APEs and Antidotes
During the period of my serious book indulgence of the last few months, I picked up a book I purchased at the 2003 International Coach Federation conference. I’d loaned the book to others but had never QUITE got around to reading it myself. Yes I DID say 2003!
My purchase had been the common knee-jerk reaction to an excellent speaker. You know what I mean! "That was a great lecture, I MUST buy his book." And get him to sign it as well!!
And I think that’s why I hadn’t read it. I was somehow ashamed of being sucked into that kind of purchase, but really that’s the way of the world and conferences and business. (So, go get over yourself, Chris!)
The book was HighLife 24/7: Balance Your Body Chemistry And Feel Uplifted by Matt Church. (Here’s a link to Church talking, he IS a terrific speaker.)
Yeah, it sounds a bit wanky but in fact Church, an Aussie of course, has every good reason to write this book. He has a BSc in Applied Science and has worked and researched extensively with the Australian Council of Health and Physical Recreation.
I married a scientist so that I would have a built-in Scientific Interpreter for myself. (Amongst other reasons like love and lust, of course.) That would mean that I would never have to struggle to understand the scientific or the mathematical, they’d be his job to understand and convert into non-scientific (and therefore less scary) information for me! (In other words, science is NOT my forte and I would commonly shy right away from any reading in that area!)
But Church has done a great job of putting body chemistry into Everyman’s language and making it easy to see how it relates to YOU as an individual, very EARLy in the book. No need for SweetP, the Scientific Interpreter here!
So having established that I was an Adrenaline Junkie, I realised that much of the stress in my life is due to my constant overdosing on adrenaline. This forces my body to constantly pump out cortisol to keep up with me, instead of keeping cortisol for emergency uses.
As an ex-nurse, (Yes not entirely unscientific after all) what Church was talking about fitted the knowledge I’d learned (way back in the eons of time) about the body’s disease responses to these kinds of natural body chemicals. In other words, I KNEW he was making scientific sense. I also KNEW because the information resonated so strongly with the symptoms I’ve always displayed.
Now that I’m closer to the end of my life rather the start, I am all too aware of how precious my body is to me and how much it’s cracking up on me! So I stopped and listened to Church’s words.
The biggest assistance I got from this book was the reminder that I have a choice as to how much adrenaline I seek. Clearly my inclination can’t be entirely disspelled, but I can remember to mete out my adrenaline a little more carefully by asking myself is this an Adrenaline Priority Event (an APE)? How many APEs do I need in my day? And most of all, to start implementing APE Antidote Strategies for when I overindulge in that ever-so-exciting chemical!
I real day-to-day terms, that means things like:
- making sure that I leave enough space between clients to go and sit and meditate for 10 minutes and allow any emotional/adrenaline uptake to subside.
- not creating artificial deadlines (often unrealistic ones as well) to cause surges in adrenaline and when depleted, bursts of body-toxic cortisol.
- trialling different ways to create a buffer between walking out of my home office at the end of the day and walking the 5 metres to my kitchen to take up my role of wife, cook etc! (Without the drive home with radio blaring seventies rock, I don’t have time to wind down from my day.)
So can I recommend you take a look at High Life 24/7? It’s a short, easy, and fascinating read!
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