What's the Worst that Could Happen?

This is the first in an indeterminate number of volumes authored by Dale Holbrook (internationally renowned creator of the “So?” method of accountability avoidance) designed to help those afflicted with anxiety create a stress free life.

Many people suffer from stress in some aspect of their lives, be it at work, home or outside a pay toilet while wearing pants with no pockets.  In fact, I would venture to say, without any research data to back me up, that at some point in a lifetime every human being suffers anxiety about something.  And let me set your mind at ease.  You will never be able to eliminate the sources of stress in your life.  They are just going to keep hammering away at you from birth canal to sepulcher; day after day, year after year (and for those Hindus out there, lifetime after lifetime), relentless in their assault on your peace of mind.

Yes! Yes, you got it, because if you have no pockets, you have no change! Now back to the point.

First, some personal history; I learned at an early stage in my life (pre-alcohol, of course) that my personal reaction to stress was sleeplessness.  And as I love to sleep as I love living, it was obvious that I must find methods of driving the stress out of my life, or at least my perception of life.

This series of essays is intended to share my experiences in developing stress elimination techniques for my own use in hopes that it will offer you some guidance in building your own stress fighting arsenal. To keep it simple, and reduce the need for you to reconcile conflicting concepts, I will limit the content of these missives to one approach per.

The first is, and I know that those of you who have spent time with me will recognize this, “What’s the worst that can happen?”

Well, that’s it in a nutshell. Yeah, I guess that sums it up pretty nicely. But, as I write to boost my self-esteem (remember, you don’t pay to read these… so you owe me) and a writer’s self-esteem is measured by word count, I will continue.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” is predicated on the belief that most stress is induced by the need to make a decision; the more imminent and hazardous the event, the greater the stress level, but this approach works for trivial matters just as well.  Let me give you a somewhat contrived, albeit historically validated, example.

Let’s say you are taking a leisurely stroll through the Burmese jungle one afternoon, having left your 12 bore Howdah Double Rifle at the lodge because of its prohibitive weight and the dearth of suitable gun bearers due to a lackey labor-management dispute when unexpectedly you happen into sunlit clearing concurrently in the possession of a tiger. Suddenly, you notice your stress level leaps into the red zone.  Now those uninitiated into my techniques will immediately identify the tiger as the source of subject anxiety (or stress, if you will, but is this really the time to pick nits, your staring down a lethal killer and all?) But there you would be wrong.  The tiger is not the source of stress.  He is there and will decide on his course of action without regard to your needs, want and concerns. Your stress is one hundred percent driven by your need to make a decision as how to handle this all too common phenomenon.  Your choices would seem to be limited to: a) run like hell (GTFO in testosterone speak), or b) yell loud enough to strike fear into the heart of the beast (let’s face it, in the world of flight or fight, screaming like a little girl is likely to be as successful as any other defensive maneuver one could employ in this oft reported scenario) hoping he will opt to avoid conflict now in favor of finding a more cooperative meal in the future.

So then, to the application of my technique: Having identified the source of stress is your need to make a life affecting decision post haste, we turn our attention to the options and their likely outcomes upon implementation.  First, you could run for your life.  What’s the worst that could happen? Well, as we know that the large predatory mammals are genetically programmed to chase down and kill fleeing prey, the worst that could happen is you would die.  If you die, then what do you have to worry about?  Nothing, stress supplanted by recognition of one’s own fate.

Then what of option two?  You begin shouting and waving your arms in a threatening manner. The tiger is suitably annoyed by both the noise and your impudence in the face of a fifteen-hundred pound killing machine and he chooses to use you as a claw sharpening implement to allay his disgust at your pitiful behavior. What’s the worst that could happen? Once again, you would die. Then what would you have to worry about?  I think you are probably starting to understand the power of this stress elimination process.

There is yet another option. You could stand there whimpering (I’ll bet you are wishing you’d paid the extra money for the waterproof boots right about now) frozen to inaction. The tiger is moved to embarrassment by your girl-like display and leaves for another part of the jungle in hopes he can find one of his deer-eating buddies to share his new joke, “Did you hear the one about the hunter who wandered into the jungle without his Howdah?”