Monthly Archives: December 2017

The lost art of joy – Vulnerability

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“Masquerade!
Paper faces on parade …
Masquerade!
Hide your face,
so the world will
never find you!”

It was 1994 and I was a clown.

I say that quite literally. I was at Hillsong conference, doing a stream on drama and performance, and one of the available workshops was clowning. It was a transformative day in so many respects. We all put on clown clothes, with wig, full face paint and the big red nose, and I managed to score some of those big red clown shoes too. After the workshop, the facilitator encouraged us to leave the costume on and practice our new skills amongst the unsuspecting Hillsong delegates. So I spent the rest of the day, including riding the bus back to the main convention centre, dinner and the evening concert in full clown costume.

It was exhilarating.

I was painfully shy as a teenager. Actually, I had social anxiety disorder, debilitating shyness. I discovered drama and performance through the church youth group I was attending at the time and it helped me overcome a lot of insecurities and grow in confidence. Still, performing improv style in front of hundreds of strangers was not something I was comfortable with … until I donned the clown outfit. I had the perfect disguise – my own identity was hidden, and my new identity was associated with fun and laughter. I made hundreds of people laugh that afternoon because I could dance around, make silly jokes and sing silly song without fear of personal ridicule. I got three hundred people in the food court at dinner time to all sing Happy Birthday to someone. Sometimes I didn’t need to say anything at all, people just laughed at the shoes. Eventually I had to take off the wig and the shoes and literally wipe the smile off my face, and I was back to plain old me.

From ancient cultural traditions to the modern superhero, we’ve used masks to create new personas or hide old ones. Masks empower a temporary transformation. When you wear a mask, you disguise who you are which frees you from your own limitations, and at the same time, it projects a different persona, empowering you to act within a new set of rules that the mask allows.

I got to hide who I was and clown around because of the mask the clown costume provided me, but it wasn’t the real me, the authentic me. It was a version of me the mask had created. While the mask I wore that day made lots of people happy (including me), it wasn’t sustainable. I couldn’t stay as a clown forever. If I tried, I would have worn myself out. At best, the mask gave a surge of temporary happiness, not long term joy.

Our social connections bear a striking resemblance to my clowning experience. We live in a society which encourages masks. We are consumed with creating the right appearance, from designer clothes to botox injections. We have to say the right words to be liked by the right people, in our on-line and our real world communities. We harshly criticise those who don’t share our beliefs, who don’t fit into our ‘tribe’, and we try desperately to ensure we aren’t treated in the same way.

We fear real connection, because we fear shame and rejection.

We wear our masks, we put our paper faces on parade, hiding our faces so the world will never find us.

I have a wonderfully wise friend who, in recent conversation about this subject, said this,

“Wearing a mask all the time is exhausting. Sure, we all have to wear a mask to get through life intact … but we need to be able to take it off with people we really care about.  Otherwise we disconnect completely and that can be a very lonely place to be in all the time.”

I also love the work of Brene Brown, who has so many applicable quotes, it’s really hard to limit myself to just one … and that’s why I have two!

“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”

and

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”

Shame suffocates deep, sustainable joy. We might be able to use our mask to inspire a temporary happiness, but it’s only through authentic connection that we can experience joy in the truest sense.

Being authentic, being real, being vulnerable is scary! But without authenticity, without vulnerability – without being real – we can’t form the connections to others that allow real joy to flourish.

We don’t have to open ourselves up completely to everyone, but we do need to practice vulnerability with those who are most important to us. By being real, and being vulnerable, at least with those of us who are the most important to us, we can enhance our connection and in doing so, grow our joy.

The lost art of joy – Music

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With only five days to go before Christmas, most people are rushing into the shops to purchase those last minute items.

The average shopping centre in the pre-Christmas week is an auditory and visual cacophony. Not only are there people EVERYWHERE, there are fairy lights, baubles, and tinsel everywhere! Then there are those Christmas carols, the auditory froth of tinny Christmas melody bubbling incessantly in the background. It’s all enough to make you want to shop on-line.

It’s such a shame the way Christmas carols have been subjugated and exploited for commercial gain. So many of the old Christmas carols are euphonious in their own right, with a lyrical profundity that encapsulates the deeper meaning of Christmas in just a few words.

In fact, music in general is fundamental to us as a language of emotion. The linguist Steven Pinker once said that music was “auditory cheesecake,” a purposeless byproduct of language development. But music is deeper than language. Neuroscience suggests that we’re hardwired to interpret and react emotionally to music from before we’re able to crawl, and well and truly before we develop language. Music activates most of our brain, from our frontal lobe and temporal lobe to process the sounds across both sides of the brain. Music also activates our visual cortex, our motor cortex, our memory centres and, not surprisingly, our deep emotional brain centres. It’s only if the song has lyrics that our language processing areas are activated.

Music has been shown to affect our physical bodies and our minds. Music helped to reduce blood pressure, heart rate and anxiety in heart disease patients, while upbeat music can have a very positive effect on our emotional wellbeing, so long as the music was happy and upbeat. Music that we expect to be happy also results in an increase of dopamine, the neurotransmitter of pleasure.

So the emotional connection that music carries is very important for our overall joy.

Listening to music can increase our joy. While the research supports the improvement in mood that comes from listening to happy, upbeat music, there’s a place for ‘sad’ or ‘angry’ songs too, which can connect directly to our souls and provide a type of catharsis that goes beyond trying to express our emotions through the clunky limitation of speech.

Music can help to scaffold memories, especially emotional memories. Remember the music playing when you had your first kiss? Or the song that they played at a friends funeral? Playing those songs related to happy times in your life can help you to recall and re-experience those uplifting emotions if you’re feeling down.

Music creates opportunities for healing. Hospitalised children were happier during music therapy (in which all the children were involved and could play with simple musical instruments like maracas and bells while a leader played the guitar) than they were in standard play therapy when their options puzzles and toys.

But more than anything, music increases joy through the power of human connection. Music is emotionally deeper than language and the social bond that music can create between people is much stronger than any intellectual or verbal connection. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate this – people who go to concerts and who go dancing report higher levels of subjective wellbeing than those people who listen to music on their own. People who create music together have higher levels of happiness and find other activities more pleasurable overall, an effect which has been demonstrated in groups of both adults and school children.

So if you want to increase your joy, engage with music, and use music to engage with other people … even if it is singing Christmas carols.

The lost art of joy – Learning

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Solomon wrote: “Of the making of many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness unto the flesh”.

I loved that verse when I was at school. It was utilised more than once when my teachers wanted to give us more homework – “But, sir, the Bible says that too much homework is bad for you.” Not that my teachers cared, they just gave me more homework anyway.

Much study may be a weariness unto the flesh, but some study is actually very beneficial. Learning helps to promote joy, and joy helps to promote learning.

It’s been shown that learning is much easier when there’s joy involved. Co-founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, Dr David Rock said,

“Engagement is a state of being willing to do difficult things, to take risks, to think deeply about issues and develop new solutions … Interest, happiness, joy, and desire are approach emotions. This state is one of increased dopamine levels, important for interest and learning.”

and

“There is a large and growing body of research which indicates that people experiencing positive emotions perceive more options when trying to solve problems, solve more non-linear problems that require insight, [and they] collaborate better and generally perform better overall.”

This makes sense. According to the classical psychology principle of the Yerkes-Dodson law, optimal task performance occurs at an intermediate level of arousal, with relatively poorer performance at both lower and higher arousal levels. Too much stress (anxiety) or not enough stress (boredom) results in reduced performance. When someone is happy and engaged, their learning is at its optimum level.

But while it’s true that happiness and engagement create the optimal conditions for learning, it’s also true that learning created a sense of joy.

Learning new things is stimulating. Exposure to new information makes the brain work harder. We are very predictive creatures, and our brain has adapted to be predictive because it’s the most efficient way of processing the vast amount of information that we come across each day. After a while of being exposed to the same stimuli, our brains get a bit lazy. There’s no need to grow new branches and our brains become a bit stagnant. There’s no stimulation, so there’s no dopamine rush. We just get into our rut. But being exposed to new experiences, to new stimuli, is invigorating. Our brain can not longer rely on the same old predictive pathways, and new parts of the brain need to be engaged to process all of the different things we’re being exposed to. The dopamine cloud that comes from all of the novel stimuli is quite euphoric.

Learning something new helps our brain to stay supple. The brain is like a muscle – the only way to keep it flexible and strong is to exercise it. By constantly providing stimulation, our brain can better cope when unexpected events occur, because we’re already used to novel challenges. It helps us stay resilient by improving our psychological flexibility.

Learning something new can also give us a sense of accomplishment which is always good for our self-esteem and self-confidence.

There are many ways to learn new things – read new books, or if you’re not the reading type, find some interesting, factual documentaries. A great way of stimulating your brain is to learn a second language, which also gives you a great excuse to do the other thing that helps to grow your brain and your joy, which is to travel to a different country. Trying to speak a new language in a foreign country will really give your brain a workout, which may seem very daunting at first, but will help you grow immensely. You can also learn a new skill like craft, or a musical instrument. Your learning doesn’t just have to be about yourself – learn to juggle or make balloon animals, and use those skills to entertain people, or put a smile on a child’s face. That way the joy is shared through learning and giving.

Just remember your values when deciding what you would like to learn so that your learning is in step with your authentic self and enriches your life. And make sure you keep your work and life in balance as you carve out time to learn something new, all that study doesn’t become a weariness unto the flesh.

The lost art of joy – Laughter

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(and part 2 – https://youtu.be/cZ4R4e_f3-c)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was lectured by Patch Adams once. He took his pants off.

When I was in medical school in the early 1990’s at the University of Queensland, Patch Adams gave a guest lecture. He was originally booked on a speaking tour and sadly, his other engagements cancelled, but he was extremely generous with his time, and visited our humble university anyway, to share his life story and his less-than-conventional views on practicing medicine. This was before the movie based his life was released (it came out in 1998), where he was portrayed by none other than the great Robin Williams.

It took a little while for the audience of young, idealistic, somewhat naive medical students to warm up, and in order to engage us, Patch took off his pants.

Everybody laughed!

It had the desired effect. He had everyone’s attention and it broke down the pretence and barriers. He later put on a pair of clown pants and continued to use humour to communicate his message of laughter, advocacy and social justice.

For the record, I have never taken my pants off to enable better communication with my patients, just so you (and anyone from the medical board who’s reading this) knows. It was the first and only time in my whole seven years of medical school that anyone ever delivered a lecture in their boxer shorts, and it’s not a customary way of engaging with one’s audience. Still, he made us laugh, and it was once of the most memorable lectures I have ever been to.

Laughter connects us. It certainly helped Patch Adams engage with people from all walks of life. Laughter equalises, because it is one of the most ubiquitous and natural of all human emotions.

And laughter is the best medicine, as the saying goes. According to the Mayo Clinic, laughter can lighten your load mentally and induce physical changes in your body. Laughing increases your intake of oxygen-rich air and stimulates your heart, lungs and other muscles. Laughter increases the endorphins that are released by your brain.

A good belly-laugh can also stimulate circulation and aid muscle relaxation which can help reduce physical symptoms of stress. Over the longer term, laughter can improve your immune system. Humour can actually release neuropeptides that help fight stress and potentially more-serious illnesses.

Laughter may even help to relieve pain by stimulating the body’s production of endorphins. Laughter can also make it easier to cope with difficult situations – like the saying goes, you either laugh or you cry. Laughter is also thought to lessen depression and anxiety.

Laughter is even thought to improve your cognitive function. As cognitive neuroscientist, Dr Scott Weems says, “Comedy is like mental exercise, and just as physical exercise strengthens the body, comedy pumps up the mind.”

It sort of goes without saying that laughter increases our joy levels. But it’s worth mentioning, because sometimes in the serious business of adulting, we can start taking things too seriously, and sometimes we just need a good laugh.

As always, it comes down to balance. There are times when we need to be serious, but we can’t be serious all the time. There are times when we just need to (metaphorically) take our pants off.

The lost art of joy – Move!

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What’s your vision of bliss? Massage? Sitting by the beach with a pina colada? Enjoying a sumptuous dinner with friends?

Most relaxation fantasies don’t involve sweat.

So it’s almost a bit counter-intuitive that exercise is one of the most frequently associated habits of happy people. Although maybe it’s not so counter-intuitive, as there is strong anecdotal evidence of the “runner’s high” – the feeling of euphoria that some people feel after a session of vigorous exercise, the “endorphin buzz” that ironically doesn’t have anything to do with endorphins!

Endorphin buzz or no, exercise is certainly one way of enhancing the joy in your life. I previously wrote about the work of George MacKerron from the University of Sussex, who used an app he created to map the correlation of happiness to activity and location. Using the hundreds of thousands of data points from the tens of thousands of users, he found that the times that people recorded the highest levels of happiness and life satisfaction were during sexually intimate moments (on a date, kissing, or having sex). Number two was during exercise.

Physical fitness is good for us. I’ve never seen a study that shows exercise to be a bad thing. Ultimately, it’s not how fat you are that’s important for your longevity, it’s how fit you are, and the way to get fit is to exercise. Physical exercise isn’t just good for the body but good for the brain as well. While the exact pathways are still being determined, there’s good evidence that moderate regular physical activity improves the balance of pro- and anti-inflammatory mediators in the body and in the brain. In the brain, this improves the overall function of our brain cells. Exercise is also thought to increase the production of a growth factor called BDNF which helps the brain cells grow new branches and improves their ability to form new pathways, which in turn, has been shown to improve mood disorders like anxiety and depression.

Exercise is great, but not everyone is ready to suddenly get up and run a half-marathon, me included. These days, I’m like a walrus on tranquillisers. I’m certainly not about to jump up and go for a jog. Some people have physical injuries or conditions that limit their capacity for physical exercise.

So how do you find the balance between maximising the joy-enhancing effects of exercise while not pushing yourself so far and causing yourself some unhappiness?

Simply, move more.

Where are you at with you’re level of exercise right now? If you could turn it into a scale from 1 to 10 (where 1 is completely sedentary, and 10 is your ideal version of regular exercise), what would you rate? The next question is, what’s one thing you could do to go one point closer to 10? So let’s just say that you walk 200m from your house to the bus stop in the morning, and the same on the way home at night. For you, that might be a 3/10. What else could you do to make that 3 turn into a 4?

You don’t have to go for vigorous two-hour walks or run up every set of stairs you come across to be happy. Just move, and move that little bit more. That will help build joy in your life.

The lost art of joy – Regret

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I took my son to see the latest Star Wars movie, “The Last Jedi” this afternoon. Don’t worry, no spoilers here. I don’t want to ruin the enjoyment for anyone.

What I can say is that one of the strong themes of the movie was regret. In this movie, Luke Skywalker, the hero of the original Star Wars trilogy, was in self-imposed exile, hiding physically and ‘spiritually’ (from the power of the force), because of the choices he made.

Everyone has regrets, the ‘what could have been’ … the one who got away, the job you could have had, the fight you wish you hadn’t, the investment you didn’t make or possibly the one you did. Like death and taxes, whether big or small, we all collect some regrets as we walk along life’s path.

Regret isn’t necessarily bad, it can be an opportunity to move forward into joy if it’s handled the right way. If regret is eventually going to lead to joy, then it has to spur us on to make adaptive changes. It’s learning from our mistakes. We might realise how we have been too busy to spend our time according to what’s valuable for us, or not given enough, or not looked after ourself enough, and we resolve to eat better, work less, or give more to others. There are so many different examples of how joy can come from acting mindfully and adaptively on our feelings of regret.

But sometimes regret becomes overwhelming, where instead of riding the wave of regret to power us forward, it dumps over the top of us and we are swamped by it’s deluge. They can sometimes merge into an overall feeling of being wrong or bad, it may cause paralysis because you mourn what you could have or should have done, and can’t seem to make a better decision going forward.

If any good, if any joy, is going to come from those experiences we may be regretting, then we have to grab our surfboard. Remember:
1. It’s ok to fail. Failure is inevitable. Without it, there can be no success. What’s done is done.
2. Make lemonade. Learning from what happened takes the lemons that you’re stuck with and makes them into something better.
3. Keep looking forward. Once you stop looking to the past mistakes, you can start focussing on future opportunities
4. Be mindful. Engage in the present moment to enhance your current joy.
5. Be values driven. You’re much less likely to regret decisions that you make if they are based on your values. But if things don’t go according to plan, you can always go back to step 1.

It’s that committed action to our values that ultimately enhances our joy, now and in the future.

The lost art of joy – Beauty

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Cottesloe Beach, Western Australia, at sunset

I like to flirt with photography.

There’s a particular ambience about taking photos, especially landscape photography, at either dawn or dusk. The softer light, the interplay of shadows, all make the end of the day a great time to wander around and take some photographs. I’ve always lived on the east coast of Australia, so I don’t ever get to see the sunset over the ocean, but late last year I was at a conference in Perth, Western Australia, so I thought I would seize the moment. I analysed the weather forecasts, and on the only sunny day of my trip, I skipped the afternoon workshops and went to Cottesloe Beach. There, I sat in front of the Indiana Tea House, the chill of the icy gale creating a stunning contrast to the majesty of the sun dipping into the sea, then the pink and orange glow fading beyond the expansive horizon.

It was a moment of profound beauty, a moment of aesthetic richness in the vast tapestry of the earth’s natural grandeur.

I remember that moment as one of joy. I was cold, and I was tired and I was hungry, but those aren’t the feelings that I’ve tagged to my memory of that event. The joy of beauty trumped my usual hangriness.

That bond between beauty and joy has been confirmed in broader studies. George MacKerron, now a lecturer at the University of Sussex, used an app he created to map the correlation of happiness to activity and location. He has tens of thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of data points. The times that people recorded the highest levels of happiness and life satisfaction were during sexually intimate moments (on a date, kissing, or having sex) and during exercise. The next three types of moments where people recorded the highest levels of happiness were all related to beauty: when at the theater, ballet, or a concert; at a museum or an art exhibit; and while doing an artistic activity (e.g. painting, fiction writing, sewing).

But what about beauty links it to happiness?

I think it’s a complex answer to a simple question.

Some people believe that physical beauty, especially of people, is related to happiness of those people. The more beautiful you are, the happier you are. That might seem true, but like beauty itself, the assumption is superficial.

Beauty is not specifically related to the usual markers of happiness (colloquially known as the “Big Seven”: wealth, family relationships, career, friends, health, freedom, and personal values). It’s not something that meets our material needs or aspirations. So the observation that beauty is associated with joy means there must be something deeper to it.

Stendhal, a French writer in the 18th century, wrote, “Beauty is the promise of happiness.”

I think that’s closer to the money.

It may be that our appreciation of beauty is because it is able to encourage the feelings we associate with happiness: calmness, connection (to history or to the divine), wealth, reflection, appreciation, hope.

Beauty offers a portal directly to our emotions. It transcends conscious thought and speaks directly to our soul. It communicates in a language that can never be described in just words.

I travelled from one side of Australia to the other but you don’t have to travel 5,000 kilometres to experience beauty. Beauty is usually all around us, but so often we aren’t paying attention. Mindfulness, being in the present moment, paying attention to what’s around you, can help you unlock the beauty that’s all around you, if you take the time to appreciate it.

See if you can experience something beautiful in your every day life, and unlock the joy it contains.

The lost art of joy – Kindness

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Kindness is like a campfire – it gives light, it gives warmth, and it brings people closer together.

I recently heard a story of a new mum in Canberra who returned to her car after a physically and emotionally taxing day, staying with her sick baby in hospital, only to find that an overly zealous parking inspector had added to her distress by issuing her with a parking ticket. She was initially distraught by the discovery, but when she opened the envelope, she found more than just the ticket. She also found a note from complete stranger who just happened to be passing by. The note read: “I saw your car had a parking ticket on it, I’m sure whatever you were going through at hospital is tough enough so I have paid for you … Hope things get better!”

It was such a small act, but the effects of this stranger’s kindness was so profound. The financial exchange was minimal, but the joy and hope it generated were enormous.

And that’s the thing about kindness. One of the best things you can do for your health and happiness is to be kind to other people. Altruism activates rewarding neural networks, essentially the same brain regions as those activated when receiving rewards or experiencing pleasure. Studies also show that both the hormones and the neurotransmitters in the brain involved in helping behaviour and social bonding can lessen stress levels and anxiety. The immune system and autonomic nervous systems are positively affected by the quality and extent of social networks, and increased sociability and concern for others’ wellbeing can improve immune system and stress responses.

But kindness isn’t just about what it does for us, but it’s also about what it does for those to whom it’s directed. The joy and hope of kindness is bidirectional. Like the story of the mum with the sick baby, the kindness of a stranger was a ray of light in an otherwise very dark time. Sometimes those simple acts can make the difference between someone getting through or giving up.

There are infinite ways to show kindness, but the thing that links them together is unselfishness, the “disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others”, or in less formal language, simply giving with no strings attached.

If you’re looking for some ideas on some new ways to show kindness, the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation has plenty of them. Check out https://www.randomactsofkindness.org/kindness-ideas.

The lost art of joy – Simplicity

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Over the last couple of days, we talked about joy through balance, balance of our stress levels and balance of our time commitments.

There is another aspect of balance and joy – the balance in our physical life, the joy inherent to a life of simplicity.

In our modern western society, we grow up with a couple of implicit assumptions – rich people are happy, and poor people are not happy. Sort of capitalism’s golden rule. But are those assumptions true?

In the late 1970’s, Philip Brickman and his colleagues published a study in which they suggested that people who had won the lottery were no happier than a similarly matched control group who had not won any money.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the idea that joy can be attained from a simple life is as old as the ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus, who history records, sought a tranquil life – “a state of satiation and tranquility that was free of the fear of death and the retribution of the gods. When we do not suffer pain, we are no longer in need of pleasure, and we enter a state of ‘perfect mental peace’.” He spent his time in a garden and taught his school of philosophy there. He was content to eat simple meals, and aspired to a neutral mood.

So if joy can be found in the simple life, and is not necessarily guaranteed through material wealth, why do we have have expensive houses filled with expensive cars, whole wardrobes of designer clothes we hardly wear, subscribing to 200 channels on massive wide-screen TV’s that we don’t have time to watch because we’re on social media on our expensive smart phones, complaining about the unrepayable personal debt that we have.

This post is certainly not a diatribe against all material things or debt necessarily. I love my iPhone X, my Apple Watch, my iPad pro etc etc. I don’t need them all, but I like them. It would be hypocritical to push an anti-consumerism line while being stocked up with nearly every Apple product I can fit on my person.

The key is balance. Embracing a level of minimalism doesn’t guarantee happiness, but trimming some of the unnecessary trappings of materialism can make room for those things that count more in terms of joy.

Embracing a level of minimalism is a means to an end. It frees up some of our most finite resources like time, money, energy, and helps to remove stress. It frees up all of these resources that you can now start investing in what brings you purpose.

Finding joy through minimalism is an expression of living through your values, which we discussed in an earlier post. It’s much easier to say no to things that have no significant value when we understand what is that is of significant value.

One we know what is truly important to us, we can start clearing our lives of all the things that clutter our lives, the material possessions that suck up our time and unbalance our quest for joy.

Writing about minimalism at a time like Christmas, one of the biggest shopping seasons of the year, is always a little ironic. That said, I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t be buying presents for others, and that we should abandon Christmas shopping altogether. Though we can use the opportunity to declutter a little by giving in other ways.

Perhaps all of those clothes you aren’t wearing can be given to your local church or charity to pass on to those whose wardrobe is sparse. Perhaps you can have a garage sale to thin out the junkyard of unused appliances in your house, and donate the proceeds to feed those who are hungry.

That is the generosity of Christmas at its best and has the added bonus of decluttering your life – a double whammy of joy at Christmas.

The lost art of joy – Striking the right chord

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In yesterday’s post, we talked about the joy thief of excessive stress, and about finding the right balance to optimise our emotional homeostasis.

Many people assume that if excessive stress leads to no joy, then having a life of no stress would be the opposite and lead to a life of untold happiness. Except, it doesn’t. No stress may feel great in the short term, but a life of absolutely no stress is a different form of malaise, leading to emotional weakness, something which is just as joy-sapping as excessive emotional strain.

As I said yesterday, it’s all about balance.

So how do you know where the optimum is between not enough and too much? The answer to that lies in the humble guitar string.

I really don’t know a lot about guitars, but I do know that when you first put a new string on the guitar, it’s unstretched – there’s no strain on it at all. If all you did was tied the two ends of the string to the tone peg and the tuning peg, the string would remain limp and lifeless. It wouldn’t be able to do anything useful. It certainly wouldn’t play a note. When the tuning peg is twisted a few times, there is some tightness in the wire. The string is now under tension (i.e. stress). It’s now able to play a note of some form, so it can do some work and fulfil some of the function of a guitar string, though the note’s out of tune.

With a small adjustment, the string reaches its optimal tension and can play the correct note! This is the point where the string is fulfilling its designed purpose. Optimal stress equals optimal function.

With further tightening of the string, the perfect pitch is lost, but the string can still produce a sound of some form. With more tension, the string can still make a noise, but it’s off-pitch, and on a microscopic level, the fibres inside the cord are starting to tear. If the string were wound further and further, it would eventually break.

If this ratio of the tension of the string versus the usefulness of the string were to be plotted as a graph, it would look like an upside down “U”. This is the classic stress/productivity curve.

Each of us has our own particular point where we are in tune. When we know where our sweet spot is, we can operate within it, achieving our best in life without doing ourselves harm. This is the first point that we need to identify on our own personal stress/productivity curve. This is the point of maximum productivity.

We also need to understand that a bit more stress is ok. It’s inevitable that we are going to be stressed beyond what we usually cope with at times. Without that challenge, there would be no growth. Challenges usually hurt. You can’t have growth without pain. Our muscles adapt and grow when they are pushed just beyond their optimal load. The key is learning how far we can push ourselves before we start to falter and fail. This is the second point we need to discover on our personal stress/productivity curve. This is the point of maximum growth.

We understand where these points are on our own personal stress-productivity curve when we listen to our inner selves and learn from our mistakes. Once we have found our own note, we can sense when our bodies and minds are starting to stray outside of our optimum performance, to listen when we’re not quite in tune. Joy is much more likely to thrive if we are playing our own notes in tune, striking the right chord.