Tag: stress

Stealing freedom

Posted on by philipdodson

IMG_6034

Those who try to control others are often frustrated by the inability to focus on their own challenges in life. They feel the solution to their woes is to see others as the person to blame and change.

Trying to control others is only going to lead to stealing someone else’s freedom of choice. Imposing your will on others is denying you the chance to live your life, to focus on what you have and what is important to you, and it restricts the freedom of others.

Happiness comes when you allow others to be free and you free yourself from the burden that is manipulation.

Inspire yourself by focusing on your freedom, focusing on what matters to you and by stepping away from issues that are outside our control.

Live without the stress and the effort of the futility of trying to engineer things that we can not. Short-term we can manipulate and coerce others, but longer term it is our own happiness that builds the right life for us and attracts the right people who want to be part of our journey because they have chosen to.

Freedom of choice is the most precious gift of life, keep yours safe and don’t steal others.

Allowing others to control us is one of the biggest injustice you can do to yourself. Love yourself, be kind to yourself, choose your own happiness first and step away from anyone who can’t respect that and who tries to stop that.

The 3 F’s and the scale of 1 to 10

Posted on by philipdodson

IMG_5981

The 3 F’s, otherwise known as flight, freeze or fight.

These are nearly always our initial reaction to a perceived threat. The reaction comes from the limbic brain, our chimp brain. Now back in the early times of Homo Sapiens, many threats were like real threats, physical life or death type situations.

The chimp brain is stronger than our human brains, so it dominates our decisions, and it reacts quicker too. In the case of a large truck heading towards us at high speed that is great, as freeze or fight doesn’t end well. The human brain will be pondering the probable outcomes logically and rationally all the way to the morgue.

We need that chimp brain, even though the physical threats are for most of us pretty rare now. However, when it comes to the emotional or verbal threats and situations that the chimp still very much perceives as a threat, then the 3 F’s are not the answer.

Sure initially we react with anger, hurt, and all the other emotions to what people say or do, the emotions of others are hardest to deal with. We might hide from situations, run away, we might react angrily or simply become the ‘rabbit in the headlights’ and make no decision.

The solution is to pause before action, allow the limbic brain to react in our heads and do not try to stop it. Then look at the situation in terms of this simple scale. 1 being not really that important to 10 being life or death situation, so very important.

Using a brief moment to measure the situation gives us a chance to bring some logic and rationale into play and that gives us time to react in a more measured way.

As we will realise that most of the time when our chimp is upset it is nearly always down at the bottom of the scale near to 1 not at the high end near to death.

If you react with anger, aggression and hostile emotions, then the other person will usually engage their chimp brain and the win at all cost mentality will be used by both parties, with usually a pretty poor outcome, even for the ‘winners’.

We do need emotions, otherwise, life would be dull and boring, but let’s use the emotions of love, kindness, and empathy. Not anger, aggression, hate and emotional or physical violence.

Apart from rare physical threats, measuring the situation on a simple scale of important or not is better than any of the 3 F’s.