Arthur Ciaramicoli

Thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

Well, stress really is produced mostly by misperception.

When we're perceiving inaccurately, we produce stress and we produce the stress hormone cortisol.

And when we do that, we narrow our ability to think in a more expansive way, and it also reduces our capacity for empathy, meaning that when our thinking becomes narrow, and that is a result of the stress hormone cortisol, we can't see things very clearly, and we tend to perceive in distorted ways.

Well, you may be, but the issue is, and here's where empathy comes in, Mike, is empathy is really about perceiving beyond the surface.

So if you're in a stressful situation, the question is, can you slow down your perceptions enough and slow down your reactions enough to see the truth so that you can make very good decisions rather than making quick, impulsive decisions based on narrow thinking?

Well, you know, when we needed to be protected against tigers, yes, we had that flight system activated through our brains that makes us want to run away.

produce these stress hormones that allow us to do that make our heart beat faster and get more energy and sugar into our muscles but most of the time today in our current world in our civilized world we're producing stress when we're sitting in a chair not going anywhere if your boss walks by you and he has a frown and you think that it's because he's angry and upset with you you produce the stress response then later you found out that he has a migraine this morning and

And he wasn't even thinking about you, but you overreacted because your perceptions were distorted.

And again, that's where empathy comes in, because empathy allows us to slow down our perception, find out where our biases are, and that's where cognitive behavioral therapy helps, because it focuses on the distortion we make in thinking, like generalizing or mind reading.

And in that case, the person would be mind reading.

They'd say, oh, gee, he's frowning.

He must be upset with me when, in fact, the poor guy has a migraine.

He's not even thinking of the teacher sitting in the classroom.

It's very hard to do, Mike, but if we practice the development of empathy, we more and more learn where our biases are, how they come from the past.

And when we realize which kind of cognitive distortions we tend to use repeatedly, we can filter them out over time.

And when we're in a stressful situation, we tend not to use them.

The more we become disciplined about trying as much as we can to perceive accurately.

We kind of learn our old records, our old stories, and when we get a sense of repeating those old ways of perceiving, those ways of perceiving that we know are not based on the truth, we can tend to discard them much quicker than in the past.