Critics say both statins and fluorides are supposed to have a negative impact on your IQ, Actually, neckties are supposed to restrict blood flow to the brain, too. (Maybe that’s what’s been going on in the United States lately?)

Regardless, I’m going to share some potentially impaired ideas with you that I’ve been thinking about for the last few months. I’m hoping that sharing this information might help you avoid a few of the pitfalls that I’ve encountered on my own life-journey.

From the book, New Eyes by Steve Treu: “A fundamental tenet of Buddhism is that suffering is inevitable during our lives.” When I’d have a bad day while working at the hospital, I’d just go up to the OB unit, look at all of those newborns and think, “You poor little babies, you have no idea what’s coming.”

Over the years, I’ve come to understand from my 20/20 hindsight, that a large percentage of my most mentally and emotionally painful experiences were preventable. They were, for the most part, self-inflicted wounds due to my personal conditioning, education, and perceptions. Most of the pain, however, could be directly attributed to my ego.

The ego is an amazing part of all of us. I’ve written about how our Amygdalae’s, those little almond sized parts of our brains, can drive us bonkers, but egos can be much worse.

The classic definition of ego is “a person’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance. And the synonyms for ego are our self-worth, self-respect, self-image, and self-confidence. It’s that part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious and is responsible for not only reality testing but also for our sense of personal identity.”

Some of us have over inflated and undeserved super egos, and some of us don’t have enough of an ego. It’s the Goldilocks ego that would be “just right,” but they’re hard to come by most days.

Look, we all need a strong ego just to survive, but your ego can also spin out of control so fast that it makes the speed of light stand still. What’s the cause of most of our ego problems? Well, childhood, junior high-ood, and adulthood are three factors. Then throw in parenthood, and just “the hood.”

Because parenting doesn’t require any training, most of us tend to do unto our children as our parents did unto us, and that can create more baggage than a Samsonite store. There are your overly critical parents, those demanding parents who just won’t stop picking on you. Then there are the over nurturing, helicopter parents who won’t let you out of their sight. Both provide us with lots of material to screw up our ego for life.

If we can be objective about our egos, we can avoid a majority of those self-imposed craters of pain caused by them. It all feeds into our self-inflicted unhappiness, and in the big picture, it’s kind of meaningless.

If we could just tangibly remove ourselves from the equation, step back and look at what’s really going on, much of what we become hysterical over is just senseless. The size of our house, the cost of our cars, the number of karats in the diamond, and the quality of our clothing will not deliver lasting happiness. Always ask the question, “In the big picture of life, does this really matter?”

Some of us tolerate toxic people and noxious situations way too long, and most of us take things much too personally. If we can just step away and quiet our amygdala we can see who the jerks are, what their game is, and why it’s better to just avoid them any way we can.

If that doesn’t work, take seven deep breaths which will automatically throw your body into the relaxation response. Then take a really hard look at whatever is driving you crazy and ask, “Did anyone die?”