Last week, I introduced you to my simple, yet effective, approach that I used to become a BFF (Best Friend Forever) with stress so it would no longer be such a barrier to my health and well-being. Following the cumbersome health complications that I experienced when I chose to ignore the effects of stress on my body, befriending stress has become the most effective health improvement intervention for me so far.

Although the idea of “befriending stress” may sound like an abstract concept, it is not very different from the process we use to befriend someone we meet that we like:

1. We get to know them better.
2. We create safety and trust between us.

In this section, Stress: Part Two, I will share with you the most profound and unusual pearls of wisdom that I have gathered in regard to how we can create safety and trust in our relationship with stress so we can enjoy a happier, healthier, and more productive life.

1. Question your perceptions! We are built for fight or flight in response to demands from the environment. It’s nothing personal, just a matter of survival. One of our most primal needs is to connect with others, yet our brain and nervous system are built for war and not for love. This presents us with a great paradox that we have to somehow reconcile to reinstate a sense of safety within and without. Our brain has evolved to give us the greatest survival advantage and that translates into us looking at things from a threatened perspective. We can intercept this scientific truth by literally questioning our assumptions and that which challenges us. For example, if you did not get an “Exceeds” in your performance evaluation, does it really mean that you should have concerns about your job security?
2. Make a regular practice of choosing the words to your own life story. We are what our experiences have shaped us to be. Most of our memories are stored in our brain without conscious intervention on our part. A memory of a negative experience will get triggered and elicit a response when a situation occurs that mimics sensations of that negative experience. As brilliant as we may be intellectually, most of our actions happen without our permission. For example, if we had a negative parent figure in our childhood, the moment we get close to someone as an adult, implicit memories will resurface of what it was like to depend on someone who was not dependable. Then the relational part of our brain will shut down to disrupt the perceived negative consequences of depending on someone again. We can start re-writing this story by assessing how much of our assumption that the present moment resembles our past is a truth or a story. We can also become a regular participant in deciding if bringing the past into our present is leading us to our desired outcomes.
3. Embrace the power of your emotions—one emotion at a time. We have been conditioned to be afraid of our own emotions, because well, they have a life of their own! We need to embrace that it is biologically impossible to not make an emotional decision. Prominent neuroscientist, Joseph Le Doux, has shown us that when a threat is perceived by our thalamus, which relays motor and sensory signals, it only takes eight milliseconds for the message to reach our amygdala, which is responsible for detecting fear, but forty milliseconds to reach our prefrontal cortex, which is the thinking part of our brain. Instead of running away from our feelings, what if we fully embrace and trust them by giving them a name and choosing how we allow them to shape our behavior? Making intelligent use of our emotions (otherwise known as emotional intelligence) has been found to be more important than IQ in how well we do in life. You can access a free resource to help you with this endeavor by clicking on this link: http://bit.ly/JoinMyndZen
4. Reconcile differences between expectations and actuality. Our brain perceives difference, or change, as “errors.” When we are promised a sweet-tasting treat and we get something sour instead, two structures in our brain get activated that emit very strong error signals. The two structures are the orbital frontal cortex and the amygdala. The activation of these structures draws our metabolic energy away from the part of our brain that supports higher intellectual functioning and results in us acting impulsively and often putting our foot in our mouth. To change this, make it a high priority to identify any parts of your life that present your brain with the taxing job of reconciling differences and, one by one, eliminate them. Do you support healthy living, but find that your health improvement initiatives end the moment you sit in front of the TV at the end of a stressful day with a bag of unhealthy snacks? Do you have a significant person in your life who says they love you but often minimizes you? Recognize all situations that aggravate your brain by showing up as errors, call them by name, and let them go. Your brain will love you for it!
5. Treat your brain as the best part of yourself. Our brain is our best friend and the CEO of the amazing operation of our incredible body. Improving our relationship with stress involves improving our relationship with ourselves. Although we haven’t been taught how to do that, there are several practices we can learn that are simple, backed up by science, and take only a smidgen of our time. Mindfulness meditation is one of the most effective and well-documented methods to quiet down the alarming narrative of any story and allow us to infuse our present moment with safety and trust. We can chose any focal point that makes us feel safe and protected as an effective way to build an internal sense of safety and trust. We can simply focus on our breath and recollect all the amazing things the power of our breath accomplishes, like oxygenating our one hundred trillion cells, or activating the parasympathetic branch of our nervous system, which governs rest and digestion. If you are one of the many of us that needs some guidance meditating, I invite you to use some of my favorite guided meditations that you can find here: http://bit.ly/myndzenguidedmeditations.

We modern humans are having such a hard time keeping our nervous system calm and available to serve our higher purpose and objectives in life. Part of the problem is that we have had to turn our brain into a warrior in order to survive throughout the ages.

Ultimately, we all strive to accomplish one, and only one, universal state—to be happy! However, there is not just one type of happiness.

We feel a primal type of happiness when we are in love and we make love to the object of our affection. But there is a different type of happiness that has been a secret until neuroscience uncovered it for us. This other type of happiness does not leave us, like the afterglow of being with the one we love. Instead, we carry this other type of happiness with us, and it shapes our perceptions of the world and how we expect the world to show up for us.

The foundation of this amazing, effervescent happiness hinges upon a baseline feeling of safety.

No matter how well we do in life, happiness will continue to be a fleeting target for us until we are ready to improve our internal sense of safety and trust. Changing the perceptual lens through which we view the world is a powerful way to improve our relationship with stress and increase our health and happiness.