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 an external stimulus such as work demands, issues with a coworker or family member, or financial problems, agitance is free floating and is not typically experienced as a threat or felt as a moment of being uncomfortable. For the most part, agitance exists below our awareness, but it ultimately exerts a palpable effect once a certain volume has been reached.
The following are my fifteen proven ways to help you gain control of your agitance and learn to live in a totally new dimension. See if you can incorporate just one of these into your life today, and add as many as you can over the course of the next several weeks. Many of these require nothing more than conscious awareness and planning. They needn’t take money, time, or unrealistic effort. I encourage you to read through all of these ideas first, and then choose which ones would be easiest for you. Do those first, then build upon that plan by adding more and more of these techniques, saving the most challenging ones for later. Once you know how to curate your agitance for the better, you’ll then be prepared to work on making more room for discomfort, which will be the focus of the next chapter.
1. Take a Technology Time-out
In an earlier chapter, I discussed how technology is boosting our overall agitance. From e-mails to texting, surfing the Internet, and much more, our agitance is being pushed and maintained at unsustainable levels. Clearly, the role that technology plays in our lives is not going to diminish anytime soon. So it becomes more important than ever to find ways to better manage its impact on us. One way is to schedule technology time-outs, in which you take brief respites from your digital interactions, giving your mind and body a breather and a chance for your agitance to cool down.
For starters, I often recommend that individuals stop all technology involved with work at least one to two hours prior to bedtime. It is also valuable to limit technology when it’s not needed. Often we are on the computer or smartphone far more than we actually need to be. As I also discussed earlier, we can become reliant on using these devices to fill idle time and deal with lack of structure. See if you can limit your “plugged-in” time throughout the day, and avoid cell phones, texts, computers, and so on when you really don’t require them, especially when it comes to weekends, vacations, and evenings with the family. Allocate designated times when you’re allowed to plug yourself in, but then be strict about the limitations you set. If you have children who are old enough to use technology on their own, set limits with them as well. It’s never too early to teach good “tech hygiene.”
2. Value and Tolerate Imperfection
I have also discussed how the rise in technology has resulted in a greater need for perfection, not only in ourselves, but in what we expect of others, which can be dangerous. Humans are flawed by design, and there really is little likelihood of long-term or sustained perfection in all that we do. The expectation of perfection in our relationships alone is significantly damaging, triggering arguments and conflict. Think of the last time you bickered with a loved one; it likely sprang from a place where someone’s expectations were too high or idealistic.
Interestingly, however, the rise of perfection in certain areas of our lives, namely computers and electronics, has made some of us prefer imperfection in some cases. A great example of this relates to music. As music has become digitized, many musicians prefer the old distorted analog models of music—the human ear actually prefers it. Personally, I love early rock ’n’ roll music, such as the Beatles’ first recordings, in which the vocals are much more raw and the harmonies less perfect. I also enjoy music performed live more than the polished, recorded versions that are products of modern technology. And although the goal with technology is perfection, this may not really be what we should strive for outside our high-tech world. Working toward perfection is a recipe for unhappiness, resulting in a lack of acceptance and appreciation, and less tolerance of others. We never feel good enough or complete. So the real goal is not the achievement of perfection, but rather the journey of self-improvement—evolving, embracing imperfection, and gaining an ability to grow and learn from it. As one of my local colleagues and good friend Evan Shapiro, Ph.D., says, “There is no shame in missing the mark.” Strive for consistency, but not for perfection.
See if you can find value and appreciation in imperfection; it offers us the opportunity for making constructive changes in our lives. When you find yourself demanding perfection, remind yourself that it’s ultimately unachievable and that it’s a setup for disappointment and unhappiness. You can find acceptance even when you’re imperfect. Rather than basing self-esteem on external structure and behavior—such as proving x, getting y done before z, or winning a trophy—see if you can extinguish that frequent need to be perfect and to be acknowledged. Depend less on awards and accolades. See if you can do away with expecting perfection, recognition, and “trophies” in order to feel good about yourself. Rely less on external measures of success on which you base your self-value. Fuel your self-esteem from within, accepting that you cannot be—nor do you need to be—perfect all the time. I know, easier said than done. But consider this: You don’t even need to be perfect at doing this exercise! Just put it to the test without any heavy lifting by spending five minutes on a routine basis, either daily or every two or three days, focusing on what you appreciate. I’ll be covering the power of gratitude in the next chapter, but for now see if you can identify things in your life that make you grateful and pleased with your accomplishments without winning an award or receiving public recognition. Choose simple things, such as your family, your job, or the extra hour you had yesterday to sit and read a book. Research suggests that such regular practice of gratitude is correlated with improved physical health (e.g., better ability to manage stress and improved sleep) and healthier relationships. Also, learn to admire the peccadilloes in your partner and other loved ones, and to appreciate imperfect situations. The next time your spouse or partner, friend, coworker does something that doesn’t live up to your expectations and really irks you to the core, take a moment to pause and remind yourself that you are accepting and testing out the challenge of living with imperfection. You can even turn that irritation into a source of admiration. After all, many of us were once amused by our loved ones’ shortcomings!
3. Limit the Flood of Sensory Input
In part 1, I discussed how we often become reliant on being stimulated by multiple sensory channels—sounds, sights, tastes, smells, and behaviors. The effect of this is a constant craving, like an addiction, for more sensory stimulation. Without this flood of sensory information, it has become common for people to feel chronically bored and sluggish. This elevates agitance. A typical example of this is eating and watching TV while also entertaining company. Consider how many senses are being fed by this activity—hearing, sight, smell, touch, and taste, in addition to the physical process of talking.
To eliminate this perpetual need to juggle multiple sources of sensorial input, it’s important to retrain ourselves to require much less stimulation. There is great value in learning to feel fulfilled and satisfied with little sensory input. Achieving this is much easier than you think, and it’s not necessary to travel to a Tibetan monestary. Set aside certain times during the week for focusing on stimulating one or two sensory channels at the same time. For example, eat without any other distractions. Don’t watch TV. Don’t read. Don’t speak with someone else, check e-mails, or read text messages. Activate just your senses of taste and smell. That’s it. Or, for another example, simply read a book or newspaper without any other senses being tapped. An easy way to start is to concentrate on reading one article without stopping or multitasking.
4. Chill at Bedtime
Falling asleep at night doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily relaxed. Many people carry the stress of the day into their sleep, with the result that sleep is less restful and rejuvenating, or it’s disrupted with wakeful periods, all of which can lead to physical symptoms in the morning, such as headaches, stomach discomfort, and a host of other symptoms. I have learned in my practice that having people listen to a relaxation CD prior to bedtime can make a dramatic difference in how well they sleep and how they feel the next day. In fact, if I had the opportunity to improve just one thing in my patients, then it would be, without a doubt, helping them learn to sleep more productively. And often the easiest way to do that is to change the nature of their bedtime routine. This is a particularly helpful approach for those individuals who find it difficult to relax before bedtime without resorting to sleep aids.
A CD (or any source of audio, including a portable listening device that can play audio files) at bedtime essentially does the work for you and involves no heavy lifting. If you have any interest in using an audio program at bedtime, feel free to check out my website, marcschoen.com, where you’ll find my newest Stress Answer program. This audio program was used in one of my recent studies, which examined both subjective psychological and objective blood measures of resilience. By comparing these measures before and three months after the study, I found that using the audio program prior to bedtime significantly boosted subjects’ physical and psychological resilience to stress while simultaneously lowering the inflammatory response in the body—all good things for health and sleep. The biochemical I looked at in particular was a cytokine called interleukin-6, which is highly influenced by the stress response in the body. In those who responded well to my audio program, interleukin-6 was dramatically reduced in the bloodstream. (The details of this study can be found on my website.)
In addition to testing out audio programs designed for bedtime, you can access an abundance of other sleep tips and studies at the National Sleep Foundation (sleepfoundation.org), and from there decide which materials will help you to enhance your quality of sleep.
A second suggestion I want to make related to bedtime is to go to bed sooner. A large number of individuals constantly delay the act of going to bed. When it’s time, they begin looking for something else to do to avoid disengaging and letting go. If you are one of those people, test out getting to bed sooner several days a week, without having to make a lifelong commitment to do so. See if you notice a difference, not only in the quality of your sleep but also in how you feel the next day. Lack of sleep and lack of quality sleep have a direct impact on agitance levels.
For many, resisting sleep may have ancient roots related to the fear of letting go, wherein sleeping meant being vulnerable to danger, even death. Hence, avoiding sleep is a means to guard against this vulnerability. The problem with this condition is that over time you are teaching the body to resist sleep. In a sense you are teaching the body to resist its own instincts. And the more you get out of sync with these basic drives of the limbic brain, the greater the level of agitance.
For help in establishing a sleep-enhancing routine, you’ll find a wealth of ideas in other books that focus solely on sleep, or go to marcschoen.com for a list of resources.
5. S-L-O-W Down
We all intuitively know from experience that there’s value in slowing down. The problem is that this is hard to do, because our present culture tends to emphasize speed and multitasking. There is data to show that multitasking leads to more distractibility and poor concentration, very similar to the previously discussed results relating to fast food. When we’re in speed mode, we have to be more on edge and alert, which naturally creates tension and agitance. There’s value in slowing down, whether it’s slowing down when we drive or just sit and eat a meal, speak with others, or run errands. We also would do well to place limits on the times during which we multitask. For instance, spend time with a friend without needing to be involved in other activities at the same time, such as checking and responding to texts and phone calls. It’s remarkable how society has managed to accommodate these compulsions as acceptable behavior. Just a generation ago this would have been plain rude!
6. Stop Procrastinating
A fair number of people have a procrastinating style—a tendency to delay taking action or completing a task that should be done. In my clinical experience I find that procrastinators are often hardwired to put things off—as if it’s part of their DNA and personality. I’ve also learned that these individuals need external demands and pressures to get things done, and often to produce their best work, whereas non-procrastinators can find it unbearable to wait until the last minute. So since procrastination may indeed be hardwired, I’m not looking for people with this characteristic to make a 180-degree turn. Nor is it necessary to change dramatically for agitance levels to benefit.
As you can imagine, procrastinators typically create a significant amount of internal agitance. These individuals need to get riled up enough to accomplish a task, even though this has a compromising effect. The longer a person waits to pursue a task, the greater the level of agitance. The tendency to procrastinate rears its ugly head in the realm of decision making as well. Many of us today confront multiple issues at once that need some kind of decision, and typically it happens through e-mail. Rather than dealing with the situation or e-mail as it comes in, it’s easy to delay it, resulting in a mountain of bigger problems that need to be managed and resolved all at the same time—creating a significant buildup of agitance that could have been avoided.
To counter this, consider setting aside certain days of the week during which you strive to procrastinate less or not at all. Remember, you’re not committing to a long-term lack of procrastination, but rather certain times when you make a conscious effort to kick it to the curb. Just as you would set boundaries for your use of technology, set limits for your procrastination style. I realize that some people claim to thrive when they procrastinate—they say that they perform better once they are really pressed to take action and meet a deadline. These people may find it difficult to set limits on their procrastination.
For those individuals, I suggest that you identify tasks in which the stakes aren’t so high and see if you can tackle those tasks sooner rather than later. For example, if you tend to delay managing your e-mails, aim to set aside thirty minutes a week to organize your in-box. Or if you’re the type who is always fifteen minutes late to appointments or meetings, which causes you distress and ticks your agitance levels up, designate one day a week when you make it a goal to be on time. Pick a single routine appointment for which you’re chronically late and aim to leave fifteen minutes earlier than usual. Don’t feel you have to make a long-term commitment at first. Just test it out and see how it feels. Remember, the goal isn’t to stop procrastination altogether. Unfortunately, that’s unrealistic for the vast majority of procrastinators. The goal is simply to lessen the magnitude of your procrastination, which will automatically turn down the volume on your agitance. A little can go a long way here.
7. Stop Trying to Get It All Done
How often do we find ourselves getting aggravated by our inability to get all our work done and commitments met? We may even find ourselves saying, “If I just get this done, then I can relax, and feel okay about relaxing, leaving the office, or going on vacation.” But by trying to get it all done, we can often get so worked up that we feel beat up and maybe even sick afterward.
When people are constantly trying to fit in more things than they can reliably and realistically complete in a day, agitance levels go up. Have you ever found yourself making multiple stops and running errands while also trying to get to an appointment on time (and finish a call on your cell phone and respond to a text)? Chances are you arrived late with some guilt brewing, while feeling a very stoked level of agitance.
The fact is, we seldom can get it all done. I have an expression for this: “If I actually ever get it all done, then chances are, I’m done!” The goal, ultimately, is to accept that in this time of explosive demands, paperwork, and deadlines, getting it all done is as unrealistic as striving for perfection, and our level of comfort and happiness should no longer be predicated on being perfect or getting it all done. Although it’s important to strive to give everything our best effort, remember, there is no shame in missing the mark. And there is no shame in saying to yourself, “I’ve done the best that I can do. That’s good enough!”
8. Embrace Uncertainty
Uncertainty is inevitable. It’s human nature to find uncertainty very unsettling, and as such it’s also human nature for it to create high levels of agitance within us. As we wrestle with uncertainty, we struggle to find ways to manage it—and many attempts can worsen its effects. When you look back at your past, can you identify a time when uncertainty resolved itself in a constructive manner? Most people generally find that it has, which makes uncertainty such a double-edged sword. Uncertainty can in fact be a friend—it can be a helpful catalyst to get things done and help you to confront unresolved issues. But it does fan the flames of agitance, leaving us with feelings of angst, dread, and worry. Now that we live in times of great uncertainty, it’s best we find better ways to accept it, and develop an increased sense of comfort, tolerance, safety, and a genuine appreciation of it. Instead of fearing it, we need to embrace it.
As previously noted, in the next chapter we will review how to employ the power of gratitude in managing discomfort, which can have a profound effect on the limbic system. For now, when you do feel a sense of uncertainty, focus on a feeling of appreciation, and teach yourself to value it and achieve a level of comfort with it—despite how you might initially react to it. You can even focus on other areas of your life in which you feel thankful. With practice, this will ultimately recondition your response to uncertainty as you begin to view it in a more healthy and constructive way.
Although anger can serve a survival purpose in terms of helping us to take action to defend and protect ourselves, in most modern cases, anger and hostility are overreactive responses from the limbic system that have no real utility. And they can pose serious health risks. It’s well documented that hostility is strongly correlated with a higher level of mortality and age-related disease. It’s even been linked to a physical deterioration of special chromosomal components called telomeres that have everything to do with aging.
Far too often anger becomes an addiction, and we may find ourselves angry going through life when there really is no reason to justify the emotion. Making matters worse is the fact that giving up anger is often difficult once it’s become a chronic modus operandi, and there can be a resistance to doing so. We may falsely hold on to the belief that anger serves a purpose or even protects us, and perhaps punishes someone else. But in reality, it is only harming us.
In order to let go of anger, we have to go against the grain of the limbic brain’s amygdala, overriding its nature to retain anger for some misdirected form of protection or even revenge. But anger stokes the fire of agitance, and only makes the inner flame burn stronger and with more heat. So consider giving up anger and embracing forgiveness, which is a significant predictor of mortality independent of other health and behavioral variables. Even if you find it difficult to fully relinquish all your anger, consider having anger-free days, in which you depend less or not at all on anger, focus on openness, tolerance, and acceptance, and even agree to smile when you don’t feel like it. The field of dialectical behavioral therapy has found that just a half smile can be a constructive form of treatment. Participate in charitable acts that you might not typically perform, such as volunteering or helping someone else, which has been proven to help abate unrelenting anger in people. Consider finding other ways to deal with your hurt. This is also where traditional psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, and anger management groups can make a big difference.
10. Keep a Regular Schedule
A main focus of this book has been to encourage you to embrace discomfort in a more manageable way. In doing so, there are times when it’s important to strive for some consistency and predictability—not merely as a way to avoid discomfort or fear, but rather to build up a stronger foundation on which to manage discomfort better. This is where establishing certain basic routines can be very helpful. In general, even though our outer mind or consciousness often likes novelty, and becomes bored with predictability, our inner minds or unconscious mind and body may seek predictability. Familiarity creates a powerful sense of comfort in the unconscious. Any parent with young children can see this in the repeated pleas to read the same book over and over or watch the same video repeatedly, even though to us it seems boring and repetitive. So it’s important to strike a balance. By structuring parts of our lives to have this familiarity and regularity, we are fortifying our inner resources to successfully confront and manage discomfort in our lives.
Just how do you go about doing this? Easy: Start by aiming for a consistent bedtime routine and “lights out” time. You already know my thoughts about the value of restful sleep for agitance, so this practice has a double bonus. It also helps to establish regular routines around other activities in your daily life, such as when you eat and exercise. My goal here isn’t to expound upon the benefits of exercise, sleep, or eating schedules per se. It’s the consistency of these very basic aspects of our lives that counts. Keeping a regular schedule for all the things you do over and over again will by its very nature lower agitance levels. More important, such a practice will give you the resources to confront bigger challenges.
In fact, in The End of Illness, Dr. David Agus spends a great deal of time describing the benefits of keeping a regular schedule from a biological standpoint. He reiterates how the body loves predictability, describing how many of his patients mistakenly worry they have cancer when what they actually have is low energy and a poor sense of well-being. For them he prescribes a simple solution: keeping a regular schedule. That means paying attention to when you sleep, when you eat, when you exercise, and how you schedule downtime. Small changes in your schedule can have a profound effect on you physically. Look at how losing an hour of sleep or sleeping in a new location with different sensory stimuli can affect how you feel physically or emotionally. Even eating different kinds of food or eating at unusual times during the day can have an impact.
So clearly, small changes in schedule can influence how we feel and the agitance levels in our bodies. If the thought of sticking to a regular schedule in all that you do seems overwhelming because the nature of your life is erratic and unpredictable, then do as I suggested and at least start by going to bed and getting up at roughly the same time five to seven days a week. See if you notice a change in your agitance levels by creating some greater consistency. Then explore other aspects of your life in which you can create more regularity. Your body—and your agitance levels—will love it.
Although it would seem that staying within your comfort zone would preserve your level of comfort, the fact is the less we challenge our comfort zone, the more our comfort zone begins to shrink—often without our awareness. Eventually, many more things begin to agitate us because of our diminishing comfort zone. It’s best to think of the comfort zone as a muscle, and if a muscle is not worked and challenged, it ultimately atrophies and weakens. In order to prevent this from happening, we need to be on the lookout for and challenge our human tendency to want to reside in this old familiar place. We have no choice, really: To truly experience and sustain some measurable level of comfort in our world, paradoxically we have to create some discomfort. In other words, the experience of discomfort is the necessary precursor to the experience of comfort. But there are some things we can do that do not require heavy lifting or walking on hot coals that can challenge our comfort zone and help expand it at the same time. Here are some ideas.
Right about now, you might be wondering if this conflicts with the idea of keeping a regular, predictable schedule in which you avoid “new” things, such as a new bedtime, a new lunch hour, or a new time for exercise. For clarity purposes, there’s a difference between engaging in activities that expand your comfort zone and doing routine tasks that are part of everyday life and that relate to the core aspects of your survival (namely, eating, sleeping, and moving your body). By regulating these essential elements of livelihood, you are in fact creating a space for more sweeping changes in other areas of your life.
12. Take a Breather
It’s so common to get into a certain work rhythm and find ourselves neglecting our inner sense of balance. Although we’re getting things done on the outside to conform to or meet certain requirements or expectations, it’s often at great expense to our inner rhythms. Put another way, how fast we try to get things done can often conflict with how fast our inner speed or rhythm wants to go to feel healthier or more at peace. And our inside rhythms can be so easily neglected and overlooked because they are less obvious and noticeable. To use an analogy, it may help to think of the ocean. For most people, they notice all the noise and activity on the surface of the ocean, while the water beneath the surface, which is much more quiet and still, goes unnoticed and is minimized and overlooked. Yet this water below is far more substantive and has a much greater volume than that which lies on the surface.
We are easily conditioned to the squeaky wheel syndrome—we give our energy and attention to the immediate, while more primary and central needs, which aren’t so obvious, get pushed down, delayed, or forgotten. Because of this, problems develop within us that we are often unaware of until they morph into something noticeable and demand our attention, eventually crescendoing into high levels of discomfort.
But there are some powerful techniques that can be practiced to better preserve the balance, and like the other exercises, they don’t require a substantial time commitment. I’ve learned consistently in my practice that if patients take even one or two minutes twice or three times a day to reset their inner rhythm or frequency, their risk of experiencing symptoms is significantly reduced. I saw evidence of this in an informal study that I did at UCLA, in which we were looking at how hypnosis influenced the healing response. Subjects were given a small dose of the tetanus bacteria through the skin, which activated their body’s inflammatory response. One group received training in self-hypnosis and were instructed to do their self-hypnosis in two-minute blocks, two to three times a day, while the control group did not receive the hypnosis intervention.
The hypnosis group healed substantially faster. We learned that the hypnosis worked by inhibiting the inflammatory response: Those individuals who took time each day to do a self-hypnotic exercise had a significant healing effect and a substantial reduction of inflammation in the area of the body that was being measured. What was particularly interesting about our findings was that the only area that showed this anti-inflammatory response was the one where the hypnotic effect was targeted, which in this case was the forearm. In other words, it was possible to target the hypnotic effect to a very specific part of the body. Another intriguing discovery made was the subjects’ self-report after completing the self-hypnosis exercise: Many said that they barely detected a difference by doing it. Their outer, or conscious, mind was unable to fully identify and sense the huge effect the exercise was having on their biochemistry. This is an important point, because it reiterates the fact that our outer mind isn’t typically capable of evaluating a process that is unfolding in our inner mind and our body. So whether the outer mind is aware of the change or not may actually be immaterial in terms of creating substantive results.
To get a positive result for yourself, it isn’t necessary to learn self-hypnosis. You can achieve a remarkable effect by using what I call the Schoen Breath Technique originally described in When Relaxation Is Hazardous to Your Health. This step-by-step process is outlined in the following box. You can also go to marcschoen.com and download an audio file that takes you through it (use the word “breath” when asked for a download code). Try using this technique two to three times a day. It is best applied at your first awareness of your agitance level starting to spike. We’ll also be using this technique in the next chapter, on reconditioning the brain to handle more discomfort.
Warning: At first, you might notice that the relaxation effect lasts for only a few minutes afterward and wonder how this can have an impact—very similar to the subjects in my study who were unable to detect the influence of the self-hypnosis intervention on their health. But remember, we are interested in the aggregate sum of agitance across the day. By punctuating the day several times with this technique, you ultimately lower your overall level of agitance. For example, if you typically run at sixty miles an hour and experience high levels of agitance and discomfort, by using this technique across the day, you may find that your average speed is reduced to forty miles an hour. And the more you use this technique, the greater the result, and the more likely you’ll be able to recondition your body to run cooler, with less collateral damage across your day.
I developed the Schoen Breath Technique in 1984 as a tool for hospitalized patients who were in an acute state of stress. I had tried a number of other breathing and relaxation exercises throughout the years to relax these types of patients. But many times I found that it took too long for these exercises to take effect or that patients found them too cumbersome to continue on their own.
Determined to find another approach, I connected myself to a number of biofeedback monitors that could track my heart rate, blood pressure, galvanic skin response, frontalis muscle, and respiration levels. Over a number of trials, I was able to devise an easy technique that rapidly induces a state of relaxation and significantly lowers blood pressure and heart rate.
I have found that sometimes in as little as forty-five seconds, this technique can substantially shift an individual who is in an acute state of stress to a state of significant relaxation. I often called this technique my “95er,” because it generally works ninety-five percent of the time. One of the reasons my breath technique can be so effective at managing agitance is that science has documented many times over the benefits of certain breathing styles on the brain and body. For instance, we know that breathing exercises directly affect areas of the brain stem that in turn strongly influence basic functions such as heart rate and sleep, not to mention breathing itself. Since the brain stem sends its impulses to the limbic system, we have the ability to adjust the limbic brain while at the same time influencing autonomic function to produce a relaxed feeling.
The following steps will take you through this technique.
First, sit comfortably with your feet on the ground and your back straight. Place your hands on your lap, with your palms either facing each other or facing upward. You can do this exercise with your eyes opened or closed. If you find yourself in a highly stressful and noisy environment, try to find a quiet space to do the exercise, such as another room, the restroom, or even your parked car (but of course, never do this while you are driving).
Step 1: The inhale
Step 2: Holding the breath
Step 3: The exhale
Step 4: Repeat steps 1 through 3
Step 5: Questions to ask yourself
Remember, using the breath technique two to three times a day brings the best results. If you are under particularly high levels of agitance or stress, then use it more frequently. Typically, applying the technique in the earliest stages of agitance or discomfort will prove to be the most fruitful.
13. Delay Your Need for Gratification
In the previous chapter, I discussed how we as a culture have become accustomed to instant gratification, and as a result have developed a certain level of discomfort when we delay our gratification. Although I will discuss this more in the chapter devoted to upping your tolerance for discomfort, it’s something that I’ll highlight here. You may find it helpful to refer back to the Agitance Checklist in chapter 3 (page 44) and see how you fared in terms of your levels of agitance. Many of the questions correlate directly with your need for instant gratification.
Think about the areas of your life in which you frequently require instant gratification. For example, if you send an e-mail or a text, do you feel a level of agitance if you don’t get a quick response? Or if you find yourself getting bored, do you need to quickly fill that space with something in order to feel more at ease? What happens when you get hungry? Do you feel the urge to quickly grab something to eat? Do you get easily irritated when you’re in line at a store or the post office and the clerk is either new or taking his or her time? What if you feel an uncomfortable irritation or pain in the body—does it spoil your whole day? Are there certain people you find yourself more irritated or impatient with—people at work or family members?
You may come up with many other examples relevant to you. Identify at least two or three areas in your own life that drive your agitance levels up. Challenge yourself to hang out in these moments without having to take some form of action to mitigate your discomfort. For example, if you’re hungry, wait a little bit longer than you would normally before eating something. If you find yourself irritated with a particular individual, practice being more patient and less agitated. Track your experience in a diary if you’d like, which is an excellent way to identify those areas you’re going to work on, as well as make a record of your attempts to conquer your need for instant gratification. When are you most likely to succeed? When do your attempts fail? What methods do you find work for you to vanquish your emotional and perhaps physical responses when you cannot be instantly gratified?
14. Practice Hanging Out
We as a culture have become accustomed to relying on external structure, such as by being busy all the time and always engaged in some activity. But when that structure isn’t there, it’s easy to experience an unsettled feeling or agitance. The best example of this is something we see (and experience!) so often: When people are standing in line or have to wait, they pull out their smartphones in order to fill this empty space. As I also noted in the previous chapter, many kids today are being raised with constant structure, running from one activity to the next—soccer practice, piano lessons, a tutor, acting lessons, and so on. It’s no surprise that this generation feels particularly challenged with open space that’s not scheduled or filled to the brim. But as I’ve described in the previous chapter, constantly moving from one task to another and needing constant stimulation also creates higher levels of agitance. In order to begin eliminating this need, take time to just hang out, smell the roses, talk to a friend, or even sit quietly in silence and reflection. There is great value in doing so.
I remember, in my early hypnosis training, going to a place in the mountains and having to spend three days by myself with instructions to avoid speaking with others if at all possible and to avoid listening to music. I was there to write down my thoughts, practice hypnosis, and walk within a contained space. Since there were no cell phones then, there was no chance of talking to anyone on the phone or playing with a smartphone. I’ll never forget that first day my adventure began. It was a Friday afternoon, and I was so uncomfortable that I couldn’t wait to go to sleep to get away from my assignment. I was basically stuck with myself and my thoughts. When I awoke on Saturday I wished I’d slept longer, but there I was having to start the day the same way I’d finished the night before—bored and uncomfortable. The days stretched on and on and it seemed eternal. But sometime Saturday afternoon, an inner quiet set in and I was no longer uncomfortable being still in an open and unstructured place. And by the time Sunday arrived, I wished I didn’t have to return to my regular life.
Try taking these time-outs for yourself. Expect that there will be an unsettled feeling, especially at first. It doesn’t have to be three days, like my experience. Start with just an unstructured hour, then work your way up. Learn that you can ultimately find some level of comfort without having to immediately take action to settle your growing level of agitance. Keep in mind that at first, your new habit of hanging out will create some agitance, but with practice, you will find that you experience a greater level of comfort, and you will be able to stop being an “agitance junkie.” I am hopeful that you’ll find yourself making healthy choices, rather than choices that are ultimately for the express purpose of feeding the agitance junkie in you.
At this point you might be wondering what I mean by “just hanging out.” This can take many forms. For some it may be sitting quietly and being still with no other distractions. But if you are accustomed to multitasking and engaging many senses at the same time, such as grabbing for your cell phone while standing in line, then try to limit doing more than one thing at a time. See if you can stand in line without occupying yourself with anything else, including nearby magazines or other distractions. Or if you’re used to being with friends and texting or waiting for your phone to ring at the same time, try putting the phone away and fully committing to hanging out with your friends. Unlike the strategy I outlined earlier related to limiting the multisensory flood of information, in this exercise we are primarily interested in you learning to deal more comfortably with open space and less external structure and fewer distractions. See if you can endure moments focusing on a single thing, be it spending time with friends or just getting through a long line at the market.
It comes as no surprise that exercise can play a vital role in knocking down agitance. For our purposes, rather than attempting to achieve a cardiovascular effect, which might require longer bouts of exercise, aim for short bouts of exercise. I have learned that this can be enormously helpful in reducing agitance levels, and particularly in heading off the Let Down Effect. Examples of exercises you can do to gain the benefits of movement on agitance levels include taking a short brisk walk, jogging (even in place) for five minutes, going up and down several flights of stairs for several minutes, stretching, and participating in group classes such as yoga, indoor cycling, Pilates, kickboxing, and the latest craze, Zumba. Remember, it doesn’t have to be a workout that will get you primed to run a marathon. You only need to move your body beyond its customary level of activity. And you can do this without breaking a sweat—even as little as five minutes several times a day can alter your levels of agitance. One of the ways I like to do this after a long day is to sit on the floor and stretch while I watch the news or even talk to good friends in person or on the phone.
Steering Clear
By incorporating as many of these fifteen strategies as you can into your life, which are instrumental in steering clear of the hazard zone of your discomfort, you can head off an encounter with your survival instinct. But what if you’re already in the red zone and are looking for more direct relief? Well, in the next chapter, we’ll examine how to manage your discomfort by boosting your tolerance for it using another set of strategies I have developed and successfully used over the years. What we’re essentially doing is training the cerebral and limbic brains to react more productively to discomfort. These strategies help turn what would be a perilous reaction into a source of power.
I t’s i mportant to keep i n mi nd that the goal i sn’t to vanqui sh discomfort—this is unrealistic, and leads to a place of diminishing returns. Instead, the goal is to ultimately cope with discomfort in an effective manner, which can have a profound influence on your health and happiness, as well as how well you age. Remember, our reaction to discomfort can play a big role in biochemical alterations in the body, including the impact of your stress hormones, your body’s inflammatory response, cellular aging, and even how your genes express themselves.