STREEEETCH YOURSELF IN 2024

Stressed about the state of the world and/or your sanity? We've got four tools to help you adapt and succeed over the coming year.

-  JOSHUA DAVID STEIN

IF THE PAST 12 months are any indication, 2024 is going to be a year. The world is on fire-literally and metaphorically and a super-polarizing election looms, which is like catnip for anxiety. There's AI (friend or foe?) and inflation (up or down?) and that weird thing on your neck you've been meaning to get checked out, and you're going to want a tool kit that'll help you anticipate, understand, and overcome adversity and anxiety. Luckily, we have four tools that help you not only cope but thrive.

1. RUGGED FLEXIBILITY

ELECTION DRAMA, FED by social media, can fuel nostalgia for the "good ol" days," back when the world was calm and stable. Except that's only wishful thinking, says performance coach and author Brad Stulberg in Masters of Change. "Things are never as static as we pretend they are," he says. "We're always in a cycle of order-disorder-reorder." To actually cope with the churn, Stulberg recommends what he calls rugged flexibility. The ruggedness is about holding on to what's essential to you; knowing what your core values are. The flexibility comes from letting the rest go. The approach, he says, will help you adapt, evolve, and grow so you're not constantly feeling unstable. A nonpolitical example: An injured runner understands that while running can't happen right now, what's important to him-movement-still can. So he could transition to, for example, rowing or lifting.

USE IT:

THINK OF CHANGE as a constant, Stulberg says. Ask yourself where you want to be rugged and where you can be flexible. "This helps you view change and disorder as something you're in conversation with," he says, not as something that's happening to you that you need to white-knuckle through.

2. SUPERCOMMUNICATOR SKILLS