Episode 41: Dealing with the stress of illness

Welcome to Vizsdim from the Area of View, the podcast for those who wish to learn how to crush their anxieties and find meaning and purpose in their lives. How are you today, Dr. Klein?

I'm excellent. How are you, my dear?

Okay, I wanted to have a conversation with you today about something that has struck me, that happened to me this week, and I really, I'm flummoxed about it. And I read an article in the Wall Street Journal, actually, that was called about the view of the arc of life, and I want to talk about that. But I want to talk about it from an experience that I had this week. I have a very good friend who is 94 years old, and she wasn't feeling very well. And she said, something's wrong. And I said, okay, let's not fool around. Let's go to the hospital and let's see what it is. And so I took her to the hospital. I don't like hospitals. They scare me to death. It's not my thing. I just don't like it. Just walking in makes me, I don't know, the smell and everything. But she's a wonderful older woman and they treated her with kid gloves. They treated her beautifully. And yet the two of us were nervous. She was nervous because she thought she might be having a heart attack. I was nervous because I thought I might be having a heart attack from nerves. The stress, the stress, the stress, the stress of being in an environment like that, particularly when you're older. And then I got home and I happened to see a book on my bookshelf written by a woman that you and I really like a lot, Ellen Langer, a professor at Harvard. The book is called The Mindful Body.

You

And for some reason I pulled it out and I read a chapter and I just want to talk to you a little bit about it. Let me just read from it. Hope I don't get sued. I'm allowed to read from it, I guess. And it's called Mindful Hospitals. And she says, while at present, most people in the medical world may disagree with my view that stress is the number one killer, it would be hard to find many who don't think that stress is bad for our health. Nevertheless, there are little focus on how to make hospitals or more generally the administration of medical treatment less stressful. We have to go to the hospital, say, for a mammogram or chest x-ray or because we broke our collarbone or for hundred other reasons. Hospitals ostensibly are for healing. Yet as we enter the building, we're likely to get sicker because our overwhelming feeling is fear. Moreover, our attention may be drawn to those who are in worse shape than we are or who may seem to represent our future selves. The environment is sterile and medical personnel quickly walk the halls with serious facial expressions, again conveying gloom and doom. This is clearly not the place we want to be. And she's right. It scared me. I was scared. I was scared for my friend. I didn't know what was happening. I didn't know if she was going to die. I don't know. And so we go and we go to hospitals for whatever reason and we become totally stressed. So you as a medical professional, can you help me and our listeners understand how we can be less stressful in a healthcare environment?

That's a good one. Well, I absolutely agree with everything you said. It's a super stressful play. I spend a lot of time in hospitals. Most of them as a doctor, but occasionally as a patient. I'll tell you a good patient story when I was a patient. I actually wrote an article about this, is a pretty long piece. I don't know if you've ever seen it. I'll send it to you at some point.

I did, and I'd love for you to talk about it, because it's a fascinating piece.

And so it's a long piece. I'll try and cut it really short. But I ended up having diagnosed my own kidney tumor and I had to have surgery. So I went into the hospital and ended up having surgery and then ended up spending more time. had a complication. Of course, doctors always get the complications. That's a well-known fact. And anyway, in the middle of the night, I'm in a really great hospital. can say it was the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. And the surgeon I had was fantastic. And even though I had a complication, wasn't his fault, things happen. But here I am in this hospital, and here's what would happen. Every night, I felt like I was in the middle of the shopping floor at Walmart on Black Friday. That's how much that's how bright it was. That's how much noise there was. The one thing you need after surgery is rest more than anything else. Well, this would be the last place you should go to rest. Right. And somebody would come in at two o'clock in the morning and again at five o'clock in the morning to take out my trash. Because, I would have accumulated a lot of trash between two a.m. and five a.m. And I, you know, I after I felt better.

Sure.

My wife actually suggested I write about this. So the last day of my hospitalization when I was finally feeling better and out of pain, I made a million notes and I wrote this story, but it made me laugh. The other thing is, I won't ask you this question, but anyone who has been in a hospital gown...

You

I call them candy wrappers, right? Because you might as well be wearing a candy wrapper because it's, you're going to be, it has absolutely, it's the cheapest material you could find. At least part of it's flying open at some point because the ties are generally either in the wrong place or absent, which is common. They provide no warmth. They certainly provide no comfort and they absolutely add to stress.

Yeah.

So I agree with everything you said. there's two parts of this conversation. One is we can dispose of the first one very quickly. Hospitals, medical facilities need to do a much better job of putting patients at ease. It's not that hard. You could do it. They should be quieter. They should be more optimistic. They should be bright colors. They should be very clean. And people should not be walking around with frowns on their faces. as we've talked about in many episodes, being unhappy and being sad is a total waste of your time most of the time. It doesn't help anybody. It certainly doesn't help yourself and it doesn't help those with whom you interact. So we can dispose of that. We need to improve hospital and all medical facilities, make them more patient and family friendly, make them less scary, give information much more easily, although that's improved quite a bit with patient portals. OK, now let's talk about the L-Side. Right now, there's still stressful places. How do we deal with the stress? That's what you're asking me. So many people who have not worked in hospitals don't like them for all the reasons you just said. I know so many people feel that way. A lot of my own family members feel that way because I somehow was a total failure in convincing any of my kids to go into medicine. I have four kids, none of were interested. My oldest son once told me, Dad, I would have done it, but you got up too early.

Yes.

So, yeah, so the question is how do you deal with these stressful situations? And this is really the topic we've talked about. had a session podcast on anxiety quite a while ago. We should revisit that again. And we can actually do some of that right now. So how are we to deal with anxiety?

Yeah.

And the simple answer, the quickest way to get to deal with it is to understand the Viktor Frankl rule, which to repeat is that we are each in complete control of how we feel. We are not required to react in any particular way. It's totally up to us. And the way to get there is to understand that everything we see or hear or touch, feel, whatever, is interpreted in our brain. You've heard me say this many times, no event. No word, no statement, no event, no activity has any intrinsic value. Our brain is absorbing this through one of our senses and then deciding what to make of it. So if we hear a very loud banging noise all of sudden, we're likely going to jump because our brain has decided, ooh, loud noise, danger. you know, let's get those cortisol flying through the body. Let's get attentive. may have there might be a line coming after us. You know, that's that's the first that's a flight or fight or flight sensation. That's what our brain does. But that noise, that same loud noise, if you were at a concert, right, and somebody Hit a loud chord or a drummer made some loud drumming sound or somebody smashed the guitar like the who used to do at the end of a concert. You're not going to jump because you know, that's unexpected loud noise. So not all loud noises generate the same response. What that tells you is your brain is doing the work. Your brain is taking an event and deciding what to make of it. In a concert, a loud noise, you don't make a big deal out of it. All of a sudden, you're sitting in your kitchen and you hear a loud noise. then you're going to jump, right? Or you're outside at a restaurant, wherever you are, that's going to incite a certain response. So that tells us that since the response is in our brain, the evaluation of the event is in our brain, we get to control how we react to whatever our brain has decided. So you walk into a hospital, you see sick people, it's cold, it's sterile, it's scary, right?

Yes, yes.

But you can decide, well, my brain has taken in through my sight and sound and smells. My brain is saying danger, scary place, whatever. But then you get to decide, brain, calm down. It's not that big a deal. I can see, you know, there's nobody here with a hatchet coming after us. It's OK. It'll be fine. So that Viktor Frankl rule that we have complete control of how we feel, how we interpret any situation. Remember, he was in a concentration camp. He saw the worst of the worst of the worst of the worst of humanity. And yet he survived because he understood he could control how he reacted. And the one thing they couldn't take from him was that ability to decide how he was going to react. So that's the short answer of how you deal with a stressful health situation. The initial reaction, loud noise of that situation, metaphorically, you can't help. But immediately after or soon after you can decide, wait a minute, okay, I got bad news or I saw something bad, whatever. I don't have to freak out. I don't have to jump off a cliff. I don't have to cry. I don't have to scream. I get to decide how I want to feel. I prefer to take this in stride and just let it unfold and be more calm about it. Because you know there are people who do that, right? You know people who will be in the same situation you are and you'll get super upset or freaked out and they're just kind of like, answer. Right. You go, how do they do that? Right. If they're exhibiting the Victor Frankle. They're deciding how they want to interpret the situation. So that's the short answer of how we deal with this and it applies not just to health situations, it applies to all situations. Again, you know, I made my own diagnosis on my kidney tumor. You know, I didn't freak out and I was a meat. I've never freaked out. I didn't like it. I bleep. Right. Because I knew.

Not for one minute did you freak out?

Yeah, yeah.

Right away I knew this is probably not going to be good. What is that going to mean? Very quickly I was able to process, okay, we're going to make the diagnosis. It's not going to be a good thing. I don't know if it's going to be, you know. It's probably malignant. may not be really what I call really malignant, meaning it has metastasized, it's done things like that, but I am going to have to have surgery. I'll probably be okay. I went through that whole process in literally a minute because I have training, right? I know this, right? I saw what it looked like. I know what these tumors, I've seen so many of them. I knew on the scan what this looked like. went, okay, that's a tumor. It's probably a cancer, but it's going to be like a well-behaved tumor, meaning a polite tumor that isn't going to, I think, be life threatening. And I turned that to be right. I could have been wrong,

Really? yeah, okay. Yeah.

but I very quickly, I could go through that whole process in a minute, realize what was in front of me. Well, who's happy about having, knowing they're gonna have surgery and not quite being sure it's gonna be okay, right? So yeah, I have a big advantage in that sense, but still, you know, you know I'm not afraid of death. You know how we've talked about this a lot, that death is inevitable. You know, we hope it's later than sooner. We hope it's more tranquil than. something horrible that happened like the woman who got stabbed on the North Carolina train or Charlie Kirk who was murdered. We hope it's in a much more tranquil piece of way. We pray that it is. It may be, it may not be, but we know the end is coming at some point. That's such an important concept for people. Now, it's very hard when you're young. I get it. And as you get older, it gets a little bit easier. But that's very important to realize that this life is a temporary event. So it's going to end at some point. Keep that in the back of your mind. And number two is you get to decide how you have to feel. Freaking out about a health care situation, whether it be yours or somebody you're with, as my wife often tells me, you know, when does freaking out ever help? Right. teach my kids rule number one, don't panic. Because the first thing all of us are naturally going to do is panic. That's our first reaction. So you have to train yourself not to panic. It's not a natural thing for most people.

Of course, yeah.

But when you, all right, so you diagnose yourself, my goodness, I probably have a cancerous tumor. You call your children. How do they react? What did you say? How do they react? How does stress translate in a family like that?

So I called my wife and it's like I called her, it was kind of like I called her to tell her, the way, I'm stopping to get milk at the supermarket. Yeah, right. Because her thinking is the same. OK, we'll deal with it. We'll take care of it. Whatever we have to do, we'll take care of it. I never saw her once for a second look.

Yeah, notice I didn't say what did your wife say, because I knew exactly what your wife would say. She'd say, okay. Yeah, okay. Mm-hmm.

upset, concerned, and just for people to know, my wife does actually love me. So it's not that she doesn't care about me, but that's just the way she reacts. So my children, I don't even, I mean, I did tell my children, but I just said it in a matter of fact way. I have this tumor. I found in my kidney. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be fine. I'm going have to have surgery. They'll take it out, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to be fine. And they trust me because A, I tell them the truth and B, I'm a doctor and they know that I probably know what I'm talking about, but they do trust me. They know I'm not going to lie. I tell patients all the time when I would make a diagnosis on a patient, cancer generally or something like that, and they'd say, oh God, I don't know what I'm going to do. Tell my children. And if they're adult children, I would say tell them the truth. They say, I can't tell them the truth. They're going to be so upset. go, no, no, if you don't tell them the truth, here's what's going to happen. They will never believe you going forward. Never. Right. If you don't tell them the truth now, then down the road when you say, oh, I'm cancer free, then I can't believe that either. They're not going to believe anything you say. So tell them the truth. And not the little kids, but adults, adult children, older children, or even teenage children. Tell them the truth. The only people I would not tell the full truth to is a little person. Right. Somebody, you know, kindergarten, I mean, elementary school age, you you don't have to tell him everything. And for them, it's probably best to say, you know, daddy's got this thing and he's going to go to the doctor and they're going to do this thing and then he's going to be okay. And even if he's not going to be okay, you still tell him he's going to be okay. For little kids, you don't tell them all the truth. But for the older kids, you do. You tell them exactly what's going to happen because then as you go forward, they believe you, right? They don't have to worry then, God, is dad telling us the truth or is he lying to us again? You don't want that. Just tell them the truth.

So you told your kids and they took it and they.

So I told my kids the truth. They said, OK, you said you're to be OK. I believe you. That was it. No kidding. OK, you say you believe you're going be OK. We believe you. We know you're going to tell us the truth. We know you're not going to lie to us. So yeah, you see it. And I was OK right now. You know, I had surgery, had a complication. wasn't a nothing burger. But, you know, I affect the title of that story I wrote is called One Bad Week.

Yeah.

Because that's really about what it was. That was about one bad week. I mean, it was a bad week, but it was just one week, right?

So, but it was indeed a stressful situation, yet the stress didn't overwhelm you.

No, I didn't have any stress. had pain, but I a lot of pain and in retrospect, I shouldn't have had that much pain. My pain wasn't handled properly and I take some responsibility for that, actually. It's just my nature, but I do. But I didn't have stress about it. You know, I knew I was going to be OK. And let me put it this way.

Yeah?

When I had the complication, surgeon, when I was readmitted to the hospital, by the way, 36 hours in the emergency room on my second admission when I had the complication. I had been home for 12 hours, had a complication, went back. I was in the emergency room for 36 hours. So was that stressful? It was painful. It was unpleasant. But, you know, it doesn't help to be freaked out about it. You have to have a plan. have to say, OK. Now, for me, obviously, as a doctor, I have some advantages. I know what's going to happen. At one point, the surgeon said, I want to do this particular procedure on you. And I went, that's not going to be fun. I don't want that. I know I'm not going to like that. And I talked him out of doing it. I said, let's wait a day and see what happens to my numbers, my blood test. And I think because I was a doctor, he was willing to give it a shot. I don't think he was crazy about it. And I think if he thought I'm sure if he thought I was wrong, he would have said, no, no, we're not doing that. But he was he was kind of on the fence. And so my particular feelings about it, he was he did, I think, weigh his decision a little bit. But if he was if he was sure he had to do that, he would have done anyway. So so but it's not stress, it's understanding what's going to happen. So the stress, the anxiety, it doesn't help. It doesn't improve. it makes it worse. Remember you're in charge of how you feel. You are not required to scream and yell and freak out when something happens. Maybe initially certainly, but after a very short time, no. You're not doing yourself or your loved ones or anybody any favors. And the way you handle it is to remember the Viktor Frankl rule. I'm in control of how I feel. I get to decide. You can't decide about your pain. You can decide how you react to your pain. For sure I did that. but you can decide how upset you want to get, how anxious you want to get, how stressed you want to get, that's under your control. Because remember, everything's interpreted through the brain, and then you get to decide how do you want to react to it.

Health and wellness of people is something you're saying that we can control it. But my question is, and I mean this in all necessary, you go to a doctor, which is in and of itself a stressful situation, because unless you're going to your annual physical, if you're going there, there's a reason. I don't feel well, something's wrong, I have a chest pain, whatever. So that's stressful enough. And then you're given a bad diagnosis or what could be a bad diagnosis and that's even more stressful. What I'm trying to get is tell me how do I control it so that the stress doesn't overwhelm me, that I can get into this Viktor Frankl understanding of that I am in complete control. How do I get in complete control? I'm stressed, I'm out of sorts. How do I get there?

Okay, that's such a great question. And for this, we're going to head to the aerial view for a minute. So let's say you're diagnosed, God forbid, metastatic something cancer. And you look at the data and your doctor says, you look, we've made great progress. if everything goes great, we could get three years out of this. So lung cancer is a great example. We used to diagnose lung cancer until very recently. And I saw so many lung cancers and you know, immediately that game is over, right? or pancreatic cancer. Let's just stick with lung cancer for a while. That game is over. Well, now with some of these immunotherapy drugs, you can live for years. No kidding. There people who've been on the drugs for years and they would not have lasted 12 months previously. OK, but at some point that drug's not going to work anymore. And at some point it's going to end. So instead of being 12 months, maybe it's 48 months, maybe it's four years, whatever. Right. OK. So when you're in the area of you remember, you see all of time, you see the whole thing. And when you see yourself on the last moment of your life, and, Enid, you know this, right? You've seen people who have fought the good fight against some disease and right at the very last minute, they kind of relax. They know it's over. They give up and they die more peacefully. They've come to grips with it. They've accepted it, right? You know what I'm talking about, right? You've seen it, right? And so from the air of it, you go, wait a minute. OK, I know how this is going to end. I'm going to accept this at the end.

I do.

So why don't I accept it now and stop and not waste all that time being anxious and depressed and sad, right? Let's just accept it now. Let's just take every day, every moment, enjoy it for what it is, embrace every moment, whatever it is, is. Some will be great, some will be painful, some will be sad, some will be happy, whatever. I'm going to look at that last day and I see where I am on that last day because from the aerial view, you can appreciate it. And you say, OK, let's get rid of all the middle garbage. How about if I just adopt that attitude now? I'll do the best I can. I'll dedicate the rest of my life to being with my loved ones, helping, still helping as many people as I can, to bringing joy and love to the people around me and anybody I can. And I'll take the medicine, I'll do the procedures, whatever I think I'm willing to do. And I'll be OK, because the end is going to come for everybody. It's not a surprise. Right. So when you get stretched out and freaked out when you get a bad diagnosis, it's like a shock. It's a shock. But when you think about it, it really shouldn't be so much of a shock. We're all going to die. We're all going to get an illness or we're going to have some tragedy befall us. And that end record is going to play. We're going to get to that end record. So why are we shocked? You can say, I didn't think my time was now, but turns out it is. Right? Okay, what am I gonna do with the rest of my life? Whether it be two weeks or 10 years, right? I get to decide. So there's no reason to be stressed. Don't be shocked. The end was coming. The last record is going to play. That's the story of human life. So don't waste a minute of it being stressed out or freaked out about it. Right. It will play out as it will play out. There will be days when things are great and days when things are not so great. It's all part of your story. Remember, your book is written. It's all part of that story. Embrace every moment. Every page of your book is important. You don't have to stress and freak out about it.

Right? came to, you when I was, you went to summer camp, I think, didn't you, when you were young? Okay. So for those people who didn't go to summer camp,

I did, I did.

Often in many summer camps, at the end of the summer session, whether it be two weeks or four weeks, whatever number of weeks you go to camp, a lot of camps have a competition between, they split the camp in half and they have a color war, right? And one team is blue, one team is red depending on your camp colors, and there's color war. And everybody knows that at some point towards the end of the session, there's going to be color war.

Color War.

But nobody knows exactly when it's going to break out. So that's one of the big things. when is Color War going to break out? How are they going to announce it? This is some kind of reveal, some cool thing, right? But everybody knows it's coming, but they don't know exactly when, right? And then Color War is announced and everybody's excited, but they already knew it was coming. Nobody's surprised. They might be surprised how they did it, when they did it, but not that they did it, right? Color War was always coming. Illness and death are coming. They're always coming. We don't know when. We hope it's when we're older and we've had a complete life, but it could be when we're very young. We don't know, but it's always coming. So it should never be a shock in the sense that it happened. It could be a shock when it happened, but then immediately you have to revert to, okay, now I'm at this point in my life. I didn't expect it to be so soon, or I'm amazed that it came this late and I had so many years. It was always coming. Color War was always coming. This was always coming. So how do you want to deal with it? Right? Don't freak out. Don't stress out. You have the Viktor Frankl rule in your quiver. Pull it out and remember, I'm in control of how I feel. Embrace every moment. Don't waste a moment. Enjoy it as best you can. Dedicate your life to those around you to making the world a better place. What a great gift. Now you know when your last you know your last record is right in front of you. Now you can see that last record. OK, what are you going to do at the time? I better hurry up and finish up my life so I at the end of it can say, I did a pretty good job, right? Maybe I didn't do it as well as I but I got time now. I'm going to dedicate my life to not worrying about my disease, not fretting over my disease. not freaking out and stressing over these, but turning it around, turning the camera around. And I'm going to do what I can to make others feel better, to help other people. I've known plenty of cancer patients who go to hospitals and deal with cancer patients. Right. Amazing. Right. You've seen it. Right. So that's the point. That's the point. That's how you deal with the stress. You just you don't have to have it. It's not a requirement. Right. We know that we have the ability to decide how we want to feel and how we want to act.

Yeah, yeah, right. I have.

Is there, I mean, do you believe in deep breathing or do you believe in, mean, when you're in a situation where the stress is almost overwhelming, what is the, what's the trigger? How do you get to the point where it's off your shoulders? How, particularly when you're in a hospital, for example, we knew as we, at the beginning of this, we both agree that it's a stressful place. It's dark, it's light, it's bright and it's noisy and it's stinky and it's not as clean as it should be. and there are people around you who are sick and it's just one thing after another, somebody in the thing crossed from my friend was having a seizure. It was stressing me to beyond. So what do I do? Do I deep breathe? How do I get to the area of you at that particular point? What do I do?

That's right.

Okay, it's not, I'm not saying this is easy. It takes practice like anything else, right? So I still, my first reaction is always panic for about a millisecond until I realize, no, no, no, no, no, that's not going to work. Right. So, but everybody's first reaction is panic in the very beginning, right? When an event, but certainly in a situation like this, have you ever seen anybody have a seizure before? Okay. So one would look and go, so that's what a seizure looks like. Enid (25:52.7) Yes, I did, yes.

No!

See, get to decide, as Victor Frankl is teaching us, you don't have to freak out, my God, a seizure. You're in a hospital, they know how to handle seizures, right? So you don't have to worry about it. You're not taking care of the seizure patient. You're not in the street yourself and watching a person in front of you fall down and have a seizure. You're in a hospital, they'll take care of the seizure. But you don't have to freak out. You can say, well, they'll take care of the seizure and isn't this interesting? That's what a seizure looks like. I never seen one before, right? So you see what I'm saying? You train yourself to not freak out, to not stress out, but to look at it as another moment of your life that in this case is kind of interesting. So you don't like hospitals because you're not used to them. So think about people who go to the hospital every single day. Every day we're in the hospital, right? They don't think anything of it. Right. That's like you go into your office. Right. You're sitting in your office now. They go to their office and in their office, it turns out to be lots of sick people undergoing all kinds of crazy things. You know, a hospital, a hospital is not an emergency room. An emergency department is a small segment of a hospital. Right. So you're only seeing the most acute episodes or things that are happening instantaneously. I I've told you this when I was an intern. For some reason, I was blessed with spending three months in the emergency room. Right.

Yeah, right. Sure.

a lot for an intern. So I spent a lot of time in the emergency room. And first, I was catatonic, right? I was like, my God, what do I do? And then you learn and you get used to it. So that's, that's the way to deal with these things is to decide how you want to react to them. And you don't have to freak out. That's the point, right?

But you just said you did when you first got into that ER, you were catatonic.

For the first five minutes I was.

Five minutes. Okay.

Yeah, I just finished medical school a couple of, you know, a month earlier as my I was an intern at a major city hospital. I walk in and my first we call them rotations. My first assignment was to be in the emergency room. And I started on a Saturday night in an inner city emergency room. It is like jumping off a cliff, you know, a 500 foot cliff into ice cold water. Right. That's what it was like. And so for the first five minutes, I was I was catatonic. I didn't freak out, but I really couldn't move. I almost couldn't move.

Yeah.

I took a deep breath, whatever it works for you. And then you go, okay, I have to do this. You know, okay, I need to embrace this and I'll learn as I go and I'll figure it out. And this is probably going to be very challenging. And by the time the next couple of hours later, I was in the groove, right? It just became my new reality. That's another thing. You know, our reality is constantly changing. You know, you go into your, you're a college student and you go into your first department and You know, you look at it and okay, well, it's not my home, but I'll get you, you you make it a little nicer. You do what you can do. And then it becomes your home and you're used to it. And then your parents come and they walk in and they go, you live in this s-hole, right?

dump. Right, right, right.

What? And you go, what are you talking about? It's fine. It's fine. Because you're used to it. It's become your new baseline. But somebody else walking into it thinks, my God, this is a mess, right? It's disgusting. Whatever, right? We've all lived in disgusting apartments. I certainly have. So, you know, you get used to it. You'll get used to anything at some point, right? The whole point is to avoid the freak out part. That's what we're talking about. That's why you wanted to talk about. Let's avoid the super stress freak out part. And the shorter answer is,

Yeah.

Yeah.

Remember the Viktor Frankl rule. You get to decide how you feel. Your brain is interpreting this. Your brain is deciding this is scary. Your brain is deciding this is stressful. Your brain is doing this. Nothing else. The hospital is not saying I'm a stressful place. Your brain is deciding it's a stressful place. Okay, guess who's in control of your brain? You. That's what Viktor Frankl is telling you. just, yeah, the initial shock, you're not going to get over too well, all right? But immediately you should say, okay, wait a minute, wait a minute. I'm in control how I feel. I don't have to freak out. Now I'm to look at this. I'm going to see that person. Enid (29:52.7) Yeah.

have a seizure and go, well, I got to see what a seizure looked like. I never had a chance to do that before. That's interesting. That's how you have to do it, right? You have to reset the thermostat. have to accept what's happening around you in that sense and understand that you get to decide how you want to interpret it.

I'm going to end this because we're at the end by telling you that little secret. I'm sick of that. I'm on my way to the ER because I'm so sick. No, I actually, I spent seven and a half, almost eight hours in the emergency room with her. They did send her home. She was diagnosed with pneumonia. But during that time, and I was stressed, and I actually thought to myself, and I will admit this to you, Victor Frankl wouldn't have been stressed. He saw a lot worse.

I thought you were sick of me.

And it did calm me down a little bit. And I admit it helped. So I end this podcast by actually thanking you because you've taught me that. You've taught me that I'm in control and that because I'm in control, I've got to gain control. And that's the trick is gaining that control. So I end this podcast today by thanking you. I was telling you a story that was something that's been on my mind now because it happened last week. And I... And I wanted to say it publicly thank you for helping me get there. I'm not totally there, but I'm working my way. Working my way back to you. Anyway, I thank you. I will give you the final word because otherwise I'll keep singing and you don't want me to hear me. Sing. Okay, good.

I love when you sing and I would say this is a gift. This is a gift to people. If you can teach people to learn how to handle stress by understanding that it's self-imposed, that it's not external. Stress is generally not external. Your brain is interpreting everything. And I'm not talking about somebody coming at you with a knife or something like that. I'm talking about the kind of situations that cause stress in general. Even even those most fearsome ones, you are control how you feel. You get to decide. And once you believe that and understand it, because it is true, then as you practice it, gets better and better and better. And one day maybe we can all be like my wife.

With that, I thank you for another good conversation. We thank everybody for listening and tell everybody where they can write to us.

Question at wisdom from the aerial view.com. That'll get it done. Question at wisdom from the aerial view.com. Thank you everybody for listening. It's always a pleasure in it. I love our conversations. I wish we could do them every single day. Goodbye everybody.

One more time.

Thank you. I do too. Peace. Bye bye.