Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life by Trevor G Blake

trigger a negative thought-image, and the material realization of that comes into your life, not the thing or person that caused your thought.
    The problem is compounded by the simple fact that, in order to influence us, people or media must hold our attention long enough to create a reaction. Fear paralyzes. It works better than any other emotion to keep us entranced long enough for whatever message they have. Media and people tend to hold us fixated by making us feel anxious, perhaps with gossip, a rumor, or a dramatic headline.
    The effects of fear are important to understand if you want to get out of the quicksand. As soon as you feel fear, the amygdala (a small, almond-shaped organ in the center of your brain) sends signals to your autonomic nervous system, producing a wide range of effects. Your heart rate increases, your blood pressure goes up, your breathing gets quicker, and stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol are released.
    Robert Sapolsky, a professor of neuroendocrinology at Stanford University, has focused his research on issues of stress and neural degeneration. He has won many honors for his papers that show links between long-term stressful life experiences, long-term exposure to hormones such as cortisol, produced during stress, and shrinking of the hippocampus area of the brain.
    The hippocampus is a mass of neurons, each with multiple branch-like extensions (dendrites and axons) that make connections (synapses) with other neurons all across the brain. The hippocampus is also one of the few regions of the brain known to be able to produce new neurons, a process called neurogenesis.
    Professor Sapolsky has shown that enduring a high stressor,like watching fearful news or listening to someone spread a stressful rumor at work, for more than thirty minutes, negatively impacts the hippocampus in various ways. To begin, sustained exposure to higher than normal levels of cortisol results in the pruning back of the number of branches and synaptic connections of hippocampal neurons. By a variety of mechanisms, these conditions also increase the rate of cell death in this region of the brain.
    As if this wasn’t bad enough, recent research is demonstrating that sustained increases in glucocorticoid levels also have negative effects, impairing the hippocampus’s ability to create new neurons. Over a period of time, all of this results in the shrinking in size of the hippocampus with associated declines in cognitive function, including the ability to retain new information and adapt to new situations, which is exactly what you don’t want when you are attempting to reinvent your life .
    Fortunately, according to Sapolsky, the negative effects of excessive stress can not only be stopped but reversed “once the source, psychological or physical, is removed or sufficiently reduced.” Simple! Change a little, change a lot.
Chronic Complainers
    Think about the day you have had so far. How many times did someone complain about something to you directly or within your hearing? It may have been a trivial matter like the weather or something significant they saw in the newspaper such as the state of the economy. How often did you automatically join in? Did you start a chat by having a little moan about something? Think about all of your Twitter posts, texts, and emails and which of them were critical of a thing or person.
    Although the criticisms may be slight, they accumulate in the course of a day into an avalanche of negativity that raises anxiety.It is scary when you stop to think about it and realize how many of the words being mapped out are negative. Whether verbal, written, or electronic, they have the same impact.
    Many people revel in gossip and rumor mongering. It bonds them quickly and is the easiest way to make allies. Because it’s so contagious, we can slip into the habit innocently. It holds groups together like glue, and you cannot reinvent yourself as part of a group. The aim is for you to