Chapter 9: What’s my motivation?

Actors are famous for asking movie directors: “What’s my motivation?” When it comes to wondering
what your motivation is for lowering stress, the answers are numerous. There are so many health
benefits to managing stress you’d get bored reading them all. But the highlights include reductions in
occurrences or severity of the common cold, depression, anxiety, muscle tension, chronic pain, road
rage, anger, insomnia, skin rashes, digestive tract disorders, diabetes, and hypertension.

Is that enough motivation?

Here’s more. Take away smoking and poor diet, and stress is considered by many experts to be one of
the top lifestyle risk factor for heart disease (the biggest killer by far in the US today). And, in over 30%
of cases, do you know what the FIRST sign of heart disease is?

Sudden cardiac death.

So, if stress is a risk factor in your case, you might not get ANY warning before you find out that your
level of stress was TOO HIGH. Now that you know this, you probably don’t want to wait to start
managing your stress until it’s too late. Still, we are all creatures of habit and some habits (particularly
bad ones) are notoriously hard to break. Let’s just accept that as a given.

If lowering your stress for a long-term health benefit isn’t motivating enough (and by the way, for most
people it isn’t), how about lowering your stress for an immediate benefit you can appreciate within
days? Does that sound more inspiring?

YOUR TOTAL NERVOUS SYSTEM MAKEOVER

We’ve already seen what it feels like to self-regulate your nervous system. That’s an immediate benefit.
And that’s just a minor short-term benefit of lowering our stress levels. Now let’s consider what it might
be like to do a TOTAL NERVOUS SYSTEM MAKEOVER. Remember the stress scale in chapter 1? Would a

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bigger investment of your time be worth it if you could wake up feeling like a 1 or 2 on the 0-10 stress
level almost EVERY SINGLE DAY?

Your body is a storehouse for stress, which is why you go around at a much higher stress level (probably
somewhere in the range of 3-5) most of the time – because you never take the time to release any
steam, unwind or self-regulate your nervous system.

THE DANGER OF HOLDING IT IN

Let me tell you a quick story to illustrate what I mean. When I first decided to take up exercise on a 5-
day a week basis, I started attending a spinning class at my local Y. (In spinning class you sit on a
stationary bike and an instructor helps motivate you and your classmates to ride harder and faster.) On
one particular Saturday morning, I arrived late, and the spinning instructor asked me to leave, explaining
that I had not adequately warmed up.

I resisted leaving, but she was firm. It was a small insult, but I remember feeling embarrassed and angry
by getting kicked out of the class in front of everyone else.

I went upstairs to another part of the facility where I could work out on an elliptical trainer. It was no big
deal, and, as you will soon see, I would have been much better off if I had immediately let my anger go.
But for some reason, I didn’t.

As I exercised upstairs, I remembered that the instructor would often come up after class and exercise
herself. I decided that I was going to “give her a piece of my mind” when she arrived.

I stood hunched over my elliptical training machine, somehow holding in a lot of anger, as I worked out
while waiting for her to appear. When she finally arrived, I’d been stooped over that exercise device,
with my shoulders clenched, for a full 45 minutes.

She saw me, came over and apologetically explained that, for liability reasons, she had to exclude me
from the class. Given the angry look on my face, I’m surprised she was willing to speak to me at all. And
it was a logical, perfectly reasonable explanation for why she had to do what she did.

But the damage to my body had already been done. I had spent almost an hour on that elliptical
machine feeling angry and tense. As it turned out, I’d stored enough stress in my body to last me a full
month: The next day, my shoulder muscles started to spasm and this pain in my back lasted about four
weeks. It took a lot of massage, numerous yoga classes, a chiropractic visit and stretching out on a foam
roller to erase all the stress I stored in my muscles on that day in less than ONE hour.

You are storing stress in this way too. Every traffic jam, every deadline, every hour you spend hunched
over your computer or a steering wheel feeling frustrated, you are storing stress in your body. Without
a method for releasing it, you’ll start confusing a stress level of 3 as relaxed and a stress level 5 as
normal. And that’s when – if things really get stressful – you’ll be more likely to escalate your internal

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stress levels to a 6, 7 or 8 where you may start to experience anxiety attacks and possibly even panic
attacks.

RECALIBRATE: GET STRESS OUT OF YOUR SYSTEM

So, what’s your motivation for doing the exercise, stretching and meditation techniques described in this
book? YOU WON’T BE STORING STRESS IN YOUR BODY. You’ll be releasing it. Every day – after your
stress workout – you’ll recalibrate your nervous system to a 2 or a 1 or maybe even – the holy grail of
stress management – zero!

Now here’s my promise. Play along with me on this for at least two weeks, preferably four. I KNOW
THAT’S A LONG TIME.

Let me ask you this seemingly non-related question: Have you ever had a day where, for whatever
reason, you skipped brushing your teeth in the morning? How did that feel?

Not good, right? Do you need any motivation to brush your teeth? No, of course not. Avoiding that
unpleasant feeling or taste in your mouth is motivation enough.

Let me tell you something amazing, but absolutely true: Now that I exercise four to five times a week, I
feel so much better THAT I WILL NEVER GO BACK TO NOT EXERCISING – and I promise you’ll experience
a similar change. Just like you would if you skipped brushing your teeth, I get a similarly unpleasant
feeling in my whole body when I skip my daily work out. (And when I miss two days in a row, I get so
cranky I can’t stand myself.) Talk to ANYONE who works out on a regular basis and they will all tell you
the same thing – you begin to miss that easy, care-free feeling so much when you DON’T do it, that
working out at least three times a week eventually REQUIRES NO WILLPOWER AT ALL!

So, your motivation here is NOT that you’re going to live longer (which you probably will, by at least four
years) but the REAL reason you are going workout regularly for a couple of weeks or even a couple of
days is that you want to see what it feels like to feel better NOW.