If you were monitoring some of my vital statistics, (ie: blood pressure, adrenaline levels, stress hormones, etc.) just 15 minutes ago, you would have thought I was in a life or death situation. You would have thought I was in the middle of the woods wrestling a God-damned black bear for my own life.

You would have thought I was cornered by a pride of lions in Africa who have have had to eat their own feces for the last three weeks just to survive; and now they have me pinned in a corner ready to eat me for dinner. And then the king lion comes galluping on a horse ready to give the other lions the signal to attack me.

(I have nightmares about this)

You would have thought that I was sitting on a airplane, and a stress fracture in the window broke the whole window, and suctioned me out of the window. And now I’m falling thousands of feet without a parachute to my own death. And then to make things worse, the plane explodes because a UFO shoots it with a laser beam.

(Talk about Stress!)

But none of those scenarios were occurring. What triggered such high levels of stress? Well, to put it simply, I was trying to pack a bicycle inside a cardboard box. I was in my basement packing a God-damned bicycle inside of a bike box. Nothing was going right. My scissors weren’t cutting correctly, I didn’t have enough packing material, I was running out of tape, my patience was gone, and I couldn’t make anything work. My family was on the floor above me listening to me make barbaric noises, and screaming swear words nobody knew existed. I might have perked the ears of every animal in a 10 mile radius. There was also a small rumble coming from that basement that might have been detected on a Richter scale. And to think, I was simply putting a bike in a cardboard box.

(Pictured above -> REALITY)

They say when you are stressed its good to pet a soft animal or swim with dolphins. I totally would have swam with dolphins if I could have. I would have made chirping sounds and held onto their fins as they toted me around. You probably would have heard me giggle too.

But no! I was pissed, I couldn’t figure out where I left my dolphin-swimming tank, and my furry dog was probably hiding of his life with all the noise I was making. There were plenty of things to break in the basement. It might have felt good to put a dent in my mom’s washing machine. It might have felt good to punch something really hard, like the cement wall. But I’m not that stupid. I know what happens when you punch cement walls.

So what did I do? The Quick Coherence Technique

This seriously saved my life, my mom’s washing machine, a broken hand, and an expensive emergency helicopter medi-vac flight to Florida to swim with the dolphins.

I learned about this technique a few months ago from an internship I was doing with HeartMath (heartmath.com, heartmath.org). But this was the first time I tried it when I was about to explode from high levels of stress. It worked a lot better then I thought it was going to work. As a matter of fact, I was pretty impressed. If you know somebody who is a Scrooge this holiday season… Teach them how to do this.

People need to learn how to manage their own stress. I was having a conversation with somebody about this the other day. People experience the same level of stress doing stupid pointless things as if they were actually in a life or death situation. Getting attacked by a bear can have the same physiological reaction in your body as putting a bicycle into a piece of cardboard. And if we choose to keep ourselves stressed out and take out our anger, we are only reinforcing the neurological framework for that reaction. So next time we do something pointless and stupid that stresses us out, it is easier for us to over react. So if you stop that habit, and realize you are putting a bike into cardboard and not actually getting attacked by a bear. Or if you realize you are looking for your car keys and not getting attacked by horse-riding lions… Then you can take a more practical approach to dealing with stress. You can then start to reinforce the neurological reaction process that calms you down. If you continue doing that, it will be easier to calm down each time as you practice finding coherence.

Do you want to hear a story of somebody who did something stupid in a stressful situation? I’m going to tell you anyways because this is just too good. My mom is a nurse who works in the operating room. She got called into work last night for an emergency case. When that happens, the doctors get called in too. Well one of the doctors (lets call him “Dr. Pierre”) who got called into work was rushing to the hospital and hit a skunk with his car on the way there.

But this skunk wasn’t dead! So “Dr. Pierre” panicked and threw the skunk in his trunk because he was in a rush and felt bad for the skunk he hit. What do skunks do in life or death situations? They spray their awesome smelling fumes all over the place. So “Dr. Pierre” runs into the hospital holding the smelly skunk. “We have to do something for him [the skunk],” he ran in saying. They told him to get the hell out of there with the skunk, and rightfully so. So he put the skunk back in his trunk and got ready for surgery. My mom was in surgery with the doctor and he smelled like skunk the whole time, and they were all making fun of him for it.

True story. Imagine that.

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