The Happiness Track

That’s from the first chapter “Stop Chasing the Future” in which we meet the anxiety that goes with a constant looking ahead to the next to-do on your list.

The antidote? Be here. Right now. Live in the moment. Carpe diem.

Let’s talk about carpe diem for a moment.

It means “Seize the day!” right? Well, yah. That’s one way to translate the Latin phrase. But a more accurate translation is actually closer to “pluck the day.” As in, pluck that day like a ripe piece of fruit. You don’t need to “seize!!” it like someone else is going to grab it before you. You just need to calmly reach out and pluck it. Then savor it.

“Pluck the day!”

And, taking it a step further… Technically, as we’ve discussed, we can’t pluck or seize the day. We can only seize this moment. So, as Dan Millman says, “Carpe punctum!”

Seize the moment. Be here now. Live in and enjoy this moment.

Our big goals and ambition are essential. And we need to remember that our full engagement in THIS moment is the ticket to our happiness and to our success.

That’s from chapter two: “Step Out of Overdrive.”

Drive is good. Too much drive without enough strategic recovery? Not so much.

The solution? We need to learn how to “surf the stress waves”—deliberately training our recovery and, in the process becoming more resilient and able to bounce back quickly from stress.

Of course, this is almost PRECISELY what we talked about at length in our Note on Peak Performance where we had fun with the equation: Growth = Stress + Rest. You push yourself hard (deliberately!) then you recover EQUALLY hard (deliberately!) and voilà! Growth.

And, whenever I read “resilience” I immediately think of antifragility.

To further deepen the tattoo on our consciousness: When we’re fragile, stress happens and we break. When we’re resilient, stress happens and we can handle it better and recover faster than when we’re fragile. But… When we’re antifragile, we rub our hands together and strategically create stress and recovery cycles KNOWING that every challenge makes us stronger.

So, in this context, Emma tells us that “resilience is the ability to quickly bounce back from the stressful situations you face every day: a difficult interaction with someone, a delayed flight that threatens to make you late for an important sales call, working long hours on a project with a looming deadline and so on.”

Daniel Goleman echoes this wisdom in Focus where he tells us: “Emotional resilience comes down to how quickly we recover from upsets. People who are highly resilient—who bounce back right away—can have as much as thirty times more activation in the left prefrontal area than those who are less resilient. The good news: we can increase the strength of the amygdala-calming left prefrontal circuitry.”

How do we Optimize our resilience for those little stressful situations we face every day?

We go to the African savannah. Not for a vacation but to watch a lion chasing an antelope. Imagine that. The lion is doing its thing hunting the antelope. The antelope is in flight mode with its sympathetic fight-or-flight system fully activated. Now, if the lion catches the antelope, the antelope’s life ends. If the antelope escapes, she almost IMMEDIATELY drops out of the fight-or-flight stress mode into a “rest-and-digest” parasympathetic recovery mode.

She doesn’t ruminate about the near-death experience and keep herself in a state of stressful vigilance. She goes back to doing her thing in a relaxed state.

We want to cultivate THAT kind of ability to shake off stressors and not allow them to snowball into debilitating chronic stress. Intense on. Intense off. Waves.

One more thing here before we move on to one of the best ways to create a sense of calm.

In One Spirit Medicine, Alberto Villoldo makes this brilliant point: “From television and Internet alone, we’re exposed to more stimuli in a week than our Paleolithic ancestors were exposed to in a lifetime. And we’re continually running to keep up with the new information, to the point that we’re chronically exhausted. I can’t count how many times I have heard someone say, ‘If it weren’t for caffeine, I wouldn’t get anything done!’ Nature designed the brain to deal with only one lion roaring at us at a time, not the entire jungle turning against us. Now, however, our brain is too overtaxed to spend time sorting through all the data, much less looking at it with fresh eyes and deciding what is or is not a crisis, and what, if anything, needs to be done about it.

The media bring us news about wars and devastation happening in distant lands, but our fight-or-flight response operates only with local coordinates, and doesn’t understand far away. When we read about some catastrophic event, the thinking part of our brain grasps that it’s happening at another time and place. But the brain perceives images nonverbally and much faster. So when the hippocampus, which regulates the fight-or-flight response, is presented with streaming video of an atrocity, it registers it as happening now and nearby, and goes on high alert. The more damaged the hippocampus is by stress and toxins, the closer and more threatening the danger seems to be.”

So, recap. We’re exposed to more stimuli in a WEEK than our ancient ancestors experienced in their entire LIFETIME. Our brains evolved to handle one occasional lion at a time. Not the entire jungle roaring all day every day.

Practically-speaking: Recover from the stress in your life without adding more unnecessary stress to the load. Unplug from the echo chamber of stress that is your news feed. Give your limbic system some time to cool off. Go for a walk. Meditate. Reflect on how you will give your gifts to the world in response to the challenges we face. Play with your kids. Relax.

Now for one of the best and most direct ways to induce a deep sense of calmness… Our breath.

Ah… The breath. I get more relaxed just reading about it.

Let’s take a deep breath now.

Inhale to a count of 4 or 6 … hold for 1 … and exhale for a count of 6 to 8. Do that three times and if you don’t feel more calm do it another three times until you do. (Hah.)

It always astonishes me how quickly a deep breath or three can drop us into a different state of being. Can you feel it? Now, let’s chat a little more about our vagus nerve. In fact, let’s have another brilliant professor from the University of North Carolina help us out.

Here’s how Barbara Fredrickson puts it in Love 2.0. She tells us that “It emerges from your brain stem deep within your skull and, although it makes multiple stops at your various internal organs, perhaps most significantly it connects your brain to your heart.”

Well that’s handy, our vagus nerve connects our brain and our heart.

Barbara also tells us: “…people with higher vagal tone, science has shown, are more flexible across a whole host of domains—physical, mental, and social. They simply adapt better to their ever-shifting circumstances, albeit completely at nonconscious levels. Physically, they regulate their internal bodily processes more efficiently, like their glucose levels and inflammation. Mentally they’re better able to regulate their attention and emotions, even their behavior. Socially, they’re especially skillful in navigating interpersonal interactions and in forging positive connections with others. By definition, then, they experience more micro-moments of love. It’s as though the agility of the conduit between the brains and the hearts—as reflected in their high vagal tone—allows them to be exquisitely agile, attuned, and flexible as they navigate the ups and downs of day-to-day life and social exchanges. High vagal tone, then, can be taken as high loving potential.”

So, high vagal tone is connected to pretty much everything we want. And, our breath is a super-powerful way to help cultivate that vagal tone. Nice, deep, diaphragmatic breaths with nice, extended exhales.

Remember, as the authors of The Healing Power of the Breath point out, the breathing rate that leads to the highest level of heart rate variability (another powerful correlate of well-being) is somewhere between 4 and 6 breaths per minute. Hence, our 4 to 6 inhale and the 6 to 8 exhale.

Emma recommends a number of breathing practices and reminds us that training our breath is like training anything else we want to get good at. We need to practice.

As I mentioned in The Oxygen Advantage and Anxiety Free, my breathing practice has been shockingly transformative. Patrick McKeown tells us that we breathe too much and that to “breathe right we need to breathe light.”

He says: “The traditional Chinese philosophy of Taoism succinctly describes ideal breathing as ‘so smooth that the fine hairs within the nostrils remain motionless.’ True health and inner peace occurs when breathing is quiet, effortless, soft, through the nose, abdominal, rhythmic, and gently paused on the exhale. This is how human beings naturally breathed until modern life changed everything.”

Following Patrick’s recommendation, every morning in my 20-min AM meditation, I start with a simple breathing exercise for the first 10 minutes—deliberately training myself to breathe lighter. I place one hand on my chest and the other on my belly—gently pressing my belly in. I breathe lightly yet deeply into my diaphragm. Breathing just a little less air than I’d like (Patrick says 30% less) then exhaling longer than I inhale while completely relaxing and letting the breath happen naturally. Repeat.

Super simple. And almost crazy how much more calmness it’s created as I’ve combined this practice with exclusively breathing through my nose. (More in Breathing 101 soon.)

One more reminder: Remember the exhale. Make it longer than your inhale. That’s the fastest way to use your breath to relax your nervous system.

For now, exhale nice and fully. Then take a nice, deep but mellow breath in. Smile. Exhale again. Repeat. High fives to you and your vagus nerve.

That’s from a chapter called “Enjoy a Successful Relationship . . . With Yourself” in which Emma walks us through a number of ways to do so.

One of the keys?

In addition to cultivating Self-Compassion (check out our Notes on Kristin Neff’s great book), Emma tells us that we need to believe in EFFORT more than “strengths”—echoing Carol Dweck’s fixed vs. growth Mindset and Angela Duckworth’s Grit equation in which effort counts twice.

Then we have Jack Ma as our exemplar. Born to a poor family. Fails his university entrance exams. Twice. Gets rejected from dozens of jobs. Discovers the Internet. Drives two start-ups into the ground. And then becomes the wealthiest person in China. (Hah.)

Only ONE way to do that. A growth mindset. A deep sense of true confidence that we have what it takes to meet whatever life throws at us and a commitment to winning or learning.

We need to reread this line: “No matter what one does, regardless of failure or success, the experience is a form of success in itself.” And then move from nodding our heads and saying, “Yah. Totally.” to actually EMBRACING it and living it. Easier said than done. Note to self: The experience of actually going for it and learning is, in itself, a form of success.

Phil Stutz loves to share the same wisdom. He says crazy things like, “Failure is our religion.” And quotes another billionaire who says that he simply goes from failure to failure to failure WITHOUT winding up at “success” per se but simply continuing the process of showing up, trying hard, learning and getting a little better each step of the process.

Any great failures you can reframe as epic Win or Learn experiences? Yah. Which one? What’d you learn? (Good luck and have fun with your next one! :)

That’s from the final chapter called “Understanding the Kindness Edge” in which we look at the SCIENCE that demonstrates the fact that we are wired for compassion.

Get this: Bring people into a lab. Look at their brains. You can light up their “pleasure centers” when you give them money AND when you have them observe a charity receiving money. Or… Bring different people into a lab. Give them money. Ask them to spend it on themselves or on others. Those who spend it on others are happier.

As Emma says, “Through compassion, you get in touch with your full potential for strength, power, and vitality. Through compassion, you find purpose.”

With that in mind, let’s take a moment to reframe all that we do professionally as one big opportunity to give ourselves in loving service to others. And, let’s slow down in those moments with our family and friends to let them know just how much they mean to us.

With love and gratitude for your generous support of me and our work,

B