Proven Strategies That Help You Feel Better and Live Longer

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(…continued from last week)

Your Emotions Can Physically Harm You

When I was growing up, my father owned a restaurant in Twin Falls, Idaho. He spent most of the time when at the restaurant, being the front man. He did a lot of the schmoozing with customers, helping the staff, and running the day-to-day operations there. His partner was more in the background, more silent.

One evening, while my father was there working at the restaurant, his partner came in through the back door, unbeknownst to my dad. The partner began to just give the cooks a very hard time, and was picking at the waitresses. My father and he had been having these kind of problems for awhile. Because his partner had started drinking way too much, and would show up at the restaurant drunk.

My dad heard this noise coming from back in the kitchen, and couldn’t figure out what was going on. So he went back, and here’s his partner raising havoc; yelling at the cooks, giving the waitresses a hard time. My father got furious. He and his partner had had arguments about this before.

He told his partner, “Get out of here! This is inappropriate.” His partner refused and told him to mind his own business. Dad blew up! Dad grabbed his partner, and bodily threw him out the back of the restaurant.

When dad came home, mom said she’d never seen him so angry—ever. He had a temper, but she said she had never seen him this furious about anything.

He said, “Either he’s going to buy me out, or I’m going to buy him out, because we’re not going to do this any longer!” Mom talked to him for hours and tried to calm him. But he just couldn’t let it go. He had hit a peak anger state—and was stuck there.

Mom had to get up with us kids early in the morning. But she stayed up with him until around 2:00am, then said, “I’ve got to go to bed because I’ve got to get up really early. Calm down. Go for a walk. Do something. But calm yourself down.”

Dad paced around for awhile longer, then finally he went to bed. One hour after going to bed, he died of a massive heart attack at age 45.

Don’t Let Stress Kill You

It wasn’t until I was about 16; mother and I were talking about dad dying. She began to fill in the details. I’d never heard this from her before. She said, “You know your father was a very good athlete. He played tennis, he skied, he hiked, he fished, he spent a lot of time out of doors, he was a very healthy, active man.”

Two weeks prior to this massive heart attack he had gone to Salt Lake City, and had his yearly complete physical. The doctors told him, “You’re so healthy you are going to live forever.” Mom said that what killed him was his anger.

When they did the autopsy on my father, what they found was he had triple the normal amount of adrenaline, cortisol and other stimulating hormones in his bloodstream. The doctor told mom if he had gone and worked it out, if he had walked it off, instead of going to bed and letting it keep building up because his body was no longer moving, the heart attack may not have ever happened. The doctor’s conclusion—that the build up of the hormones in his body from his angry mental state, killed him.

We need to take care of our minds. We need to have some balance in life. Yeah distressing things happen. Unfair events happen, things we don’t want to occur, occur. At the same time, we need to make sure we’re getting some of the good stuff. This doesn’t mean that every other week you have to leave on a vacation to a different part of the world. You don’t have to do that either. What you do have to do is have some balance.

When negative stuff comes along, deal with it as best you can, do what you can to move forward with it, let it go. When good stuff’s happening enjoy it, take it in, let it nurture you inside of your mind and your body. Think the positive thoughts, impregnate them inside of your memory banks so that they literally are given birth inside of you and you can draw on them again, and again, and again.

Eustress & Distress

There are two types of stress. There is eustress which is the good stuff. It is actually helpful, energizing, is absolutely great for you. And there is distress—which is tough on you.

Eustress and distress. If you think about a bell curve, rather like a small rounded hill. Imagine this bell curve hill, and on the left hand side would be eustress, on the right hand side would be distress.

Another way to think about this little hill would be like a tachometer on a car measuring the RPMs. When it’s at rest, the needle on the tachometer is far down to the left. It’s not doing anything. When it’s turned off it has 0 RPMs. And that goes all the way up to maybe 6,000 RPM’s on the far right hand side at which point you probably blow up your engine.

Eustress goes from very little good stuff going on in your life, to a lot of good stuff. And then you move over the hill down to the other side where you run into distress. This is where you’ve gone too far, too hard, too long and it burns you out. At the bottom of the slope on each side of this hill, on the far left and the far right, it looks about the same. When you have no eustress in your life, where there’s really nothing good going on at all, and on the far right hand side which is where you have distress to the extreme. Way too much going on, can’t deal with it, too much hitting you too hard, too fast. They look a lot alike.

At both places, on the far left or the far right, you feel tired. You don’t have much vitality. Your energy level is low. Mentally you feel drained. You feel used up. It feels like something has taken its toll on you. Your mind isn’t clicking. It’s working at a very, very slow pace. Often times you feel despondent, sad, unenergized, not good.

Moving Up the Stressor Hill

What happens is as you begin to move up the hill, from the left hand side, as you go up that, as your tachometer in effect lifts up, you start to feel a little better. You get a little more energized. By the time you’re halfway up the hill on the left hand side, you start feeling pretty good. Your body is more energized, there are possibilities, things look good to you, it feels all right, you’re probably enjoying yourself a bit. And as you move on it to the top, when you’re at the peak of that state you’re excited, you’re passionate, you’re enjoying yourself fully.

An example of this good eustress is preparing for and taking a vacation. When you were getting ready and you were packing for that vacation, and you were thinking about what you were going to do and where you were going to go, you were excited. You can imagine the beach or the mountains or the wherever you went. You could think about it in your mind and you can feel that gut level, excited feeling. That is eustress. That’s what it feels like. It’s that excited, passionate, energized feeling. When you’re at the top of this peak, that’s what you’re feeling.

Now as you begin to move over the peak a little ways beyond it, it’s still okay. You move into the distress which is to the right of the peak, when you move over a little bit if it’s only just a few degrees that way or a little ways that way, that’s fine. Your body can cope with stress; it’s not a big deal.

It’s only when you begin to slide down the other side, when you get maybe a third of the way down the right hand side of the hill, the distress starts to take its toll on you. Up until then you’re doing good. That stress even over there is productive; it’s moving you forward, it can strengthen your body and your mind. But when you move too far down the right hand side of that hill, or that tachometer go to far too long in the redline area, when you move too far down that side you start to feel and notice some tensions in your body.

Tension Compounds

Have you ever had knots in your shoulders? Have you ever had tensions or get a kink in your neck? You ever get those little tension headaches? Or perhaps at the end of the day your lower back just feels like it’s all tied up, maybe it’s stiff. You ever have any of those things? Those are called hypertension.

As you slide down that right hand side of this hill and move into the distress, the tensions build. Your attitude begins to be affected. You start feeling more stressed, you feel more pressure, your irritation level goes up, you begin to feel negative about what’s going to happen. As you move on down, when you finally hit the lower part of the hill on the right hand side once again, you have no energy, you’re worn out, you feel emotionally used up, your reserves are spent.

You want to live somewhere between halfway up the slope of the hill on the left hand side to just past the peak on the right side of the hill. That is an optimum range.

I don’t care if you have the fanciest car with the best, balanced and blueprinted engine on the planet, if you drive it in the red line all the time you will blow it up. So your engine can go into the red line but you don’t want to drive it there all the time. So you don’t want to lug the engine at too low of an RPM, and at the same time you don’t want to be running it in the red line a lot either.

It’s the same with us. You have some of the eustress stuff, the good stuff in your life. It energizes you, boosts you, and has actually been proven to be healthful. Because when you are in eustress it releases chemicals and hormones in your body that strengthen your muscles, that are good for digestion, that strengthen your heart, they let you breathe easier, your mind gets clearer, your vision gets stronger, you focus better. Eustress chemicals that are released within you and hormones are actually very good and healthful for you.

Why are some people consistently winners? Simply put—because they know the secret to controlling the 3 key aspects of themselves, giving them control over their personal and professional success. In the “Winning All The Time” audio program you’ll learn proven strategies to rapidly manage all three of these deeper aspects of your self. Check out the free video on this, at http://www.WinningAllTheTime.com

(to be continued…)

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