If You're Stressed About The Future, This Will Set You Free | Dr. Ellen Langer

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:12Telling yourself that the world is falling apart, that we're on our way to a dictatorship, whatever things that are going to keep you up at night, is not serving any purpose. So do something about it, whether that means finding places to donate money, to do some work, to elect the officials that have the same views as you, and so on. But if you're doing nothing but worrying, worrying is a waste of time. You know, I have a few one-liners about worrying. The first one is you should ask yourself, which is not the case here, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? Now, you're talking about potential tragedies.

0:54But most of the things we worry about are just inconveniences. Right. And most of the things we worry about never happen. and if you reflect on the last time you worried and how you dealt with and you saw it didn't even happen you'd be more persuaded of that the way to deal with stress i think is um stress relies on two things it relies on an assumption that something is going to happen and that when it happens it's going to be awful well the first you can't predict and this is very hard for people to accept that predictability is an illusion. You can post it. You can look back. You know, let me make this, use an example.

1:37Let's say you're at a party and we see Tom and Susie fighting. And I said to you, are they going to get divorced? You say, kind of white, no, right? Sometimes people fight. Well, let's say we don't have that conversation. So you see Tom and Susie fighting. Two weeks later, you're told, you know, Tom and Susie are getting a divorce. I knew it. You should have seen the way they went at each other's party. All right. You can't predict. You can predict for a group that if you were to start 100 Mercedes and you turn the key, most of them will start, not necessarily all of them. And that would be more than if you were in some used car lot.

2:18Sure. But you can't predict the individual case. And we're all individuals. And when it comes to our health, we really care more about how the medicine is going to go down for us personally. Now, I believe that stress is the major source of our illness. Really? Over and above diet, genetics, even treatment. It's a very big statement. And that stress, though, is psychological. Right? Right. Events don't cause stress. What causes stress are the views you take of the event. So if you open it up and you're more mindful and if you said to yourself, rather than this thing is going to be awful, give yourself five reasons why it might actually be an advantage.

3:07So now it could be awful, could be advantageous. You're immediately somewhat relaxed. But I say go to the next step. Let's assume it does happen. What are the advantages? The worst case scenario. And what are the advantages? And so then when you say, you know, you'll be able to deal with whatever happens, then you're less worried about them. And, you know, you don't have to spend so much time trying to control the outcome. But for the big things that are happening in this world right now, I think that it's a super test of all that I'm saying. Yeah, yeah. How do you manage stress, though? I don't experience that most of the time.

3:47You know, I was... You're a professor at Harvard. You've got books. You've got people that rely on you. You see people coming to you with their problems. How do you navigate all that? Yeah. I surely, at this age, have had real things happen. I had a fire that destroyed 80 % of what I owned way back when. My mother died when she was a young woman. I'd been divorced. And so none of those things sound so big anymore. But nonetheless. In the moment, it's like. Yeah. Yeah. So and when those things happen, I don't think that my response is, oh, well, you know, I'm of this earth, but it doesn't stay with me.

4:27So let's say the man, I wrote about this in The Mindful Body when the house went up in smoke that I called the insurance adjuster. He came over the next day and he said it was the first time in his 25 years of the job where the call was less bad than the damage. Most people go, oh, my God, oh, my God. And he gets there. One little room. Yeah. And here. But, you know, to my mind, it was already gone. What was the point in getting crazy over it? And I immediately felt that what had been burnt were things of my past. you know so if i were to redo it today you know that day would i how many of those things would i have bought again or what have you um but it was still a little scary sure and but i might as well tell the whole story now because this turned out to be wonderful really how could it have been wonderful tell me okay so i go to uh the charles hotel to live now because i don't have a house And I have my two dogs.

5:30And so I'm a sight to be seen, right? You know, marching. Okay. It's Christmas. Wow. On Christmas Eve, I go out. I come back and my room is full of gifts. Not from the hotel management, not from the hotel owner, but from the so-called little people. The people who parked my car, the chambermaids, the waiters and waitresses. It was years that when telling the story, I would cry. Now I've told it so many times. And I don't remember except for one thing, anything that I lost in the fire. But every Christmas, I'm reminded of what I think is the basic goodness of people. Wow. Why did they give you all those gifts?

6:16Just to be nice because it was Christmas. Wow. Yeah, and they knew what had happened. And if you would have lived in the home, you wouldn't have had that experience. That's true, too. I hadn't realized that. But the funny thing is, the one thing that I miss, and I set that up for you to say, well, what was that one thing? I was teaching a large course in a few weeks. All of my notes were burnt. What was I going to do? Oh, man. So, I called the student from the year before who got an A, and I borrowed her notes. It was like a game of teleprompter. That's great. And I apologized to the class before telling them that I don't know how this is going to go.

6:54following reason. And I think it was the best class that I taught. Really? Because it was happening right then. That all of the information I was giving them was a new version or a version that I believed right at this moment. You know, when you present PowerPoints, it's just too easy not to use the same PowerPoints. You don't want to think things through. So you're innovating things. You're adding time. And so I enjoyed it more than any other class that I taught.

7:26I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. And if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life, and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you want to make it easier, you want to make it flow, you want to feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is going to help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following. And thank you for listening to this episode of The Daily Motivation Show.

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8:59Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.