Your Survival Instinct Is Killing You : Retrain Your Brain to Conquer Fear, Make Better Decisions, and Thrive in the 21st Century by Marc Schoen Ph.D

Author:Marc Schoen, Ph.D. [Schoen, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101609835
Publisher: Hudson Street Press
Published: 2013-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

Part 2

The Nature of Survival

Chapter 8

Managing Your Comfort Zone

Fifteen Simple Strategies to Stay Cool,

Calm, and Collected

Much has been written in the past decade about the science of happiness. Scientists have found that we each have our own happiness “set point,” the genetic and learned tendency to maintain a certain level of happiness, similar to a thermostat for your mental well-being. We can say the same is true of our discomfort set point—the genetic and learned tendency to tolerate a certain level of discomfort, before our survival instinct ignites and takes command. In the first part of the book I showed you how our discomfort set points have been lowered tremendously due to certain pressures inflicted by our modern society, resulting in our having an abysmally low tolerance for discomfort. It’s that Cozy Paradox I described: In an age that affords us many comforts and opportunities to thrive, we’ve become hypersensitive to most forms of distress such that our bodies overreact to stimuli in ways that harm our health and, ultimately, our capacity to flourish. As you’ve also learned, stimuli can be any number of things, from fluorescent lighting that triggers migraines to calls from your boss that stir agitated feelings leading to sheer panic.

The good news is that we can adjust the settings of our inner thermostat. Angst and dread will always be part of our lives. But we can transform fear into safety, and build our “muscles” for dealing with uncertainty and instability. We can effectively turn down our susceptibility to the survival instinct, and make the instinct less reactive to the subtle and everyday hassles that are inevitable.

With this new understanding of how our survival instinct plays a tremendous role in our lives, we can arrive at better solutions to healing ourselves and staying as healthy as we can be. We can learn how to care for this inner part of us that refuses to be dismissed or neglected. By the time you finish reading, you’ll learn how to successfully disengage your brain’s reaction to discomfort when there is no actual danger, and develop new and healthy ways of managing it that don’t involve unhealthy habits, overeating, pain, stress symptoms, unproductive relationships, or compromised work performance. You will even find that you can feel more comfort and safety when you are faced with difficult problems.

The pathway to raising your tolerance, however, starts with managing your agitance level, which you know by now has a dramatic impact on your everyday living and long-term health. And as you may also be able to guess at this point in the book, I’m not going to recommend the usual suspects for coping, such as medications or even talk therapy. You’ll be surprised by just how easily and effortlessly you can lower your level of agitance—and the effect this will have on your discomfort threshold—by incorporating some simple and highly practical strategies into your daily life. I can’t reiterate this enough: Agitance levels are different from individual stressors. Unlike stressors, which typically represent

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