mental health

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Season 1 Summary: Accelerated Evolution

Image by John Hain from Pixabay.

The second chapter in the Supermorning series was a bit of an odd one. It basically set out to explain why we continuously do things we know are wrong and not do things we know are right. 

It’s central to the principle of consistency advocated on this blog. Without it, our innate inconsistency is terribly frustrating. With it, this inconsistency becomes understandable and even controllable. 

So, let’s start with the problem:

Cavemen stuck in the future

Humans have evolved slowly like any other animal over our 200 millennia history. And for 99.9% of this history, this slow pace of evolution worked fine, simply because our environment changed just as slowly. 

But then science and fossil fuels combined to kick off the Anthropocene. We totally changed our environment in the evolutionary blink of an eye, while our emotional makeup remained unchanged. 

Hence, we’re all cavemen stuck in the future – a place where our primitive emotions are badly outdated. 

Primitive emotions

To simplify things, we can zoom into five main primitive emotions: Craving, Ego, Sloth, Frustration, and Worry. For me, it also works to view these as the Big Five mythical creatures roaming our minds. 

Conditioning your mind to instantly recognize the Big Five is very useful in the quest to adapt to life in the Anthropocene. The emotion safari is one way of approaching this conditioning. 

Positive emotions

Every villain needs a hero. In this case, the Big Five primitive emotions meet the Great Five positive emotions: Inspiration, Altruism, Flow, Tolerance, and Excitement. 

But like any good superhero story, the villain is not all bad, and the hero is not all good. We need to strike a fine emotional balance. 

Building environments

A good understanding of the Big Five and the Great Five facilitates the construction of intelligent environments that attract good emotions and suppress bad ones. 

Here are some instructions for each pairing:

  • Craving and Inspiration. Remove temptation from your life and, instead, learn all you can about things you’re passionate about. 
  • Ego and Altruism. Regularly expose yourself to challenges to learn that failure is not fatal. Make sure some of those challenges are truly altruistic in nature. 
  • Sloth and Flow. Rid your environment of bait for your sloth. Instead, consciously shape it so that productivity becomes as natural as possible. 
  • Frustration and Tolerance. Don’t expose yourself to frustrations you can do nothing about. For everything else, remember that there are only two useful responses: positive action or tolerance. 
  • Worry and Excitement. Limit exposure to worries beyond your control. Use worries within your power as motivation for doing the thing that will reduce your worry the fastest. Also, make sure you have a long-term purpose you can get excited about.  

But even in such well-designed environments, primitive emotions still stick around. They get weakened, but they never leave. Dealing with the Big Five as they come up gets quite a lot easier with some fun visualization. 

Acceptance

There are hard limits to how quickly we can change the wiring in our minds. Hence, primitive emotions will continue plaguing us for years to come, even if we do our best to accelerate our evolution. 

Accepting the caveman in yourself and in others can save you a huge amount of wasteful inner conflict. If you can direct all this previously wasted energy to more useful purposes, you’re already well ahead of the pack. 

Accelerating evolution

Of course, accepting our caveman does not mean that we should stop improving. On the contrary, some of the mental space opened up by reduced inner conflict can be used to further accelerate our evolution. 

This can be put into practice by including accelerated evolution into your constitution and keeping a counter of tiny saves where you successfully warded off the Big Five. Another vital application is when something really bad happens and we need to stop a Big Five stampede. 

These tools and ideas are not magic bullets, but they will slowly increase your compatibility with our modern world. And this increased compatibility will gradually make happy, healthy, wealthy, productive, and sustainable living the default instead of the exception 🙂

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Big Moves to Remove Big Stressors

Sometimes, you need to do something big to permanently reduce stress in the longer-term future. Such big moves should be thought over very carefully, but they can often be very valuable.

Let’s take a look. 

Permanent stressors

There are several things in life that can result in permanent unhealthy stress levels. Possibly the three biggest ones are:

  • An unhealthy relationship
  • An incorrect career path
  • An unsuitable place of residence 

Getting out of any of these can be really tough. But if you’ve tried everything else and still experience unhealthy stress levels as a result of your permanent stressor, such a big move could be worthwhile. 

Look before you leap

The grass is always greener on the other side. In other words, you should put in plenty of thought and research to make sure that your life will genuinely be better after your big move.

If you just want out at any cost, you can easily end up jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. 

Execute like a pro

Taking the plunge will be tough, but there’s no need to make it any harder than it needs to be. Plan carefully and execute everything by the book to ensure that things go as smoothly as possible. 

Making a big move not only takes up a lot of mental resources, but also a lot of time. So be sure to give up some other responsibilities to give yourself a fair shot at making your move stick. 

Big moves like these don’t become necessary very often – perhaps once every decade. So, when the time comes, you can afford to invest the effort required to execute like a pro. 

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Win Over Your Worst Critic: Yourself

Our third permanent stress reduction technique is an interesting one: winning over your inner critic (a.k.a. achieving true self-respect). 

If you regularly stress about all the things you don’t have and compare yourself unfavorably to others, today’s post could be an important one. 

So, let’s take a look at ways to silence that inner critic. 

Life is long

The human mind instinctively wants things to happen immediately. Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite of what’s needed to build a good life in today’s society. 

Indeed, our modern world belongs to those who manage to consistently and intelligently invest, be it in themselves, in their relationships or in the markets. By their very nature, investments bring little or no instant gratification. But over a decade or two, they grow enormously valuable. 

This realization is the first step to healthier self-expectations. True success never happens overnight, but, if we’re patient, each one of us has the capacity to build a life we can be genuinely proud of. 

Just get started. You have time. 

Patiently keep investing

If you want to win yourself over, stop obsessing about everything you lack. Instead, focus on building habits and environments that will keep you moving in the right direction day after day. 

In everyday life, it may sometimes feel like you’re going nowhere slowly. But if you look back after a year of consistent constructive daily actions, you’ll be amazed at how much you’ve developed.  

And when you’ve earned that realization, you’ll automatically see yourself in a much better light. 

Fail like a pro

Many of your initiatives and investments won’t amount to anything noteworthy. But the way you respond to this perceived failure goes a long way to determining your level of self-respect. 

As the old saying goes: “If you want to succeed, increase your failure rate.” Indeed, failure really is nothing more than life giving you valuable negative feedback, helping you continuously improve. 

If you keep responding well to failure, your inner critic will eventually see it as a good thing. And when you master this skill, this former inner adversary actually becomes a valuable ally.

Invest, fail, learn, repeat

There’s this amazing sense of invincibility that kicks in when you have this awesome cycle running smoothly. 

With each completed cycle, your mind will go to a slightly higher plane. Your ideas will become more interesting, your resources more capable of realizing your elevated ideas, your self-image more comfortable with negative feedback, and your inner critic more positive about your efforts.

This is the path to genuine self-respect. If you’ve not done so already, start your cycle today. 

And always remember: You have time.  

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Health, Relationships and Stress Management

Good physical health and nourishing relationships are excellent sources of long-term mental health. On the other hand, poor health and unhealthy relationships can have the direct opposite effect. 

If you regularly experience excessive stress, take a good hard look at these elements. They might hold plenty of potential for permanent stress reduction. 

Health

Many people stress about their weight, appearance and general health. An environment that makes healthy diet and fitness automatic can help a lot in this respect. 

Also, as we discussed last week, exercise is an excellent stress management tool. But this awesome tool only becomes fully accessible if you’re already in reasonable shape. This is yet another great reason for building healthy fitness habits. 

Lastly, many people stress about how much they stress. Taking concrete actions to improve your mental health according to the ideas shared this week and last week can be highly beneficial. 

Relationships

Being on bad terms with someone you spend plenty of time with can be very stressful (especially if you really care about what that person thinks of you). 

Many times, it’s best to just swallow your pride and compromise a little more than you might want to. Not stressing about a soured relationship is often worth a lot more than winning an argument. 

But the best is to prevent serious relationship setbacks in the first place. Challenge yourself to become mindful enough to catch yourself in that moment when things start going seriously wrong. 

In that critical moment, chances are that both parties have become defensive and irrational. Further escalating the situation can only end in tears. 

Either postpone the discussion to a time when everyone has calmed down or at least get yourself back to a calm and objective state (stop – breath in deeply – breath out slowly – think – speak). If you become calmer, chances are that the other person will too. 

And if the other person keeps responding poorly, accept that, like you, they’re just a caveman stuck in the future. Practice some tolerance or, if there really is no other solution, consider permanently moving your life away from that person. 

An extra incentive

We all know that we should look after our health and occasionally check our egos at the door for the good of our relationships. The tricky thing is actually doing it. 

If you have trouble following through, your own mental health can be a great added incentive. Adding stress reduction to the long list of other reasons might just get you over that crucial tipping point 🙂

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Proactively Prevent Overwhelm

Last week’s list of stress management techniques can be quite effective, but they’re still just band-aids to cover deeper issues. 

This week, we’ll address those deeper issues directly. This is the only way to permanently lower your stress to healthy levels.

Let’s start with an obvious one: the stress originating from that horrible feeling of overwhelm. 

Why are you overwhelmed?

Many people today feel overwhelmed by their responsibilities or by life in general. 

There are several possible reasons why you might end up overwhelmed. So, the best place to start is to actually understand which one applies to you. Here are three likely candidates:

  • The fear of losing your income. Knowing that you won’t be able to make ends meet if you temporarily lose even just a fraction of your income makes it much easier to end up overwhelmed.
  • Impatience and fear of losing out. Wanting things to happen unrealistically quickly is another good way to become overwhelmed. 
  • Complicating your life. Perhaps your responsibilities in each area of life look OK in isolation, but when you put them all together, it becomes obvious why you’re overwhelmed. 

Let’s look at each one in turn.

Fear of losing your income

Apparently, 4 out of 5 Americans live paycheck to paycheck. In this modern age of abundance with sound financial advice all around us, this is a truly unbelievable statistic. 

A worker living paycheck to paycheck has no leverage. And a worker with no leverage is generally a stressed worker.

If you’re too worried about your income security to turn down tasks, chances are that you’ll routinely end up with too much responsibility and, more importantly, all the most tedious and/or stressful tasks. 

This is a big problem because overwhelm strongly decreases long-term performance. Taking on too much (often demotivational) responsibility in the fear of losing your job therefore increases the chances that your fears come true. 

There are two ways to take back your leverage:

  • Become indispensable. Do everything within your power to control your responsibilities and give yourself a fair shot at consistently delivering your highest quality standards. Then get to work on building a reputation for quality and integrity.
  • Build a financial buffer. A solid investment portfolio that can sustain your lifestyle for an extended period of time releases a lot of tension.  

Impatience and fear of losing out

Competition can be a very healthy driving force behind progress, but it can also be taken too far. Just like the previous section, overloading yourself is an excellent way to ensure that you fall behind the competition. 

In this case, you need to work on the skill of prioritization. Make sure you only spend your time on tasks that can have the greatest impact. Defer, delegate or delete other tasks. 

On a more philosophical level, it’s critical to accept that all good things take time. In day-to-day life, it often feels like we’re going nowhere slowly. It’s only when we step back and view life on a year-to-year basis that progress becomes clearly visible. We’ll be talking more about this in two days’ time. 

A complicated life

Life has many aspects aside from work. And it’s very easy to let several of these grow to the point that, collectively, they become totally overwhelming. 

The key here is to see your life as a whole. Whenever you’re thinking about taking on a large new responsibility, you must be very clear about what other responsibility you will give up. 

Starting a family is the most obvious example. This is a massive undertaking, greatly increasing both your responsibilities and your expenses. Don’t commit to this if you can’t give up a large chunk of your existing responsibilities. 

Other aspects like hobbies, social life, social media use, and side-hustles can also easily grow too large. Keep a close eye on these.

The example of this blog

I have a lot of painful experience with pushing myself to (and beyond) the point of complete overload. It’s super stressful, but somehow also very easy to keep doing over and over again. 

It took me many years to reach the level of mindfulness required to break this cycle. Now, I diligently adhere to the principle of giving something up for every new responsibility I take on. 

For example, I would never have started this blog if I did not reduce my degree of employment at my current job to 60%. Without this trade-off, this blog would probably have lasted no more than a month or two. 

So, please think carefully through your responsibilities and your future commitments. In many cases, less is more 🙂

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Recap: Short-Term Stress Management

This week was all about techniques for dealing with high levels of existing stress. Next week, we’ll get to some longer-term methods to prevent high levels of stress from occurring in the first place. 

So, let’s round up this week in the usual fashion.

The checklist

Here’s the lowdown of the four stress-management ideas we discussed:

  1. Develop a game plan for stress management.
    • We all know some typical stress-reduction techniques.
    • Making these techniques useful requires a proactive game plan to make sure they’re easily available when needed. 
  2. Let go of unnecessary stress.
    • Often we’re stressed about things that are not so dangerous, highly unlikely or totally outside our control. 
    • Becoming mindful of such cases makes it a lot easier to let go of useless stress. 
  3. Find your Most Efficient Next Action (MENA).
    • There are also many times when your stress is legit.
    • In such times, pouring all this restless energy into doing something about it results in very natural stress reduction. 
  4. Stop digging.
    • We have a tendency to keep doing the thing that caused our stress in the first place.
    • Be mindful of this possibility and do the positive things in the previous steps instead. 

So, there you have it. I really hope these ideas can make your days a little bit more tranquil 🙂 

Have a nice weekend!

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When Dealing With Stress, Start By Not Making It Worse

I’m sure you’ve heard of this age-old piece of advice: When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. 

As we’ll discuss today, this little bit of advice can often be very useful for stress management. 

Are you still digging?

So, what is it that caused you to end up in this stressful situation in the first place? Did you do something? Not do something?

Honestly assess whether you’re still doing (or not doing) that specific something. If you are, you’re still digging and you really need to stop! 

Maybe you’ve taken on too much responsibility at work. In this case, the last thing you want to do is to take on more responsibilities either at work or at home. 

Did you have a bad falling-out with a loved one? Then check your ego at the door and stop making it worse with passive aggressive behavior. 

Stressed about your health? Stop self-destructing on empty calories and other unhealthy addictive substances. 

Easier said than done

There’s good reason why the old adage at the top has been around for so long. People have a natural tendency to keep digging when they’re in a hole. We often get some sort of unhealthy short-term satisfaction from digging even harder. 

But a little bit of mindfulness can help a lot with putting down your shovel and rather focusing on the positive ideas we discussed over the past three days. 

So, stop digging, build a game plan of stress-relief techniques, let go of any unnecessary stress, and take deliberate action on useful stress. Together, these ideas can greatly reduce stress and anxiety. 

See you tomorrow when we formally wrap up this week’s topic. 

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Stress Reduction Through Deliberate Positive Action

Yesterday’s post ended with a suggestion to let go of stressors that are out of your control. But there are also many stressful situations you can (and should) do something about.

In these cases, redirecting all this restless energy into meaningful action becomes an excellent stress-relief strategy. Today’s post digs a little deeper into this valuable idea. 

Why positive action is so useful

Most of the problems we experience in our wonderful modern world arise from our primitive emotions. These emotions evolved over the first 99.9% of human history, but, following truly stupendous technological progress in the last 0.1%, most of them have become badly outdated. 

One of these outdated emotions is Worry. As discussed here, Worry can actually be very useful because it can get us to take proactive action and prevent future problems. 

Stress and anxiety are more advanced forms of Worry, but their purpose is the same. They desperately want us to take care of some serious threat that might arise in the future. 

As discussed yesterday, the problem is that they’re often dead wrong.

But there are also many times when they’re right. Today’s post is about those times. 

The Most Efficient Next Action (MENA)

When you’ve gone through the thought exercise presented yesterday and determined that your stressor is something worth worrying about, MENA is your next stop. 

Your MENA can be found from a simple question: What is the one action I can take to reduce the most stress with the least effort? 

Once you’ve found your MENA, make it your very top priority and get it done. If your stress lingers, move on the the next MENA. 

It really shouldn’t take many successfully executed MENA’s before you can relax again. Doing something about your stressor is exactly what your entire 200-millennium-old biology wants you to do. It’s a very natural way to find peace again. 

A healthier relationship with stress

Executing your MENA can be hard, but if your stress is great enough, you can leverage it to get you through. In this sense, stress, like Worry, can be a very good thing. Without it, you might not have the drive to take some tough actions to secure your longer term future. 

Acknowledging this positive aspect can also help improve your relationship with stress. Often we stress because we’re stressed. Making smart use of your stress can kill this nasty vicious cycle before it starts. 

So, what’s your next MENA?

See you tomorrow for our final short-term stress reduction technique: the advanced skill of not making things worse 🙂

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Letting Go of Stress

As introduced yesterday, this week discusses four interesting methods for short-term stress relief. 

One of the strangest characteristics of modern stress and anxiety is that much of it is focused on things that really are not all that dangerous. We easily overemphasize the magnitude and/or the likelihood of a potential future hazard. 

In such cases, the practice of letting go can be very useful. It’s best implemented through some simple questions: 

What is the worst that could happen?

Many times, some negative thinking can actually be quite helpful. Imagine the worst possible outcome. Will anyone die or get seriously injured? Will you end up on the street? Will the world stop spinning?

In the vast majority of cases, the answers to these questions are no, no and no. Just realizing that you will survive even the worst possible outcome can really help you let go of the stress. 

What are the chances?

If the worst possible outcome really can be something serious, the next question is about assessing the likelihood. In our modern society, we’re well insulated against most calamities, making the statistical likelihood of a very bad outcome very low. 

Terrible things reported on the news are often one in a million events that are unlikely to befall you even if you live 100 lifetimes. Correctly labeling a stressor as having an almost zero likelihood is a great way of letting go. 

What can I do?

Often, we find ourselves stressing about things we cannot do anything about. As discussed earlier, worry can be a very positive emotion when it can get you to take proactive action to prevent future troubles.

But if there genuinely is nothing you can do, letting go really is the only reasonable option. Realizing this can be very powerful. 

On the other hand, if you can actually do something about a genuine future threat, getting to work right away is just as effective. That will be tomorrow’s topic. See you then!

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Techniques For Controlling Stress and Anxiety

Welcome to the third health sub-chapter in the Supermorning series: Mental health. 

We’ll kick off with a week of short-term techniques for reducing the impact of existing stress. Then, we’ll look at longer-term strategies to permanently reduce the amount of stress in our lives. And finally, we’ll tackle the complicated topic of happiness. 

So, let’s start simple with some well-known stress management techniques.

Move

We’ve just finished the sub-chapter on fitness, which also happens to be the best way for reducing excessive stress.

If you’re stressed, your body is filled with fight or flight hormones in preparation for physical action. But if you just sit there, these hormones keep accumulating and making you even more anxious. 

Movement is an excellent way to release this built-up tension in a natural way. Ideally, you would move around outside in some green spaces to experience the added anti-stress benefits of nature. 

Talk

An open chat with a trustworthy person who has mastered the art of listening is another excellent stress-release mechanism. Stress and isolation is a combination we should particularly wary of. 

If you don’t have someone like this in your life, maybe a psychologist can be a good option. Getting stressful things off your chest in a safe environment is arguably the main benefit of psychotherapy. 

Relax

If exercise and talking don’t quite cut it, dedicated relaxation practice is the next step. Deep relaxation will flush stress hormones from your body, helping you unwind.

This can be particularly useful right before bedtime to help you get a good night’s sleep. Good options include yoga, meditation, massage, burning certain fragrances or just taking a nice hot bath. 

Breathe

If you’re in a very stressful situation you cannot escape, focusing on your breath may be the best way to control anxiety. The 4-7-8 technique is a good option. 

Build a game plan

I’m sure you’ve heard all these tips before. But it’s often useful to see them all together like this. 

To get the most use out of these ideas, it’s important to develop a game plan of how you will apply them in a stressful situation. 

So, decide beforehand on the type of exercise you can do, who you can talk to, and what relaxation technique you can practice. Make sure that all the elements required by these techniques are at your disposal. 

I really hope this helps! Tomorrow, we’ll cover something a bit less obvious: the subtle art of letting go. 

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