message is that all you can control is the way that you react to these things. You can't control outside circumstances, you can't control the people. MARY: That's right. If you can change what's inside, the outside won't have as big an effect on you. STACEY: You make the point that difficult people can indeed affect your health. Explain how that really happens. MARY: Well, there's two things that happen when you're around difficult people: your blood pressure can go up and you get really high levels of stress. You know any time you know you're going to have to deal with a difficult person, say a difficult boss, you're thinking oh jeez I do not want to do this. You might overeat, you might stay up late at night thinking about the confrontation you're going to have because everything feels like a confrontation. So again, if you can bring yourself, if you can visualize it so you can get there. If you can get to that calm, centered space in yourself, every encounter with the difficult people is going to be ratcheded down so that you can remain calm. So you don't feel like your heart rate is going up, that your breathing is getting shallow and that you're sort of stressing out because stress, the cortisol hormone that gets activated when you're stressed, is so bad for your health. STACEY: And stress is so bad for us on so many levels. MARY: Right. Yeah, so that's one thing