I know you're okay but. . .

Linda Ferguson, NLP Canada Training
I Know You’re
Okay but. . .  
@canstockphoto.ca/KevDraws/

I Know You’re Okay, But. . . 3
A System of Brain, Body, Mind and Social Connection 5
The 4 Problems You Might Want to Solve Now 7
Three Ways to Make Change Happen 9
How Do You Know You’re Lonely? 11
When You Need Company, Walk in Someone Else’s Shoes 12
Conquer Loneliness By Looking At Connection 13
An Action Is Worth A Thousand Words 15
When Does Stress Become A Problem? 17
Remember to Breathe 18
Make Friends With Your Purpose 20
Genuine Play Drives Out Stress 21
How Tired Are You And How Are You Tired? 23
Wind Down With Low Impact Movement 24
Where’s Your Quiet Place? 25
Choose Presence Over Problem Solving 26
Are You Restless? 28
Add Meaning to Movement 29
What Will You Remember A Year From Now? 30
Hang Out With Someone Who Stretches Your Mind 32
Taking The Next Step 34
Loneliness, Stress, Fatigue and Restlessness 35
Change Happens In All Parts of the System 36
Join A Community That Knows How to Play 37
5 Books To Stretch Your Understanding of You 39
Linda R. Ferguson, Ph.D. 39

I Know You’re Okay, But. . .
There are two kinds of people: people who are okay and people who are
definitely not okay. If you’re not okay, it’s hard to find help that will work
for you. Being not okay takes many forms, and the key to getting back to
being okay is a great therapeutic relationship. It’s hard to keep “dating”
helpers until you find a good match.
This book might help you be patient while you go through the process of
finding what you need.
If you’re okay, it’s almost impossible to find good help. People who are
okay are busy, functioning adults with responsibilities they are managing.
They are often uncomfortable with needing help because their problems
seem trivial to others. After all, if you are smart, successful and have
friends and family, you’ve got what everyone wants. What kind of help
could you need?
You know there are days you wish you had a better answer for what ails
you. You know there are times in your life when you suffer in silence
because you’re not sure what you need and the people around you all
think you’re doing great. Maybe you feel ashamed of wanting help, as
though the mark of a grown up were to handle all things independently.
Maybe you feel like there’s something broken in you and no one will be
able to see it, much less fix it. Maybe you’re just too tired and too busy to
figure it out.
This book will help you figure it out. We’ll cover how the social nature of
the human being means we all do better with interaction and support.
We’ll explore how the mind/body/brain system thrives with the right kind
of connections to ideas, to environments, and to other people. And we’ll

practice making small changes in state, perspective and relationships that
result in tangible improvements in your well being and productivity. And
we’ll give you a great start in an hour or two, so you can get on with all
the things you’re already doing so well. Because there’s already so much
that is right with you and right with your life and work. It only takes a small
change to make a big difference.

A System of Brain, Body, Mind and Social Connection
What makes a person a person? There are four essential components that
interact to make up one human being. To make a person, you need a
brain, a body, a mind and a network of social connection. You might think
you could survive with only three of the four, but you wouldn’t know
yourself as a person (and no one else would recognize you as a person)
without all four.
Let’s start wth the brain. There are lots of sci-ﬁ books and movies that
have speculated about whether you would remain the same person if all
that stayed alive was your brain. You know that when your brain dies, you
die too. Your brain is the center of operations for your interaction with the
world. It seems to generate your mind (the part of your brain you can
know without science), run your body, process sensory data about the
state of your body and your world, and use pattern recognition to
generate behaviours that keep you alive and functioning. Your brain is
still more complicated than a computer (even a really big computer) and
it operates with massively more information than your mind can handle.
You need a brain to be human.
But the people who study the brain have an intuition that you could not
have a normally organized human brain without a body. This is intuitively
correct to most of us, since we use our bodies every day to be our main
interface with everything outside us, from the atmosphere to objects to
other people. Descartes said “I think therefore I am” but most of us know
that we are because our bodies tell us so with a mind-boggling range of
pain, perceptions, movement and pleasures. The idea of being a living
brain trapped outside a living body is the kind of stuff we use to make
horror ﬁlms and nightmares. So we can probably agree that a person
requires a body.

A person also requires a mind. Your mind is the part of you that makes
meaning of the sensations and perceptions generated by your body and
your brain. It’s often wrong or illogical or annoying, but your mind is your
awareness of yourself. It’s the part of you that feels the same whether you
are nine or ninety and because the mind has no physical reality (we can’t
study it the way we study brains and bodies) it is the part of you that
seems immortal. The only thing more frightening than your mind is the
thought of being mindless. Even when it doesn’t feel like your best friend,
you need your mind.
Most of our models of being human stop here. If you have a brain, a body
and a mind, then you meet the requirements for being recognized (by
yourself and others) as a human being. You have everything you need to
make the claim “I think, therefore I am.” But having all of this and nothing
else is like having a single dot on a page. You don’t know what it means
and there’s not much you can do with it.
To be a fully functioning human being, you need to be connected to
others. Just as one dot has a function or meaning in terms of other dots,
people create meaning and results by interacting with other people. Your
thinking is more complete when you explore the thoughts of other
people. You have feelings about physical things (hurts! ick!) but you have
emotions about situations that involve the way you connect with other
people. Your body beneﬁts from connections with other bodies. Human
beings are pack animals and we thrive in connection with a pack.
Without others, we struggle to see our own experience or to learn from it.
We have no one to check our blind spots, and no one else’s experience
to observe, replicate or improve. Perhaps you would be better off without
other people, but probably not. You need connection for maximum
adaptation and learning. And you need connection to thrive.

The 4 Problems You Might Want to Solve Now
As the saying goes, the 4 part system that makes you human comes with
some bad news and some good news. First, the bad news: if any of the
four components that make up the system are out of whack, the whole
system suffers. The good news is that you can use the whole system to
make the system better again.
There are lots of problems that emerge when the system is out of whack.
At the extremes, they are relatively easy to identify and you won’t feel bad
about looking for healing or help. You do not need this book to do that.
You need this book to help you address the common, everyday
symptoms of a system that is out of whack. For lots of reasons, these are
the problems that you experience when you’re basically okay, problems
that it can be hard to ﬁnd someone to help you solve.
The ﬁrst problem is loneliness. It’s the consequence of not having our
social connections work the way we want them to work. We want
connections to make us feel safe and motivated. While we all like to feel a
little bit special, no one likes to feel alone in the world. It’s especially hard
to feel that you are lonely while you are surrounded by people who
demand your attention. You are sure to feel lonely sometimes (it seems to
be an epidemic) so it’s worth spending a little attention to think about the
best way to solve the problem of loneliness.
The next problem is stress. Stress is not always a problem, but when it is a
problem you know it because it strains your ability to connect with your
body, with your best self, and with other people. You don’t need a lot of
information on what causes stress because you probably already know.
While it sometimes takes a while for you to recognize, other people will
see the signs of stress in you and tell you about them. This will not often

seem helpful (since stress throws your connections out of whack). As an
epidemic, it’s probably almost equal to loneliness in the numbers of
people afﬂicted.
Another problem you probably want to solve (because it is also
epidemic) is fatigue. You might be tired emotionally (social connection),
mentally (your mind) or physically (in your body). Your brain doesn’t get
tired, but that doesn’t help because it exists outside your awareness. All
the parts of you that you know can get tired. And when you are tired,
everything is slower and harder and all problems feel worse. If you are
physically tired, you might be able to arrange some rest (or not) but it’s
harder to ﬁnd obvious solutions to being emotionally and mentally
exhausted.
A fourth problem is restlessness. Your brain is supposed to keep all your
systems in whack. It recognizes when you are lonely or stressed or
otherwise not well-balanced, and it looks for solutions. This shows up in
your awareness as restlessness. You want something, but you do not yet
know what it is. You know what you have is not satisfying you but nothing
else seems likely to work better. You want change but you also crave
security and stability. There’s a lot of churn in mind and body and
connections when you can’t settle down and focus because nothing you
have chosen feels like a good choice. Restlessness is good (because it
motivates a search for better alternatives) but it feels bad.
And it feels worse because it means you do not know what you want in a
world where you are always supposed to know what you want. That’s
what we expect of smart, successful, connected people like you. So
restlessness not only results from a system that is out of whack; it
interferes with the changes that are necessary for the system to come
back into balance and well-being.

Three Ways to Make Change Happen
Now for the good news. You can approach each of these problems using
different parts of the integrated system that makes you human. You don’t
have to solve a problem where it shows up: you can change the system
by changing any part of the system. In practice, this means that you can
change the way you feel (physiology involves the body and the brain) or
the way you think (changing perspective by giving your mind new
thoughts to think) or the way you connect (other people are part of the
solution).
Changing your body changes your emotions. That’s why we use the word
“feeling” to describe both physical sensations and emotions. A long walk
will not solve every problem, but it will often bring new alternatives into
awareness. Changing your body also changes your brain (that’s one of
the meanings of neuroplasticity). While you can’t influence your brain
directly (it remains outside of your awareness), you can change it by
repeating new behaviours which create new connections in the brain. In
the rest of the book, I’ll suggest a way to open up each of the 4 problems
using your physical self.
You can also change your mind. The thing that makes this difficult is that
your mind is always trying to settle on just one meaning and it resists
change. Psychologists call it confirmation bias: once your mind has an
idea in its grip, it does its best to make new information support that idea.
We’ll look at some ways you can shift your perspective so that your mind
is willing to try out new alternatives when you are experiencing any of the
4 problems.
The other way to get yourself back into whack is to connect with others.
We all need other people because our connection with them is our

fastest, most effective route to learning what is possible. It’s also our
safest and most economical way to test alternatives (it’s always cheaper to
learn from someone else’s mistakes). Social connections are not just an
antidote to loneliness; they can open up more satisfying alternatives
whatever problem you are experiencing.
So let’s get started making change happen.

How Do You Know You’re Lonely?
How do you know you’re lonely? Making things better begins with
knowing what problem you are trying to solve. For each of the 4
problems, understanding how you construct your experience of the
problem will be a guide to knowing what to change to achieve a better
result.
Loneliness is tricky: it’s not the experience of being alone. It’s the
experience of feeling disconnected, often while surrounded by people. If
you’re lonely, you need to stop and think about the kind of connections
you already have, what you are giving your attention, and what feelings or
thoughts are showing up that let you know you are lonely.
Here’s a process for stabilizing your experience of being lonely. Begin
with a time when you are sure you were lonely in the past. As you
remember that time, step into your memory as if you could replay it. See
what you see, hear what you hear, and feel what you feel in your body
when you are lonely. Scan through your experience, then step all the way
back out of that experience and answer these questions.
• What was true about you when you were lonely? Think about what you
felt, what you did and what the voice in your head was telling you.
• What was true about your connections with other people when you
were lonely? Think about whether you were alone or surrounded by
others. Were you thinking about people? What did you remember or
imagine other people saying?
• What was true about your connection to your environment when you
were lonely? Were you in a crowded, noisy place or a quiet, remote

place? Was there movement around you? Was it a place to work or a
place to relax? What else do you notice about the place and time when
you were lonely?
Now work through your descriptions asking yourself, “Could I still be
lonely if this one factor were different?”
Some people find that just being able to accurately describe loneliness
makes it possible to avoid triggers or to see ways to make it harder to feel
lonely.
When You Need Company, Walk in Someone Else’s
Shoes
Have you ever watched people walk? Each person has a distinctive step
and rhythm. You’ll find you can get a good read on people just by
watching how they move. You’ll also find that it is hard to be lonely and to
be connected through movement at the same time.
When you don’t want to feel lonely, get outside and walk where there are
other people. This means you can’t go on a solitary walk through a
brooding forest and expect that to change your mood. It is likely to be
what you feel like doing when you are lonely. Remember that your mind
wants to stabilize the world by finding support for what it already thinks.
That means you will feel like doing things that reinforce your current state
of mind.
To make your mind change, you must make your body do things that feel
unfamiliar. One easy way to do this is to imitate the walks of other people
and allow the changes you make in your rhythm, posture and movement
to help you imagine the inner life of the people you imitate. If you pick

people to imitate who look purposeful, or who are holding hands, or who
are clearly in the middle of a great conversation, you will set yourself a
paradox.
Your body and brain will be altering themselves to match someone who
is not lonely. Your mind will then be getting the signals of ‘not lonely’ and
begin to look for conﬁrming information in your experience. Because
you are moving as they move, you will also be sending yourself signals on
multiple levels about moving forward with others (and not being stuck
alone). All of this will be true even while your mind is holding the idea
that you are lonely.
Since you can’t hold a state (lonely) and the opposite of that state
(moving forward with others) at the same time, your mind will have to
choose one or the other. If you are moving (and not just observing and
imagining), then your brain will be more active in the not-lonely state and
it is more likely to send not-lonely signals to your mind. When the whole
of the system encounters ambiguity, it tends to give more weight to
physiology than to thought. So the best way to tip the balance into not-
lonely is to engage in a lot of the physical signs of being not-lonely.
Conquer Loneliness By Looking At Connection
They say that seeing is believing. And to see something, you have to look
at it. It’s not enough for something to exist in your proximity. Seeing
requires attention.
You can pay attention to what makes you lonely or you can pay attention
to looking at the million ways you are connected to the world and the
people around you. Once you accept the label “lonely,” you will look for
evidence of your loneliness. This is not a personal fault: it’s the way the

system maintains stability. You confirm your biases so that the world feels
more stable and meaningful. This, in turn, allows you to feel better and do
better. If your focus isn’t serving you, you need to destabilize it first and
then reinforce a more useful perspective.
The best way I know to see myself in connection is to borrow the eyes of
a fictional character. It’s not possible to be immersed in a story without
embracing your ability to connect with someone else’s experience and
point of view. And while you are immersed in the story, you also have
access to all the evidence of the character’s connections to other people.
Reading fiction is a win/win: it demonstrates your connection to the
author and the characters and it allows you to borrow the perceptions of
characters who are not lonely. This sets you up to feel not-alone, which
makes it possible to look for confirming evidence that you are not alone.
Another great way to challenge the perception of loneliness is to put on
headphones, choose music you love and notice that everyone in the
world now seems to be moving in the rhythm of your own personal
sound-track. It’s an illusion (more confirmation bias) but it is also a way to
see the truth that you are part of your time and place.
And one more way to shift your perception is to simply think of people
you like and notice what you like about them. If you try to think about
what they like about you, your confirmation bias will resist and you’ll end
up doubting they like anything about you. But if you pay attention to what
you like about them, you’ll move your attention to what you have in
common with them. There’s lots of evidence that what we like is what we
recognize because it is already part of us, too.

An Action Is Worth A Thousand Words
What’s the opposite of lonely? One way to feel more connected is to
connect. This means that instead of waiting for others to understand or
help us, we need to step out of our heads and do something to engage
with the people around us.
Paradoxically, it can be very hard to engage in giving generously to the
people who are closest to us. Giving to them when we are feeling lonely
can be passive-aggressive. It’s easy to get caught up in the storyline
where we give and give and they take and take. That will reinforce
loneliness, not challenge it.
So go out in the world and ﬁnd small, helpful things that you can do for
other people. You can volunteer with a group that genuinely activates
your curiosity and compassion. Or you can indulge in any of the small
actions that make life better for someone else. You can be the driver who
makes way for someone trying to merge, or the customer who says
something nice to the barista. You can buy a ‘pay it forward’ coffee or
give money to someone on the street who is cold and hungry.
All of the 4 problems tend to make us want to stop moving. The antidote
is to ﬁnd ways to take action. When you start, the action will be in
opposition to what you are feeling, and it will take willpower. You won’t
feel lonely and think: “I just need to go connect. There are lots of people
who love me.” You will feel lonely and think, “I just need to hibernate.”
You only need to hibernate if you want to protect and grow your feelings
of loneliness.
Instead, push through the desire to hide in a corner and go out in search
of the small ways you can take an action that makes someone else’s life

better. You’ll ﬁnd it’s very difﬁcult to act connected and feel lonely. Your
system is likely to rebalance in favour of the feeling you support with
action and connection.

When Does Stress Become A Problem?
Stress is not a good thing or a bad thing. It’s a thing you need in the right
amount. The right tension in guitar or piano strings allows you to make
music. The right tension in your muscles allows you to sit up straight or to
sink a foul shot. The right tension in your attention allows you to catch
errors you might easily miss.
Psychologists say there are four responses to stress: fight, flight, freeze or
tend and befriend. You’ve probably never heard of tend and befriend,
but it’s like nesting. When you are stressed, you might respond with
stress-nurturing (it’s like stress eating but you feed other people instead
of eating all the cookies yourself). Stress is a response to a threat. It helps
you stay alive, either by moving away from the threat or by bonding with
a group that will offer you protection. But for most of us, stress is also the
biggest threat to our well-being and productivity.
There may be some kind of stress that you really enjoy. You might run
long distances or work out hard at the gym or you might love roller
coasters. Or you might be carrying the stress of keeping your business
running (and your people employed) through hard times. You might be
caught between family concerns and work objectives you’re not sure you
can reach. You might even be stressed out by knowing that you’re really
good at what you do and you really don’t love it anymore.
What are the signs that your stress has crossed the line from helpful to
hurtful? Knowing your own limits means recognizing the change in your
tone of voice or lapses in memory or minor accidents and errors that only
crop up when you’re carrying too much for too long. We all have our own
personal early warning systems. Paying attention to them is the first step
to managing better.

If you’re okay most of the time, then other people might notice your
stress with vague approval, as if being stressed was a virtue. Instead of
helping you manage your stress, they are likely to reinforce it as a mark of
respect for your strength and perseverance. They will, perhaps without
realizing it, encourage you to own your stress. We’re going to encourage
you to own your success and keep just enough stress to keep you safe
and motivated.
Remember to Breathe
The key to all physiology is breath. When you are stressed, your breath
changes to support the states associated with stress: the states that allow
you to fight, fly or freeze. None of these are likely to be either
comfortable or helpful in managing the situations that are causing you
stress. While you’ve been managing okay, you’re not at your best until
you are able to find a breathing pattern that supports your best.
Just take a deep breath. We’ve all heard it. Most of us have said it to
others. It is good advice as far as it goes. It allows you to adjust or reset
and find a thread of purpose and calm in a tense situation. The next step
is to breathe consistently in a way that supports what you want in the
situations that are causing you more stress than you want.
Instead of telling yourself to pay attention to your breath and to breathe
deeply and calmly—nice work if you can get it—allow your attention to
guide your breath outwards. As you breathe into more space, you will
naturally slow and deepen your breath but you won’t cause the
dissonance you get from trying to be relaxed and stressed at the same
time.

Here’s how to do it. Become aware of your breath as it enters through
your nostrils and leaves your body through your mouth. Don’t control it,
just notice it and visualize the column of air moving in and out. Gradually
imagine that the air is ﬁlling your whole body and leaving your body
through all parts of the membrane of your skin. Pay attention to the
boundaries of your body as it exists in space and holds you together. Let
the breath come in and out gently through these boundaries.
Now create some space by pushing your breath out to form a bubble
around you and breathing in and out from the boundaries of this bubble.
Keep your attention at the edges of this boundary and the way the breath
comes in from these edges and is pushed out to these edges. Gradually
let your breath push the edges out until you are holding the whole of the
room in your breath. If there are other people around, you can breathe
past them to the edges so that they are held in your breath.
Continue to push your breath outwards until you are holding not only the
whole of your building but the whole of the neighbourhood around your
building. Feel your awareness grow with your breath.
When you are ready, begin to pull your breath back, ﬁrst back to your
neighbourhood, then back to your building, then back to the edges of
the room. Take your time, breathing in and out to the limits of each space.
Pull your breath back to the space around you, and into your personal
bubble.
Now come all the way back, so you are aware of your skin as the
boundary between you and what is around you. Breathe in and out of
your skin for a few moments before pulling your breath back into a
column of air, coming in through your nostrils and being released gently
through your mouth.

Practice this exercise so that whenever stress is pulling you into tunnel
vision, you can breathe your way into as much space as you need.
Make Friends With Your Purpose
When some people are really stressed, you’ll hear them talking about
needing to get away and get clear. They might be saying, “I just need to
put things into perspective.” What do you think they mean?
Stress limits our attention: it enlarges the situation causing us stress so
that it seems to take up all our awareness and represent all of our world.
Putting things into perspective means getting far enough away to see
beyond the edges of the situation that is causing stress so that you can
put it in a big picture that includes the rest of your life and the world
around you. This kind of distance allows us to feel less emotion and make
better, more rational decisions about how to move through a situation to
get to a more desirable outcome.
If you have a good friend or a good coach, they can gently guide your
attention outwards until you ﬁnd your perspective. If you have lots of
resources, you can escape on a holiday that puts miles between you and
the situation that is causing you grief (at least you can if you ‘forget’ your
cell phone). But you would not be reading this if it were that easy. You’re
good enough at managing so that no one even knows how much stress
you are really carrying. You need to be able to get perspective without
leaving town or relying on a guide.
The answer is paradoxical again. Instead of working against the inﬂuence
of the stress to get outside your situation, you can use the stress to drive
you to its core: the purpose you want to serve by resolving or managing

the stress. Purpose feels like the centre of the situation, but it also seems
to exist outside the edges of the problem in a bigger world.
Begin by asking yourself: “why is it important that I do this thing that is
causing so much stress?” When you have an answer, ask “Why is that
important?” Ask three more times, until you have 5 whys. You’ll find that
you now see the situation as the bullseye of a much bigger target. From
this distance, it’s easier to navigate and harder to be so stressed.
Genuine Play Drives Out Stress
If you’re stressed, you might think that you don’t have time for play. What
you mean is that you can no longer remember what play feels like and so
you cannot imagine that you could be playful now.
You could be playful now. But it takes more than assigning some time for
a hobby. We all know people who “play” golf or go to the gym as if
someone’s life depended on their achievements. To get back to playing
for the sake of playing, you need to revisit your childhood and remember
what it was like to be a child at play.
The first thing you will notice is that play can be both serious and fun at
the same time. Small children play with intense focus. They enter a space
where it matters to them to be fully engaged and they let go of
everything outside that space. When they are finished playing, they also
leave that space intact. It doesn’t usually filter out into family dinner or
bed-time.
The question is not: what could you do today that would be fun? The
question is: what could you do that would engage your attention and
your physiology so that you had no room left in your thoughts or your

body for whatever is stressing you out. And the thing that is likely to
engage you with this kind of intensity will probably involve other people.
Our brains prioritize our interactions with other people, so engaging with
other people is the fastest way to overwhelm your focus so that you can
get it off the thing that is causing you stress.
A second thing to look for in good quality play is this: it doesn’t matter
whether you win. You don’t have to be good at it to be fully engaged in it.
If you are like many stressed-out people, this is hard to get your feelings
around, even if you agree theoretically that all feedback is useful and the
key is to keep learning and improving. Babies learn to walk by falling and
often they laugh when they find themselves sitting instead of standing.
When was the last time you laughed after falling?
If your ability to play has gone dormant, you will need other people to
tease it back to life. Be gentle with yourself and be willing to be bad at
play until you get better at it. Take an hour or so and do something with a
friend that you remember that you wanted to do or liked to do a long,
long time ago. Find your inner artist or dancer or builder. Tackle
problems that have no consequences: puzzles or obstacle courses that
don’t reward winning and don’t punish failure. The idea is to play for the
sake of the experience your mind and body and brain enjoy when you
are playing.
Laughter helps, and it’s easiest to laugh with other people. Find a friend
or a performance that can help you laugh until you notice the first tickling
urge to play. Let yourself daydream about places to visit and things to do
until you find that you are actually doing something to move into the
space where play happens.

How Tired Are You And How Are You Tired?
Most of the people who will read this book are tired. They are tired
physically and emotionally and mentally. They are tired right down to the
bones. They are even tired of being tired. They daydream about a good
night’s sleep and then lie awake wishing sleep would come or they fall
asleep and wake up feeling tired still. Tired is an epidemic.
The ﬁrst step in dealing with fatigue is asking yourself: how am I tired?
Ask yourself these three questions:
• If I had three good sleeps in a row, would I still be tired? If the answer is
yes, you might be physically tired but it’s probably not your biggest
source of fatigue. The root of your fatigue is probably mental or
emotional.
• If I woke up excited about the work I am doing, would I still be tired? If
the answer is yes, you might be mentally tired, but it’s probably not the
key to your fatigue. The key is probably physical or emotional.
• Is there someone in my life who comforts me by making me feel safer
and stronger every time we connect? If the answer is yes, you might be
emotionally tired, but you’re already on the path that leads out of
emotional fatigue. It’s more likely that you will ﬁnd a leverage point for
change in your physical or mental well-being.
There are other clues, of course. If you are clumsy or sore or prone to
colds, you might be physically tired. If you struggle for focus or stumble
over problems you usually solve quickly, you might be mentally tired. And
if you just can’t connect with even one more person who is happy or sad
or full of frustration, you might be emotionally tired.

If you’re tired of being tired, you can find the rest you need. It begins with
identifying the kind of fatigue that provides a leverage point for change,
so that when you rest and heal there, you will also reduce the fatigue in
other parts of you as a human system.
Wind Down With Low Impact Movement
Whether you are mentally, emotionally or physically tired, movement will
help. It’s another paradox: you can’t rest well while you are tired. You rest
when you are relaxed and your first focus in dealing with fatigue is to
relax into it.
When you’re physically tired, you will want to collapse or stop. It seems
obvious that when you are tired you should stop everything and rest. The
difficulty, which you might have experienced, is that if you are so tired
that fatigue is a problem, you will probably also have trouble resting. You
might crash into sleep, and then wake up sore all over, or wake up in the
middle of the night, or dream crazy dreams so that you wake almost as
tired as you went to sleep.
If you’re mentally or emotionally tired, you will be tempted to throw
yourself into physical activity so that you stop feeling or thinking. What is
likely to happen is that you will end up physically tired, but not relaxed or
rested. Your body is where you live. It is not a distraction from your
problems. You need to bring your body and mind into balance, not wear
them out.
The best answer is gentle, methodical movement. Go for a walk and keep
at it until your muscles unwind and your thoughts settle. Get out your mat
and do gentle stretches or yoga. Go for a bike ride in a gentle landscape,
even if the bike is in a gym and you have to imagine a ride along gently

rolling hills. You’ll be tempted to speed up, to push harder, to amp up
your fatigue until you can crash. Use music or machine settings or bio-
feedback but stay gentle. Your goal is not to work until you drop. It’s to
unwind until you can settle and rest.
As you move, you might notice your balance. Most movement is a
continual process of moving in and out of balance. It reminds you that
you are capable of getting back to the balance of focus and energy and
well-being that is you at your best. As you stretch and release, you’ll
understand right down to your core that stretch must be followed by a
release, and that rest is part of supporting the effort you want to make
and the results you want to achieve.
Where’s Your Quiet Place?
Balance and well-being don’t just happen. You make them with intention
and discipline. One of the best ways of restoring yourself when you are
tired starts before you get tired. You need to ﬁnd a place that offers you
quiet and perspective, and you need to visit it with attention often
enough so that you can go there when you need that quiet.
My quiet place is sitting cross legged on the beach in P.E.I. watching the
waves. The ocean is immense and eternal and it doesn’t get tired or full
or lost. When I sit there, time moves differently and the edges between
me and the world soften. I get bigger and smaller at the same time. I only
get there for a few days each year, but I know it well enough to get there
in my mind when I need it.
Where is your quiet place? Where is a place that you have been in real
life that made you feel both bigger and smaller at the same time? Where
can you go that takes up enough of your attention so that the voice in

your head settles down? If you sit quietly now and ask yourself for a place
that restores your perspective, you will find that something comes to
mind. You need to visit a place you know, not a place you have only
imagined. You need a place that is encoded in your senses and your
physiology.
You might not be good at “imagining” or “visualizing.” When you close
your eyes, your world might not light up with imagined landscapes. It
might just be dark. That’s okay. Use the voice in your head to describe
your quiet place to you. Let it tell you what you are seeing and hearing
and feeling as you sit or stand in this place that makes you feel grounded
and balanced. You don’t need to be creative to do this: you need to be
determined to explore and define this landscape with the same detail
you bring to analyzing problems or planning strategy.
Visit your quiet place regularly; in real life when you can so you can
capture the sensory detail that keeps you grounded, and in your thoughts
when you can’t get there in life. You want to learn this place so well that
even when you are tired, you can visit for a few moments and find
balance and perspective. Then you’ll be able to see how to get the rest
you need.
Choose Presence Over Problem Solving
When you are really tired, you need to feel safe. Your entire mind/body/
brain/social system operates to keep you alive. It thrives on safety. But it’s
hard to feel safe when you’re fatigued because you can’t be sure you
have enough left in the tank to get you where you need to go.
Here’s what helps human beings feel safe: the presence of people they
trust. This isn’t about talking through a problem. It’s about being

physically close to someone who makes you feel safe. What that means
depends on your personal situation. You might feel safe while holding
your kids (because when they are safe, you feel safe.) You might have
someone in your life who will hold your hand while you go for a walk.
There may be people you can give a hug, or people you can snuggle
with on the couch.
If there’s not enough touch in your life, you might substitute sound.
Sound surrounds you: it has your back. You might be listening to music,
but you might also just listen to someone who sounds the way you want
to feel and let that voice seep in at your edges and begin to unwind your
knots and prepare you either for rest or for one more step in the right
direction.
Sound and touch blur the boundaries between us and give us the feeling
that we can access more strength in connection. Seeing someone is
seldom enough to make you feel safe. Sight reminds us that we are
distinct from what we are seeing. Words also put the connection outside
us and often make us feel less connected and more vulnerable. That’s
why it’s easier to restore your energy and direction by tuning out the
discussion and letting sound or touch remind you that you are not alone.
You are a pack animal and your pack will be part of how you move
forward. That’s not about ‘helping.’
Some of the people who will help the most when you need restoration
won’t even know they’ve inﬂuenced you. The baby sleeping on your
shoulder can give you better access to your strength. The voice on the
radio can be soothing or bracing. Social connection restores through
presence, not problem-solving.

Are You Restless?
Restlessness is a sign that your system is out of whack. It means that your
attention and your intention are trying to do different things at the same
time. It’s physically uncomfortable, mentally distracting, and an emotional
roller-coaster. And yet we seldom talk about restlessness because it is
slightly embarrassing to admit that there’s nothing really wrong: you just
can’t settle.
To understand your restlessness, imagine its opposite. You might call the
opposite of restlessness by any of these names: presence, flow,
concentration, focus, engagement or congruence. When you are the
opposite of restless, you are not rest-full or even resting. Instead you are
aware of having your whole system engaged in just one thing. That thing
might be rest, but it is more likely to be movement without friction, a state
where mind, body, and social connection work together to make the
present moment satisfying.
You don’t know when you are in flow because your whole attention is
wrapped up in what you are doing. You know when you are restless
because you bounce. Your physical sensations get mixed up: you might
be sore and tired and really want to move all at the same time. Your
emotions are pulled in different directions so that you cannot be any one
thing for more than a few minutes. Your mind keeps jumping from one
thing to another without coming back to a central issue or thought. You
feel out of sorts and discontented and unable to concentrate.
Restlessness means that you either need to work on defining your
purpose or you need to change your behaviour so that you are acting in
alignment with your purpose. Purpose is often inconvenient and time-
consuming and it doesn’t always lead directly to rewards that will impress

other people. But it’s built into the core of human beings to want to do
more than survive. We want to find meaning and make meaning and
when we avoid that for too long, it tugs at our attention and makes it
uncomfortable to stay doing what we are doing where we are doing it.
If you don’t listen to your restlessness, you’ll find it also trips you up and
winds you up. A better response to restlessness is to hear a call from your
bigger self and listen to it.
Add Meaning to Movement
It’s not hard to get moving when you are feeling restless. It’s hard to
maintain movement. The key to balance is not to get moving, but to stay
moving until you accomplish something. What the “something” is
depends on you. It could be that you set a goal for your activity that it is
related to something that has meaning for you. If you run, your goal
might be a distance or speed that relates to your ongoing reasons for
being fit. If you do yoga, you might want to work on balance poses to
prime yourself for better balance internally.
What if you don’t work out? You can do meaningful physical activity at
home. For some people that will mean cleaning out a closet or scrubbing
the kitchen floor. For others it might mean tackling a home maintenance
job or gardening. The requirement is that whatever activity you choose is
not just a way of tiring yourself out. It’s a way of accomplishing something
and tiring yourself out.
And although it’s been recommended already, taking a long walk, in
nature if possible, is one of the most proven and accessible ways to use
your physiology to improve your well-being and clarity. Take a long walk
through a park and let your mind settle until it quiets. Give your senses

lots to notice and let them become fully engaged and present as you
walk. The idea is not to overwhelm the restlessness but to use it to
become more integrated into the life around you.
Your body is not a vehicle for the real you: it is an essential component.
Movement is as necessary to your body as food or rest. If you think you’re
too busy to take a walk, ask yourself how much time you will save when
you are clear and able to focus. It’s likely that forcing yourself to pay
attention takes more time than simply paying attention would. It’s also
true that twenty minutes of movement can feel like a much longer break
than twenty minutes of social media or coffee.
So when you recognize that you are restless and having trouble focusing,
take the hint from your bigger self and get your system back into balance
by moving with purpose.
What Will You Remember A Year From Now?
It’s hard for people to imagine what their lives will be like in five or ten
years. While it’s true that most of what happens today will not be
important in five or ten years, thinking that way is both harder and less
helpful than you might think. If you can’t imagine your life in five or ten
years, it’s hard to imagine that is the right yardstick for measuring
importance today.
It’s also hard for people to limit themselves to the present. It takes a huge
amount of commitment and practice to fill the whole of your mind with
the moment you are living. If you’re feeling restless, a mindful practice
will only help you if you have dedicated a large amount of discipline to
that practice over months and years. While mindfulness can yield
amazing benefits, we want to explore what will help now.

Now, it might help to jump ahead just one year in time and notice what
comes to mind. What work will you be doing? Who will be important in
your life? What will you like about you a year from now? Some people
think of this as daydreaming. You can think of it as daydreaming with
purpose. As you put some effort into exploring what you think your life
will be a year from now, you’ll be able to connect the dots between what
you are doing and what you need to do to have the life you want in
twelve months time.
If you’re not good at daydreaming (a lot of people have lived for a long
time with the belief that daydreams are the enemy of accomplishment),
then pretend you are making a strategic plan. A good strategy depends
on knowing where you are going. As you forecast your position twelve
months from now, you can analyze the factors that will be important in
optimizing your achievements . You don’t have to tell yourself that you
are daydreaming. You can tell yourself that you are planning. Either way,
you will be inviting the pattern-making processes in your brain to predict
probabilities based on your life today.
Your restless mind will have lots of places to jump once you focus on
predicting your personal future. Instead of feeling conﬁned, it will feel
busy and productive. As it does, you may ﬁnd that a balance settles into
your thoughts, feelings and physiology. That’s the way you know that you
have treated restlessness as a message from your bigger self, a message
about knowing what is important and why it is important.

Hang Out With Someone Who Stretches Your Mind
Another way to understand restlessness is as a signal that you are missing
information that you need to satisfy something or to move you towards
something. Unfortunately, restlessness is a prompt to action, not a map of
how to ﬁnd what you want. While you might be restless because your
mind is jumping between a lot of different ideas, you can’t resolve the
restlessness with the information you already have.
The solution is not usually to sit quietly by yourself until the answer comes
to you. That takes discipline and practice. You could do a bunch of
research on what you might need and hope that somewhere you ﬁnd
what you don’t know you need. You could even ask a mentor or advisor
to tell you what you want. Often they will be working from the same data
set as you are (they see you as you see you), so their best guess at what
you need will not be based on the new information you are seeking.
Here’s a better answer. Find someone who is good at getting you to think
new thoughts. Hang out with them, whether that means connecting in
person or watching TED talks. Find someone who is hard to follow, and
follow them. Learn about something that is at the edges of your
awareness, something that makes your mind stretch to understand it. It’s
important that you do this by connecting with a person because your
brain prioritizes information about people.
When you hear a speaker or spend time with an author, you respond not
only to information about their topic but to the way they have organized,
interpreted and communicated that information. It has been said (maybe
by Socrates) that “nothing human is foreign to me.” That’s a little
misleading. Other people are not foreign to us, but they often think
thoughts and encounter experiences that are very different from our own.

That paradox allows a connection to someone else to open us up to
information that might otherwise be just outside our awareness, just
beyond our edges.
And often, the mind responds to a good stretch the way your body does.
It returns to a more relaxed and balanced state. From this state, you are
better able to decide where to move next.

Taking The Next Step
There is never an ending or a beginning. There’s the step that follows this
one. Sometimes it takes you in a circle; sometimes it leads to a rest. More
often, it keeps you moving. The whole human being was designed or has
evolved (pick your model) to keep moving. The parts only make sense as
a way to continually learn and adapt. We might not always get better but
we have to keep moving, even if we are just treading water to hold onto
to an experience for as long as possible.
As you think about what you want, you can think about what you want to
keep, what you want to change, and what you want to get and what you
want to make. There is no category for what you want to let go or get rid
of. Your brain does not get rid of anything; it simply pays attention to
something else instead. Your mind forgets, but it is hard to forget on
purpose. Your body carries reminders of all of your experience, from scar
tissue to habits. Your friends forget, but not reliably and not on purpose.
For a human being to let go means to decide to want to pay attention to
something else.
There are problems that get in our way. The four we have discussed are
the four that are most often troubling without being overwhelming. Fear
and pain and anxiety and grief also grab our attention and throw us out
of whack. They are not insurmountable, but they are more than we can
cover here. They require the same pattern of choices using the same
systems that we have covered. You can learn to use different components
of the human system to rebalance when the possibilities you can see are
more scary than satisfying.
You don’t have to make a choice between ﬁnding help and doing it on
your own. You can become aware that helpful inﬂuences are always

available. You just need to notice them and use them intentionally to
become more effective, more energetic or more engaged.
Loneliness, Stress, Fatigue and Restlessness
Deliberate, positive change starts with hope. You have to believe that it is
possible to live in better balance with all of yourself. You have to believe
that it is possible to grow all parts of yourself instead of stunting one part
to feed another. You have to believe that loneliness, stress, fatigue and
restlessness are not normal.
Following the advice in this booklet is an act of faith in your whole self.
Human beings are meant to be bigger than they think: our brains process
inﬁnitely more information than we can manage consciously. We are
continually surprising ourselves. Sometimes that’s a great thing.
Sometimes we feel like we are not enough because our minds cannot
keep up with our bigger selves, the self that holds all of our components
in one integrated and emergent system.
You get to choose what you will make of the imbalance in processing
between your conscious mind and all the rest of you. Some people
handle this through spiritual belief. Some people use science to see the
whole as more than the sum of its parts. Some people believe that family
or culture are more important than individual experience. These are all
ways to keep moving, knowing that you will never know enough to really
understand yourself, much less the rest of the world.
If the big belief systems are leaving you unsatisﬁed, if you know what you
believe but can’t quite pull everything into an effective whole, then you
will experience the four problems addressed in this book. And when you
experience them, you can let go of every belief except one. Keep the

belief that working with different parts of you can allow you to make
gentle, effective changes to your overall balance and well-being. Keep
just enough faith in yourself to try something small and pay attention to
the difference it makes.
Look after your body by giving it interesting sensory experiences and
exercise and food and rest. Look after your mind by shifting your
perspective so that you can see around the edges of your experience
and mindset. Look after your heart by paying attention to the people
around you in ways that make you stronger, more energized, and more
playful. You’ve got this. You can ﬁne tune the system that is you.
Change Happens In All Parts of the System
As a human being, you are composed of a brain and a body, an
individual mind and a web of social connection. All of these are dynamic:
they change as circumstances change inside you or around you. As one
changes, the balance between them also changes. You have to make
constant adjustments to feel whole and healthy.
Your brain changes in response to what you think, feel and do. You can’t
access it directly, so you can’t use the brain to make change. Although it
is an incredibly powerful processor of information, it is not a processor
that you can program directly. Deliberate change starts when your mind
changes what you notice, the language you use, the way you interpret
information, the way you act or the way you relate to others.
The mind is both easy to change (because you can easily use new words
to describe a reality) and difﬁcult to change (because you can easily
revert to old choices in how you interpret and evaluate). So the most
reliable way to deliberately change your mind is to make choices that

involve your body and your social connections in the change you want to
make. It takes discipline, repetition and often the support of others to
make change happen in the mind.
When in doubt, when you are being challenged, when you don’t feel
effective, step back and see yourself as a system of systems. Look at the
edges of the different parts of you, and ﬁnd the places where small
changes are possible. Be curious about how the parts overlap and
interact. Imagine difference. This is all possible without knowing for sure
that you can make a difference. You are just imagining.
Then take it a step further and experiment. You don’t have to commit to
believing in yourself or the world. You just have to ﬁnd enough faith to
motivate you to test a change in case it works. You don’t have to believe
in your destination to go for a walk. You have to take one step, and then
another.
Join A Community That Knows How to Play
This is the part where you might expect me to offer recommendations for
further study. I will do that in a moment. But more information doesn’t
convince people that better things are possible. Experience, curiosity and
play convince people.
If you want to deal with your problems and make the most of this system
that is your life, here’s my best advice: be part of a community that offers
you the things I have described in these pages. Human beings are better
in a group: we are pack animals. Find a pack that encourages you to play;
a pack that prods you into movement when you are stuck; a pack that
makes you safe enough to relax and curious enough to stretch.

Great innovation has always come from minds that play and stretch
together. Great human experience has always come from people who
share a purpose and break bread together. Great energy comes from
people who create what they cannot find.
Being your best self includes finding a community that brings out the
best in you. And if you can’t find one, make one. You’ll get tired and
stressed and restless. You might even sometimes be lonely. But you’ll also
have everything you need to pull yourself into balance and keep moving.
And if you need help getting started, reach out to us at
www.nlpcanada.com. We keep each other on track to be playful and
curious and disciplined. We are always open to new people who want to
learn more about how human beings connect with their best selves to
live their best lives.

5 Books To Stretch Your Understanding of You
Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the
Brain. Houghton Mifﬂin Harcourt , 2017.
Burton, Robert A. A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience
Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves. St. Martin’s Press, 2013.
Duke, Annie. Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You
Don’t Have All the Facts. Random House, 2018.
Heath, Chip and Dan Heath. The Power of Moments: Why Certain
Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact. Simon Schuster, 2017.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2011.
Linda R. Ferguson, Ph.D.
Linda Ferguson leads the dynamic community of change, motivation and
learning at NLP Canada Training. For more than 15 years, Linda has been
working to turn the best thinking about how people work into practices
that allow people to make peace with themselves, make stronger choices,
make better connections and make good things happen. Linda thinks of
her work as design thinking for people who want to own their own
experience and shape their lives and outcomes. You can ﬁnd more of
Linda’s work and writing at www.nlpcanada.com . Follow her at
www.facebook.com/NlpCanada or on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/
lindarferguson.

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