Living Less Stressed: Keeping Calm in the Chaos

By Jerry Ryan

Your one-stop shop for fighting stress, this book will have you living less stressed in as little as ten weeks.

Through a combination of evidence-based methods, you’ll learn about the power of your brain chemistry and its effects on your thoughts, emotions, sensations, and behavior. You’ll discover how your brain chemicals impact your response to stress and how those chemicals are connected to your diet. You’ll find out how positive self-talk breaks your old neuro-firing patterns of negative thought.

With powerful exercises to help re-wire the brain connections that are keeping you stuck in fear, worksheets to help you determine what direction to go in life, and food lists that support your brain chemistry, this book will help you turn your life around.

The best thing about learning your own brain chemistry is finding out that You are the Head Chemist of your own life!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781982256876

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Copyright © 2021 Jerry Ryan.

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ISBN: 978-1-9822-5686-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-5688-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-5687-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021915987

Balboa Press rev. date: 09/13/2021

DEDICATION

You know how itgoes. You pick up a book, flip to the dedication, and you see that, as usual, the writer has dedicated the book to someone else and not you.

Not this time.

This book is dedicated to you, dear reader. You’ve lived day after day with stress that makes it hard to get things done or even to think clearly. You’ve had to try shutting off the negative thoughts that constantly pop-up in your head like a game of mental Whack-A-Mole. You’ve missed out on a lot of things in life because you were worried or afraid.

It’s not an easy life when you’re stressed out. You can’t enjoy everyday pleasures. You won’t risk making a decision because it might be the wrong one. You feel stuck and nobody knows it. You don’t have a choice because you’re reacting on autopilot. You do what you need to do to survive the day.

This book is written for you, the anxious, the nervous, the worried, the stressed. Yes, it’s dedicated to you, along with my wife Marcy, my sons David and Daniel along with their wives Jodi and Jennifer, my grandchildren Christopher, Kylee, Kobe, Jordan, Brennan, and Brody, my brothers Terry, Pat, Pete, and Ernie, my mother Nona, my late father Jerry, and every client with anxiety whose stories you’ll read in the chapters.

In your hands, you have a way to change your old patterns and live your life less stressed. As Dr. Wayne Dyer said, When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Who Is This Guy and Why Should I Listen to Him?

CHAPTER 1

Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.

— Lily Tomlin

CHAPTER 2

The human mind, as it turns out, is messy.

— Ellen Ullman

CHAPTER 3

Life is not a journey you want to make on autopilot.

— Paula Rinehart

CHAPTER 4

The mind and body aren’t separate. What affects one, affects the other.

— Anonymous

CHAPTER 5

You always have two choices: your commitment versus your fear.

— Sammy Davis, Jr.

CHAPTER 6

You cannot believe everything you hear.

— Jude Morgan, British Author

CHAPTER 7

No problem is so big or so complicated that it can’t be run away from.

— Linus Van Pelt

CHAPTER 8

Most people are prisoners, thinking only about the future or living in the past. They are not in the present, and the present is where everything begins.

— Carlos Santana

CHAPTER 9

The voice in your head that says you can’t do this is a liar.

— Anonymous

CHAPTER 10

Edit your life frequently and passionately. It’s your masterpiece after all.

— Nathan W. Morris, Author Of The Art Of Getting Money

EPILOGUE

In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.

— Deepak Chopra

INTRODUCTION

Who Is This Guy and Why

Should I Listen to Him?

Bullying builds character like nuclear waste creates

superheroes. It’s a rare occurrence and often does much

more damage than endowment. — Zack W. Van

S tress in my life began early. My father worked for the federal government, and we moved a lot for his job. Every move we made meant that I had to go to a new school. By the time that I graduated from high school, I had been to eleven different schools. I was in a new house, a new neighborhood, and a new school every year. Getting used to each new place to live was hard because I knew that we would probably be moving again. But the hardest part was being the new kid in class again every year.

The bullying began in the second grade in a place that I thought was safe — the boys’ bathroom. Getting pushed, tripped, threatened, or punched became the common factor in every boys’ bathroom in every school that I attended. Fear became my constant companion in school. The anxiety that I felt tied my stomach in knots every morning. Some days, it would make me throw up before school. It got so scary that I started avoiding going to the bathroom at all. That didn’t turn out well. Wetting my pants at school when I was in the third and fourth grade was my introduction to public humiliation. You can imagine the teasing that happened. The stress got so bad in the fifth grade that our family doctor told my parents that I had pre-ulcer conditions and they put me on a baby food diet for a few months.

By the time I got to high school, I had turned to alcohol as the way to handle the stress. As a freshman, I had even begun sneaking cherry vodka into school with me. A friend and I would sneak out to the parking lot at lunchtime and chug a half-pint. It definitely made the afternoon drafting class flow smoothly. Freshman year was my first contact with marijuana, the herb superb, as it was called by my classmates. I was introduced to marijuana by a pothead from California who sat next to me in World History. He had long hair in a rural county high school and because of that, he was an ‘outsider.’ I understood that title completely since it was stuck on me too. We became buddies quickly.

The first few times, there wasn’t much of a buzz or at least not one that I noticed. However, the stress about getting caught showed up in full battle gear. Rural Midwest communities weren’t very open-minded about smoking marijuana back in the early 70s. It didn’t seem like the marijuana was relaxing my tension at all. So, I smoked more, a trend I continued as time passed.

As high school progressed and I moved from school to school, the bullying continued. The first turning point in my stress came at the local YMCA. I began taking a judo class which led to me getting a set of weights to work out with at home. I began to see that there might be another way to handle the bullies and the other stresses in my life. I went to the library and began checking out books on meditation in my search for calmness. This was the beginning of my education on how my body and mind worked together.

But the stress had built a fortress in my head. Even though I was on the football team in my last two years of high school, that didn’t stop the bullying. I just got bullied by my teammates instead. So, I continued smoking marijuana and added over-the-counter medications to my stress relief program.

I continued taking martial arts classes to help with my self-esteem and to continue learning how to battle the bullies. The Eastern philosophy that I was learning sparked an interest in Buddhism, Taoism and other belief systems that had been around for centuries. I began reading books such as The Tibetan Book of the Dead¹, The Egyptian Book of the Dead², The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley³, and The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda⁴. I was still looking for the key that would unlock my inner peace.

As I began college, I began to think that enlightenment doesn’t come from reading but from actual experience. While under the stress of going to college full time and working full-time, I continued to use marijuana, over-the-counter drugs and alcohol along with weightlifting and martial arts to handle my stress. My search for escape from the stress was led by my misguided brain to add psychedelics to my journey. Having read the books, I wanted the experience it firsthand. The early 70s was a playground for anyone seeking a drug-induced, psychedelic experience. During that time, I became friends with Mickey Mouse blotter acid, purple microdot, and other psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms. I have often told people that I took enough acid to melt a battleship. I would continue the psychedelics for a long time, stopping for a while, and then revisiting them like they were my old buddies from time to time over the years.

With the lack of a true goal for college and being stuck in such classes as Anthropology and first semester Russian language, I lost interest in school. Besides that, there were no promotion opportunities at my job. The stress increased.

Having grown up near military installations throughout the United States, a solution to the job stress presented itself — join the Army! Let me assure you that there is no lack of stress in boot camp. Physical and mental demands are placed on you and punishments are given to not just those who fail but to everyone in the group.

After basic training, I was sent to San Antonio, Texas for training at the Armed Forces Medical Education and Training Campus. I was taught the basics of how to be a combat medic and then I went to classes to be a surgical technician. I would learn later that the combat medic training meant that I could be deployed in a combat zone at any time if needed. Luckily, that never happened.

I graduated from the classes in December and headed for Fort Benning, Georgia for six weeks of on-the-job training in an operating room. This was the Army’s center for training Airborne paratroopers, Army Rangers, and other testosterone-heavy troops. After the OJT experience that included working on several paratroopers who didn’t land well, I had a two-week break before I had to be at my assigned base.

I had been engaged to Marcy since I signed up for the Army and we had planned our wedding for New Year’s Eve. It just happened to be during the two-week break. We got married despite a snowstorm that kept several guests from getting there. After the reception, we packed up the car and headed for my assigned post.

During my four years in the military, I worked in the operating room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center as a surgical technician. Between the overbearing and demanding personalities of many of the surgeons and the fact that people can and do die during surgery, work stress was high. Working in the operating room was stressful on its own, but the amount that I was getting paid was below poverty level. It takes a long time for the paperwork to move through a bureaucracy like the Army, so I was getting only $390 a month while trying to find a place to live in Washington, DC. The cost of living in DC was insane. The average apartment would cost almost my entire month’s pay. The apartment managers wouldn’t even accept an application unless you made the amount of your rent payment in one week. Doing the math, it was practically impossible to find a $100 apartment. We ended up spending our first year of marriage living in a rundown apartment complex where gunshots in the middle of the night were common. Lack of money also meant no marijuana or alcohol to help with the new financial stress and the psychological stress of living in a nighttime war zone.

Luckily, Marcy got a job as a pharmacy technician and the Army eventually got my paperwork filed. Our income more than doubled but it still wasn’t enough to meet the high cost of living in the DC area. To bring in more money, I started working as a delivery driver for the major pharmacy where Marcy worked. After a short time, I was trained to do unit dose medications in peel packs to be delivered to various nursing homes. That gave me access to the entire gambit of pills. I was like a kid in a candy store.

The owner of the pharmacy was a man in his thirties with a major drug problem. The bottom drawer of his desk was full of bottles of amphetamines, barbiturates, and other psychoactive goodies. They were supposed to be returned or destroyed because they were expired. But expired didn’t mean that they weren’t still working. Besides the owner’s little drug stash, one of the pharmacists was concocting his own self-medication cocktails on a daily basis from the pills in stock.

The owner introduced me to his drug of choice — cocaine. Following that introduction, cocaine got added to my list of self-treatment options along with a laundry list of prescription drugs that I had within easy reach. I was working two full-time jobs and trying to spend time with my family so I took things that would keep me awake. During this time, we had our first son, David. Nothing like the extra little stress of a newborn child.

My use of psychedelics continued too. My friends and I would take LSD and drive around, visiting all the local attractions like the Washington Monument, the National Botanical Gardens, and the Smithsonian Institute. However, I didn’t limit it to recreational times only. There were several occasions where I had taken LSD and worked in the operating room. There were no bad outcomes from any of those episodes though. In fact, it seemed to bring a sense of premonition or mental connection with the surgeon that felt almost telepathic. Words weren’t needed. I was handing him the surgical instruments before he requested them. While I thought everything was going well, the overload of the work hours, the drug use, and the stress of working in a military setting finally broke me down.

I was working night shift in the operating room, and we had no surgeries to do. I had worked at the pharmacy all day and made sure to take some amphetamines before going to work that night. With no work to keep me focused, I tried reading. After reading the same paragraph five or six times, I realized that reading wasn’t going to slow things down for me. I started cleaning the break rooms. Working in a sterile environment requires constant cleaning to kill all the possible critters that can contaminate. After not only cleaning both break rooms but rearranging them a couple of times, I knew that I needed to ask for help. My brain was racing so fast, it felt like smoke must be coming out of my ears. I turned to my supervisor and explained my problem. He sent me to the Drug and Alcohol Rehab Department where I did a one-week stay on the Psych ward in case I went through amphetamine withdrawal. Fortunately, nothing like that happened. I was then transferred to an inpatient rehab facility for a month of recovery training. It gave me more insight into why I was using drugs and alcohol but no real, long-lasting instructions on how NOT to do it again. The rehab worked for a little while. It was long enough to finish my time with the Army and not lose the benefits that came with that. I was glad to get out and even more glad that I didn’t get booted out with a dishonorable discharge for drug use.

When I got out of the Army, I wanted a job with very little stress, so I began working the graveyard shift as a clerk in a convenience store while attending college. Within a few months, I was promoted to store manager and the stress level went back up as did my use of alcohol and my other favorite drugs — marijuana, amphetamines, and psychedelics.

With our family growing from the addition of our second son, Daniel, and the subsequent need for more income, I returned to working in the operating room. I hadn’t worked in an operating room for a couple of years so my anxiety about being able to get a job was very high. My fears were not realistic even though they felt like they were based in 100% fact. I ended up getting a job at the first hospital where I interviewed.

After the management found out that I was highly skilled as a technician, I was selected to work with some of the specialty surgeons along with their special personalities — demanding, condescending, and arrogant. Working with these individuals kept my stress level high even though I was doing weightlifting and martial arts several times a week. The stress was so high that I would often call in sick because of stomach trouble. I would wake up feeling fine but during my walk out to the car, I would puke almost every day. Because I had sinus problems since high school, I would blame the vomiting on post-nasal drip. I thought that the change from a heated house to the cold, damp outdoors was causing my sinuses to drain and making me throw up. I now know that it was the stress.

To escape the surgeons of the day shift, I moved to night shifts as a member of the trauma team. It seems like that would be more stressful, but it was actually more focused on lifesaving and not on personalities. Another side benefit from night shift was the slow pace when there were no emergencies.

It was during one of those slow-paced nights that a new stress entered my life. On Father’s Day 1987, I was attacked on the job by someone looking to steal narcotics. The attack happened roughly one year after a previous break-in where narcotics were stolen, and a similar theft happened about one year after I was assaulted. I never saw it coming.

The night shift started as usual. My coworker and I got the shift change report and we started doing the routine nightly tasks such as restocking surgical supplies in each room and setting them up for their scheduled surgeries the next day. We had sixteen operating rooms to prepare, and they were separated into two different areas of the hospital. There were ten rooms in the south hospital and six rooms in the north hospital about a quarter mile walk through the hospital corridors. Around midnight, I gathered all the restocking supplies for the north hospital and pushed the cart across the skybridge to the north hospital.

I was working in one of the rooms, preparing it for a total knee replacement surgery the next morning. My next memory is being back in the south hospital operating room office, giving my beeper and keys to the north OR back to my coworker and telling her that I needed to take a nap. The next thing that I remember is being lifted from the couch in the break room and seeing a massive bloodstain on the pillow where I had my head.

An investigation determined that I had been struck from behind with a heavy blunt object. It fractured my skull from the lower left side in the back of my head moving up and around my left ear. I was in a coma for five days and the neurosurgeons had given a 5% chance to live. My wife and sons had been contacted by the nursing staff, and they sat in my room, waiting to see what would happen.

There are times in life when knowledge isn’t such a good thing. This was one of those times. There were a couple of times during the coma when I had brief episodes of consciousness. Each time I woke up, I looked around the room. I knew that I was in a hospital bed and that there was a table next to my head. The table had an item sitting on it that I recognized as a sterilized package used for surgical instruments. The masking tape holding the gray cloth wrapper in place read Burr Hole Tray.

I knew what that meant. Neurosurgeons use a burr hole tray to relieve the pressure on the brain when a person has had a head trauma of some kind. The process is simple and almost medieval. They take a small crank-style hand drill and put a drill bit in that’s about as big around as your thumb. Then, they drill a hole in your skull! After those thoughts, I faded back into the darkness of unconsciousness.

Luckily, the burr hole wasn’t needed because I came out of the coma. When I woke up, I wanted out of that hospital as quickly as possible. I didn’t want to risk being attacked again. Of course, the doctors wanted to keep me in the hospital for observation, but my fear was not going to let that happen. I was out of there as quickly as I could sign the discharge paperwork.

The following 18 months was a roller coaster of stress. The assault had caused brain damage and there were things happening in my head that I had no control over. The new stress involved:

• trying to balance a checkbook and not remembering what 7+7 equals

• stopping in the middle of a sentence to try to figure out what word I wanted to use when talking about everyday things like a refrigerator or a car

• being afraid of being attacked again caused me to stay awake each night until after 1 o’clock since that’s when I had been attacked on the job

• realizing that I had almost been killed despite all my years of martial arts training

That stress about almost