that and that is our problem so the solution to the problem just like heart disease is to get down to the root of it not to give some medication on top of it to try to let you know put a little balm on that on heart so it does hurt quite it's bad that is not the solution the solution is to go deep into the process and make sure that we analyze who it is that we need the esteem from where are our vulnerabilities and how it is that we are going to reorganize very clearly what our priorities are and then how we're going to defend ourselves in the teeth of the and downright anger and disappointment and guilt inducing manipulations of those people who we are going to take our time back from okay and so on my website is Team Dynamics I have a lecture there called success forces and and also a number of little audio clips and I talk about how we get out of things and and how we how we a 1:1 sequence is called blame big Louie and now what we do is we there are there are essentially tricks that we use to slither our way around the social pressure that is essentially trying to get us to over commit and and therefore lay this lay the groundwork for our stress mm-hmm yeah so what you're saying is we don't need to be or we may not necessarily need to be part of that many villages yeah you don't need to have that much status in that many villages and we don't need to be protecting our status in every village and if kind of conscientious if you think about conscientiousness if you think about the big five that we talked about personality individual differences in personality think about conscientiousness as effectively being a it's a measurement of anxiety and so if a person is very low in conscientiousness they don't have any anxiety they don't care if they get to school on time they don't care if they get to work on time they don't care if they pay the rent they don't care if they take in a shower okay they're just basically not very anxious um whereas think of think of in your mind's eye of a person that you would call uptight you know everything has to be right everything's got to be right on target everything every every bit of the accounting program needs to work perfectly their taxes need to be filed on time in other words what's driving them is anxiety and what what this is is that the we're conscientiousness effectively is is is the analysis of the mind of how much anxiety we should have with respect to a given level of threat and so a average person has the average amount of anxiety with respect to the average threat but a highly conscientious person has a high degree of anxiety with respect to the average threat which means they are miscalibrated okay so they are overestimating the worst-case scenario so they are thinking that they're going to get fired when they're not going to get fired they are thinking that they're going to get thrown out of the church and scolded or not get into heaven when they're not going to get thrown out of the church and they're not going to heaven anyway and so essentially what's happening is that they are miss allocating their resources and and so they are they're quite if they are agreeable they're quite easy to exploit and so they're their anxiety and tension and overkill on so many things is is actually the result of a of a nervous system that has unusually positive qualities in other words these are very valuable qualities to the village but they're not particularly valuable qualities to the individual and so as a result it's useful for these people if they're smart enough to actually back the camera up and understand what is happening here and so that they can do exactly as you're suggesting which is to to make a conscious deliberate effort to direct their to direct their anxiety and conscientiousness towards the people and the villages that matter and essentially be willing this is what I call dare to be average in other words with respect to a whole lot of your the villages that you may be connected to if you are stressed out a lot it's because you have not accepted and dealt with ah and dared yourself to just be average in some of these villages just be good enough okay rather than shine and and this this is a this is it this takes a little getting used to and it also takes a sometimes a deep analysis of what is really at risk what villages need to be analyzed carefully and who are we willing to let go of status with and and so I actually like to have people monetize some of these risks in order to reduce their anxiety so for example mm-hmm less conflicts of interests between people are about time and energy and it's going to turn out that what keep what we're squabbling over here is resources and so what we need to do is we need to find out who is really in control of your resources who are the most important minds with respect to how is that you're going to make a living and how much control do they have and where are their alternative sources that you we may be able to replace them with if need be and the whole point is here to not be exploited in your life by by essentially figuring out who is worth making sure that we are demonstrating excellence to and who is not worth in worth making sure that we're just riveted displaying excellence too because if we if we don't do this we will wind up with a life out of balance where we have effectively over-insured ourselves by getting too many good grades with too many different people all for no ultimate benefit to us very interesting and people who have individual issues they're welcome to call into the show here or also visit your website this Team Dynamics org to have a private session with you regarding this issue yeah or even better listen to a bunch of my stuff on there because the truth is is the techniques are quite they're quite generic in other words it's it's the you can if you can't if you can't adapt them for your situation no problem people can always give me a call but very often if people will listen to the techniques that I'll use like blame big Louie this is these are techniques for stepping around the social pressure that the potentates will give us and the potentate might be your mother-in-law might be your spouse okay might be your pastor might be your boss the is I'm not sure who the people are that are putting your life under time pressure but there's somebody and you we need to think through who they are why it is that this is happening and what we really have to lose if we instead dare to be average yeah I remember recently I was talking with a family member who had told me that they'd listened to a few of the podcasts and I asked them to do something and they said you know I wish I could but I can't I thought oh dang it I've been pushing here so back away right away I realized what they were doing excellent I'm all happy about this this is great all right a little letter yeah my little mother who is a very agreeable and highly conscientious individual IV right to be exploited the was exploited left right sideways her whole life and at about 75 she listened to me give this lecture about 10 years ago and she sat there and listened to this lecture at the end of it just got up and said well you know that is great but I wish I would have known this fifty years ago and so this uh these relatively simple techniques for stepping around this is not changing our personality and incidentally this is not assertive 'no straining so in the 1960s and 70s it was recognized by psychologists that that the is happening that a lot of people are getting pushed around and their life goals are going right down the drain and they are stressed out and don't have any time and energy for themselves and they recognize that what was happening is that their lives are getting overburdened by other people and so they invented this thing called assertiveness training and and in principle the idea was great but in practically speaking the idea is not good because essentially the idea is to teach people in such a way that it essentially morphs their personality into being assertive and I think what they noticed I know we interrupted you but I want to share this so that people get it a lot of nice people when they get pushed too far they get aggressive and they essentially get to a line where they finally display their own anger because finally the expectations have become so ridiculous on on multiple fronts and they finally go off on somebody who asks one percent too much and and that person doesn't really see that they're that far out of line but our person finally has had it because they're exhausted and their end of their rope and somewhere inside that head they're realizing that this is not fair but the whole darn value proposition between them and other people is not fair and they snack and my snap what it means is that their perception of fairness in the situation shifts rapidly too from them being guilted into thinking that they have not lived up to some of these expectations and therefore they need to get more to the inference suddenly that realizes you know what I've given too much and I'm exhausted I finally had it and I'm not happy and then they display their anger and then then the problem is is that it's not too long before they feel guilty and then they can see more and it's just a mess so the assertiveness training folks said hey listen you know there's there's I forget what it was passive-aggressive and assertive and passive it's when you get walked on aggressive you know then you're being too aggressive so the thing to be is assertive and if you read what passes for assertive it's it's kind of aggressive and essentially disagreeable and yes it requires more gonads than most nice people have there they really can't do it now they're nice words for people that are in the middle of the bell curve or more disagreeable to average so for them it might give you a few nice lines that you could use but the truth is the average person is not getting walked on it's the people in the top 25 percentile for for agreeableness who are also conscientious those are the people that are getting walked on and those people cannot absorb the lessons of sort of missed reading because it's too much different than their personalities so they need something else and that's something else is the sleazy set of techniques that I've come up with at my website fantastic now these are great you know when I first heard that oh I wish I could have had a can I ride away walked back and thought jeez maybe I'm being too pushy with this person it was great yeah so top which I know you you and data they were okay all right all right yeah yeah I wanted to know if you can if you can kind of dig in to your 30 you know almost 30 years of clinical experience and see see if there's something you want to share with us about an example about a patient client that you may like that had this situation and that you had to walk her him through a stressful situation and how they go okay I've had so many I can't even yeah I actually there's another type of stressful situation so instead of doing that but I'm going to talk about this is a this is another common type of problem where we can't let's suppose somebody is up against it very difficult that they have a big exam okay they have a big project do and they agreed six months ago they're going to do this big thing and now there it's been blooming and they've been putting it off and now they're pretty overwhelmed and and so this is this is big-time stress this might be a for example of medical students facing final exams or some such thing as to get a huge amount to do and then it could get overwhelming now it turns out that once again we see that that the rid of almost everything is time pressure so the person in order to do what it is that is expected to be done they can sense that they may not be able to accomplish this in the time that they have so if it turns out at some what suppose and authors agree to a book deal and they're they have to have this book by you know November first and the truth is it's only half done and they're really in trouble and so they're very stressed and they feel like just getting drunk and going to Hawaii and not answering this phone okay now so how how do we handle things where we may not be able to measure up to what the expectations are and yet we are in this shoot one way or the other and we have to do whatever it is the answer to this kind of stress which orders on almost a different perspective which is going to be what I call performance stress as opposed to time pressure they're very similar usually they are interrelated but they are not always interrelated so so for example what suppose we are we are somebody who's shy but we've taken a singing claps and we've got a recital you know two weeks from now now we have done everything we we've sang and sang and saying and we know the words etc but we're feeling very stressed about this so what is it that we can do about whether it's the medical student or etc we're feeling like we may not be able to accomplish it so the right way to do this is to shift our focus from the outcome to the process so the outcome for the medical student is fast and so that is the goal but now I would say let's try to not make that the goal what we're going to do instead of course that's our ultimate objective but what we're going to do is we are going to make something else our goal and that something else is going to be correctly doing the fundamentals of how it is that we would prepare for this exam so for example we would that medical student incidentally and I've had many cases like this where I found that they're just real smart and people people have a lot of confidence but maybe in a lot of ways they're flying by the seat of their pants and they have not really ever learned some some of the fundamentals of setting and it might be something else so you've got the singing class but you've never learned the fundamentals of managing anxiety and performance okay so you've been learning how to sing but you haven't learned that those those fun notes and so what we do is we set up a system where we realize we've got 75 days so some big exam and and we find out essentially how many hours we have to study and we've got it computed and then we figure out how much material we've got and we can figure out pretty quickly that we can only cover 30% of the material so we decide that's what we're going to do we can cover 30% of material this is the 30% that we're going to do and we take our notes and we have little checklists and questions etc and we methodically work our way through this and the issue here is that we are going to do this methodically and effectively as effectively as possible and we are going to let the chips fall where they may and if it turns out that we failed and we fail okay if it turns out that we succeed we succeed if we have to sing at this thing in two weeks we are going to do our little progressive muscle relax station jogging in place stress management process etc we are we made God forbid if it means it up to you go to your physician and get a beta blocker so that you can sing for this time so we are going to do what is known to do to make that happen if it turns out that you you know can't can't face it then you can't face it but we're going to be prepared all the way it turns out you choke in the middle of the song you choke in the middle of it's all okay so the notion here is that the goal becomes goals should fundamentally be that which you have control over goals are not things that you do not have control over so a nice way to stress yourself if you're done businessman is to say well I'm going to have sales next year my widget for of a million dollars well that's kind of ridiculous okay and so you go to Tony Robbins and you put it in your mind's eye supposed to think happy thoughts about how this is all going to happen etc this is an railroads didn't know that have 1 million dollars all over your bathroom ah yeah so know the correct way to do things is to get very comfortable with the worst-case scenario make sure we know what it is almost always the worst case scenario is nothing other than inconvenience and embarrassment that is almost a hundred percent of every worst-case scenario that anybody will ever fit the I worked in a maximum-security prison where those people many of those people have rolled the dice in the justice system because they did not want to take the deal for eight years and they lost and they wind up of a life sentence that is a very bad outcome okay any outcomes that any of our people face from day to day are unpleasant inconveniences you may lose your house because your business they go down you may have to move in your mom's garage till you get a decent job and you get an apartment again and start from scratch these are embarrassments and inconveniences that these are not terminal cancer and they are not life sentences so once we get comfortable with the worst-case scenario and we realize that our is to not quote succeed an incentive our objective our job is in fact to do the process as intelligently and well as we can and that includes getting asleep on time exercising and eating healthy fit okay and taking breaks and essentially having our lives in some kind of reasonable balance because that's how we will function best and this is what we do and we do it over and again and we check little boxes every day as we continue to move towards greater ability with respect to whatever this is and then whatever the outcome is is whatever the outcome is and we'll live with it okay and this is how we reduce stress management from any direction almost with any problem that we we must it's useful to make sure we carefully map carefully imagine the worst case scenario that we guard against the worst case scenario as well as as effectively as we can and then we break down the problem whatever it is into its fundamentals and we execute those fundamentals in a in a methodical fashion and this is the way we go about doing anything and if we do it that way the life still has plenty of excitement and there's plenty of drama as to whether or not how successful we're going to be but we can take some of the unnecessary drama out of it by realizing that these things are not life or death issues and our job is to do things as reasonably well as we can and let the chips fall where they may
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