An Interview About Stress and Humor

Earlier this week I was interviewed by Drew Tarvin of HumorThatWorks.com - a site dedicated to helping corporations, companies, managers, employees, and even your average Joe (or Joe-ette) bring humor into the workplace and life in general.

Highlights from our talk include:

• The Gift of Stress (0:35)
• Why We Suck at Handling Stress (5:50)
• Can You Become Stress-Free (9:40)
• The Seven Rs of Stress Release (16:30)
• The All Important Reminder (20:14)
• Humor as a Diffuser (27:15)
• The Stress of a Haircut (32:06)

You can listen to the interview and download the transcript here.

Book Launch Party!

The 2/22 book launch party was a big success!
Over 50 people turned out to celebrate the release of The Gift of Stress.

 

As part of the festivities, I was able to bring together local friends and business to donate (i.e. give gifts) their products and services towards a free raffle! Everyone who showed up was given a raffle ticket, and could get more raffle tickets for each copy of the book they bought. They then put the ticket in a box designated to the prize they wanted to try for.

I would like to extend a special thanks to my donors:

http://www.MagnetTheater.com - Level 1 improv class

http://www.feng-shui-design-interiors.com - Feng Shui for more money or a new honey

http://www.SushiBySimon.com - Sushi class

http://www.StoryPirates.org - 4 tickets to a any upcoming show

http://www.ObliqSound.com - 4 CDs: "Speak" by Michael Olatuja; "Sira" by Ablaye Cissoko & Volker Goetze; "Abyss" by Jacques Schwarz-Bart; "Like Water" by Anne Drummond

http://www.AndrewShapiro.com - 1 CD: "Numbers, Colors, and People"

http://squeezethestone.org - 1 DVD: "A Good Uplift"

Want to be happy? Talk to your neighbor

A Harvard Medical School study is about to be published in BMJ (a British journal) that adds weight to SSO's definition of stress: Stress is a reaction that commonly occurs when your current situation doesn't match your ideal version of that situation.

The operative word is commonly.

According to the NY Times article the study shows a positive impact of people around you being happy - particularly those who see and are physically close to.

"A next-door neighbor’s joy increased one’s chance of being happy by 34 percent, but a neighbor down the block had no effect. A friend living half a mile away was good for a 42 percent bounce, but the effect was almost half that for a friend two miles away. A friend in a different community altogether can win an Oscar without making you feel better. “You have to see them and be in physical and temporal proximity,” Dr. Christakis said."

This study also confirms the efficacy of the 6th R of Stress Release - Remind. The more reminders you have about your progress and desired state, the easier it will be to maintain.

So go out there and hang out with happy people!

The stress release --> ideal life continuum

A lot of people get caught up in their stress because they're used to it.

Oh sure, they're alive, doing their 'thing', but there's more out there ... an ideal...

Most people don't dare (or know how) to expand their frame of mind beyond their current situation to dream their impossible dream (sorry Cervantes). Practicality and reasonable-ness gets in the way. The thing is that your real, underlying ideals have no basis in practicality or reason. They're dreams, and the more we let ourselves recognize the adventure that's really going on in our heads, the better.

Without this expansion, you'll have no idea what your ideal is, or how close you can get to it.

Real-life scenario:
I conducted another Key to Stress Release workshop yesterday. In it, I coach a participant through the Seven R's of Stress Release starts with helping the coachee Recognize their ideals.

Last night's participant started talking about his (potential) need to move. As he was about to describe another two-bedroom apartment, I encouraged him to think bigger - the result that he'd love to have a house in Costa Rica.

While this may seem far-fetched (Where's the practicality?!?), it turned out that it wouldn't take much nudging or planning for him to actually have a house there (perhaps one he'd share with friends and/or family for the time-being), but it was not as distant as everyone else in the room thought it would when we first went down that path.