Managing Open Loops and Stress

I call this death by a thousand to-dos or a thousand

open loops. So let's talk about these open loops.

These open loops, these little everyday open loops,

are all the

things that I'm sure are even on your mind right now.

This is the email you haven't sent.

This is the Amazon thing you have to s- send back, right?

You gotta go to UPS for that. This is that conversation you need to have with

somebody. This is that, uh, new sports team you have to

sign your kid up for that you forgot about, right?

This is that thing you, uh, your husband or your wife asked you to do.

All of these are open loops that are happening in our brain all the time,

and every single one of these open loops, our brain

perceives it as a potential threat, which means it

creates a stress response, okay? And this stress response is designed

to mobilize the resources,

increase the energy our body's making, so that we can

assess and address

each one of these open loops. Now, this is the key right here,

because

if we don't assess and address these open loops, well,

as we all know,

they just keep coming. And eventually, these open loops

start to turn into these little arrows, these little daggers,

okay? Because they're not going away, and your stress

r- system is, is staying turned on all the time,

and this is one of those

things that keeps us in the chronic stress cycle.

We have to learn, we have to have a system for

navigating these thousand to-dos and open loops.

And the best way to do this, okay, is the way you

assess these things is you gotta get them all written down on

a piece of

paper. All the things, all the open loops, all the

things that you need to solve for, you gotta write it all

down. And then, this is where our skills come in,

you have to identify no more than three

every day. There should never be more than three,

uh, critical open loops that you have to solve for each day.

Every day I have three things that are the most critical things for me to get

done,

and anything I do outside of that is a bonus.

This is a s- way that your system can start to not

perceive every open loop as a threat.

You gotta assess and you gotta address.

In the next video, we're gonna talk about the bigger open

loops

that can really create damage and really create a

never-ending chronic stress. I'll see you in the next video.