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I’m writing this from the relative comfort of a resort in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Now, don’t go thinking I am some extravagant baller rapper or something, it is the off-season in one of the more affordable beach areas. It is coldish: too cold to be on the beach after sundown but warm and bright enough to enjoy the daylight. Decent conditions, I find, to sit back and catch up on a blog post I have been thinking about.
A few weeks ago, with significantly lower temperatures and worse weather, I gave a talk to a room full of people in Boston, Massachusetts. The title of the talk was “The Art of Taking It Easy” and was based on my most recent book by the same name. The talk went well and of course, I used my usual examples of Bears and Traffic to help my audience understand stressful situations that are actually threatening versus those that are only threatening thanks to our interpretations. If you haven’t read the book, and you totally should, our stress response is our brain’s reaction to a perception of threat.
I use the example of an attacking bear as a real threat that almost none of us have experienced but can imagine. I counter this with the example of traffic as a nearly universal experience that is not actually threatening. Think about the last time you got stressed in traffic, you have to know that traffic was not a threat to you. The cars on that road were not out to get you or attack you in any way. At no point that morning did hundreds of random strangers organize for a meeting and say, “OK, today we are going to make Judy late for work.” The stress that you experienced was due to your interpretation of the situation.
So why does traffic seem so stressful? Well, our brain creates these things called beliefs, values, and expectations, and they in turn influence how we perceive the world. You may believe that you have to be somewhere at a specific time, say nine in the morning. Maybe your belief is substantiated by others’ expectations because we all know you’ve been warned about showing up to work late. But it is the belief that you are late that is making your brain perceive traffic as a threat to your livelihood. Maybe you value punctuality (unlike Judy) and you think that being late for an appointment reflects negatively on your character. Maybe, you simply have an expectation that when you are on a highway you should be driving at a certain speed and the traffic you’ve encountered this morning contradicts your expectations.
Whatever the reason I would like to point out that in all those scenarios the perceived threat was a product of your thoughts. The traffic was real, but it was your own beliefs, values, and expectations that made a non-threatening situation into one that you found stressful.
On the other hand, sometimes we are faced with actual threatening situations like being attacked by a bear. This is my example of a “real” source of stress. Just to be clear, I have never been attacked by a bear so even my real example is imaginary. However, I can easily imagine being approached by an angry or defensive bear. Fangs exposed, claws outstretched, charging at me and ready to pounce on a moment. If we were to ever find ourselves in that situation, the bear would pose a very real and legitimate threat.
My brain would agree, and I believe that if I get into a fistfight with a bear I am going to lose. I expect that if a bear attacks me, it will shred me to pieces, and I value my not being shredded to pieces. My brain would definitely perceive a threat in this situation, and for good reason.
Managing stress often comes down to being able to recognize the difference between bears and traffic.
Anyway, after my Boston talk a woman approached me and said: “I can tell you aren’t from the area, because of what you said about traffic.”
I said, “How so?”
She went on, “Because the people around here drive like idiots. Traffic in Boston is very stressful.”
Besides missing the point entirely, she seemed to think that drivers in Greater Boston have some unique quality that differentiates them from drivers in New York City, or Los Angeles, or Houston or Chicago or pretty much anywhere. Unless the Massachusetts Driver’s License is not valid outside of New England there is simply no way that can be true, drivers are drivers, traffic is traffic, and it all sucks. Like Cheech and Chong once said: “Things Are Tough All Over”. Your problems are (probably) not unique.
I get this sort of feedback a lot, and usually, it is about the bears. People will tell me of their bear encounters or problems with dangerous animals in general. People in Florida will tell me about alligators and at least two in Oklahoma told me about encounters with tarantulas. However, it truly amazes me that people from all over the country claim to have some unique form of traffic.
As they continue to miss the point.
