Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life by Margaret Moore Page B

an occasional or fleeting state. It has become the prevailing weather, a cloud of emotional stress following us around for most of our waking hours. Even our dreams can feel frenzied. Some call this “hurry sickness”—we’re always in a hurry, constantly rushing, fretting and rarely experiencing the opposite state of calm wellness.
    This sickness is brought on by two sources: external, the frenzied world around us, and internal, the frenzy we create for ourselves. Some of this internal frenzy we are conscious of and can name and recognize. Some of it is subconscious, seeming to come from a source beyond reach.
    External frenzy is everywhere. Perhaps outside our office is a noisy street with lots of traffic and activity, or we’re surrounded by others in a high state of noise, like a high-stress financial trading floor or a room of hungry toddlers. Or we sit down at our desk to find that the Internet connection isn’t working, we have 250 unanswered e-mails and four deadlines today.
    Our inside frenzy is our internal noise level, partially driven by our response to the thoughts and feelings generated by the outside frenzy.
    Whether externally or internally generated, frenzy is a thief. It steals away our sense of being calm, at peace, in charge, in control, the boss of our lives in the moment or overall. So how can we put the thief behind bars and get on with being our best? Here’s how:
    Awaken to your patterns of calm and frenzy
    Dr. Hammerness talked about the importance of regulating one’s emotions, processing and managing the negative emotions and harvesting and amplifying the positive emotions. In the case of frenzy, this means being like a firefighter, rescuing your calm out of the fires of frenzy. However, before you regulate, you need to become mindful—aware and awake to your calm and frenzy—noticing moments when you are calm and moments when you are frenzied. When does each state turn up? What triggers them? Are there different kinds or levels of calm or frenzy at work, home or when traveling?
    Our experiences with and reactions to calm and frenzy are as distinct and individualized as our fingerprints. One person can feel calm in one chaotic situation, while another will feel anxious and lacking control in that same situation. We need to look to our inner Sherlock Holmes so we can discover which situations allow our negative emotions to take over and better understand our own mysteries along the way.
    When calm or frenzy appear on your consciousness radar, what do they look like, feel like, sound like? Find metaphors that describe their essence. When you feel calm, it feels like gentle waves washing rhythmically onto shore. Your eyes relax, you smile and your shoulders drop. You feel grateful and alive. When you feel frenzy, it feels like you are driving in a blizzard, sitting inside a buzzing beehive or surrounded by road rage in a traffic jam.
    Start to reflect on your experience of calm. Think about times when you don’t notice the frenzy and you feel calm. Recall how youare feeling and what is happening. What can you learn from the calm moments or episodes? Get the thirty-thousand-foot view of both your calm and frenzy patterns by keeping a stress graph.
    If you want to get to the thirty-thousand-foot level to view both your calm and frenzy patterns, take a piece of paper and graph out your various life stages, major life events or weekly patterns. Assign a rating to your overall level of calm for each life stage, life event or daily life. Is there a lot of variation—high and low periods driven by life stages or events? Or is there a constant level of frenzy and you can’t remember a calm and frenzy-free time?
    Let’s use a scale of 1–10. Think of 1 as you lying in bed or on a tropical beach: calm, relaxed, tranquil. Think of 10 as being how you feel when the Internet connection goes down in the middle of returning the important e-mail to your boss,