How to Begin Draining the Life Out of Your Worries & Aggravations

Developing Skills You'll Regularly Use by Keeping Them Simple

Welcome to another issue of the Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter. If you haven’t yet become a paid subscriber, please consider doing so.

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Okay...let’s get into Issue #0007

September 4th, 2023

Today I’m going to share with you a simple, but potent idea for getting your stress under control (or anything else you’d like to apply it to)

 Now, please understand, in the Jacks Hopkins Now Newsletter, I’ll be sharing many ideas...across lots and lots of issues of Jack Hopkins Now, for getting your stress under control. Why so many? It’s simple.

The more tools you have to get something done, the more confident you feel and the more competent you become. It’s as simple as that.

I’d like for you to hang with me for a moment, first. I want to go through something that will lay the groundwork for what I’ll be sharing right after this next bit.

While I’m sharing it, for that reason, I also hope you’ll enjoy absorbing the content, and have it stored away in your memory, later...in case you ever find yourself in the position to save someone’s life.

 After this, you’ll rest comfortable knowing that, in many situations, it’s much simpler than you might think.

The human heart is the pump that circulates our blood throughout our body. If it stops, you have a medical emergency. If it stops for too long, you are checking out of planet earth.

There are two chambers on the upper part of the heart that are called atria. The right atrium and the left atrium. There are two larger and more muscular chambers on the lower portion of the heart, called ventricles. The right ventricle and the left ventricle.

When an electrical stimulus from the SA node located in the right upper atrium of the heart, fires off and causes the upper heart chambers to contract, electrical signal then passes through another node, called the AV node to the lower heart chambers, causing them to contract, and pump blood.

Oxygenated blood is pushed from the left atrium down into the left ventricle. From here, the left ventricle contracts forcefully and pushes blood out to your organs and tissues.

Your organs must have an adequate supply of oxygen for your survival. As the blood makes its way to your organs...and finally arrives at each one...they each gladly accept this blood that is rich with the oxygen it needs.

The now oxygen depleted blood, is returned to your heart when it enters the right atrium, being pushed down into the right ventricle, where, from there, it will be pumped out into the pulmonary artery...and through the lungs...where it can load up with oxygen once again, before going back into the left atrium and then left ventricle...and repeating the process over again.

Sometimes, like when someone is having an acute heart attack, the heart, itself-which is a muscle-doesn’t get enough blood flow.

This can cause the heart to become unstable and develop very dangerous heart rhythms. A heart that has been damaged by a heart attack, is incredibly vulnerable to a rhythm known as ventricular fibrillation (V-fib). In V-fib, you’re the ventricles of your heart will begin to quiver.

When this is happening, they are not pumping. When they aren’t pumping, your blood isn’t moving. When your blood isn’t moving for more than 3-4 minutes...bad things happen, and organs-like your brain-start suffering damage and shutting down. Without immediate intervention, you’ll die.

What intervention? In the absence of a defibrillator (to shock the heart back into rhythm) being immediately available, CPR will need to be started within 1-3 minutes. Within 1 minute is much better.

The idea is to keep the blood moving throughout the body to try and keep your organs as oxygenated as possible until help arrives. The sooner an ambulance with a defibrillator arrives, the better.

A defibrillator, in a nutshell, provides an electrical shock to the heart in hopes of “knocking” the ventricles out of the quivering or fibrillating, and back into a normal cardiac rhythm, where the heart is, once again, able to pump blood throughout the body on its own.

Now, I am going to share something with you, that, some of you will already know. However, I’m confident that at least as many, will have never thought about it before...and this may make them feel a whole lot better:

There are Only Two Things That You Need to Remember about What You Just Read to be Able to Save Someone’s Life When They are Having and Acute Heart Attack

1.     If someone becomes unconscious or unresponsive and you cannot feel a pulse, call 911 immediately.

2.     After having made the call, start CPR immediately and continue until EMS or medical help arrives.

That’s it. Those are the only two things you need to remember to do. Do those two things adequately, and you’ll have as good of a chance of saving that person’s life as a cardiothoracic surgeon who might have been there-instead of you-who had nothing with them besides what you had: their hands, arms...and brain.

Sure, they’ll know a hell of a lot more than you about what’s going on inside this person’s body, and what is being achieved by CPR and defibrillation...and what will need to be done, later, if they survive.

 But to make sure them live long enough to have a fighting chance once EMS arrives...it comes down to two simple things.

However, if a heart is being contracted and released often enough, and hard enough...by literally any human being performing CPR on them...then it’s as good as it would be if anyone else was making the heart contract often enough and hard enough.

 Good enough...is good enough. No matter who is doing it.

1.     Call 911. 2. Start CPR

(If you don’t know CPR, I urge you to get certified as soon as humanly possible.)

Now, let’s move on to something a bit different.

Answer This Question: What causes the stress you experience in your life?

When I ask people that question, I often get answers like, “My husband/wife, money, my job, the kids, the neighbors, crime etc.”

To many people, answers like that seem to cover much of what bothers them. However, just because something seems to be right on the money...doesn’t necessarily mean it is.

We generate our stress, internally...by doing this one simple, innocuous “little” thing:

 Resisting reality

What do I mean?

In order for us to be able to generate and create emotional distress about something, we have to first have told ourselves a story about how the thing that is happening or that exists...should not be happening or should not exist.

Without our story to set the frame of reference, the experience, or thing...is just an experience, or just exists. It doesn’t allow us to create an inner emotional distress.

Just last week, I bought my wife a schlarpdizzle. The look on her face was one I’ll never forget. Our kids couldn’t believe it, either.

See what happened? You have no idea what the hell a “Schlarpdizzle” is, what it does etc. I don’t either. I made up the word about two minutes ago. Since you didn’t know what it was, there was no way to predict what my wife’s response should have been. A made-up word made it difficult to have, or even to create a frame of reference.

Yet, for most of the experiences and things in our life, we not only know what they are, but we already have a frame of reference about what they mean...to us.

However, the fact that we have a frame of reference doesn’t mean that it’s one that will prove to be the most useful frame of reference, either for ourselves, or...for the world at large.

Our frames of reference determine whether something helps us easily generate emotional distress, or, whether it assists us in experiencing a far more enjoyable and/or useful emotional response.