Choose happy

Here’s a nice stress reducer. It doesn’t cost a thing. You don’t even have to give up coffee or (horrors!) exercise. My stress reducer today is to ask you to choose happiness.

Many seem so quick to anger lately. Someone pulls out in front of you and you stay mad for hours. That poor other driver who committed this heinous crime likely has no idea they trashed your day. Often, they had no intention of wronging you so grievously by forcing you to apply your brakes. Perhaps they even had some real crisis going on, like an emergency when they pulled out a bit quickly.
You jumped from daydreaming driver to crazed maniac in a nano-second when the “tragedy” occurred. You then managed to nurse your anger into a moderately ducked up day by replaying the incident again and again and again. The whole event took maybe all of 4 seconds from beginning to end, yet you wasted many minutes retelling the sordid tale several times in the break room.
My suggestion is to get over yourself. Stuff happens and your brakes worked fine. No harm, no foul. You might even step back a few steps in your mind and practice a little objective observation. Watch as the color of your face went from normal to bright red while you pounded on your steering wheel like a three year old and screeched, “Hey, ass hat… what the puck?!!” (I’m considering avoiding using the word fuck in print so I’m exploring alternatives? 😉 )
What you can’t see by observation is that your blood pressure shot up, pulse increased, respiration escalated and muscles tensed. Stress hormones flooded into your system. Your body went to full fight or flight mode but there was nothing to fight with or flight from. By retelling the tale again and again to others or to yourself, you forced your body to maintain its red alert status. In case you didn’t know it, this is really hard on your body, mind and spirit.
Consider improving your health, saving wear and tear on your steering wheel and sparing your 6 year old from having to unlearn the word asshat, or whatever eloquent verbiage exploded from your mouth. Try instead, “Oopsy! That was close. Glad my reflexes are so good. It must be my lucky day” or something equal to the occasion. Then you might even laugh.
It’s a beautiful life if you try looking at things from a higher perspective. Save your health and help limit the bad word vocabulary of your kids by following this simple suggestion. When something happens that surprises you, take a deep breath and say to yourself, “Well, that was a surprise!” Then, laugh, let it go and get on with things.
It’s your choice. Choose happy.