The Art of Taking It Easy by Brian King

Author:Brian King
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Apollo Publishers
Published: 2019-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

Getting to the Gym Across the Street

The thing about writing a book is that sometimes you hit your stride, cranking out pages and pages of engaging text, and sometimes . . . well, sometimes you can’t even force it. While pounding out pages isn’t necessarily hard physical labor, writing can be terribly frustrating and terribly stressful, especially when you are working on a deadline. Here I am, writing this on a Sunday evening. All weekend long, I have known what I want to write but I have been having a hard time getting it out.

To help clear my head, I put my computer away and asked Sarah to get Alyssa ready to go for a drive. Although it is early November in Colorado, we’ve been enjoying moderate temperatures for the past few weeks, which we have been taking advantage of at the nearby parks and zoo (and still no bear attacks!). Getting out into the world did the trick. As soon as I got out of the house, the ideas for how to start this section started flowing. Some of them were better than others, of course. By the time this gets into your hands, I hope I chose well.

I didn’t have to let you in on that thought process, but I did so because it serves as a good example of something I mentioned earlier that you may have forgotten: if you don’t like the way you feel, change your thoughts. This is probably one of the best pieces of advice I can share, so it is worth returning to. I felt frustrated and maybe even a little stressed so I took steps to change my thoughts. Sometimes a change in environment or activity is precisely what we need to kick-start different activity in our prefrontal cortex. For whatever reason, I had hit a major roadblock in my writing process. A “writer’s block” if you will. I’m pretty sure I just made up a new term there—you can use it if you like.

In the previous sections I have hopefully made the point that feeling in control is key to remaining calm and reducing the overall impact of stress in our lives. If I haven’t, maybe you shouldn’t have been skimming after all. And you wonder why you got that “D” in history. I feel you—I wasn’t a very good student either. Okay, here is your recap: being resilient means having the right kind of activity in the prefrontal cortex so that your amygdala doesn’t react to everything in our world as a potential danger. In other words, being resilient means having the right kinds of thoughts in your head, and those thoughts relate to how well you feel you can handle whatever situation you are facing. I am sure you have heard the phrase “power of positive thinking” or something like that being spewed by so-called motivational gurus, but there really is a kernel of truth to phrases like that.49

Maybe you don’t have those positive thoughts. Instead, maybe you have a tendency to worry.

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